In the aftermath of my father’s death, I wanted only quiet. I chased sanctuary through shadows. I walked the vanishing miles. I lay awake in the midnight hours, but even then, a nearby fox would call out for love, or a deer would high-step through fallen leaves, or a squirrel would bumble in the gutter.

I didn’t mind the birds of dawn, but I minded the eradications of tree surgeons—the carburetor rage of their chainsaws, the thonk of severed limbs hitting the ground. I minded the boot of the boy who smashed the trash bins until they crashed—spilling a bell choir of bottles. I minded the neighborhood girls’ pissing accusations—You’re such a thief, you’re such a liar, you stole my phone, you’re such a liar. I minded the keel of the news and the yawp of the sun. I minded the pretension of narrative, words upon words—how, even when no one was near or no one was speaking, there was a terrible howl at my ear. Worse than consonants. Louder than vowels.

I had been reading Virginia Woolf before my father died, before I rushed to him as his final storm set in, the despair of his lungs in their drowning. Turning her pages. I had been reading Virginia, also Leonard. The long swaying arms of the searchlights over their street called Paradise, in their England, 1917. The clattering machinery of the German Gotha bombers and the ascending cries of the sirens and the putter of the Royal Naval Air Service squadrons and the puff-pop of the smoke where the bombs had succeeded. A letter, sent by Virginia, to her friend Violet Dickinson, bearing news: She and Leonard have bought a table-top letterpress from the Excelsior Printing Supply Co. They are about to hand-build books of their own. Manage the text, command the art, tighten the bindings. Although the letterpress is broken when it arrives, and there are but a scant sixteen pages of how-to’s to get them through the early days. They eye the letters in reverse (Caslon), take the quoin and composing stick into their hands, and decide: Virginia will set the type and bind the pages, Leonard will ink and pull. It will unfold in the dining room of the house where they live, a place called Hogarth.

Play, Leonard will one day say of the thing, sufficiently absorbing. Calming the noises inside Virginia’s head.

Type in her composing stick. Ink on her fingers.

A thin red thread in the eye of her needle. Punch.

Sew.

Salvation.

*

In the aftermath of my father’s death, I bought paper, thread, acrylic paints. Needles, brayers, buttons. Instructions I discovered I could not follow on the form and beautification of blank journals. I awled and bone folded. Knotted and snipped. I made my mistakes at the kitchen table and beside the sink, beneath bare bulbs and in swaths of sun, in the early mornings when I would wake to the fox that lived by the shatter of the moon and was bereft with love. I was not setting lines, not administering hyphens, not placing Caslon between margins. Still, I was sufficiently absorbed: color, paper, knots; ghost prints and ephemera. There was stain on my clothes and waxed linen in my needles. My hands were cracked and raw.

When story returns after story quits, it arrives in fits and fragments, rushes west, flusters east, is soft, invincible fury. I punched and patterned, tore and blended, stole flowers from the garden to preserve them. Is it like this, then, or could this be true—the hands matriculating the rage, arting the heart, deposing meaning?

Fractions arranged. Thread kettled.

Red approximating blue. Salvation.

An amateur obsessive.

*

Before my father died, when he already wasn’t well, I grew frustrated with Virginia. I was reading her fiction by then, her To the Lighthouse. I’d sit in my bed, early in the day, and hear myself yak back at her—cut the vines of her sentences, her looping plentitudes, her times passing. I’d find an easier novel and abandon Virginia, and then I would return. Float into her sea and ride: billows and breakers, tide and tug, the nether and the offing.

I’d yield. It was the only way I knew to read Virginia, although sometimes, whirlpooled into the length of a single Virginia sentence, I’d find that I was drowning. That I could not understand Virginia.

And yet: On the eve of covid-19, my father older than he’d ever been, my father in the early phase of passing, I went to the Kislak to visit Virginia. To hold what she’d made with her hands in my hands. To reckon with what remains when those we battle with, and love, go missing. I’d wait inside that clean box of that reading room for Virginia’s letterpress work to be retrieved. At a long table before an assembly of soft supports that hold the archived and retrieved in a non-spine-breaking V, she came.

Her thick and desiccated pages. Her assertions of ink.

Her chipped and fraying bindings. Her nether and her offing.

I held what she’d made with her hands in my hands. I pretended permanence.

We go to books for solace, and for proof, to begin again at the beginning. Handmade books, first editions, inky manuscripts, especially. They carry time forward on their own electric currents. They keep what we can’t keep. They counterweight the dying.

Thumbprints. Center knots. Errors.

That crease in the top corner.

The infuriating riddle.

Hold the old book in your hand, and you are holding something living.

When the famed Philadelphia bibliophile A. S. W. Rosenbach (1876–1952) was eleven years old, he bought, for the grand sum of $24, an illustrated copy of Reynard the Fox. Young Rosenbach didn’t have the necessary cash on hand, but he had the support of a book-obsessed uncle, in whose shop on Commerce Street the boy had been working since the age of nine. A deal was struck. A book was won.

In “Talking of Old Books,” reprinted in Books and Bidders: The Adventures of a Bibliophile, Rosenbach remembers the early undertow of what would become his lifelong obsession:

At that age I could hardly realize, spellbound as I was, the full quality of mystery and intangible beauty which becomes a part of the atmosphere wherever books are brought together; for here was something that called to me each afternoon, just as the wharves, the water, and the ships drew other boys who were delighted to get away from books the moment school was out. 

Rosenbach was, in the words of Vincent Starrett, a writer for the Chicago Tribune, “an excellent bibliografer, something of a scholar, and a bookman who would have lived by books, for books, and with books whatever his station in life might have been. It was his initial love and knowledge of old books that made it possible for him to become the great figure known as ‘the Doctor’ in the auction rooms of Europe and America.”

And what a figure Rosenbach cut—a University of Pennsylvania graduate with a Ph.D. in English literature, whose book-acquiring adventures were often front-page news. Over the course of a life that never swerved from rare books, he held the manuscripts of Chaucer, Lewis Carroll, and James Joyce in his hands (not to mention a considerable number of Gutenberg bibles, the copy of Moby-Dick that Herman Melville presented to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a letter from Cervantes); amassed a fortune in children’s books (most of them donated, toward the end of his life, to the Free Library of Philadelphia); fed the bookish appetites of such men as Pierpont Morgan and Henry Folger; named his fishing boat First Folio; wondered why no wife of a U.S. president had become a genuine book collector; and “made it a rule,” as he writes in A Book Hunter’s Holiday, “to look at any book which is directed my way.” His final Philadelphia residence, in the twentieth block of Delancey Street, is now the home of the Philip H. and A. S. W.

Rosenbach Museum and Library, and it is here where book lovers can, by appointment, see some of the books, letters, and manuscripts Rosenbach could never quite part with himself.

Dard Hunter, in his dusty shoes and hat, his workman’s shirt and tucked tie, traveled the world in search of not just paper but rare books written by other paper lovers. Rosenbach—cigar smoke rising, whiskey swirling, millionaires waiting—dominated auction rooms. They were men of their times, bound by the thrill of the chase and the deep reprieve of history and the hope for the eternal.

__________________________________

From My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera by Beth Kephart. Used by permission of Temple University Press. Copyright © 2023 by Temple University. All Rights Reserved.

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.

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.

