The Paris Review - A Literary Wonderland
From one of the most classic literary journals of all time, famous for its author interviews (among other things), comes the PR feed. Grab your coffee and conjure your most literary mindset cause you're going to need it. Academics and shut-ins will wet their pants over this. Ya gotta love it!
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Still from Season 3 of Caveh Zahedi’s The Show about the Show. Courtesy of Zahedi. Many artists are in some sense cannibals, but the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi takes it further than most. The initial premise of his brilliantly deranged series The Show about the Show was that each episode would be about the making of the one before it (so Episode 1 follows Zahedi’s travails in selling the show’s pilot, Episode 2 reveals what went wrong behind the scenes of Episode 1, and so on). When a moment hadn’t been caught on camera, he’d ask everyone to re-create it; if someone refused to repeat the embarrassing thing they’d said, he’d cast an actor to play them instead. The recursive f…
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Dominique Goblet’s Pretending is Lying. A Seattle Queer Film Festival screening of the documentary film No Straight Lines, which profiles five crucial queer cartoonists including Rupert Kinnard and Alison Bechdel, brought me back into the graphics circuit. After reluctantly reading the final panel of Dykes to Watch Out For last weekend, I’ve turned to Pretending Is Lying, a fractured graphic memoir from the Belgian artist Dominique Goblet and the first English translation of her work. Goblet is as invested in her own fraught filial relationships as she is in the work of memory, and the emotional texture she achieves with only graphite, charcoal, and a little ink is stunn…
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17776 (screenshot), by Jon Bois. Four years after its first chapter was published on SB Nation in 2017, Jon Bois’s serialized multimedia novella 17776: The Future of Football is still my favorite (and some of the only) “new media” lit online. Told through text interspersed with video and graphics that mix satellite imagery, newspaper clippings, and Telestrated sports-field diagrams, the story follows the sentient space probe Pioneer 9 as it flies over the United States of the future: a land in which no one dies any more, but everyone still loves football. With their newfound immortality, Americans have developed more and more baroque constellations of rules for their fav…
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Still from Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) courtesy of the Criterion Collection. Years ago, I went to go and watch the Mike Leigh movie Another Year at a cinema in Bristol. It is a typical Mike Leigh film in that it is just about matchless in its emotional acuity, punctuated by shots where the camera lingers for about ten seconds more than is tolerable on the face of a character who has either had a shit life or is going to go on to have a shit life; it’s funny; it has an overall aesthetic atmosphere that makes you think of allotments even when an allotment never appears on screen; and it’s hellbent on presenting the most unglamorous vision of London that could possibly exist.…
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Illustration: Liby Hays. Courtesy of Hays. Liby Hays’s Geniacs!, a graphic novel out this summer from the art book publisher Landfill Editions, takes place at a hackathon—truly inspired material for slapstick comedy, body horror, and philosophical reflection alike. This tech competition’s goal? Invent a new life-form. “People always think my ideas are dumb … but they’re purposefully so! Their failure is coded within them! It’s like when scientists artificially reanimate the cells of a dead pig’s brain. The brain becomes trapped in an infinite loop reliving the terror of its final moments. But within that narrow terror loop… We might find potential for new forms of though…
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Ukrainian ethno band DakhaBrakha on its concert in Lviv. Photo by Lyudmyla Dobrynina, Creative Commons license via Wikimedia Commons. I have been thinking often of the 2017 anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky. The collection includes nine poems by Lyuba Yakimchuk, who grew up in Luhansk, one of the regions taken by Russia-backed separatists in 2014. Her poems of that period bear witness to the decomposition of a country, a region, an identity, and language itself. Her words break apart under the pressure of violence: “my friends are hostages / and I can’t reach them, I can’t do netsk / to pull them out of the b…
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Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester, Greater Manchester, England, UK. Photo by Michael D Beckwith, with permission of the administration. Agnès Varda’s 1967 Uncle Yanco is the earliest—and, at under twenty minutes long, the shortest—of her “California films.” Through greetings, dinners, interviews, and house tours, which she stages and reenacts for the camera as they occur in real time, the short documents the director’s first encounter with a distant relative, the painter Jean Varda, whose nickname titles the project. Jean lives on a houseboat in the endlessly quirky “aquatic suburbia” of Sausalito, where he paints, sails, naps, muses on love and light, receives his…
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Publicity photo of the Ronettes—Nedra Talley, Veronica Bennett (Ronnie Spector) and Estelle Bennett—by James Kriegsmann. On Wednesday, in the hours after Ronnie Spector’s family announced her passing from cancer at seventy-eight, I played, on loop, her cover of the Johnny Thunders punk anthem “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” Recorded for The Last of the Rock Stars, her 2006 comeback album, the song is also a dirge for Thunders, who died in 1991; he had been one of Ronnie’s crucial supporters in the period after she left her abusive ex-husband, the megalomaniac, murderer, and iconoclastic music producer Phil Spector. On YouTube, you can watch her perform a live …
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Will Arbery. Photo by Zack DeZon. Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which opened at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, continued to work on me long after I’d emerged from the theatre into the megawatted midtown Manhattan night. The play’s world—much like the white, rightwing, Catholic, intellectual milieu of Arbery’s upbringing in Bush-era Dallas—wasn’t something I’d seen onstage before. We meet Arbery’s cast of five characters seven years out from an education of Plato and archery at an ultra-strict religious college. They hunger for passion, touch, reason, the pain and vitality of others, and for one another. They are characters to be reckoned with, if kept at a …
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Thomas Pollock Anshutz, Woman in an Interior Reading, n.d., oil on canvas, 16 1/4 x 23 1/4”. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome. The context of our exchange was my need for context: two years earlier I had set out to capture the terms of our estrangement, to build a frame so fierce and broad it might finally hold us both. If not an opponent to the cause, my mother was a wily associate—allied in theory but elusive by nature, inclined to defy my or any immuring scheme. The chan…
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Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones during a concert at the Royal Lawn Tennis Stadium in Stockholm, 1965. Photo: Owe Wallin. © Tobias Rostlund / Alamy Stock Photo. The drummer Charlie Watts died on Tuesday, aged eighty. Watts took up the drums as a child after cutting the neck off his banjo and converting it to a snare. Born in London during World War II, the son of a truck driver and a homemaker, he was a jazz aficionado from the age of twelve, and went to art school in his teens. In 1963, the Rolling Stones hired him away from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, and Watts—cultivating a stoic demeanor and known for his refined fashion sense—remained a member of the band…
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A new essay anthology, The Contemporary American Essay, collects works by forty-seven American writers that exemplify the diverse styles and subject matters explored within the form throughout the past twenty-five years. In the excerpted introduction below, the editor and writer Phillip Lopate considers the boom of literary nonfiction amid times of uncertainty. Henriette Browne, A Girl Writing; The Pet Goldfinch, ca. 1874, oil on canvas, 22 x 36 1/4’’. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been an uneasy time of rupture and anxiety, filled with historic challenges and opportunities. In that close to twenty-five-year spa…
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My father, Ted Berrigan, is primarily known for his poetry, especially his book The Sonnets, which reimagined the traditional sonnet from a perspective steeped in the art of assemblage circa the early sixties. He was also an editor, a publisher, and a prose writer—specifically one who worked in the forms of journals and reviews. While his later journals were often written with the expectation of publication—meaning the journal-as-form could be assigned by a magazine editor—his sixties journals are much more internal. In these journals, he’s writing to document his daily life and his consciousness while figuring out how to live, and how to live as a poet, so to speak. Thes…
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In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Like many readers, I suspect, I first came across the name Mohammed Mrabet in relation to Paul Bowles. Throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s, everyone from Life Magazine to Rolling Stone sent writers and photographers to Tangier—where Bowles had been living since 1947—to interview the famous American expat, author of the cult classic, The Sheltering Sky (1949). “If Paul Bowles, now seventy-four, were Japanese, he would probably be designated a Living National Treasure; if he were French, he would no doubt be besieged by television crews from the literary talk show Apostrop…
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In recent years, the work of the ninety-four-year-old artist Betye Saar has experienced something of a critical reappraisal, with major retrospectives appearing concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019. When asked why this sudden resurgence in attention might be occurring, she replied: “Because it’s about time! I’ve had to wait till I’m practically 100.” It’s baffling that she had to wait at all: Saar’s work, especially her Joseph Cornell–inspired assemblages, is without peer. Thankfully, a new show at the Crocker Art Museum, in Sacramento, California, suggests that talent travels matrilineally in the Saar family. “Legends …
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Leonora Carrington, Playing Tarot, ca. 1995, graphite and gouache on paper, 22 x 36 1/4″. Private collection. © Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, New York. “With a mysterious smile on her lips,” writes the Chilean film director Alejandro Jodorowsky, “the painter whispered to me, ‘What you just dictated to me is the secret. As each Arcana is a mirror and not a truth in itself, become what you see in it. That tarot is a chameleon.’ ” This comes from Jodorowsky’s The Book of Tarot; the painter in question is Leonora Carrington, the British-born, Mexico City–based surrealist famed in life and death as much for her strange, entrancing writings as for her visual art. And th…
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Photo: Drew Reilly. “Ballet was full of dark fairy tales,” Megan Abbott observes in her new novel, The Turnout, noting that “how a dancer prepared her pointe shoes was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself.” These mysterious and private rituals of young women—these “dark fairy tales”—are at the heart of Abbott’s work. Over the course of ten novels, she’s explored the violence and crime that pervade American girlhood. In Dare Me, competitive cheerleaders become suspects in a murder case. In The Fever, an outbreak of illness is tied to the “enigmatic beauty, erotic and strange” of a small-town high school. While undoubtedly one of our best cr…
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It is one of the ironies of literature that the Thousand and One Nights should owe its global fame to stories—“Aladdin” among them—that never belonged to the original collection in Arabic. They were the work, invented or recycled, of a young Syrian man named Hanna Diyab. Perhaps the most influential storyteller whose name is known, Diyab himself remained obscure until a memoir he wrote in eighteenth-century Aleppo was discovered at the Vatican Library more than two centuries later. The Book of Travels, edited by Johannes Stephan and translated by Elias Muhanna, appears today in English for the first time. The English edition, published by the Library of Arabic Literature,…
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ca. 1900. Photo: C. F. Lummis. Restoration by Adam Cuerden. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. When I first read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” years ago, before I knew anything about its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I loved it. I loved the unnerving, sarcastic tone, the creepy ending, the clarity of its critique of the popular nineteenth-century “rest cure”—essentially an extended time-out for depressed women. The story had irony, urgency, anger. On the last day of the treatment, the narrator is completely mad. She thinks she’s a creature who has emerged from the wallpaper. The rest cure caused the illness it claimed to eliminate. Beautifully…
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Sarah Schulman’s new book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 is the culmination of twenty years of research, interviews, and writing on the history of American AIDS activism and the grassroots organization ACT UP. In the excerpt below, Schulman describes the impact of OutWeek, the first major national publication to call itself a lesbian and gay magazine, through some of its founding members. The first and last covers of OutWeek magazine, published weekly from June 26, 1989, until July 3, 1991. Images from the OutWeek Internet Archive and courtesy of Gabriel Rotello. Photo credit to Jim Fouratt and Michael Wakefield, respectively. In …
