Roy Miller's Blog, page 234
March 27, 2017
British Indie Tests New Biz Model with Crowdfunding Campaign
The U.K.-based New Internationalist Publishing, which has been an employee-owned cooperative for decades, earlier this month launched a crowdfunding campaign that allows contributors to be brought on as partial owners in the business. The endeavor has, to date, raised more than $446,000 from more than 1,600 investors. Among those who have contributed to the campaign are a few bold-faced names, such as actress Emma Thompson, novelist A.L. Kennedy, political columnist George Monbiot, and musician Jarvis Cocker.
Investors are asked to pay a minimum of $60 to purchase “community shares” in the company, which publishes fiction with social justice themes, nonfiction books on current affairs and a magazine about social and environmental issues. The 35-day crowdfunding campaign, which has a goal of $610,000, is called “Buy Into a Better Story;" it began on March 1 and ends on April 6.
“These shares are different from ordinary shares,” sales and marketing manager Dan Raymond-Barker explained, “They can’t be transferred or sold. Investors have one vote, no matter how much they invest and, as co-owners, become stewards of New Internationalist’s mission into the future.”
According to Raymond-Barker, the celebrity contributors were informed early on about the campaign and asked to participate "in whatever way they felt comfortable." These stars were also contacted because each has a relationship with the . Thompson subscribes to the magazine; Monbiot has written columns for it; and Kennedy and Cocker have supported the house. Cocker, Raymond-Barker noted, "has even given us shout-outs during [performances]."
Investors will have voting rights over the charter governing the press’ editorial policy, and will also be invited to join New Internationalist’s new advisory board. The company projects that at a future date it will be able to pay interest and even, Raymond-Barker said, “consider repayment of capital.”
New Internationalist, which currently publishes about 20 titles each year, is confident it will hit its $610,000 goal and, with the money, hopes to, among other things, launch new imprints.
Founded in 1973 as a magazine that reported on global issues, New Internationalist expanded into publishing books in 1982. Now it also operates a mail-order division selling its books and magazines. Headquartered in Oxford, the company also has a Canadian office and distribution in the U.S. through Consortium.
“We've been a workers' co-op for many years, so co-operative principles are in our DNA,” Raymond-Barker said, “It feels like a natural progression to go one step further and be co-owned by our readers and supporters. Having a multi-stakeholder co-op with ourselves as worker-members and ordinary people all over the world as investor-members seems like the best way to develop and thrive into the future.”
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Young Adult Short Story: “The Call of Llyn Caldwell” by Tamara Grubbs
“The Call of Llyn Caldwell” by Tamara Grubbs is the First Place-winning story in the young adult category of the 12th Annual Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards. For complete coverage of this year’s awards, including an exclusive interview with the Grand Prize winner and a complete list of winners, check out the May/June 2017 issue of Writer’s Digest. And click here for more information about entering the 13th Annual Popular Fiction Awards.
In this bonus online exclusive, you can read Grubbs’s winning entry.
The Call of Llyn Caldwell by Tamara Grubbs
Kellen Slade was born in a pig pen.
As far as rumors went, this wasn’t the worst to work its way through Saw-Whet Valley, but it had the distinction of being the longest lasting. Kellen was 16, and still the humbling details of his birth tickled ears throughout the town.
It tickled the ears of Alice Taft on a Thursday afternoon. She’d grabbed a damp cafeteria tray from a dwindling stack and was standing in line, wiping from her palm what she hoped was warm water, when a girl in tight denim shorts and a Broncos t-shirt glanced back at her. She boldly took in the full sight of Alice, from loosely braided hair to well-worn boots, leaned slightly and asked, “Your parents bought the old Caldwell ranch, didn’t they?”
“Yep,” Alice answered. Her thoughts churned through the short list of names and faces she’d collected over the past three and a half days. The girl looked familiar. As far as the name card for this matching game, though, Alice came up blank.