*
Recommended Reading:

Generations by Lucille Clifton • A Writer Prepares by Lawrence Block

__________________________________

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.

Montréal is a city of parallel universes, often most at ease ignoring each other. Across linguistic, cultural, and generational orbits, it’s also a city that’s shown tremendous appetite for German author Jenny Erpenbeck’s work, in great part due to De Stiil, an anglophone bookstore in the heart of francophone neighborhood Le Plateau. Owner Aude Le Dubé’s carefully curated shop features literary fiction and books translated into English—and it serves as a kind of headquarters for what Le Dubé affectionately calls “the cult” of Erpenbeck fans.

Erpenbeck’s six books—five of fiction, and a memoir in essays—are as interdisciplinary as reality itself: economy, archeology, architecture, political history, musicology, psychology, sociology, mythology. Or a more contemporary articulation of academic inquiry: Trauma Studies. From the immeasurable devastation of the Third Reich to the enduring reverberations of Red Army soldiers’ desecration, from the upheaval that awaits within a numbered Stasi file to a modern Berlin accounting of what’s untaxed and undeclared in an inheritance, Erpenbeck’s writing defies appraisal. Her work resists summary, just as her most injured characters, with intractable agency, resist straightforward victimhood. Is her most recent novel, Kairos, about an increasingly destructive affair between married 58-year-old Hans and 19-year-old Katharina, or is it a reimagining of the control, betrayal, and collapse of a state? Both, of course, and then some.

A few weeks before my conversation with the Berlin-based author, I sit down with Le Dubé beside one of De Stiil’s huge windows to get a better sense of this Erpenbeck cult.

Originally from Brittany’s Lorient, a seaport town once occupied by the Germans, Le Dubé situates Montrealers’ fervor for Erpenbeck, an East Berliner who was twenty-two when the wall came down, within the Quebec context: “She speaks to our beliefs: socialist principles, sharing, and that building a better society includes immigrants and refugees.” The pre- and post-Wall Germany of Erpenbeck’s work offers helpful analogues for the complexities and clashes of Montreal’s adjacent universes, each building from distinct cultural-political models, yet supposedly the same people.

Beyond historical and metaphorical walls, though, Le Dubé, who prefers to read in English, emphasizes the moral urgency of the Erpenbeck oeuvre. At the time of reunification of Germany, Le Dubé describes, “All of a sudden the future was dead. Everything they’d been taught to fight for was gone. When everything is collapsing, how do you build a fair society?” Climate catastrophes, xenophobia, pandemics, occupations, wars, not to mention the proto-fascist policies of Quebec’s current premier—the concerns are unyielding, for any person who enters De Stiil. “I think it’s important for people to read her. While we don’t sell her to everybody, we always mention her work.” For the uninitiated, she first recommends Go, Went, Gone. “They buy that book, but they always come back for the rest.”

When New Directions published the English translation of Kairos earlier this year, Le Dubé contacted their Canada publicist to see if Erpenbeck, who some say is on her way to a Nobel Prize, might have travel plans to North America. Once on the continent, Montreal’s not that far, right? An agent got looped in, then Montreal’s Goethe Institute, then the Consulate General, then the Ottawa Embassy. At each stage of escalating bureaucracy, though, was a champion of Erpenbeck’s work. In the early evening of October 26, the outside of De Stiil resembles a night club more than a literary writer meet-and-greet. Dozens and dozens of readers, lined around the block, await their entry. In advance of the event, I sit down in a quieter corner of the bookstore to speak with Erpenbeck.

*

Ellen Adams: In re-reading your work, I was struck by how often infidelity comes up. Across your books, what new discoveries have you made about betrayal, whether in intimacy, or infidelity of values or the state?

Jenny Erpenbeck: When I first started to write, I didn’t know what my subject would as a long-term author. But, as it turned out, you are right. Betrayal and lying are at the center of my work, as are the layers of truth: how the same thing can be revealed again and again, or looked at from other perspectives, without being a lie, but rather a different kind of truth. If you look at Book of Words, her childhood is made up to be a good, easygoing childhood, then all of the sudden you can see that there’s something underground, not told to her, and eventually her father’s true profession is revealed. Even in The Old Child, my first main character, she’s lying to her classmates, to everyone, about her age. There’s a lot of hiding in my books. It’s always interested me. Hiding gives a certain kind of freedom because you can try something on without telling anyone, an experiment you undertake. And there’s always the question of what is the truth? In The Old Child, the truth is not revealed at all, not even in the end, so you don’t know where this lie comes from. And of course in Kairos, lying in the very middle of everything, as is the question: Who’s lying to whom, and in which way? Sometimes it’s shocking, with how little we can be content because we expect a certain truth. And if this is given to us, we are content. If someone believes a lie, it’s also sad, because it tells us that he or she is lacking the instruments to even doubt. But perhaps if you are young, it’s a blessed state of mind, to be so trusting.

EA: It makes me think of that initial rendezvous with Hans in Kairos, where Katharina thinks, “How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything?” The self-deception, the self-erasure that allows for their connection to exist.

JE: I think almost everyone has had this experience once in life, that of betrayal. If we were to see all the complexity all the time, it would drive us mad. And there’s always the question behind it: How could I take a half-life for a whole life? Was I content with so little that I couldn’t even see there was something missing, there was something hidden from me? In Kairos, all the things that are hidden, earlier or later, are revealed in the course of the book, earlier or later. What also interests me about hiding and revealing secrets is—in The End of Days, for instance—is if someone dies, a different kind of talk can happen, real, serious talks when someone perhaps reveals what’s been kept secret. Or in sorting the household of someone who’s died, a character might run into a secret by chance. This is also interesting to me, that there are some moments when you can speak about what has been hidden, after years in which it was not the right moment to speak about the secret.

In Kairos, you also have to—well, you don’t have to, and you don’t need to, but it’s nice if you manage to enable someone to tell the truth without being punished. And of course, we are cowards.

(Erpenbeck cracks up.)

If you ask your lover to tell the truth, but in the very moment when he or she does, you start arguing or punishing or playing some bad games with him or her, he or she will learn the lesson that if “I tell the truth, I get punished.” Kairos is a slow process of how something meant as a kind of truth actually transforms into a relationship with lying at its center. As it was in the political history of the GDR. Ideas were received enthusiastically in the beginning, a new start after fascist times. Slowly, a certain vocabulary was forbidden, a certain exchange of opinions not allowed. People started to deliver ready-made sentences—how to bring it into good English?

EA: Catch phrases, party lines?

JE: Yes. Perhaps I shouldn’t say so, but sometimes I have the feeling that we are coming to a similar time now, because there are certain sentences that you are supposed to deliver and others sentences that you are not supposed to deliver anymore. It’s a core question to art, because we are also responsible for the ugly children among the sentences. We should love all sentences, the ugly ones as well as the beautiful ones.

EA: And to let them be heard.

JE: Yes. Because if you want to describe reality, you cannot make a detour. Reality is reality is reality, and that’s it. So if you want to describe a bad experience, perhaps you need to use bad words to bring it to life, to let the readers feel something about it. If it’s not ugly enough, it doesn’t work. If Richard III is a nice character, you might as well throw the play away.

EA: (pointing to Go, Went, Gone) Or Richard the—

JE: Or Hans the Third!

EA: The first time I read Kairos, I found myself shouting on my couch, “What an asshole!” “Piece of shit!”