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For close to seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among many others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations. This year’s competition received close to a thousand submissions, which were read by preliminary judges Julia Guez and Timothy Donnelly. After much deliberating, final judges Rick Barot, Patricia Spears Jones, and Mónica de la Torre awarded this year’s prizes to Kenzie Allen, Ina Cariño, Mag Gabbert, and Alexandra …
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Photo: © JRP Studio / Adobe Stock. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. —Matthew 8:12 I woke up with dried blood on my lips. This was the first sign that something was wrong. It was March, the month that everything was wrong. Outside my kitchen window the sky was gray, still cold, Brooklyn-bleak. I had just left my marriage, and at nights I drank wine in bed and listened to podcasts so that I wouldn’t have to sit with my thoughts. I hadn’t noticed anything strange when I got out of bed, not even the slight taste of iron in my mouth. It came together when I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror while the coffee boiled on the stove. My lips and every to…
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JANE GARDAM WITH HER HUSBAND, DAVID, HER SON, TIM, AND FAMILY FRIENDS, 1957. Photograph courtesy of Jane Gardam. You should read Old Filth, someone said to me about ten years ago. I couldn’t for the life of me, in true Gardam fashion, remember who that friend was until just now—it was the writer Nancy Lemann—but I can think of the people—dear friends—to whom I went on to recommend it myself. I adored the book, stunned I had not heard of Jane Gardam before, and immediately read the next two books of the trilogy: The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends. I then taught Old Filth in a seminar so that I could spend more time with Gardam and study more closely how she create…
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Atticus Lish in Lexington, Ky., on Sunday, May 30, 2021. Credit: Ryan Hermens I have recommended Atticus Lish’s first novel to more people than any other book. Beautiful without being sentimental, brutal without being cruel, Preparation for the Next Life (2014) is a love story between Zou Lei, an undocumented half-Uighur, half–Han Chinese woman, and Brad Skinner, an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD. “He gets it,” I told fellow New Yorkers: the Jackson Heights bars; the Flushing food stalls; the long walks through outer Queens, past housing projects and storefront mosques and cash-and-carries, all the way to the gas stations and football fields of Long Island. Everyon…
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Claire Lispector by Maureen Bisilliat, August 1969, IMS Collection. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons In an interview with Jùlio Lerner for TV Cultura, Clarice Lispector described her final writing project, the novella The Hour of the Star, as “the story of a girl who was so poor that all she ate was hot dogs.” “That’s not the story, though,” she continued. “The story is about a crushed innocence, an ‘anonymous misery.’ ” This idea of a “crushed innocence, an anonymous misery” is the axis upon which all of Lispector’s work revolves. Lispector, a Jewish Ukrainian, was forced to flee with her family. They migrated to Brazil, where they lived in Recife, in the northeast. …
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Links: Fundraisers, Libraries, & More
Welcome back to Wednesday Links! Settle in, everybody! My partner was moving apartments this weekend and I gleefully spent most of my time providing positive reinforcement and playing Super Mario Odyssey. I’ve become obsessed with collecting moons and outfits for Mario. I’m also replaying through Portal 2 at my place and I forgot what a great game that was. Are any of you playing some good video games? … Our reviewer Tara and author Kris Bryant host a podcast called Queerly Recommended. Recently they had lesfic author Jae on and Sarah to talk about the problem of authors being stalked and/or harassed by readers. It’s more common than I personally thought and is worth a listen! … Thank you to Sue for passing along these fundraisers on Itch.io (a site for indie games). The fundraisers have a week or so left and there are some great games to be had for a $10 donation: Worthy of Better, Stronger Together for Reproductive Rights Indie Bundle for Abortion Funds … Another thank you to Bransler for sending this link over of librarians having fun with romance covers and Snapchat filters! … “First Kill” by V.E. Schwab was a story in the Vampires Never Get Old Anthology. Now it’s been made into a Netflix adaptation! Have any of you watched it yet? Well Schwab wrote a piece for Esquire about her motivation behind the story and wanting to see herself in more fantasy and paranormal media. … Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way! View the full article -
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Witches, Sci-Fi, & More
The Chai Factor RECOMMENDED: The Chai Factor by Farah Heron is $1.99! Aarya really loved this one and gave it an A-: The Chai Factor is very much a swoonworthy rom-com: it’s funny and sobering, it has witty dialogue and disquieting situations, and it’s sigh-worthy and rage-inducing. I laughed, I cried, and I cheered for Amira and Duncan. The Chai Factor is an essential book for your list of summer reads. Amira Khan has no plans to break her no-dating rule. Thirty-year-old engineer Amira Khan has set one rule for herself: no dating until her grad-school thesis is done. Nothing can distract her from completing a paper that is so good her boss will give her the promotion she deserves when she returns to work in the city. Amira leaves campus early, planning to work in the quiet basement apartment of her family’s house. But she arrives home to find that her grandmother has rented the basement to . . . a barbershop quartet. Seriously? The living situation is awkward: Amira needs silence; the quartet needs to rehearse for a competition; and Duncan, the small-town baritone with the flannel shirts, is driving her up the wall. As Amira and Duncan clash, she is surprised to feel a simmering attraction for him. How can she be interested in someone who doesn’t get her, or her family’s culture? This is not a complication she needs when her future is at stake. But when intolerance rears its ugly head and people who are close to Amira get hurt, she learns that there is more to Duncan than meets the eye. Now she must decide what she is willing to fight for. In the end, it may be that this small-town singer is the only person who sees her at all. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Off the Ice Off the Ice by Avon Gale and Piper Vaughn is $1.99! This is a very steamy M/M romance with a hockey player hero going back to school to finish his MBA, and having a major crush on one his professors. There is a bit of a taboo element with the teacher/student dynamic, though the hockey hero is older than your average student. Your mileage may vary with this trope. He’s hot for teacher NHL star Tristan Holt may be at the top of his game, but he’s already thinking one play ahead. Hitting the books in the off-season means he’ll have a business degree to fall back on when it’s time to hang up his hockey skates. But his straightforward plan is complicated by his undeniable attraction to his sexy sociology professor, Sebastian Cruz. Impressed by Tristan’s brain as well as his brawn, Sebastian can’t help lusting after the gorgeous jock. With tenure on the line, Sebastian won’t break the rules by becoming involved with one of his students—at least, not until the end of term. Once final grades are posted, though, their naughty mutual fantasies can become reality. Tristan’s not sure he’s up for being the poster boy for openly gay hockey players, but Sebastian’s never been the type of man to keep his sexuality—or his relationships—in the closet. For Tristan, being with Sebastian might mean risking more than just his heart. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. A Secret History of Witches A Secret History of Witches by Louisa Morgan is $2.99! This is historical fiction with some fantasy and generational saga elements. Morgan does a lot of witch-centric fiction if that’s your jam! I’m super curious about this one, but I’m usually iffy on generational stuff. A sweeping historical saga that traces five generations of fiercely powerful mothers and daughters – witches whose magical inheritance is both a dangerous threat and an extraordinary gift. Brittany, 1821. After Grand-mere Ursule gives her life to save her family, their magic seems to die with her. Even so, the Orchieres fight to keep the old ways alive, practicing half-remembered spells and arcane rites in hopes of a revival. And when their youngest daughter comes of age, magic flows anew. The lineage continues, though new generations struggle not only to master their power, but also to keep it hidden. But when World War II looms on the horizon, magic is needed more urgently than ever – not for simple potions or visions, but to change the entire course of history. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. You Sexy Thing RECOMMENDED: You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo is $2.99! Carrie read this one and gave it a B+: I recommend this for fans of Farscape, Firefly, complicated relationships, and cooking shows. If found family and food are your thing, you will like this book, although please be aware that the lighthearted tone takes a temporary swivel into scary and sad when the pirates get involved. Just when they thought they were out… TwiceFar station is at the edge of the known universe, and that’s just how Niko Larson, former Admiral in the Grand Military of the Hive Mind, likes it. Retired and finally free of the continual war of conquest, Niko and the remnants of her former unit are content to spend the rest of their days working at the restaurant they built together, The Last Chance. But, some wars can’t ever be escaped, and unlike the Hive Mind, some enemies aren’t content to let old soldiers go. Niko and her crew are forced onto a sentient ship convinced that it is being stolen and must survive the machinations of a sadistic pirate king if they even hope to keep the dream of The Last Chance alive. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. 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Three Modes of Story Imagination
When we read stories, we fall into a semi-dream state in which people and events which are entirely made up become, to us, quite vivid. Stories can have an impact on us greater than that of the events of our own lives. We laugh. We cry. We boo. We cheer. We are roused, clobbered, affirmed, uplifted or inspired. We are changed. When we read, the real world fades away and the story world becomes real. That effect of stories upon us is possible because of our cognitive capacity called imagination. Commonly understood, imagination is the ability to visualize what doesn’t exist—at least not yet—and formulate new ideas. We “see” what isn’t there. We feel when there is no material reason to do so. We think in ways that organize experience and lend understanding to our lives. While the ability to visualize is not universal—see a condition called aphantasia—it is nevertheless how we mostly think that story happens in our heads. Visualization seems to accurately describe our mental process in reading, so it must also be the foundation of our process in writing as well, right? Well, not always. Not exactly. Actually, there are three primary modes in which a story is imagined. Writers may engage at different times in all three but are primarily inclined more to one than another. Each mode has strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages, and that in turn means that manuscripts will shine in some ways but be shortchanged in others. What, then, are the three ways in which stories are imagined by their authors? And which is your dominant mode? The Three Modes The first is what we can call the Movie in the Mind. That is when a story unspools continuously in imagination, one action flowing to the next and the next as if the story is a documentary camera that is never shut off. Many authors describe “seeing” their stories like films, their characters progressing through their days, each day following the next in calendar order. When writers report that “my characters tell me what they’re going to do”, they can be describing a form of visual imagining. What is seen in the mind is as vivid as what is actually seen through the eyes. The upside of this mode can be a heightened sense of reality to a story’s action. The downside is that this mode can lead to sequential narration, a strict chronicling of characters’ time and activities, as when in beginning manuscripts chapters start with a character waking up in the morning and end with that character going to bed again at the conclusion of the day. The second mode can be called Marker Moments, imagining fragments or episodes of high significance and emotional force. In this mode what counts is what matters, meaning that there are certain high moments that define characters’ human experience or change it. Everything in between in some way leads up to, explains, enhances, or follows the consequences and implications of those highly important moments. It’s like life. We are shaped by, and define ourselves, not by our resumes but through our most emotional experiences. When writers think, “I need to show that…” or “Readers need to see…” they are building the body of their manuscripts toward, or sometimes away from, the big turnings that are the true reasons for a story to be written in the first place. The advantage of this way of imagining story is that it puts emphasis on what is dramatic. The disadvantage is that such manuscripts can wander, trying always to hammer significance into intervening action in which it doesn’t exist. It might sound to you like I am describing the difference between outline writers and organic writers (“pantsers” in our lingo). Perhaps. There’s no right or wrong to any pattern of working. There are only, as I said, advantages and disadvantages which can be recognized and addressed. Fiction never goes exactly according to outline and discoveries don’t always arrive when there is unassigned space, nor for that matter are you forever a prisoner of the way your imagination most often tends to operate. The third mode of story imagination is one that we can call Word Driven. For such writers, the words themselves are the gasoline of the story. Words draw the road map as the writer drives ahead, suggesting what should happen, what will be said, when to turn east or west, and what it means when a story does. One word suggests, conjures or demands the next and the next in turn. Plot is fine but it is the pattern of the story’s language that builds the story’s whole effect. I have heard some writers say that they envision the look of their pages even before they’ve been typed. Voice-driven narration is a form of the Word Driven way of imagining. In imagining a story like that, what happens doesn’t matter as much as the way in which a narrative voice is relating things. Our experience of the story is as much impressions as it is events: a feeling of life being filtered for us through a unique and engaging sensibility. Word Driven imagining can bring us striking imagery, delightful language and exciting perspectives but can also hold us at a distance from a story’s events. One pitfall in each way of imagining story is that the everyday business of characters’ lives can occupy space on the page without doing much to keep us in the dream state. The Movie in the Mind can see pouring a bowl of breakfast cereal as a vivid instant of human reality when actually it’s simply boring. The Marker Moment writer may try to invest that morning activity with surprising meaning—a sense of starting anew, say—when truthfully it’s just a bowl of cereal. The Word Driven imagination will likely serve something more sensory for breakfast—eggs benedict?