(Jenny laughs.)

I wrote it sometimes, too, in the margins: How awful!!! And yet, it was very liberating to see—in such amazing sentences—experiences that many of us have had behind closed doors.

JE: The women were much less shocked than the men. The women somehow experienced similar things. Some had periods in life when they were obsessed with such a Hans character. The men were really shocked! The nice readers, you know, the nice men. “Does such a person exist? I got so angry about him!” They hadn’t faced such a thing before, as it seemed.

EA: And yet there’s so much complicity between some of the male colleagues in your books, whether it’s a Richard’s colleague who’s dating a 20-year-old—

JE: This is not what I’m judging. The age difference is not the point. The point is the character. Even if Katharina could have met a version of Hans when he was 20 years younger, he would have been the same character. The character is what matters—if someone is manipulating, or hiding a big part of his life. An older man looks at a young woman with a certain kind of pleasure? This is normal. You admire beauty. You are happy to look at some young person, man or woman, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a crime. Only if you use your experience to manipulate someone, like Hans does with Katharina.

EA: I’m curious about the idea of using sensuality or romance to lure someone as an agent of the state—for example, the “John” essay in Bits and Pieces. Or Richard looking up his own Stasi file to find that his state-declared “areas of weakness include habitual arrogance and documented marital infidelity.” And of course, Hans uses his sexual influence to surveille.

JE: To spy for the Stasi—that’s bad!

EA: Mixing spying and romance and the state—which returns us to the idea of infidelity.

JE: It seems this kind of surveillance spying is a specialty of dictatorship systems! After partition, people worked for the Stasi for a variety of reasons, and not all of them were bad. Especially in the first years of the GDR, people entered the Stasi in order to find fascists who were hiding under false identities. Or people freed from the concentration camps entered to find those who had treated them so badly.  Later on, it became more complex, to put it briefly. People were trying to gain power over others by stepping out of the system and looking in on it. This is the core of spying: you position yourself outside to look in. You look at your community, a group of friends, your family, or your colleagues, all from outside, from the very moment when you start reporting on them. (Even in Western structures where there is no Stasi, there are still people who would like to surveil. The bad characters still exist. They just aren’t given the chance to do so!) Again, it’s a question of character, as is lying. You know, Katharina is also lying. Perhaps not that badly, but she’s lying, too.

EA: And her diaries become this archive of lying—or not.

JE: We all lie to ourselves. We manipulate with what phrases we leave behind. If I make a diary entry, I might write one thing on one day, and the next day I might describe the same scenery in a different way. Is this a lie? Or if you are afraid that someone will find your diary, so you leave some things out. So it’s not all about the bad Other. It’s also about us. And of course, Katharina is not true to herself. This is the main mistake she’s making. Otherwise, she would just go away with this young guy and be happy, you know? Why is this obsession with Hans is so much stronger? And I have no answer! If any reader does, give me an answer, please!

EA: Yet there is a logic to it! In Kairos, as in other works, the logic and inner worlds of your characters feel full, flush with associations and fleshed-out subconscious. In your process of developing a book, does that ecosystem of meaning arrive to you from the onset, or do you write your way into it and then trim back?

JE: Normally, I start from the beginning, and I just write my way to the end. I have a center for every scene or chapter. I put all the material that I collected, all the thoughts that I had on it, and then I try to put it in connection to the chapter’s center. Some things about your characters will just happen in the writing process. When I had already written half of Kairos, for example, I did some research on the guy on whom Hans is based. I got this Stasi file. It became a major problem for the structure of the book, one I didn’t expect! When I studied opera directing, a famous director—one of the most famous opera directors in Germany at this time—she always said, “If you are facing a problem, don’t make a detour. Go right through the middle of it.” I think this is a basic law for all art. Even if something is destroying your initial idea or plan, you have to deal with it.

EA: Which reminds me of what you mentioned at the beginning, of not making a detour around the truth. Instead, really looking at it—while also exploring characters who are lying to themselves, or having to shed lies that they’ve told themselves.

JE: I think we are all trying to produce ourselves as like—Wait.

 (Jenny goes to the back of her bookstore to fetch her smartphone, then searches the word Heil.)

We want to produce a sound picture of ourselves, a picture that makes sense. A whole that works well with our idea of what we want to be. We want to have not only smooth outsides, but also smooth insides. And this doesn’t work, of course. We have dark corners.

EA: Speaking of which—I’m curious about Eros in your writing. Obviously in Kairos, it’s a powerful force, but it’s present in many of your books. Eros and violence, or Eros and control. Eros and compliance. What draws you to look at sensuality through those lenses?

JE: You might be right. The erotic scenes in my books are not the happy ones. I don’t know where it comes from. Of course, it has a lot to do with power. When I think of the Red Army soldier in Visitation, I thought it would be interesting to put it differently than how it is normally put, so that you cannot clearly see who is the one with the power and who is the victim. It switches many times during this erotic scene. You cannot say this is a Red Army soldier raping a German woman. It could also be a German woman raping a very young Red Army soldier. It’s not clear. The erotic in Kairos is also a deeply disturbed. When Hans is first tying Katharina to the bed, she’s thinking about how she forgot to buy onions. This is not erotic. I would say it’s the opposite of erotic. Perhaps only women can see that. A man would perhaps rather say that Katharina’s obsessed with him and she cannot leave him because she’s so obsessed with his sexual potency. But a woman reader, I think, can clearly see that Katharina’s not interested in him sexually. There’s one passage where he asks her, “Are you looking for a father?” She says, “No.” But in the end, she herself says she would have liked to have someone without all this sex, just as a good companion. If Hans had offered her friendship, perhaps she could have accepted to leave him. But he didn’t offer friendship, because he wanted to use her, abuse her. Ahh, I don’t know where it comes from. I’m not an American author. I don’t have a psychotherapist! I would say I had a lucky youth, and everything was okay. But in a way, it took me a long time to find men in my life who are not—freaks. I don’t know why.

EA: There’s an element of chance, and also an element of tolerance.

JE: Yes, and sometimes you are drawn to the freaks without knowing it. When you’re young, things happen. Now it’s been a long time that I’ve been very happy, you know?

EA: I certainly related to the onions moment. Been there! Which leads me to humor in your work. Humor appears in such subtle ways, or more head-on, like the Go, Went, Gone scene with the barrister, that owl-man lawyer. I was just cracking up. So theatrical, almost like it could have been a cartoon. Yet he’s the person who’s invested in reviewing these folks’ asylum files. Does humor come to you on intuition, or do you find yourself going back to the heart of a chapter and saying, “Maybe I should add some in?”

JE: I really have so much fun, actually, but very rarely do people see the humor. Perhaps it’s not so obvious. Of course my books are about serious issues, so it’s not much fun in general. But I do think I have a kind of humor, and I enjoy it. Sometimes it just takes me away!

EA: In Go, Went Gone, women are really on the periphery. I know that writing this book included experiential research, not to mention years-long friendships, with many men arriving initially through Italy as refugees. In the novel itself, we see and hear children. In the hellish waiting room of asylum claims, however, the women are spatially and narratively on the outskirts. One is up a tree at Oranienplatz, and the others appear via a second-hand account of sex work along a rural Italian road. What was your intention in writing these women only at the periphery?

JE: The journey from an African home country to Europe is really hard. Not so many women make it to Europe. Of course, some women do, and during my research, I met several, but then I thought: the absence of women is a screaming one. This is a story I want to tell. A connecting bond between Richard and the refugees is that all these men are missing women. It’s not just about sex, of course. It’s also about family, children, to have someone you feel close to, in a different way than a friend. This is what Richard is missing, after his wife passed away, and it’s also what these young men are missing. So the finale of the book is the men speaking about the women who they knew, who they are missing. The loneliness. It’s a major aspect of the problem. They are missing children so desperately! Many of them told me they had never slept in a room all alone. Many of them are used to sleeping in a room with their family, children, grown-ups, sisters, brothers, cousins, etc. They adore children. And then you put them into such isolating houses where they cannot meet women and they cannot have children. You forbid them to work, so you don’t let them learn the language. What would come out of it? This is a desperate situation, and it can only end badly. And if it doesn’t end badly, they are heroes for withstanding all this. These young men should be given a chance to move forward, to move, to get out, to find his own life, to find his family, to get a job. The absence of women means much more than just having sex. For most of these men, it means that life is starting. And their lives are not starting.

EA: That line—“It means that life is starting”—interests me in the context of Go, Went, Gone, given the abortion revealed at the end, from a time when young couple Richard and Christel’s life would be starting. The couple’s life comes to a halt thereafter.

JE: I am absolutely for the right for abortion. But in this case, Richard made a mistake, and it couldn’t be taken back. I thought for Christel, it would have been the right moment. For Richard, because of his career, he says no. For their marriage, that proves sad and irreversible. To come back to your earlier question, how I make the characters. In the beginning of Go, Went, Gone, I mentioned that Christel drank too much. After I wrote the whole book, I thought, “Hmm, there is one question waiting for me. Why did she drink?” Only in the very end, I had to answer that for myself. It’s a strange thing, because, of course, I’m the one inventing the story. On the other hand, my subconscious put something in the beginning that I didn’t want to go back to for a long time. I could see that she was physically and mentally wounded by the whole thing, in part due to abortion being illegal at this time. I know women who almost died—put on some kitchen table in a private apartment of someone who may or may not have even been capable of performing the medical procedure. As a friend of mine says, if you don’t allow abortions, it doesn’t mean that abortions don’t take place. It only means that abortions are made illegally and put the woman in danger.

EA: Pregnancy, abortion, and paternity are weaponized elsewhere in your writing. In Kairos, Katharina wonders which patriarchal affiliation allowed her access to the West. Her grandfather, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War? Her older male employer, who takes a bit too much pleasure in sitting next to her? Her father’s status as a professor? Paternity, and paternalism, is the go-to rubric to vouch for Katharina’s mobility. Yet in other gorgeous pages, we learn about matrilineal Tuareg traditions where kids “belong” to the mom. I’m curious to hear your thoughts: Who does a child, who does a life belong to?

JE: Hmm. It’s an interesting question. I think I will write another novel about it.

EA: Let me know if you need a reader. I’ll start studying German ASAP!

JE: You are a tough questioner! Of course I already told everything, but nobody sees it so clearly! It’s always interested me, how much you inherit by your genes versus how you’re brought up socially. In The Book of Words, the young woman ends up on the wrong side, if you look at her true parents. She’s on the enemy’s side, the one who killed them. Often, you define yourself by feeling either like a natural part of, or in opposition to, your family. You always feel you have power over who you are and why you are that way. If there’s a sudden revelation, like the sad truth about the young woman in The Book of Words, it’s like that power is taken from you. You become a victim, perhaps of your parents’ mistakes, or all the things they went through so that they couldn’t bring you up themselves. Likewise, I’ve always been interested in people who are looking for their biological parents—what exactly they are they looking for.

EA: One last question. I love that Richard has to come up with a slogan to get the protest permit.

JE: Ahh, yes! That’s one of my funny scenes!

EA: If you had to come up with a slogan for your work, what would it be?

JE: Oh God!

(She laughs.)

A slogan is a difficult thing.

EA: Maybe even the opposite of what you’re doing. Your work seems like an anti-slogan.

JE: The shorter the text that someone wants from you, the more difficult it is to write. Whenever I’m asked for a blurb for a book, I work two weeks on it! I keep looking for how to get to the very essence. Hmm. The essence.

 (She taps the table, then looks up.)

Keep being curious. Everything depends on the point of view. And the truth is never just one thing. It is a complex, living entity, moving, growing, shifting around. But these are not good mottos, because a motto should be clear about what truth is, and I am not.

EA: Maybe that is the truth, that it’s not clear?

JE: Clearly. Okay, one more slogan: Everybody should be given the chance to live.

__________________________________

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated from the German by Michael Hofmann) is available from New Directions.

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.

I first heard of Willa Cather as a teenage bookseller in North Denver, at a new, used, rare, and antiquarian bookshop that had once been a mechanic’s garage. At the bookstore, there was an entire section of Cather’s famous works, which I had labeled meticulously with colored markers on scraps of printer paper. I don’t remember hearing of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Instead, I sold heaps of used copies of O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and occasionally The Song of the Lark. Years later as an English major, I would hear these books re- ferred to as “the Nebraska Trilogy,” and despite my father being born and raised in Omaha, I still found them to be of little interest based on the pastoral covers with their willowy fonts and watercolor prairies. Perhaps in that unconscious way we often do, I decided that Cather, as a white woman writer of the Midwest, was simply not for me: a Colorado Chicana, a mixed person of Filipino, Indigenous, and Euro-pean ancestry, a young woman trying and often failing to find herself in the pages of books. What could Cather and I possibly have in common? A lot, I was to find out.

After my first book, Sabrina & Corina, was published in 2019, I traveled throughout the United States reading from my short stories and discussing some of my ancestors’ origins in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. I was also at work on my novel, Woman of Light, a reimagining of the lives of my ancestors between 1868 and 1934 and based on our family oral tradition. When crafting the official synopsis for Sabrina & Corina, my publisher settled on the term Indigenous Latinas to describe the cultural identity of my characters in hopes of distilling some sense of their and my deeply complex history. Despite these attempts, I still encountered an abundance of confusion from readers outside of my own culture and region who could not fathom my ancestors’ existence in the American Southwest before the founding of the country. We have always resided in these lands north of the current US-Mexico border, my own roots extending to Pueblos of northern New Mexico. This is where we are from, El Norte, which is also the setting of Willa Cather’s ninth novel, the masterpiece Death Comes for the Archbishop.

While it is set shortly after the Mexican-American War, Death Comes for the Archbishop opens far from the American Southwest. Cather briefly transports us to Rome in 1848, where three cardinals and a missionary bishop dine in the lush gardens of a villa overlooking the ancient city. On my first book tour, I would mention this time in American his- tory. While many readers in my own region were familiar with the Mexican-American War and the resulting Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the majority of people I met outside the Southwest were unfamiliar with how this conflict shaped the fate of millions. It seemed surprising to many audiences when I told them that California, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Texas, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming had once been Mexico, and before 1821 a territory of Spain, and before that and forever and always it is Native land. There is a saying, “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us,” which I used time and time again to help illustrate the geopolitical forces that had shaped my family’s destiny. Despite these efforts, I came home from my first book tour exhausted and made lonely by the sheer amount of historical explanation.