—but let’s be honest: breakfast is still just breakfast. To both illustrate how your story imagination works most often, and to counter-act one of its inherent shortcomings, let’s have a look at a couple of examples of the everyday in published fiction to see how what’s ordinary becomes important. I touched upon this in my post last December, The Static Hiss, but let’s look at it again through the lens of our different imagination modes. The Hidden Purpose of Everyday Activity In Karen Dionne’s The Marsh King’s Daughter (2017), Helena Pelletier is a struggling young mother living on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She has a husband, two daughters and a small jam making business. The action of the novel opens on an ordinary day: I deliver the last case of assorted jams to the Gitche Gumee Agate and History Museum gift shop, then drive to the lake and park. As soon as Mari sees the water, she starts flapping her arms. “Wa-wa, wa-wa.” I know that at her age she should be speaking in complete sentences. We’ve been taking her to a developmental specialist in Marquette once a month for the past year, but so far this is the best she’s got. We spend the next hour on the beach. Mari sits beside me on the warm beach gravel, working off the discomfort of an erupted molar by chewing on a piece of driftwood I rinsed off for her in the water. The air is hot and still, the lake calm, the waves sloshing gently like water in a bathtub. After a while, we take off our sandals and wade into the water and splash each other to cool off. Lake Superior is the largest and deepest of the Great Lakes, so the water never gets warm. But on a day like today, who’d want it to? Talk about humdrum! “The air is hot and still, the lake calm…” Does any novel really need a sentence like that? And yet, there is something important here, something charged in a way that we can’t yet see. Helena is not our heroine’s original name. She grew up in isolation in the marshes of the U.P., the only people she knew being her father and her mother, who was abducted at age twelve and held prisoner by Helena’s father, the Marsh King. Her father went to jail for this crime but now, as the novel opens, he has escaped, killing a guard in the process. Helena knows that he will be coming not for her, but for one of her daughters. Thus, this overtly humdrum afternoon at the lake achieves its under-the-surface significance because it is setting Helena’s stakes. We are learning what she has to lose. That low-key tension (at this point) is signaled in subtle ways. The lake is cold. Her daughter is extra vulnerable. And did this strike you as odd…who gives a toddler a piece of driftwood to chew on? A woman who grew up in the natural world of the swamps, that’s who. There’s nothing ordinary about Helena and this isn’t just any old day. Patricia Highsmith’s Deep Water (1957), is a dark suburban psychological thriller published long before such stories became fashionable. It is about the sour marriage between Vic and Melinda Van Allen. To forestall the messiness of divorce, Vic has allowed Melinda to take as many lovers as she choses to. This grinds on Vic who, to drive away a suitor of his wife’s, makes up a story that he has committed a murder, a lie which goes wrong when…well, you can guess. However, the novel begins on the evening of a party: Vic didn’t dance, but not for the reasons that most men who don’t dance give to themselves. He didn’t dance simply because his wife liked to dance. His rationalization of this attitude was a flimsy one and didn’t fool him for a minute, though it crossed his mind every time he saw Melinda dancing: she was insufferably silly when she danced. She made dancing embarrassing. He was aware that Melinda twirled into his line of vision and out again, but barely aware, he thought, and it was only his familiarity with every physical detail of her that made him realize that it was she at all. Calmly he raised his glass of Scotch and water and sipped it. He sat slouched, a neutral expression on his face, on the upholstered bench that curved around the Mellers’ newel post, staring at the changing pattern of dancers and thinking that when he went home tonight he would take a look at his herb boxes in the garage and see if the foxgloves were up. He was growing several kinds of herbs now, repressing their growth by depriving them of half their normal sunlight and water with a view to intensifying their flavor. Every afternoon he set the boxes in the sun at one o’clock, when he came home for lunch, and put them back into the garage at three, when he returned to his printing plant. Herb boxes? Dancing at a party? “A neutral expression.” Again, how ordinary. Why on earth would Patricia Highsmith open with such flat details? Or, wait a minute, are they actually flat? Vic hates the way that his wife Melinda dances. He’s barely aware of her, and yet familiar with “every physical detail of her”. Vic is growing herbs in his garage but “depriving them of half their normal sunlight and water”. Does any of that strike you are perfectly normal? No, I didn’t think so. Me either. Vic’s angle on things makes me uncomfortable, as I should be. Highsmith uses the ordinary not to reassure us but to unsettle us. Nothing ordinary about that! Billy O’Callaghan’s Irish Book Award-winning novel The Dead House (2017), is a ghost story. The ghost resides in a cliff-top house restored by a bruised but recovering artist named Maggie. The novel is narrated by the husband of a friend of Maggie’s, who went with his wife to a weekend at Maggie’s house…a weekend that involved a Ouija board which led to…well, you’ll see when you read it. As the novel opens, the narrator introduces himself: My name is Mighael Simmons. I am married to Alison, and the father of one child, a daughter, Hannah, who is almost seven now, and our reason for bliss. Home for us is Southwell, a small village on the Cornish coast. Our house, a mile and a half out, is a modest but ample stone-build that sits on its down wood-backed acre overlooking the sea. It is a place that holds the illusion of loneliness, yet lies within easy calling distance of the church bell. An ideal compromise. And we could not have chosen a more beautiful place to live than Southwell, positioned as it is among the fold of land and distinguished by steep streets and alleyways and lots of outlying greenery, the sort of place perfect for children. Even on the sodden days of winter, it retains a peculiar beauty. The air is clean, we can walk the cliffs, swim during the summer months or search for amber on the beaches. Cars drive slowly along its narrow roads and everyone knows everyone else by name. Okay, is O’Callaghan serious? “The air is clean”? “The sort of place perfect for children”? Michael Simmons recites his circumstances in the dullest possible way. No writer, he. Not a terribly imaginative or creative man. But wait, perhaps that’s the point? This is a ghost story, after all. A fabulous tale, one hardly to be believed. Who better to tell us a story so incredible than a man who himself has little imagination? O’Callaghan, in other words, it subtly putting us off balance, unsettling our expectations because the man who is telling us the story is so insistent that he is nothing other than an ordinary, unimaginative man. My point here is that day-to-day business works on the page when its purpose isn’t ordinary. When there is an underlying reason to show us the humdrum of life, the daily grind can become charged with meaning. That happens only when the writer knows his or her intention. This domestic moment is not simply a minute of the movie in the mind. Its significance is not explicit, nor forced through poetic use of language. The meaning of the everyday is infused. It’s presented for a reason. When a writer steps outside his or her imaginative mode, the story is no longer a fait accompli , it’s a mutable effect, a tale that can be told in any way the writer wishes—and that serves the tale itself. So, what is the main way in which you imagine the stories that you write? Movie? Markers? Words First? What effect does that have on what we read? About Donald MaassDonald Maass (he/him) is president of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. He has written several highly acclaimed craft books for novelists including The Breakout Novelist, The Fire in Fiction, Writing the Breakout Novel and The Career Novelist. Web | Twitter | Facebook | More Posts http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WriterUnboxed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WriterUnboxed?d=qj6IDK7rITs http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WriterUnboxed?i=Ds0Bibb8Paw:-jvicsWEYA4:gIN9vFwOqvQ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WriterUnboxed?i=Ds0Bibb8Paw:-jvicsWEYA4:D7DqB2pKExk [url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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The Best New Crime Novels Coming Out in July
The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Jennifer Hillier, Things We Do In The Dark (Minotaur) I’ve been obsessed with Jennifer Hillier’s sly psychological thrillers since her breakout hit Jar of Hearts, and Things We Do In the Dark promises to showcase her characters’ signature slippery grasp on morality once again. Paris Peralta is found at the center of a shocking crime scene, but she’s not afraid of the police: she’s afraid of the woman from her past who will recognize the crime and come calling. I cannot wait to read this book. –MO Daniel Silva, Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Harper) Every Daniel Silva has their own particular taste when it comes to the flavor of a new Gabriel Allon adventure, but certainly there’s some broad agreement that Allon is at his most fascinating when he’s playing to his skills as an art restorer, in addition to his career at Mossad. In Portrait of an Unknown Woman, he’s on the trail of a forged masterpiece, a painting that’s been trading hands and millions on its mysterious journey across Europe. –DM Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (Del Rey Books) I can’t get enough of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s playful takes on classic genres. In her latest, the Island of Doctor Moreau gets a Yucatan-set treatment, steeped in sultry atmospherics and set during the lead-up to the Mexican Revolution as the hacienda system begins to crumple. Carlota Moreau loves her scientist father, whose injections keep her alive; she loves her fur-covered playmates, whose ailments can be ascribed to their mishmash of human and animal genes; she even cares for the drunken plantation overseer who facilitates the gruesome experiments. But her character was raised to be pampered, not tested, and her loyalties will soon face a breaking point as the goals of her father, his patron, and those they torture pull Carlota in opposite directions. –MO Conner Habib, Hawk Mountain (Norton) A supremely tense debut, Conner Habib’s Hawk Mountain channels Patricia Highsmith by way of Hitchcock, with a chance encounter on a beach that throws two men—one of them a long ago bully, the other the bullied—into a present-day collision. Habib builds the sense of dread with slow, carefully meted out notes of obsession and intuition. –DM Barbara Bourland, The Force of Such Beauty (Dutton) I’d describe this one as “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” if it was written from the perspective of Grace Kelly or Lady Di. A former Olympic athlete, body broken from overtraining, meets the handsome heir to a small kingdom and becomes his blushing bride. Soon, her nuptial bliss turns to waking nightmare, as her husband and her mother-in-law conspire to control every dollar in the kingdom and every moment of the new princess’s life.–MO Elizabeth Hand, Hokuloa Road (Mulholland) If Lost had been written by Jane and Paul Bowles, with some input from Stephen King, then it might read something like Hokolua Road. I guess I just could have called it a tropical version of the Shining, given the set-up: an out-of-work builder from Maine accepts a job as a live-in caretaker for a remote Hawaiian estate owned by reclusive and eccentric tech billionaire. He’s out of his element, far from help, and mysterious things just keep happening…But is it all in his admittedly messed-up head, or is the land itself rejecting him? –MO Dwyer Murphy, An Honest Living (Viking) If Cara Black’s Aimee Leduc smoked pot, or if Michael Connelly was from Paris, their books might read a little something like Dwyer Murphy’s absurdly entertaining and extremely literary debut, An Honest Living. A lawyer is hired by an old man’s younger wife to find out if he’s been selling off her book collection. Actually, someone pretending to be the wife hired the lawyer, and now the real wife is trying to solve two mysteries—who would bother to impersonate her, and why did her husband send her a box of rare books and pamphlets just before his untimely demise? Those who enjoy New York settings and forays into the world of rare books will particularly enjoy this rollicking yet literary read. –MO Sarah Pearse, The Retreat (Pamela Dorman Books) A sinister wellness retreat on an island once stalked by a serial killer and now thought to be cursed? That is the intense setting for Sarah Pearse’s new novel, which features the detective from her previous novel, Elin Warner, as she looks into the death of a young woman who seems to have perished in a fall. But then Elin realizes that the woman was not a guest at the retreat, but an outsider–someone who was never meant to be there at all. Can’t wait to read it when I’m done hiding under the covers. –OR Rachel Howzell Hall, We Lie Here (Thomas & Mercer) Rachel Howzell Hall’s latest has one of the best cold opens I’ve ever read—I dare you to not race your way through this book after reading the first ten pages. After the opening shocker, we switch to the perspective of a frustrated TV writer who’s headed home for her parents’ anniversary dinner when she receives a disturbing message from her mother’s childhood friend. The next day, the friend is dead, and the writer must journey to a remote summer vacation cabin where answers to past and present-day crimes may be found. Now I need to do a list of cabin-set mysteries so I can make a joke about that Cabin Porn photography collection. –MO Ruth Ware, The It Girl (Gallery/Scout) In Ruth Ware’s latest page-turner, Hannah Jones wants to let her past lie and focus on her pregnancy, but the media just won’t leave her alone. After all, she was once the roommate of murdered Oxford “It girl” April Coutts-Cliveden, and it was Hannah’s testimony that sent the suspected killer, John Neville, to prison. Now, John Neville is dead, raising uncomfortable questions that Hannah may end up answering after all. –MO View the full article -
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Boris Nayfeld, the Jewish Gangster-Survivor, and the Birth of the Russian Mob in Brooklyn
I shouldn’t be alive today.” That was one of the first things Boris Nayfeld told me when I met him four years ago. On a sweltering Saturday in late June 2018, we sat outdoors at Tatiana Grill, a popular restaurant on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, tossing back shots of Russian vodka chased by the warm salty Atlantic breeze, surrounded by young women from St. Petersburg and Kiev and Odessa who wore more makeup than clothes. Known to his friends and family as “Biba” and described in the New York tabloids as “the last boss of the original Russian Mafia in America,” Boris had every right to marvel at the fact that he was alive and smiling and talking into my digital recorder. He’d survived multiple assassination attempts—shot point-blank by that Uzi submachine gun in 1986; he also escaped unscathed in 1991 when a grenade planted under his Lincoln Town Car failed to detonate. At age eighteen, he served three years of hard labor in a Soviet prison camp; after emigration to the United States, he spent a substantial portion of his life in various federal penitentiaries. Now seventy-four, Boris is still an imposing figure with a shaved head, piercing blue eyes, and a burly physique covered in prison-inked tattoos. Four macabre skulls. A menacing tail-rattling scorpion. A massively hooded king cobra. A Star of David inset with a Hebrew Bible topped by an elaborate crown. To initiates in the world of Russian organized crime, the blue ink on his upper body can be read like a pictorial storybook, rendering Nayfeld’s entire résumé as a professional criminal: it’s a rap sheet that includes convictions as a racketeer, a heroin trafficker, a money launderer, and an extortionist. He’s also been suspected of orchestrating several high-profile gangland murders, though he was never charged or indicted and has—of course—repeatedly denied complicity. Few of his contemporaries from the Soviet émigré underworld in Brighton Beach made it to his advanced age. Many, though not all, died public and violent deaths. Boris is virtually the last mobster of his generation standing. The ultimate survivor. His life story offers us a window into a singular moment in modern history—when a wave of Jews fleeing Soviet oppression in the 1970s arrived in the United States and, following in the footsteps of a previous generation of young hoodlums like Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, applied both brains and brawn to making their fortunes as outlaws in America. But that wave of Soviet émigré criminals in the 1970s and ’80s was unlike any that had come before. They were cosmopolitan, sophisticated, often university-educated men who’d survived for years in the Soviet Union by applying their ingenuity and daring to bilk the corrupted state. They settled in the decaying South Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, for generations a haven for immigrant Jews, and refashioned it as their own “Little Odessa.” Almost immediately, criminals like Boris Nayfeld distinguished themselves for their fearlessness. They partnered with, but were never cowed by, the Italian American Mafia. They joked about how easy it was to steal in America. They scoffed at the cushiness of U.S. penitentiaries in comparison to the starvation conditions in the forced labor camps they’d experienced in the Soviet Union. They displayed a ruthlessness and casual use of violence that shocked even jaded members of U.S. law enforcement. In contrast to more established organized crime groups—as Boris never fails to remind me—their power lay in the fact that they felt they had fuck all to lose. Yes, they were tough, but their intellect, creativity, and global ambitions truly distinguished them among the ranks of American gangsters. The schemes concocted by Boris and his fellow criminals from the Soviet Union seem, even today, remarkable for their ingenuity and brazenness. These were guys who’d survived in a totalitarian state that normalized illegal activity, one that viewed crime as a form of anti-communist rebellion and even elevated it to an art form. In the United States, their illicit ventures escalated from audacious and theatrical jewelry swindles to the most sophisticated financial fraud, stock manipulation, and international money laundering. In a few short years, the Brighton Beach mob’s tentacles stretched over to Antwerp and Berlin, from Bangkok to Sierra Leone. As you’ll read, Boris Nayfeld and his partners were among the first to spot and exploit the untold fortunes to be made in the economic chaos after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union began its inexorable collapse. They also targeted many routine aspects of daily life that we all take for granted in the United States—from putting gas in our cars to the credit cards we use to pay for it. Soviet-born criminals, and their Italian American mob partners, stole billions of dollars in gasoline excise taxes through daisy-chain schemes that have become the stuff of underworld lore. And it took FBI and IRS agents years to figure out how they were doing it. They pioneered and perfected new forms of bank fraud and myriad health insurance scams; they counterfeited everything from hundred-dollar bills to Marlboro cigarettes. Their criminal genius lay in exploiting the unseen weaknesses within the economic system right under our noses. When I met Boris Nayfeld, he was seventy years old and on parole for his final felony conviction—a bizarre murder-for-hire plot turned into an extortion scheme that was splashed all over the tabloids for weeks; at the sentencing hearing in the Southern District of New York in July 2016, the prosecutor described Boris as “an extremely complicated person with a rich criminal history” who’d spent “most of his adult life in Russian organized crime.” “Extremely complicated” is an understatement. In the four years I’ve known Boris—interviewing him at his home, hanging out in noisy Brooklyn restaurants and scorching banyas—his personality remains a conundrum. He’s at once chilling and charming; cunning and street-smart, and, somehow, remarkably naïve. I’ve watched him describe with utter detachment scenes of extraordinary violence committed to him, around him, by him. I’ve also listened to him talk with passion and sophistication about reading Dostoevsky’s novels while locked up for eight straight months of solitary confinement in the notorious Special Housing Unit (or “Shoe”) at the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in Lower Manhattan. Boris has said repeatedly that he has no regrets for anything he’s done in his life. Yet across his stomach, tattooed in massive blue Hebrew letters, are the words “God Forgive Me.” It’s hard to reconcile many of these internal contradictions; but this duality is, I believe, what makes Boris Nayfeld a uniquely fascinating character. His story provides the first authentic insider’s perspective on the birth of modern Russian organized crime and its continuing ramifications in our contemporary world. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has often been described as a virtual mafia state; the criminal career of Boris Nayfeld, a man roughly the same age as Putin, offers us a unique, granular insight into how the former Soviet Union became the largest kleptocracy in history. On one level, this is a classic immigrant story: in the early 1950s, Boris Mikhailovich Nayfeld was just some abandoned Jewish kid in a backwater city in the Byelorussian Republic of the USSR. In 1979, he managed to escape to the West, and by the early 1990s he’d become a Bentley-driving multimillionaire who’d clawed his way to a top perch in the New York City underworld. *** Almost from the first moment I met Boris Nayfeld, he fascinated me. In part, this could be because our family roots are so similar. Though one of my grandfathers hailed from Warsaw—before the Holocaust the largest Jewish community in the world, outside of New York—my other three grandparents came to the United States from Bialystok, then a predominantly Jewish city within the Russian Empire, located approximately four hundred miles to the west of Boris’s hometown of Gomel. White Russia. That’s the literal translation of “Byelorussia”—today’s independent Republic of Belarus. Though the borders were constantly shifting, in my grandparents’ era, the Jews of White Russia lived within the Grodno Governorate, a far western province of Czar Nicholas II’s empire, abutting on Poland and home to some of the largest cities—Bialystok, Grodno, Minsk, Brest—in which Jews were allowed to live and work under the restrictive laws of the “Pale of Settlement.” Unlike Boris’s family, my grandparents were lucky to get out of Russia in time. Still teenagers, traveling alone, sometimes lying in the official paperwork about their ages, they escaped the pogroms and the Czarist conscription of World War I and, later, the scorched-earth devastation of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, the Shoah that took the lives of almost all their older siblings and their families—landing in Ellis Island several years before the 1917 Revolution. The Nayfelds were the ones who stayed behind. Citizens of the USSR, they were subject to the incomprehensible collective sacrifice of the Great Patriotic War against Hitler. Boris’s grandparents survived the Nazi invasion only by escaping into the interior of the Soviet Union—settling in Kazakhstan. After the war, returning to Gomel, they lived through the decades of official antisemitism under the repressive Stalinist state. My grandparents, on the other hand, like many working-class Russian Jewish immigrants, had their youthful values shaped in the cauldron of the Pale of Settlement; even before the Bolshevik Revolution, they embraced the utopian ideals of Marx and Engels. Well into their golden years, in retirement in Chicago and Miami Beach, I remember them reading Der Morgen Freiheit (“The Morning Freedom”), the far-left Yiddish-language newspaper published daily in New York City. Lifelong progressive idealists they may have been, and Yiddish was always the mama loshen—the “mother tongue”—yet they all became proud American citizens. Throughout the last century, the immigrant experience bred a wide variety of tough Jewish types. It produced infamous gunmen, gangsters, and labor racketeers. Also: anonymous hardworking men like my maternal grandfather, Willie Smith—born Velvel Schmid—who’d fled from Bialystok in 1914 to avoid the Czar’s draft at the start of the First World War. Even as a teenager, he was highly politicized, considering himself an anarchist (not a communist); he was a short, powerfully built guy with an explosive temper who often had to use his fists to fend off antisemitic insults when he arrived for the morning “shape-up” as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn waterfront during the Great Depression. After leaving Russia, he and my grandmother settled in a small apartment on West Twenty-First Street, Coney Island—that was where my mother was born in 1930—a short walk from where Boris Nayfeld and his family, a half century later, would find their first modest American home, in the housing projects, on Neptune Avenue and Thirty-Sixth Street, near Seagate. *** One morning in 2019, while staying at Boris’s sprawling house in Staten Island, I awoke to find him whipping up some scrambled eggs and lox and blini. He’s a very good cook; when I asked, he explained that he’d spent a few semesters at a culinary school in Gomel in his early twenties. But before breakfast, we both needed to swallow our morning levothyroxine pills on empty stomachs—we learned, with mild amusement, that we shared the autoimmune disease of hypothyroidism, and we had the exact same dosage of medication prescribed to correct it. In the brilliantly sunlit kitchen, Boris smiled and offered me a glass of hot tea. It reminded me of how my Grandpa Willie drank his tea. Black. In a water glass. Not a mug. I remembered how he, too, had been able to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Babel in the original Russian. How he, too, loved to play cards and gamble with his Yiddish- and Russian-speaking friends, though their game of choice was pinochle and Boris’s game is clabber. Of course, none of my grandparents were convicted criminals—let alone headline-making heroin traffickers, money launderers, or suspected murderers. But in the years that I’ve been hanging out with Boris Nayfeld, I’ve often wondered what my grandparents would have made of him. Would they have regarded him with revulsion—as a shtarker, a gonif who made a fortune preying on his fellow Jews? Or would they—if even begrudgingly—have recognized a familiar character in Boris Mikailovich Nayfeld: The Jew with the indomitable spirit? The Jew whom absolutely nothing could break? For me, Boris represents a throwback: a walking reminder of the hardscrabble origins of Russian Jewry in America—the world that produced a cohort of muscular, savvy, steely-eyed men, men for whom survival often meant doing the things that were necessary—difficult, unsavory, oftentimes outside the law. *** Over the past four years, I’ve listened to Boris describing mind-boggling tales of greed and violence and betrayal. Breathless accounts of daylight shootings in Brooklyn. Audacious heists in the diamond districts of Manhattan and Antwerp. Mountains of pure China White heroin smuggled from Thailand through Warsaw into JFK Airport. Suitcases stuffed with millions in counterfeit U.S. currency. Marathons of high-stakes gambling over cards in West African beach resorts. Escapades with young call girls in Moscow casinos and onboard the yachts of oligarchs in the Black Sea. I’d only been talking to Boris for a few hours that first afternoon at Tatiana in Brighton Beach when I jotted down a phrase in one of my spiral notebooks that seems, in hindsight, as appropriate an introduction as any to this book: “Welcome to the dark side of the American dream.” ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Last Boss of Brighton: Boris “Biba” Nayfeld and the Rise of the Russian Mob in America, by Douglas Century. Published by William Morrow & Company. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article -