I was living in my former childhood bedroom when I first spotted Death Comes for the Archbishop. While writing late one night, my gaze wandered toward the bookshelf and landed upon a cover illustration of an old adobe church in the desert, red mountains in the distance, and an endless blue sky. What, I thought, is that? Outside was my parents’ neighborhood, dark with early Colorado fall. I stood from my lap- top, drifting toward the book, and then held it for a long while. It was as if the novel and I had made eye contact, a hold- ing of one’s gaze. It was a meeting, I decided, destined to be.

I read Death Comes for the Archbishop in a few days. I carried it with me to waiting rooms and in long lines at the post office. While I was used to scrolling the shallows of Instagram in the spare moments of my day, Death Comes for the Archbishop held my attention with Cather’s magnificent descriptions of the American Southwest and close psychological observations of religious figures I had often thought were narratively off-limits: priests. The novel reminded me of my insatiable childhood reading habits—the all-nighters locked in a bathroom, the only place where I could keep a light on without detection in a household of seven children. Cather had awoken in me a type of pleasure-reading that over the years had eroded with deadlines, assignments, and the long list of reasons why we do not read out of desire but instead out of duty.

Soon after reading the novel, I spoke at a college in Winter Park, Florida. A student asked what I had been reading lately. Emphatically, I spurted out, “Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop. I’ve never seen the history of my ancestors glimpsed this way before in a novel. It’s not from our perspective or anything like that, but there we are, alongside these priests in the lands of my ancestors.” Afterward, the poet Billy Collins surprised me at my book signing table. We had met briefly years earlier in Key West, and I wasn’t sure if he remembered me, but he did, and, more important, he also had been reading Death Comes for the Archbishop. I can’t remember exactly what he had said, but there was a sense of shared discovery of greatness. “It’s wonderful,” I had said. “I hope more people read it.” It became a mission of mine that day, a project of sorts. I wanted my readers to read Cather. It was as simple as that. I had been startled into attention at seeing my own history on the page.

The prologue for Death Comes for the Archbishop feels like the narrative equivalent of eavesdropping on a nearby table at a lightly populated restaurant. There is little context, some guiding dates and descriptions of the men and their at- tire. Cather is not overly generous in her atmospheric details. She is a stylist who at least in her age predates Hemingway in her proclivity toward sparsity. “But is not realism,” Cather wrote in her 1922 essay “The Novel Démeublé,” “more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague definition of the sympathy and candor with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?”

They were talking business: had met, indeed, to discuss an anticipated appeal from the Provincial Council at Baltimore for the founding of an Apostolic Vicarate in New Mexico—a part of North America recently annexed to the United States. This new territory was vague to all of them, even to the missionary Bishop. The Italian and French Cardinals spoke of it as Le Mexique, and the Spanish host referred to it as “New Spain.”

Within the prologue, Cather mentions the physical realm: the stars coming out at night, the garden and hills, glasses of wine emptied and refilled, but the focal point is the tenor of the conversation. There is a land newly acquired by the Americans through force of war, there are some “thirty In- dian nations . . . each with its own customs and languages,” and there are also the “Mexicans, a naturally devout people.”

Us, I thought. She is describing us.

This feeling of recognition, of being glimpsed at the periphery of a great American writer’s consciousness, was not an experience accustomed to me. It had occurred more directly in the pages of Rudolfo Anaya and Arturo Islas, but their seminal works are set well into the twentieth century. Entering the world of Death Comes for the Archbishop was perhaps the first time I felt the narrative universe of my family’s oral tradition converging with the novel form. Is this what it feels like, I had thought, to read as the majority? To see yourself and your history in books nearly every time you crack open a spine?

It wasn’t a perfect match, as I would discover throughout the course of reading the novel. Cather was not necessarily my literary ancestor. She was closer to something like a neighbor, my fellow literary countryman.

Willa Cather was born in 1873 into a landowning family in Virginia and was the eldest of seven children. Her family moved to Nebraska when Willa was nine years old, eventually settling in Red Cloud, a railroad town and farming community in the rolling prairie of Pawnee lands. She was a precocious child who delighted in literature and art. In the relatively crammed house she shared with her family and an intellectually disabled domestic worker named Margie Anderson, Willa was allowed her own sanctuary in the either frigid or blazingly hot attic, a small nook formed into a bed- room and covered in wallpaper of her choosing. Her ambition was not yet to become an author. She wanted to be a surgeon, but it was a profession reserved at the time for men. As a teenager, Willa arrived at the University of Nebraska with short hair and dressed in masculine clothing, preferring the name William. In fact, one of her mentors, Sarah Orne Jewett, later criticized Cather for her tendency to write fiction from male perspectives, labeling it a form of masquerade. Despite these outward influences pushing Cather toward a life of more commonplace femininity, the young writer sought work in the predominantly male world of publishing. She began her writing life with essays and reviews in Nebraska, which led to an editorial job in Pittsburgh and eventually New York City, where she worked as managing editor of McClure’s, one of the most successful literary magazines of its time. During these formative years, Cather also met her lifelong romantic partner, Edith Lewis, who would first ac- company her to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915, a trip that would later prove monumental in its influence.

Death Comes for the Archbishop at its heart is an adventure tale inspired by the real lives of Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and his vicar, Father Joseph Machebeuf. Following two French missionary priests, distinct in their complementary personalities, there’s reserved Father Jean Marie Latour and outgoing Father Joseph Vaillant. They journey throughout the American Southwest, the farthest reaches of the Santa Fe Trail, as power moves from the Mexican diocese in Durango to that of the recently arrived Americans in Santa Fe. The priests seek to spread the faith and build a cathedral in the desert while the land transitions, from one nation to another, with Old World European ideals butting against a newly asserted American dominance, but there is a deeper, more com- plicated cultural undercurrent to nearly every chapter of the novel. Throughout the novel, the narrative again rests at the junction of French, Spanish, Indigenous, Mexican, and Middle Eastern, a cultural tapestry born out of layered conquest. In the chapter “A Bell and a Miracle,” this convergence is exemplified in the pleasant music of the Angelus bell.

“[T]he inscription [on the bell] is in Spanish…It must have been brought up from Mexico City in an ox-cart…and the silver of the Spaniards was really Moorish, was it not?… The Spaniards knew nothing about working silver except as they learned it from the Moors…The Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors.” 

While reading the novel, I found myself asking how Cather knew such depth of nuanced information about the American Southwest. Cather, who so often wrote of the Midwest and its European immigrant communities, had a fascination with the region, the Southwest first appearing in her work in 1909 with the short story “The Enchanted Bluff.” The region would emerge again in her writing in The Song of the Lark (1915), The Professor’s House (1925), and, of course, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). We currently exist in a time when writers are asked to almost exclusively write of our own experiences. This made me wonder: how had Cather embodied characters and landscapes so different from her own? She was a meticulous observer, I came to realize, of both human psychology and place. Take, for example, Father Latour’s journey to Santa Fe with his Navajo guide Eusabio and a pack mule. Latour is struck with splendor at the sight.