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Southern Gothic Crime Fiction: A Palimpsest and Primer
Elements of the Gothic permeate every aspect of American media. We see it in film, music, literature and on TV shows, where it continues to grow in popularity from the crumbling plantations of HBO’s True Blood, to the lush landscapes of Louisiana’s Oak Valley Plantation in the first season of True Detective. More recently, Ozark and Love Craft Country have captured the imagination with its Gothic settings and characters. It’s no surprise that the Gothic is making its presence felt in the pages of crime fiction. But why should we care? We should care because the stories we tell ourselves shape our society, and crime fiction is the second bestselling genre in the country. Think about the impact books such as Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) had on America. Of Native Son, critic Irving Howe said, “The day [the book] appeared, American culture was changed forever…it made impossible a repetition of the old lies.” (Library of Congress’ list of books that shaped America) That’s what Gothic fiction does. Through stories of transgression and depictions of the grotesque, it evokes anxiety in the reader leaving them to question society’s institutions, religions, politics, familial and other relationships. It makes visible problems we have with race, gender, economic inequality, corrupt leadership, etc., problems many in this country don’t acknowledge exist. The Gothic genre itself has lived long, traveled far and shape-shifted along the way. In 1764 English writer Horace Walpole used elements from Gothic architecture in his novel, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. The setting’s dilapidated castles, ghosts, incest, and exploration of taboos inspired— or spawned depending on your perspective— many works that mirrored the same themes. The popularity of the novel marked Walpole as the father of Gothic fiction. Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) further embedded Gothic sensibilities into the consciousness of European readers. Nineteenth century American authors put their own spin on the genre. Edgar Allan Poe, a recognized pioneer of detective fiction, has also been credited with developing the American Gothic aesthetic. He replaced the presence of the supernatural with humans who become monstrous by giving in to illicit desires and soul-killing obsessions. His short story, “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) is a good example. Even without ghosts, the story is no less unsettling with its dank catacombs filled with piles of human bones, and a man who has let his pursuit of vengeance drive him to a monstrous act. In American hands, the monster is an ordinary human being. Two other features distinguish American Gothic from its European counterpart. The first is the return of ideas, brutal realities, and anxieties that have been repressed, especially those related to the dichotomies on which the country was founded (e.g. freedom in the midst of slavery). This return of the repressed usually calls into question the notion of the American Dream, and wreaks havoc on the present. The second is race, or fear of the other, which becomes even more pronounced in the Southern Gothic narrative. Like American Gothic, Southern Gothic has its forefather. Without William Faulkner’s influence, the genre may not be as popular as it is today. Decaying plantation houses stand in for ruined castles. And the land itself is a place of corruption and a source of contamination in Faulkner’s work. In his short story, “Dry September” (1931), the very soil itself appears to be polluted with the sins of slavery and the blood of lynching victims. The air, too, becomes a poison that will turn an entire town into monsters. Vivid violence is also a hallmark of the work. Faulkner short stories and novels suggest that this violence and corruption can’t be contained within southern borders. Ann Petry’s disturbing crime novel The Street (1946) can be seen as proof of that. Although set in Harlem, Petry uses Gothic elements to expose the perils of racism, sexism and poverty on the road to an unobtainable American dream. A talented author writing in the Southern Gothic tradition today is Attica Locke. Her novel, A Cutting Season (2009), exemplifies Southern Gothic crime fiction. Like the country we’ve become, the novel itself can be seen as a palimpsest. The main character, Caren, narrates a story written atop layers and layers of erasure. The setting is steeped in duality, in light and dark. A snake drops from a tree in the midst of a beautiful wedding. An ornate plantation house with rolling lawns of green exists side-by-side with the old slave quarters, a place where Caren is afraid to go. A woman’s murder calls up a horrible message from the past. It’s up to Caren to excavate each layer not only to expose the truth, but to save herself and her daughter. Southern Gothic crime fiction authors often employ themes that signal: The return of a repressed past that destroys the myth of the present, Battles between good and evil, Allusions to the supernatural— a voice from beyond the grave, or unexplained events, Religious corruption. Southern Gothic crime fiction is a favorite place for preachers in five-thousand-dollar suits, Obsession with death, the fear of death, and violence depicted in ways that may unsettle the reader. We see this in S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland (2020) when one character tells his murderer in a childlike, pitiful voice that he is scared, and Plots that transgress social boundaries sometimes in ways that thrills the reader. You’ll find Southern Gothic crime fiction set in: Desolate small towns signifying a world in ruins, sometimes existing alongside wealth and beauty. In Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects (2006), depictions of wealth and the stench of a pig farm exist in the same narrative space. These settings not only evoke an emotional response from the reader, but corrupts the characters who inhabit them, Decaying buildings along with secret passages, locked rooms, and forbidden places, and Dark, mysterious landscapes with extremely uncomfortable weather that directly impact the characters and plot. Along with gothic themes and settings, writers of Southern Gothic crime fiction will populate their stories with: Human beings made monstrous by illicit passions, or an obsession that will undo them, Characters who have a dark, evil subconscious side, Grotesque, eccentric characters who flagrantly explores taboos such as incest. Here, think of the old man who shamelessly impregnates his daughters in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, A debauched aristocracy (Sharp Objects is a good example of this), and Those who are cyclically imprisoned and freed in literal or metaphorical ways. Whenever you encounter the above characteristics in your reading, think about viewing the story through a Southern Gothic lens. By doing so, you may uncover the tensions and tragic beauty that help define this country. *** View the full article -
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Into the Past: Blood Transfusions in the Seventeenth Century
The Bloodless Boy begins with a gruesome discovery: a dead boy entirely drained of his blood. (The title is apt.) A Justice of Peace seeks help from the Curator of the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, who brings with him his assistant, Harry Hunt. From various signs on the body, the two ‘natural philosophers’ quickly establish that the boy’s blood was partly removed at various times, then all of it was taken. With their experience of blood transfusion, the pair conclude that someone has subjected the boy to a series of grisly experiments. As thrillers do, this initial finding leads to a greater mystery. Set during the Popish Plot—when anti-Catholic hysteria was fanned by fabricated ‘evidence’ from Titus Oates and his associate Israel Tonge—the story drags Harry and Hooke into an intrigue dating from the English Civil Wars. So, is my tale of 17th century blood transfusion fanciful, or is it based on fact? Let me explain about some experiments Hooke and Harry knew of in their work with the Royal Society. Utilising blood to either enhance the performance of a healthy body or heal a sick one goes back far longer than the Restoration setting of The Bloodless Boy. Blood sacrifice, blood brothers, ancient Egyptian blood baths, Romans drinking the blood of gladiators; all are well known and documented. Blood is symbolically powerful: in the Bible; in the notion of transubstantiation; in the Jewish blood libel. Faust and Mephistopheles sign their pact in blood, since nothing else would do. Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed is said to have bathed in the blood of her victims, although how true this is, and how many victims there were, is up for debate. Ovid’s Metamophoses tells us of Medea preparing ‘a brew’ to cure the ailing Aeson. She cut his throat, let all his blood run out, and refilled his veins with the brew. His grey hair returned to black, his wrinkles disappeared, and the strength of youth was restored to his limbs. (Give me some of that.) In 1492, Pope Innocent VIII, suffering after a stroke, drank the blood of three boys—who were bled to death for the purpose—to revive him. The treatment was unsuccessful. Pythagorean physiology posited four basic ‘humours’ of the blood; to maintain health these had to be kept in balance. Bloodletting, and cooling or warming the blood by herbs, was thought to be therapeutic. In the early 1600s, Johannes Colle at Padua, Magnus Pegel in Germany, and Libavius of Halle all wrote of transfusion from one body to another, and how this may be set about. But it was not until William Harvey described the circulation of blood, in his Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus of 1628, that we find practical—and to a degree, successful—attempts at blood transfusion. In 1649, as John Aubrey tells us in his Brief Lives, Francis Potter attempted to transfuse blood between chickens, Aubrey lending him a lancet to do so. But Potter failed, although he ‘tried diverse times’, unable to ‘strike the veine so as to make him bleed in any considerable quantity.’ Dr Thomas Sprat, in his History of the Royal Society, describes Christopher Wren less ham-fistedly demonstrating transfusion in 1659: By this Operation divers Creatures were immediately purg’d, vomited, intoxicated, kill’d, or reviv’d according to the quality of the Liquor injected: Hence arose many new Experiments, and chiefly that of Transfusing Blood, which the Society has prosecuted in sundry Instances, that will probably end in extraordinary Success. Wren didn’t carry out these experiments himself. They were performed by an assistant, Richard Lower, who had worked at Oxford under Thomas Willis, famous for his dissections of brains. Lower also worked for Robert Boyle, who, too, was eager to trial transfusion. In his Memoirs for the Natural History of Human Blood Boyle queries ‘whether by transfusion of blood, the disposition of individual animals of the same kind, may not be much altered.’ He wonders ‘Whether a fierce dog, by being quite new stocked with the blood of a cowardly dog, might not become more tame.’ Also, ‘Whether a transfused dog will recognize his master?’ More pertinently for the plot of The Bloodless Boy, ‘Whether rejuvenation will occur if an old, feeble dog is given the blood of a young, vigorous one?’ Other experiments injected poisons and drugs such as opium into animals—a process known to the Royal Society’s Fellows as ‘infusion’—to observe how circulation carried them around the creature’s body. (Wren is credited with the invention of the syringe from this time.) Working in Oxford, Lower carried out the first known successful blood transfusion from one animal into another, in February 1665. The process involved ligatures, running knots, sticks, and quills. The first successful transfusion at Gresham College, the Royal Society’s meeting place, is described in Thomas Birch’s History of the Royal Society. Dr Edmund King and Thomas Cox used a ‘little mastiff and a spaniel with very good success, the former bleeding to death, and the latter receiving the blood of the other, and emitting so much of his own, as to make him capable of receiving the other.’ As his diary entry of 14th November 1666 tells us, Samuel Pepys, a keen Fellow and later President of the Royal Society, enjoyed ‘an exceeding pretty supper’ at the Pope’s Head, where Dr. William Croone, an original Fellow, told him of the same ‘pretty experiment’: This did give occasion to many pretty wishes, as of the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop, and such like; but, as Dr. Croone says, may, if it takes, be of mighty use to man’s health, for the amending of bad blood by borrowing from a better body. Pretty indeed. Philosophical Transactions, the Society’s publication detailing its various meetings and experiments, tells us that blood was transfused between ‘a young Land-Spaniel’ and ‘an old Mungrell Cur, all overrun with the Mainge.’ However, in this experiment the young, fit dog received the old dog’s blood. The fit dog remained fit, and, strangely, so too became the old dog, which was ‘in about 10 dayes or a fortnight’s space perfectly cured.’ More spectacularly, the following year saw the first animal blood transfusion into a human, performed in Paris by King Louis XIV’s physician Dr Jean-Baptiste Denys. A 15-year-old boy received a sheep’s blood, and the boy survived the transfusion. Denys performed another transfusion into a labourer, who also survived. (These happy outcomes were probably because of the small amounts of blood transfused.) In the same year, he performed two transfusions on Antoine Mauroy, a man suffering from ‘an inveterate phrensy, occasioned by a disgrace he had received in some Amours.’ Using a calf’s blood this time, Denys hoped that the ‘mildness and freshness’ of the calf’s blood might allay the ‘heat and ebullition’ of Mauroy’s. After the treatment Mauroy ‘made a great glass full of Urine, of a colour as black, as if it had been mixed with the soot of Chimneys.’ Anxious not to be left behind by the French, the Royal Society approached Dr Thomas Allen, Bethlehem Hospital’s physician, but he refused to allow it to infuse any of his patients. Instead, Lower and Dr King ‘superintended the introduction’ of sheep’s blood into a man named Arthur Coga, ‘and without any inconvenience to him.’ Apparently needing the payment (a whole guinea), Coga later wrote about his experience, saying that lamb’s blood was chosen for its ‘symbolic power, like the blood of Christ, as Christ is the lamb of God.’ Presumably with the promise of another guinea, they repeated the experiment. Coga reported feeling ‘somewhat feverish.’ No third experiment happened, which may be explained by a letter Coga wrote to the Royal Society the next year, describing himself in the third person as ‘Your Creature (for he was his own man till your Experiment transform’d him into another species)’. He seems to have fallen on ill-luck and indigence, describing himself as a ‘shipwrack’t vessel’, and he blamed the Royal Society for it. He signed his letter ‘The meanest of your Flock.’ Back in Paris, a third transfusion carried out by Denys on Antoine Mauroy was soon followed by Mauroy’s death—although at the ensuing trial Denys was found innocent of wrongdoing. Madame Mauroy was tried instead for poisoning her husband. The French Supreme Court forbade blood transfusions until the Faculté de Paris gave its approval. As permission was never given, Denis turned his attention to staunching wounds instead, inventing a liquid to do so, whose ingredients were a closely guarded secret. Although no such calamity occurred in London, Viscount Brouncker, the President of the Royal Society, put a stop to more experiments. Worried by the news from France, he was worried further that compensation might need to be paid to any victim of transfusion, which the Society could ill-afford. The ‘extraordinary success’ predicted by Sprat was not to be achieved until a much later age. *** View the full article -
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Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare
B Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare July 5, 2022 · Berkley Mystery/Thriller I have a confession to make: the actual mystery in mystery novels is usually not very interesting to me. I don’t care who died, or how, or who dun it. Yet I eat up historical mystery novels like M&Ms, because in a mystery novel we often have a detective (official or unofficial) who, in the course of their investigation, gets to talk to people from a variety of classes and backgrounds, which I find fascinating. Miss Aldridge Regrets is one of these novels, with a generous helping of noir. The book takes place on the Queen Mary in 1936, with flashbacks that take place in London a few weeks prior to the scenes on the Queen Mary. Lena Aldridge is a singer who performs at a Soho club. She was raised by her Black father, Alfie, who was also a musician, and never met her White mother. When Charlie Walker, a mysterious ‘fixer,’ shows up and offers her a role on Broadway, she accepts. The only catch is that in order to maximize funding, she will need to spend the ocean passage befriending the very rich Abernathy family. Oh, she should also present herself as White. Then people in the Abernathy family keep dying, and Lena has to guard a secret of her own. Once people start dying off, Lena puts herself into a bit of a detective mode, but she’s fairly passive about it, mostly trying to keep herself on good footing with the Abernathys and trying to keep herself from being blamed for anything. Also, in keeping with noir tradition, she drinks a LOT more than seems strategically wise given her situation. It’s not so much that she goes out drunkenly looking for clues, but that everyone in the family wants to confide in her – so if you prefer a more aggressive, proactive detective, you might get frustrated with the constantly either tipsy or hungover heroine. Lena’s iffy moral choices lend the novel a touch of noir moodiness but also make her a difficult protagonist for me to attach to. The club she worked at was attached to a brothel (same building, owner, and many shared customers) that victimized very young girls. Lena was one of many that knew about it but chose not to report it – not only for her own protection but because the owner, Tommy, was bribing the police anyway. She covers up a murder, she uses cocaine, she lies, she drinks heavily, and she’s kind of a crappy friend. In short, Lena is not an evil or amoral person by any means, but she is focused on her own survival and although she is capable of feeling a great deal of compassion for people, she is also capable of ruthless behavior. Lena is interesting because her skin tone, her parentage, her profession, and her current mission, not to mention the liminal state that everyone exists in while at sea, all place her in a nebulous state that allows her to talk to everyone. She travels all over the ship and interacts with everyone from the filthy rich passengers in First Class to the ship’s employees. It’s a lot of fun to see how the upper third lives, with their endless attentive service, a store for every possible need, loads of food, and flowers, and private cabins for all. But it’s even more interesting to go below decks to The Pig and Whistle, a makeshift pub in a loading dock area that is populated at night by the ship’s staff, as well as passengers from all different levels of the ship who want a more covert and informal experience. Lena strikes up a secret short-term romance with Will. She also becomes the confidant of everyone associated with the Abernathys purely because she is both of the family (she sits at their table every night, along with Charlie Walker, who urges her to charm them) and not of their family. Sadly, the family members themselves are purely stock characters: Super old rich guy Francis Parker Parker’s frustrated Jewish physician, Doctor Wilding Parker’s put-upon personal servant, Daisy Parker’s Nazi-sympathizer son-in-law, Jack Abernathy Jack’s miserable wife, Eliza Abernathy Jack’s daughter, Carrie, who wants a career despite her family’s wishes These characters get very little depth other than their basic descriptions above, which is too bad – even when secrets are revealed about this family, they don’t progress or change my perception of the family members and staff. I have to confess that the resolution of this mystery left me confused. I understood who did it, but I didn’t understand why, or why said person changed their mind about a particular, crucial element of their plan at the last minute. Lena, however, true to form, makes all of her decisions from a place of self-protection from the beginning of the book to the end. From the standpoint of standard storytelling, she’s not a heroic figure, but who can blame her for putting herself first in a world where no one else does? Ultimately this mystery is weak on the actual mystery front. However, the description of an entertainer’s life in Soho and a passenger’s life on the Queen Mary is fascinating, and while Lena is an interesting person who always seems to be either doing or listening to or watching interesting things. On those levels, I really liked this book, and recommend it for fans of that time period. View the full article -
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The Social Media Mob vs. the Novel
An absorbing conversation about "sensitivity reading" and the extreme absurdities resulting from the SR rationale. -
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Some of Today’s Kindle Daily Deals
Blood Heir Blood Heir by Ilona Andrews is $1.49 or $1.99 elsewhere! This is a spin-off of Andrews’ Kate Daniels series with the main character being Kate and Curran’s ward. Obviously this will be a more nuanced read if you’ve finished or are familiar with the prior series. I dropped off that train around book three. From award-winning author, Ilona Andrews, an all-new novel set in the New York Times #1 bestselling Kate Daniels World and featuring Julie Lennart-Olsen, Kate and Curran’s ward. Atlanta was always a dangerous city. Now, as waves of magic and technology compete for supremacy, it’s a place caught in a slow apocalypse, where monsters spawn among the crumbling skyscrapers and supernatural factions struggle for power and survival. Eight years ago, Julie Lennart left Atlanta to find out who she was. Now she’s back with a new face, a new magic, and a new name—Aurelia Ryder—drawn by the urgent need to protect the family she left behind. An ancient power is stalking her adopted mother, Kate Daniels, an enemy unlike any other, and a string of horrifying murders is its opening gambit. If Aurelia’s true identity is discovered, those closest to her will die. So her plan is simple: get in, solve the murders, prevent the prophecy from being fulfilled, and get out without being recognized. She expected danger, but she never anticipated that the only man she’d ever loved could threaten everything. One small misstep could lead to disaster. But for Aurelia, facing disaster is easy; it’s relationships that are hard. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Jane Doe RECOMMENDED: Jane Doe by Victoria Helen Stone is available for $1.99 at Amazon! Elyse and Sarah jointly review the book today and gave it a B+. They thought it was an empowering book, but felt the ending was a bit rushed. Please be warned that this book deals with all forms of abuse and abuse against a child. I’ve also heard other readers recommend the audiobook. A double life with a single purpose: revenge. Jane’s days at a Midwest insurance company are perfectly ordinary. She blends in well, unremarkably pretty in her floral-print dresses and extra efficient at her low-level job. She’s just the kind of woman middle manager Steven Hepsworth likes—meek, insecure, and willing to defer to a man. No one has any idea who Jane really is. Least of all Steven. But plain Jane is hiding something. And Steven’s bringing out the worst in her. Nothing can distract Jane from going straight for his heart: allowing herself to be seduced into Steven’s bed, to insinuate herself into his career and his family, and to expose all his dirty secrets. It’s time for Jane to dig out everything that matters to Steven. So she can take it all away. Just as he did to her. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. To Taste Temptation To Taste Temptation by Elizabeth Hoyt is $1.99! This is book one in the Legend of the Four Soldiers series and was mentioned in a Rec League on Historical Romance House Parties. Readers warn that the beginning is a little slow, but if you’re looking to fully collect all of Hoyt’s romances, this is a good price! The ton loves a good scandal, and theyre giddy when wealthy Samuel Hartley arrives. Not only is he self-made, American, and in the habit of wearing moccasins, he is also notorious for fleeing a battle in which several English gentlemen died. What the ton doesnt know is that Samuel is in London because of this massacre. He believes his regiment was given up to the enemy and wont rest until he finds the traitor. Lady Emeline Gordon is captivated by Samuel. Not only does he defy convention, but he survived the battle that killed her brother. Samuel suspects that the person responsible is Jasper Renshaw, Viscount Vale, Emeline’s fiance. Though Emeline believes Vale is innocent and refuses to break off her betrothal, she and Samuel begin a passionate affair. Can their relationship survive the fallout from Samuels investigation? Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Goldilocks RECOMMENDED: Goldilocks by Laura Lam is $2.99! Carrie reviewed this one and gave it a B+: If you are in the mood for a female-centric political and scientific and familial thriller/drama set in a space, here you go. Don’t skip the Acknowledgements, which includes a fabulous reading list for more reading. The Earth is in environmental collapse. The future of humanity hangs in the balance. But a team of women are preparing to save it. Even if they’ll need to steal a spaceship to do it. Despite increasing restrictions on the freedoms of women on Earth, Valerie Black is spearheading the first all-female mission to a planet in the Goldilocks Zone, where conditions are just right for human habitation. The team is humanity’s last hope for survival, and Valerie has gathered the best women for the mission: an ace pilot who is one of the only astronauts ever to have gone to Mars; a brilliant engineer tasked with keeping the ship fully operational; and an experienced doctor to keep the crew alive. And then there’s Naomi Lovelace, Valerie’s surrogate daughter and the ship’s botanist, who has been waiting her whole life for an opportunity to step out of Valerie’s shadow and make a difference. The problem is that they’re not the authorized crew, even if Valerie was the one to fully plan the voyage. When their mission is stolen from them, they steal the ship bound for the new planet. But when things start going wrong on board, Naomi begins to suspect that someone is concealing a terrible secret — and realizes time for life on Earth may be running out faster than they feared . . . Goldilocks is a bold and thought-provoking new thriller for readers of The Martian and The Handmaid’s Tale. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article -
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Beautiful Losers: On Leonard Cohen
From “The Lost Radio Interview.” To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work. In December 1981, I visited my older brother at the University of Michigan. There three men taught me to play three songs on guitar: “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” “Genesis,” and “Suzanne.” The first left me cold. The second, its melodic charms notwithstanding, featured the line “They say I’m harder than … a marble shaft,” leading me to believe, until just now when I finally looked him up, that Jorma Kaukonen was born in Finland and never really learned English. The third rocketed me, on my return to William & Mary, straight to the town record store, where the cashier sold me Songs of Leonard Cohen with a money-back guarantee on the condition that I listen to it ten times before complaining. There existed milieus where Cohen’s music was inescapable, such as kibbutzim and the GDR. Tidewater, Virginia, was not that milieu. A basic tenet of its all-pervasive racism was that white people couldn’t do music. Black people were denied decent jobs and homes, but there was no question that high school dances would be themed “Always and Forever” and culminate in “Brick House” and “Flashlight.” At college, surrounded by northern suburbanites’ awkward skanking to babyish punk rock, I realized that I had been inadvertently blessed. But it did take me at least ten listens to acclimate to Cohen’s chansonnier velocity and compound meters while his lyrics were sinking their claws into my soul. I taught myself all the songs on the record and borrowed his novels from the library. An image of sainthood from Beautiful Losers haunted me for decades: to live like a runaway ski. I blame The Favorite Game for the image of a sentient vibrator that drives a couple from their home, as well as a description of getting trapped in a writhing mass of young people at a political rally but failing to orgasm. I suspect they’re also from Beautiful Losers. The Favorite Game is about getting laid a lot in swinging Montreal (autobiographical). I preferred the songs, which restored the human dignity the novels attacked. I remember singing “Why are you so quiet now / Standing there in the doorway” while a housemate I had a crush on stood quietly in the doorway. For once we were in each other’s presence yet not acting like idiots, our dopiness suspended by the schematic innocence of a simple song—transfixed by poetry, lost in the timeless intimacy of two people listening to one of them perform the beauty of someone else. Then time resumed, and soon afterward he plunked down on my bed unannounced, not to sing “You Know Who I Am,” but to plead his stunningly counterproductive case for sex with me, citing what he saw as my indiscriminate promiscuity. I think the last time I saw him he was either cooking shirtless or staring at me across a dance floor, dressed as a pumpkin. Life could be so lyrical, if it weren’t a novel. Nell Zink has published six novels, including the recent Avalon. View the full article -