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

A voracious tourist, Cather first visited the American Southwest in 1912 on a trip to see her brother in Winslow, Arizona. During that trip, Cather wrote a friend, “The West always paralyzes me a little . . . I always feel afraid of losing something, and I don’t in the least know what it is.”4 Unlike Cather, I cannot recall my first experiences with the land—it is the mode of my existence. Born in a Denver hospital, I must have been only days old when I was first carried beneath that vast and brilliant blue sky. I cannot recall feeling a sense of loss or fear at the landscape in the way Cather could coming to the West at nine years old. Instead, I feel wholeness. I am of this place, and despite these differences in our backgrounds and perceptions, Death Comes for the Archbishop still amazes me with its enlivened depictions of landscape.

Rather than a mere backdrop, the physical lands of the novel are imbued with emotional resonance. Upon looking back at Santa Fe, Father Vaillant takes in the sight of the town “rosy in the morning light, the mountain behind it, and the hills close about it like two encircling arms.” The desert wind does not simply blow across the earth but makes “a hollow sound as it sucked down through the deep arroyo.” Cather insisted that words like arroyo and adobe were not altered for translated editions of the novel. There is no other way to say it, she insisted. In a letter to Knopf, objecting to errors in the French translation, Cather wrote, “How can one paraphrase a landscape which one has never seen?” But alongside the priests’ deep reverence for the land, they often reveal a sense of terror and incomprehensibility. It is a place that feels to them so featureless it is “crowded with features.”5 In one of the most affecting passages of the novel, “Snake Root,” a Pecos Pueblo man named Jacinto seeks shelter in an underground cave with Father Latour during a great and blinding snowstorm. The cavern is described as lofty and gothic, almost chapel-like. It is a moment charged with mystery and Father Latour’s fear at the unknowns of ancient custom and beliefs that predate Christianity on the continent.

Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.
“It is terrible,” he said at last, as he rose.

Terror, it should be said, does enter the narrative on more than one occasion. There is confusion about the landscape, fear of starvation and thirst, violence and massacres, villains of the highest Western order. In a novel that is woven with episodic moments of significance, the harrowing scene of a Mexican woman named Magdalena and her serial killer American husband reverberates long after one has finished reading the book. Near the village of Mora, the priests find themselves traveling into the night as their mules wither with exhaustion. They come upon a “wretched” adobe house where an American stranger appears at the door, inviting them to stay the night. Inside they find a home where dirty clothes and wet socks hang from chairs, and in that dark space she appears: Magdalena, a woman who at first the priests assume is “half-witted” with a “stupid face.” It is not surprising to read such frankly racist depictions of Mexican women in a novel written by a white writer in the 1920s, but what is surprising is what happens next. Magdalena, without utter- ing a sound, warns the priests that her husband will in fact kill them in the night.

Instantly that stupid face became intense, prophetic, full of awful meaning. With her finger she pointed them away, away!—two quick thrusts into the air. Then, with a look of horror beyond anything language could convey, she threw back her head and drew the edge of her palm quickly across her distended throat—and vanished. The doorway was empty; the two priests stood staring at it, speechless. That flash of electric passion had been so swift, the warning it communicated so vivid and definite, that they were struck dumb.
Father Joseph was the first to find his tongue. “There is no doubt of her meaning. Your pistol is loaded, Jean?” 

There is a tension throughout the narrative of what can be conveyed through language and what cannot. Magdalena, who at first is reduced by the priests to shorthand, a stereotype of intellectual ineptitude, proves to be a savior. I couldn’t help but wonder if Magdalena was somehow related to the many women of my community and family history, Mexican- American women who have fallen victim to brutalization at the hands of white American men.

When I learned that I had the opportunity to write this introduction, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to visit Red Cloud, Ne- braska, Willa Cather’s foundational home. Throughout my childhood, my family drove the long stretch of I-80 across Nebraska to visit our grandparents in Omaha. My father was born there, and my mother was relocated by her single mother in the 1970s to Grand Island. Our family in Nebraska, besides being Catholic, was not the same as my vast Chicano and Filipino side in Denver. For one, they are white, of Polish and German descent. What I knew of Catholicism is that it was one of the major roots to my family tree of several ethnicities and ancestries. Save for a Jewish maternal grandmother raised in a Catholic orphanage, of my varied ancestors their great commonality was religion.

In Nebraska, my ancestors were bakers and salesmen, and the cultural mode of the family was much more distant and silent than that of my maternal side. I can define this relation- ship through a prominent childhood memory. It is of my father standing in the driveway of his parents’ west Omaha home. He is saying goodbye to my grandfather, who is dying slowly of Parkinson’s disease. It is late November, and that flat world is cast in a great gray screen. The two men do not em- brace and there is no laughter or declarations of affection. My father does not utter, “I love you, Dad,” and his father does not utter, “I love you, Son.” They discreetly shake hands and that is that, and we are on our way, back home to Colorado.

While I was in Red Cloud, it was early summer and I was taken by the prairie scenery, the endless green and the way the wind rippled across the high grass. Birds lifted into flight and the town itself felt charged with stories. I stayed the night in the Cathers’ summer house and walked the hardwood floors, imagining a young Willa visiting her family on trips home from her busy life in New York City. Before leaving town, I made it a point to stop at Mr. Shimerda’s suicide grave from My Ántonia, but I never made it. A tornado warning came over the radio and the air turned acrid and grim. I raced along county roads, hoping to avoid the storm, and as I charged out of Red Cloud, I couldn’t help but notice that the sand hills oddly reminded me of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. When I arrived to meet my parents later that night, I asked my father, “How did your people, my people, arrive in Nebraska?”

My American story and the history of my ancestors is one of convergence. It does not begin in 1776. Our stories start elsewhere, in the center of our world. Death Comes for the Archbishop speaks to the idea of nation building. How are a people formed? Who gives us our common stories and how do those tales permeate into the collective? Perhaps it is through missionary priests, or a public school system, media, literature, art, but there is a guiding mythology that is curated to fit the needs of the nation. As a Chicana of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, defining my cultural heritage and the historical framework that created a person like me often proves difficult. Death Comes for the Arch- bishop made an aspect of my own history tangible through story. I have been confounded for much of my life by the American desire to place identity neatly into one box. I have been asked to narrow my cultural heritage, to make things easier, streamlined, avoidant. One of the most surprising aspects of Death Comes for the Archbishop is the way that Cather seems to predict the emergence of future generations born out of convergence. That shared glance, the acknowledgment of something destined to be. It’s as if the furthest reaches of the Cather imagination are somehow, nearly one hundred years later, meeting with my own.

Now it is with great pleasure that I invite you, dear reader, into the Southwest lands of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Perhaps this novel will teach you something new about human nature and the layered conquest of our nation, who gets to tell stories and who doesn’t, but more than anything I hope this masterpiece informs a deeper understanding of yourself and of your own history. But if not, Death Comes for the Archbishop is still one heck of an adventure, a novel that has endured for a century, and in a hundred more years, I would wager that Father Latour and Father Vaillant are still riding their mules throughout the imaginations of readers across the globe, even in the most desolate of deserts.

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A new introduction by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.  From Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, published by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Introduction copyright © 2023 by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.

Climate fiction is everywhere.The Guardian calls a roundup of climate fiction “stories to save the world.” The New Yorker asks if climate fiction can “wake us up to our climate reality?” A recent op-ed in the LA Times posits that climate fiction is a “surprising source of hope.” There is also a tenor to the conversation that positions climate fiction as foreshadowing; telling the future. Grist says this past summer,“reality caught up to climate fiction.” The New York Public Library tells readers to read these books before they “become nonfiction.” A college professor uses climate fiction to teach students about the potential impacts of climate change. 