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When Story Is Medicine
Please welcome new Writer Unboxed contributor Susan DeFreitas to Writer Unboxed today! Susan is the IPPY-Award winning author of the novel Hot Season, the story of “an outlaw activist on the run” and most recently the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin. She is also the creator of Story Medicine—the course for writers who want to use their power as storytellers to support a more just world, and a Founding Coach for Author Accelerator. Her essays have been featured in the Writer’s Chronicle, LitHub, the Huffington Post, the Utne Reader, and elsewhere. As an independent editor and book coach, she specializes in helping writers from historically marginalized backgrounds, and those writing socially engaged fiction, break into publishing. You can learn more about Susan on her website, and by following her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. When Story Is Medicine There are many different kinds of stories in this world. Stories that stoke our curiosity with tantalizing clues and tricky plot reveals. Stories that touch our hearts with “aww, isn’t that sweet, the world isn’t a total flaming Dumpster fire” sorts of moments. Stories that linger with us for a few days, and then lift off and drift away. There’s nothing wrong with those types of stories. But to my mind, the very best stories do more than that. The very best stories act as medicine, delivering some emotional insight or understanding that changes who we are, on some level, and the way we operate in the world. And they stay with us much, much longer. These types of stories often come to us at our hour of greatest need, and one came to me in 2015, when I was recovering from cancer: Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things. On the surface, this novel offers a fine escape from reality: It’s a historical novel, set in the 1800s, and chronicles the life of a female botanist and her ill-fated marriage to a pious lithographer with an almost otherworldly sense of goodness about him. For me, it was the perfect novel to read while on the mend from the surgery that, as it turned out, would save my life: immersive, transportive, funny, intellectually stimulating, and even a bit sexy at times. (It also clocks in at 500 pages, which is a great length for putting reality firmly on hold.) But there’s a message at the heart of this novel (and my sharing this with you won’t spoil the story, because as with any story, it’s the journey, not the destination, that ultimately matters). This message is that being good, being pure of heart, being selfless and giving and kind—being all those things that women especially are taught to be—may get you into heaven but will not save you here on earth. Because here on earth, it is often the toughest that survive—the ones with the strongest will to live, the strongest love for life itself, in all its messy, earthly glory. You can imagine how visceral this message was for me, at this time in my life. Elizabeth Gilbert gave me a great gift with that novel, and that gift was the emotional, bone-deep understanding that life is not, in fact, fair, but it is precious—and sometimes, if we want to hold onto it, we have to actually fight for it. There’s an indigenous concept of story as medicine—the idea that the right story, at the right time, can actually heal you, in spirit and maybe even in body. For me, The Signature of All Things is such a story, and like all of the novels I’ve loved best in my life, I carry it with me, inside me, wherever I go. As a novelist, and as a book coach specializing in socially engaged fiction, I’ve spent a lot of time studying what gives certain stories this extra dimension, and the potential to actually change lives. Here, to my mind, are three characteristics of such novels: They Reflect the Hard Truths of Reality Novels that offer story medicine are not just built around car crashes and jewel heists, or fantasies of romance and happily ever after. Such novels take a clear-eye look at the hard truths of reality. In The Signature of All Things, one of the hard truths the author grapples with might be paraphrased with the title of a Billy Joel song: “Only the Good Die Young.” The protagonist’s husband is so good, so generous and kind that he verges upon saintly, and he essentially dies because he’s too good to fight back. It’s really not fair, and that’s the point: How are we to live in a world that is inherently unfair? This is a theme echoed by the fact that the protagonist’s work as a botanist is all but dismissed in the time she lives in, simply because she’s a woman. How is she to live in such a world? How are any of us to? It’s only by staring down the hard truths of the world and reckoning with them that we can offer our own hard-won truths as the antidote, the cure (or at least the coping method), and offer our readers that medicine in our work. Further examples of novels that offer story medicine, to my mind, include A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which grapples with the horrors of WWI, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which wrestles against the siren song of nihilism in a universe full of random (or maybe even not so random) violence, and (lest you think these sorts of novels only come in the form of door stoppers) Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which deals with the long and complicated aftermath of childhood sexual abuse. They Offer Real Emotional Insight Of course, almost any garden-variety novel has some kind of trauma, violence, or injustice at its core—but these types of stories generally just describe, catalogue, or even exploit that sickness. They don’t actually attempt to offer a cure. To do that, you have to go deeper. You have to dig into why these sorts of injustices exist in the first place, and how they’re perpetuated—the chain of events in your antagonist’s past that made them who they are, the backstory that leads your protagonist to continue making exactly the wrong choice. Often, this means digging into the truths of your own heart, your own emotional journey as a person—the things you’ve learned through adversity, and the things you know in your own heart of hearts to be true. Because those are some of the most valuable insights you have to offer your reader, and they’re where the unexpected answers to life’s most persistent questions often lie. They Chart a Convincing Path to Transformation Finally, stories that act as medicine take their protagonists through a convincing arc of change—from seeing the world one way to seeing it another, and often from a place of disconnection or illusion to a place of connection or clarity. And that part about the path being convincing is critical, because if the transformation comes across as unrealistic—meaning, if it doesn’t actually touch on the real challenges that arise for someone grappling with those hard truths, and doesn’t move in a realistic way through all of the emotional gears involved, it won’t ultimately produce a real sense of catharsis or revelation for the reader in the end. And that, ultimately, is the goal of this type of story: To deliver real insight with the force of strong emotion—because that, in the end, is what makes them unforgettable. What are the hard truths that your novel grapples with? What emotional insights does it offer? And what is the path your protagonist must traverse, in order to reach their point of transformation? About Susan DeFreitasSusan DeFreitas is the author of the novel Hot Season, which won a Gold IPPY Award, the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, and the creator of Story Medicine—the course for writers who want to use their power as storytellers to support a more just and verdant world. Her work has been featured in the Writer’s Chronicle, LitHub, the Huffington Post, the Utne Reader, Story, Daily Science Fiction, Oregon Humanities, and elsewhere. An independent editor and Author Accelerator Founding Coach, she specializes in helping writers from historically marginalized backgrounds, and those writing socially engaged fiction, break through into publishing. She divides her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Portland, Oregon. Web | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | More Posts http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WriterUnboxed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WriterUnboxed?d=qj6IDK7rITs http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WriterUnboxed?i=DLKClRdD8h8:ssHoIR5HtL8:gIN9vFwOqvQ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/WriterUnboxed?i=DLKClRdD8h8:ssHoIR5HtL8:D7DqB2pKExk [url={url}]View the full article[/url] -
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10 New Books Coming Out This Week
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Vaughan, Reputation (Atria) “Vaughan offers a cast of strong characters that are sharply realistic and consummately human. A complex, slow-burning examination of double standards, misogyny, and public image that shares strong appeal with Scott Turow’s literary legal thrillers.” –Booklist, starred review Denise Mina, Confidence (Mulholland) “Mina keeps the plot charging at a breathless pace, and Anna is an engagingly tart narrator. Even for true-crime podcasters, the truth is tough to find in this brisk, entertaining thriller.” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearer’s Club (William Morrow) “In his brilliant new novel, Tremblay takes on the well-mined small-town, coming-of-age horror trope, transforming it into something so original, it elevates the entire genre.” –Booklist, starred review Tess Gerritsen, Listen to Me (Ballantine) “Engrossing . . . Gerritsen smoothly shifts between her complex plotlines as the action builds to a surprising conclusion.” –Publishers Weekly Louise Hare, Miss Aldridge Regrets (Berkley) “Fiendishly plotted with more twists than a corkscrew, this nineteen thirties novel set on board the Queen Mary is a real page turner.” –Rhys Bowen Conner Habib, Hawk Mountain (WW Norton and Co) “The tension is palpable on every page, and Habib skillfully illustrates the complexity of relationships and the pain of unmet desires, both queer and otherwise. His prose is as brutal as it is profound and beautiful…. A brutal and gorgeous tale of manipulation, control, and desire.” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review David Bell, The Finalists (Berkley) “I raced through The Finalists, which is not only a first-rate thriller but an insightful commentary on the challenges facing higher education. The Finalists is proof positive that David Bell is one of the best thriller writers working today.” –Alma Katsu Daniel Nieh, Take No Names (Ecco) “Combines biting humor, breathless action scenes, a clever presentation of mixed languages, and dark geopolitical commentary, including an indictment of America’s own duplicity. It’s a lot of fun. A cutting thriller with nonstop action and twisty consequences.” –Kirkus Reviews Concita de Gregorio (transl. Clarissa Botsford), The Missing Word (Europa) “There’s a great deal of intrigue…which builds on an unsettling theme of horror churning beneath the surface. This will transfix readers.” –Publishers Weekly Rozlan Mohd Noor, Soulless (Arcade CrimeWise) “Superb . . . Fans of hard-edged crime fiction from authors such as James Ellroy and Paul Cleave will be riveted.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review View the full article -
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A Question of Character: On James Patterson and Diversity in Crime Fiction