“Countless critics and authors have proclaimed that climate stories will help solve climate change. But unlike many critical arguments about literature and the arts, this is an empirical claim,” Matthew Schneider-Mayerson told me. In 2020, Schneider-Mayerson, an Associate Professor of English  at Colby College, decided to investigate that question. In collaboration with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Schneider-Mayerson used two short stories about climate change to test the impact on a small group of readers.  What he found was a small increase in concern immediately after reading the stories, which faded to statistically insignificant levels of concern within a month. 

This does not surprise me. As a climate journalist, I am familiar with the cognitive dissonance that imbues every conversation about the climate crisis. I frequently find myself in conversation with people who want to wax poetic about Kim Stanley Robinson’s visionary climate novel, Ministry for the Future, but shy away when I talk about the painful grappling my family is doing around the idea of giving up air travel. Buying books will always be easier than questioning one’s own consumption. Besides, people are busy. As Schneider-Mayerson explained, “There are so many economic, social, and cultural pressures, incentives, and norms that encourage us to go back to sleep—to focus on other things.” 

The reality is that we have no idea what climate fiction does or doesn’t do. “It’s only lately that environmental scientists are studying behavior,” Cameron Brick, a researcher from the University of Amsterdam who studies climate engagement and communication impacts, “rather than the easier way of studying what they self-report as intending to do, or having done, which is partially accurate, but has error or bias in it.” 

Brick says that part of the misleading messaging around climate fiction is “the idea that what we need to do is transform the concern and collective consciousness and then action would necessarily follow.”  The reality is that concern over the climate crisis is at an all-time high, and growing rapidly. If the goal is to save our species from climate change, perhaps a more efficient route would be to skip writing the book – even reading it – and move straight to direct action. 

In fact, if the goal is direct action, Brick says climate fiction could actually be a deterrent. “If you arouse a lot of concern and grief and terror, if there’s no sense that we can do something to prevent it, and here is concretely what we are doing and here are the people who are helping, then I think you can do a lot of harm potentially,” Brick says. “You are just gonna cause people to feel a lot of anxiety and want to disconnect.” Obviously, Brick concedes, this only matters if you’re trying to use your novel to influence change. 

Omar El Akkad, the author of What Strange Paradise and  American War, says that the debate about climate fiction “working” or not is a disservice to what art is supposed to be. “A lot of this has to do with the notion, which I find particularly insidious, that art is a problem to be solved,” he said. “Trying to take a fundamentally rational approach to solving art, to writing the perfect climate novel that’s going to cause people to change their minds and fix the climate crisis, is nonsensical.”

The reality is that we have no idea what climate fiction does or doesn’t do.[/The reality is that we have no idea what climate fiction does or doesn’t do.]

The truth of what El Akkad is saying becomes immediately obvious when you start reading reviews of climate fiction. Karen Russell, the Pulitzer Prize finalist and MacArthur fellow whose work frequently tackles climate change, told me about a reaction to her short story, “The Ghost Birds.” The story, which was published in The New Yorker,  takes place in a future where all the birds are extinct and follows a birdwatcher trying to find ghost birds. “I read a review of the story, and one commenter said it didn’t make him want to save the birds or the planet…it was something to the effect of ‘This story makes me want to save as much money as I can before I die and leave it to my kids, so they can buy water and air.’” 

As appealing as the idea of saving the world through art sounds, if you take a step back, it is actually quite absurd. The creation of art, when done well, melds the subconscious and conscious, a process that does not tend to react well to overt guidance. Or as Karen Russell so succinctly put it: “The danger of using a story to broadcast my own politics or treating it like propaganda or argument is that it can wind up sounding like a very bad Op-Ed.” 

Perhaps the confusion about what climate fiction can – and should – do is really just a question of the thin line between art and propaganda. While both may look like a book and quack like a book, most of the writers I spoke with described their fiction as an exploration towards an unknown destination. Propaganda, whose goal is persuasion, must know the destination and take the most succinct, least nuanced path to get there. When the label of “climate fiction” is applied to a book, every plot choice and character, starts to be seen as a message about climate change. 

Anthony Doerr, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, says that while his most recent book, Cloud Cuckoo Land, could be seen as climate fiction, he was more interested in addressing a disconnection between the natural world. “I was interested in showing how Anna and Omeir’s lives in the 15th century were full of everyday interactions with dozens of creatures. There are so many animals and birds in their lives, and there’s more meaning vested in other things they share the planet with than there is in Seymour and Zeno’s lives [in modern times]. And then, by the time you get to Konstance’s life [in the 22nd century]…all of her interactions with other species, besides an ant, are virtual.” In comparison, here is a World Wildlife Fund billboard with a similar message: Love it or lose it. Same point, different dimensions. 

I have to show my hand here. When I first started questioning the role of climate fiction, I was incredibly optimistic. Of course, nobody wants to read my examination of a 1977 memo on global warming that Jimmy Carter received. Even I don’t want to read that! But A Children’s Bible? American War? I was standing in my kitchen drinking a glass of water when I picked up Weather, by Jenny Offill, and found myself two hours later, still standing in my kitchen, weeping. How can these books not change…everything? 

But underneath all that optimism, I think I intuitively understood that it is the thing that makes us weep that keeps us from taking to the streets. So many readers, myself included, grew up with books as an escape. Not as a guide. Not as a way to think about the political complexities of an issue. But as a way to submerge into a totally different reality and then emerge, hours later, back into our own lives. Reflection, grappling, resonance: these are beautiful states, but they are a far cry from chaining yourself to a pipeline drill. If we’re being honest, I put down Weather, wiped my tears, and went to have a call with the guy who does my taxes. 

Interestingly enough, Offill’s novel, Weather, actually does have a call to action – a website called Obligatory Note of Hope where readers can get “tips for trying times” and learn more about climate activist organizations – but Offill says that despite the title of the website, her intention wasn’t to instill hope in readers: “Hope and despair has always felt like a false dichotomy. I suppose this website was a way of exploring that theory. The idea was if you got to the end of the novel and it was enough for you, you could stop there and think about what all of it meant. If you felt galvanized to action, I wanted to give a few gateways you could walk through.” 

El Akkad is also trying to provide gateways in his work but for other writers. He says that climate fiction plays such a central part of his novels in part to pave the way for future novelists. “In a sense, what I’m doing, either consciously or subconsciously, with all my work, is shouting, and part of the purpose of shouting is so that the next writer further down the line can speak a little more quietly.”

This idea, that the climate fiction we are currently writing and reading, is part of an iterative process that is still unfolding, is something that Russell brought up as well. “I think that an underexplored possibility of fiction is conjuring future worlds premised on different values, different social arrangements, different ontologies, different ways of living with each other and with other-than-human nature.”

Russell pointed out that even though she reads – and writes – dystopian fiction, the ease with which writers mentally conjure worst-case scenarios gives her pause. “I worry that we’ve spent so much time envisioning precisely the future we least want to inhabit that it’s come to feel  inevitable.”  It’s true; so many futuristic scenarios outlined in novels involve drought, excruciating heat, disastrous weather events, cities underwater, humans turned against each other; a terrifying tilt-a-whirl of Mad Max imagery that tends to blur from one book into another.  Russell says this is in part because we are so saturated in our modern extractive way of living. “It’s much easier for me to extrapolate from “business as usual” to a fortress world, domed cities that protect the wealthy and mass extinctions, tremendous suffering, than it is for me to conjure a world of abundance, where people live well.”