“Today, though, he worries that it is hard for white men to get writing gigs in film, theatre, TV, or publishing. The problem is just ‘another form of racism. What’s that all about?’ he muses. ‘Can you get a job? Yes. Is it harder? Yes. It’s even harder for older writers. You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males.'” –James Patterson: white male writers are victims of ‘racism’” The Sunday Times Ah, the classics. He’s since apologized and the news cycle has slogged on, but James Patterson’s comments were familiar to many of us. I’ve heard variations of this complaint from fellow novelists for years now, always from white men. It usually comes after they’ve confided about a rejection of some sort, and I feel that unsettling dread marginalized people are familiar with, that sense that you’re about to be blamed for someone’s lack of success. And then it happens. A begrudging, “The market’s just not great for white men right now.” This is usually quickly followed by a somewhat insincere, “But, I mean, it’s a good thing that there’s more diversity nowadays and all that.” Information about demographics in crime fiction is hard to obtain, but it does seem that there has been more deserved recognition received by marginalized writers, particularly since 2020, when the social protests following the murder of George Floyd galvanized the publishing industry to recognize – and, ideally, reconcile – the disparity in opportunities afforded to people of color. But this recognition has – as is often the case, and illustrated by Patterson’s interview – sparked intense backlash, and a desire for correction. That said, for all the handwringing and frightened concern about the welfare of white male writers, publishing is still a sea of bobbing white male heads. These complaints serve as a sobering reminder that marginalized writers in crime fiction still face a variety of nuanced challenges from an unhappy and resilient old guard. New ground is never given without a fight, and the rewards of professional success in publishing are fiercely, often unfairly, defended. It’s rooted in the false worry, as brilliantly explained by Heather McGhee in her celebrated study, The Sum of Us, that shared success for all means less success for one. But I wonder if these complaints are actually more reflective of character than the writers issuing them realize. And I’m not referring to the character of these aggrieved writers, but rather to the characters they’re creating. *** Gone Girl was one of the most noteworthy novels of the past twenty years, and its success helped push the concept of the psychological thriller into the mainstream. Gone Girl is famously a book of unexpected twists, but it’s also a revealing study of unsettling characters. Thrillers are known for the surprising structure of their plots, so much so that it’s not uncommon for the genre to be derided for placing plot over people. This isn’t a fair complaint, but it’s one that writers of today’s psychological thrillers have been steadily dismantling, complex protagonist after complex protagonist. This study of character extends to writers of color, and LGBTQIA+ writers, and neurodiverse writers, and other writers from traditionally minoritized communities who are finally being given both critical and marketplace recognition. And it’s accompanying, not coincidentally, the growing diversity of the country. A new character is wandering the landscape of crime fiction and it’s almost, by definition, a new perspective. And so it’s not that the publishing landscape of crime fiction is an obstacle for white men. Rather, the publishing landscape is calling for characters other than the ones who have traditionally populated the books of white male writers. Let me explain. I grew up a devoted fan of crime fiction, and I remember that, after years of eagerly flipping pages in thrillers, my pace slowed. I got bored. The books I read were usually written by men, and their protagonists fit a certain archetype. These protagonists were generally quiet, brutally violent men who were probably socio/psychopaths…but also surprisingly good-hearted. They were flawed, but lovingly so. Single and sexually active (always straight, of course), protective, intelligent. And violent. And haunted. But, you know, attractively. If his trauma prohibited the protagonist from relationships, it certainly didn’t stop women from finding him desirable. That would have been a step too far. And the more I read, the more I felt like I’d read all the stories crime fiction had to offer. And I left the genre. It wasn’t until after college that I returned to crime fiction. A happy coincidence, along with my own start as a professional novelist, led me to books by Sujata Massey and Laura Lippman, and I realized the wonderful breadth of voices thrillers had the potential to offer. That wonder hasn’t ceased. Today I’m enamored by the works of Kellye Garrett and Jennifer Hillier and Rachel Howzell Hall and Steph Cha and Katie Gutierrez and so many other writers who write captivating stories without sacrificing character. Rather, they make a story captivating because of their characters. And, as this far-from-exhaustive list demonstrates, it’s the newer writers in crime fiction who are giving us these new voices, and they happen to be a group of writers who are wonderfully diverse, and who are steadfastly proving the business axiom that diversity makes an industry better. It is, as I said earlier, the old guard who opposes them, and a heated generational divide is naturally occurring. This often happens in literature (do yourself a favor and read Mark Twain’s scathing takedown of James Fenimore Cooper). We’re at a similar moment now. A new literary movement is emerging, but it’s one less defined by how language is used, but rather by who is using it and to what end. White male writers aren’t going away, of course, and that’s a good thing – there are wonderful, necessary books by white men. Diversity often brings an unwarranted worry of exclusion, but concepts of DEI are intended to be inclusive. Simply because someone is white doesn’t mean they don’t belong. When we talk about representation, we’re occasionally talking about skin color, but we’re also talking about more. Gender and sexuality delve beyond color, as do the complexities in both neurodiversity and religion. And it’s this complexity of identities, which can perhaps be answered by a deeper search into a writer’s own identity, that’s craved. If writers continue to ignore that call – a necessary call that matches the demands of the market and the country – then James Patterson’s sentiment will prove prophetic, but not for the reasoning he gave. White male writers won’t find audiences, but not because of who they are. It will be because of the stories they didn’t tell. View the full article -
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7 Unconventional Women at the Center of Great Novels
I’ve long had a love for an unconventional woman, perhaps because I consider myself to be one. I blame my mother. Growing up, I stole her books as soon as she finished with them. I immersed myself in the world of the female PI, fascinated by these independent women who didn’t need husbands and refused to give up the job they loved, even at the risk of their finances or lives. I’ve never had the aspiration to follow in their footsteps exactly, but I’ve always wanted to create characters like them; women who don’t always follow the rules of society. Lena Aldridge started off as an unnamed woman in my first novel, This Lovely City, published in the UK. My protagonists, a couple named Evie and Lawrie, have a night out in a Soho jazz club. As they leave, there is a woman singing onstage and something about her makes Evie take notice. It’s not on the page, but Evie is going through a turbulent time and when she sees that woman onstage, confident and talented, she feels envious. That singer must really have her life together! I don’t really know why but that unnamed woman stuck in my head. I wondered if she really did have her life together – how boring! What if, really, she was falling apart? Way more interesting. Indemnity Only, by Sara Paretsky My introduction to the unconventional woman was through Indemnity Only, Sara Paretsky’s first V.I. Warshawski novel. A missing person’s case turns into a murder investigation, but it’s V.I. herself who kept me turning the pages when I first picked this up. The divorced daughter of a Chicago cop and an Italian opera singer, V.I. is so fiercely independent and I’d never come across anyone like her before, either in real life or in fiction. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone Alphabet Series Once I’d devoured the V.I. novels that were available, I moved onto Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series, of course starting with “A” is for Alibi. Santa Teresa might be a fictional town in Southern California, but it felt real when I read these books. What Millhone has in common with Warshawski is that they’re a similar age. The difference is that Sue Grafton, perhaps having had twenty-six books in mind originally, decided to keep the action firmly in the 1980s, with the plot of each book taking place soon after the conclusion of the last. Although she’s described as a loner, she has a lot of friends, her octogenarian landlord Henry being my favourite. And she’s not averse to a romantic relationship, enjoying several over the course of the series as well as having been divorced twice. Kinsey Millhone is perhaps my favourite of the trio of female PIs that I read over a short period in my early teens (Linda Barnes’s Carlotta Carlyle being the third). Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn If the twentieth century was rich hunting ground for female PIs, the twenty first has opened up new horizons. Back in 2012, everyone was reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl but, while Amy Dunne is definitely a complicated woman (the ‘cool girl’ monologue is famous for a reason), it’s Flynn’s debut, Sharp Objects that really brings women to the fore. Camille Preaker is a Chicago based journalist with a dark past who ends up travelling back to her hometown to cover the murder of a young girl. The murder and subsequent disappearance of another girl almost take a backseat to the tension between Camille, her estranged mother and her teenage half-sister. To say this book is dark would be an understatement. Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh Talking of dark books, the titular character of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen is trapped between her squalid home life looking after an alcoholic father, and her dull job as the secretary at a boys’ prison. When the charismatic new counsellor, Rebecca, arrives at the prison, Eileen throws herself at this chance at friendship. This is a novel reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson, a thriller with the literary chops to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. Blood Orange, by Harriet Tyce The psychological thriller is often seen as female dominated, but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee an interesting female lead. One of my favourites of recent years is Blood Orange by Harriet Tyce. Alison is a successful criminal barrister with a loving husband and daughter, and she’s just been given her first murder case to defend – so why is she so hellbent on destroying it all? Drinking too much, having an affair with a colleague who doesn’t have her best interests at heart, her life is on the verge of falling apart. Can she save her client and, more importantly, can she save herself? The Eighth Girl, by Maxine Mei Fung Chung Alexa Wú is the protagonist of The Eighth Girl, a clever, original thriller. Author Maxine Mei Fung Chung is herself a psychoanalyst and leans on her expertise to draw a striking portrait of a young woman with dissociative identity disorder. When Alexa’s best friend starts working at a high-end gentlemen’s club, it is Alexa too who gets sucked into the dark side of London’s nightlife. Will her multiple personalities help or hinder her as she tries to save them both? Precious You, by Helen Monks Takhar If you want two unconventional women for the price of one, Helen Monks Takhar delivers with Precious You. Katherine is editor in chief at a magazine, in a happy relationship and in her early forties. Lily is the new intern, relative of the magazine’s publisher, who walks in and seems determined to undermine Katherine at every opportunity. Is Katherine just being paranoid and jealous of a younger woman? Is Lily really out to get Katherine’s job? Or are they just as bad as one another? Trust me, this book goes to DARK places! *** While Lena in Miss Aldridge Regrets isn’t quite as messy as some of the women I’ve mentioned, she’s living a life that would definitely be described as unconventional, especially in the 1930s. I had a lot of fun writing her, and the other women she finds herself in company with, many of whom are just as complicated beneath the surface. And perhaps complicated is the wrong word to use here. Maybe the word I should be using is real. View the full article -
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The Long, Unsettling Tradition of Twins in Crime Fiction
Our fascination with twins (and particularly identical twins) likely dates back to the dawn of humankind, as evidenced by Romulus and Remus, Artemis and Apollo, Shakespeare (Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors), the Cheeryble Brothers in Nicholas Nickleby, all the way through to contemporary literature. Monozygotic (aka identical) twins make up approximately 0.3% of the world’s population. But, thankfully, they are significantly more prevalent in crime fiction. When I ponder fictional twins the first image in my head is that of the Grady twins in the Overlook Hotel. Stephen King’s The Shining and Stanley Kubrik’s screen adaptation are both seminal pieces of work. They feature several strong themes – isolation, suffering for your art, the supernatural, dysfunctional families – and yet one of the most striking visuals is the Grady twins holding hands in a corridor. Twins often develop their own private language. Cryptophasia (‘twin talk’) is a specific form of Idioglossia (a secret language, in this case shared between siblings). Sometimes this means twins only use the language of their parents later on. They simply have less need it, for a while at least, because they have each other. In Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Margo and Nick Dunne are non-identical twins (also known as fraternal or dizygotic). Margo (or ‘Go’) is vital to the mechanics of this intricately-plotted story. She is our way in, our relatable lens, our access to Nick, our trusted guide through a twisted tale. In a book with two fascinating but quite dreadful main characters, Margo acts as our guide. It is her conscience that we connect with (she’s appalled when she finds Nick cheating on Amy, and horrified when she realises Nick will stay with his wife). The openness of their twin relationship affords us insights into a hidden world. Jung and Freud described the concepts of ‘the shadow self’ or ‘Id’. Many writers are fascinated by the notion of a dark, somewhat out-of-control side to our own personalities. Stories involving twins force us to peer into those dark corners. Published in 1846, The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky follows Golyadkin, a low-level bureaucrat living in St Petersburg, as he attends the birthday party of a colleague (he was never invited in the first place). After several social faux pas, he is thrown out of the party. Walking home through a winter storm, he bumps into his double and they develop a friendship of sorts (although it soon dawns on Golyadkin (Snr) that Golyadkin (Jr) is leveraging his charm and skill to overshadow the other man). They become enemies. At the end, Golyadkin Snr notices several other doubles and is dragged away to an asylum. The book explores themes of identity and mental health, but it’s also one of the most fascinating (and sinister) twin stories ever published. It’s interesting to see just how valuable real-world controlled twin studies (medical, behavioural, genetic, psychological) are to the scientific community. This is especially true for studies involving identical twins separated at birth. In contemporary fiction, science and twins are often found together. Writers of the genre explore fingerprint patterns (dermatoglyphics), DNA sequencing, psychiatric testing and various other forensic techniques. In Tess Gerritsen’s 2004 novel Body Double (the fourth in the Jane Rizzoli series) Maura Isles discovers the body of a woman who looks identical to her, and shares her birthday. Genetic testing proves them to be monozygotic twins. For more examples of fictional twins I refer you to Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter, Sister by Rosamund Lupton, and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. *** View the full article
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