In her newest novel, Russell says she’s “trying to see if I can tune my imagination to a different horizon, and draw some of these possible future worlds premised on different values out of vagueness and into focus.” Her novel, which includes a time-traveling camera, will be published by Knopf in 2025. 

 In our conversation, Russell and I imagined a network of climate novels spread out over decades, in conversation with each other. A hundred, a thousand novelists stretching their minds as each book pushes further and further into imagining something truly different. 

In this way, by even asking the question of whether climate fiction helps to solve climate change, we create a false dichotomy. Either climate fiction can save the world, and therefore how can any of us write anything else? Or, it doesn’t save the world, in which case the climate crisis in fiction becomes like any other topic, a novelty. A plot.  

Perhaps it is not the role – or obligation – of fiction to save anything. Perhaps these books aren’t telling us about the future, they’re telling us about us: Writers – the most observant of us – are the record-keepers of a moment in time. For El Akkad, this reflectivity is the whole point. “The inherent uncertainty of art is, in many ways, the clearest reflective surface against which we see the human condition.” 

In this case, the rise of climate fiction isn’t happening in order to make us care about climate change; it’s happening because we already care. 

In the wake of ongoing discussions about whether we can love monstrous writers, or whether we should even write monstrous characters, I have escaped into a personal library not of monsters, but of mischief. Over the last two years I have built what I call the feral shelf. It began in lockdown, when I was starved for other people and parties. I found solace and satisfaction in books full of sex, intoxication, sass and excess; that railed against wellness, against the proper, against the polite. The feral shelf’s protagonists (often the writers themselves, distorted) have sharp tongues and bad habits: they act with a lust for life and all its possibilities.

The shelf has a father, son and a holy spirit: Eve Babitz, Eileen Myles, and Edna O’Brien. It extends into books possessed of high velocity writing, whether fictional, semi-fictional, or pure documentary. It includes but is not limited to Diane di Prima’s semi-fictional Beatnik shagathon; the sass and gore of Gary Indiana; the speed-fuelled nihilism of Mary Woronov; the sexual freedoms and unreliable narrations of the young Harriet Sohmers Zwerling abroad in 1950s Paris; Cookie Mueller’s collected writing and Samuel R. Delany’s luminous fragmented memories of cruising in Motion of Light In Water.

Do not misunderstand me: this library is not about championing lazy subversion; it does not look to undo any recent progress; it does not use free speech as an excuse to trumpet rape and pillage. It is a library of authors with a white-knuckle grip on the wheel; who share with me the joy and ferocity of life coming at you fast. They might not always be getting it right, but they’re almost always getting some.

I wondered what I loved so much about these writers. I am not solely drawn to them as escape from the doldrums of life because frankly, I don’t live a life in the doldrums. It is perhaps more about the indulgence of gossip and the pleasure of a perfectly delivered anecdote. I called my sister, who loves deeply nihilistic books, to ask why we both might like this stuff. She has a particular taste for the grimmer end of the feral shelf – Gary Indiana’s Rent Boy and Mary Woronov’s Niagara – as well as the raw visions of horror in novels like Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I ask why she thinks she leans this way as a reader. “It’s all about brain stuff,” she replies gnomically, explaining that “experiencing terrifying brain stuff makes other things in life seem more palatable. Stuff that gets you out of your comfort zone is thrilling, but perhaps it’s also a comfort to see that other people have mad ideas, or horrid stuff rattling about in their brain and don’t feel afraid to get it down on paper.”

She articulates something I’d been struggling to understand – that no amount of wellness and self-care can eliminate the badness rattling around in one’s brain or the world around us, although some messaging seems to suggest this is possible. I’m interested in embracing the reality of this rather than eliminating it, and I want to read about it too, articulated with wit, sarcasm, and mastery, because there is too much ‘should’ in the world, that trickles down into the day to day. We should get 8hrs sleep; we should turn our screens off; we should exercise; should curb our unhealthy appetites in pursuit of this promised happiness under strict self-control. But what if our appetites are the engine of life? What if keeping them in balance is the ride?

The writers on this shelf always understand something of the fluidity of desire and of the intensity of our appetites. It’s not quite ‘never apologise never explain’ (The Queen or Kate Moss, depending on who you ask); it’s not ‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’ (Aleister Crowley). It’s the light and the dark; the party and the aftermath; it’s always telling a good story about the night before. Woronov got close to the atmosphere of the books on the feral shelf when speaking with Gary Indiana for Interview magazine: “Your books don’t seem therapeutic to me,” says Indiana. “No, they’re not,” she replies. “They’re like — what’s that word — detritus? They’re like stuff I’m trying to get rid of, like old dead skin or bad memories.”

The tyranny of “should” can turn not just life but reading into a joyless trudge. The feral shelf is a reaction against it. Your feral shelf will in this way look different to mine, because it ought to be partly informed by what is forbidden to you. Harriet Sohmers Zwerling gets it: Life is about “earthly delights,” she writes in her diaries. “Showers, singing, looking at myself naked, reading, sleeping, sex.” Eileen Myles gets it, too: “time is so short or so long that exchanging cigarettes, listening to the birds, watching the light, you must talk and talk so you won’t be scared by the length or the shortness of it or even its ferocious speed… Danger comes to me but some people are born full of it.”

The feral shelf champions making your own choices about how to live; about being free from social expectations and subsequent judgements that come from a failure to conform. Samuel R. Delany talks about it in A Motion of Light In Water when he’s bedridden with exhaustion, trying to understand his identity tags – being black, and gay, and an author – in 1961. Because for all the progress that has been made since my mother was my age and had not been allowed to go to university or order a full pint of beer for herself, digressions from a linear life of school, marriage, kids, remain transgressions in many quarters, particularly for women, and the writers on this shelf know it. I don’t conform to many of the more traditional emotional expectations of womanhood, and neither do most of these women writers: “I am sort of invincible looking and I never display any of those womanly qualities so praised through the ages like modesty, tact, or sweet vulnerability,” writes Eve Babitz, which I find deeply relatable. She speaks of the way I want to live, which is fast.

There are fuzzy edges here: what makes one writer qualify for the shelf and another be excluded? It is not about the embracing of evil so much as Dionysian excess. It is not censoring the risky, nor denying the difficult, but the feral shelf never goes out of its way to be controversial, or undermines the rights of another to exist. It’s being a bitch but not being a bigot. It is not about very bad lives or very sad lives – there must be light and humour in among the disastrous love affairs and art projects and parties.

Art and writing are a part of life – it has to happen somewhere, and writers on the feral shelf sit among the detritus of life, recording the dirty curtains and the old ashtray; the texture of sex with different people, what love feels like, what despair is, what art is for and when hedonism flips into addiction. There are risks to be experienced solely through the pages of a book and there are things to learn about the perplexing variation in the infinite possible lives of human beings.

I read these writers because they know that to be in control of their own life and destiny is the greatest luxury, whether it’s getting out of bed past noon on a Tuesday, fucking whomever you fall for past midnight in a bar, or heading out of the city to the countryside to recover. It’s laziness and it’s indulgence; the body and the intellect; it’s my feral shelf.