“I’m Sylvia,” the girl said. “Hi. I’m Alice.”
“I know,” Sylvia said. Then, in the same abrupt, matter of fact manner she added, “That makes you Kellen Slade’s neighbor. He was born in a pig pen, you know.”
“What?” Alice asked, taken aback. She’d never been taken aback before; it turned out that the feeling literally caused her to take a step back, which, she thought, must be where the expression stemmed from. She made a mental note to look up the phrase now that she’d experienced it first-hand. Regaining her lost step, she asked, “When did that happen?”
“I don’t know. Like, sixteen years ago? He’s in second period Cultural Studies.” “Oh. Right.”
“Anyway,” Sylvia continued, sliding a plastic-wrapped salad onto her tray, “That tells you everything you need to know about that family. I’m just saying. Good fences make good neighbors and all that.”
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Alice quoted.
“Yeah,” Sylvia replied, a sudden disinterest dulling her words. “Or, you know, wire works, too.”
The remainder of the Frost poem tumbled around Alice’s heart, ashamedly concealed. Quoting old stuff like that had only ever won her quizzical or pitying looks; she wanted to punch herself for allowing her inner geek to slip out.
After paying for her salad-sans-dressing, Sylvia turned back to Alice, sizing the smaller girl up once more. Her lips formed into the bud of a question. Anticipation buzzed through Alice’s toes. Maybe the Frost quote hadn’t willed total social devastation; maybe today she wouldn’t huddle alone at the edge of a table while she scarfed down her quasi-hot lunch.
Any forthcoming invitation died on Sylvia’s tongue. She flicked Alice a smile and a wave, effectively casting her back into the unfriendly sea of SVHS.
After the final bell Alice navigated against the current toward room 209, where she dropped her bag next to the slim lined, pressboard and metal workstation at the back of the room. “Whoever said small town people are friendly, lied,” she declared. She slouched into a desk in the last row and angled the chair to face her mom. “I mean, yeah, they were real quick with the smiles when we visited last summer. They’re always kind to vacationers with ready bankcards. But dare to move in? Forget it. Trying to infiltrate one of their cliques requires a lifetime experience in clandestine ops. And even those guys would probably fail.”
Mrs. Taft glanced up from her laptop. A tired smile played around her lips; one that conveyed sympathy clinging to the edge of a frayed cord. “Ali, these kids have probably been together since preschool. It’s going to take time to gain their trust.”
“The other teachers any better?”
A shrug. A final,forced push of that frayed cord smile. “It takes time.”
“I guess.” Alice mirrored her mom’s shrug. The unconscious motion was just one of many ways she reflected her mother. Visually they seemed to be the same person separated by twenty years; June Taft saw her teenage self every morning hovering over a bowl of Cheerios, inevitably with milk dribbling down her chin; Alice felt no mystery in the aging process, only needing to flip through her mom’s old photos to track own future. In personality they were kindred to a point, but the veering off of personal preferences could be attributed to that two- decade gap. In all that mattered they were of one heart, and each heart beat for the other as they wondered at finding themselves so far outside their familiar element.
“At least it’s Friday,” Mrs. Taft said, turning back to her papers. “Mom. It’s Thursday.”
“Oh. True. It feels like Friday, though, doesn’t it?”
Alice sighed. The town of Saw-Whet Valley was so remotely wedged within the mountains of the western Colorado slope that the schools ran on a four-day school week, turning Fridays over to doctor’s appointments and shopping trips; things that required an hour’s drive at the very least. Things that, back home in their Denver suburb, could easily be slipped in on a Tuesday afternoon between school and dance. She felt the remoteness of Saw- Whet Valley like a vise around her soul. The four-day week was another reminder of how far they’d moved.
The next morning Alice’s mom drove to the school alone, eager to work on lesson plans in the quiet of an empty school building. Her father was already in the barn, or wandering the field, or doing whatever he woke before dawn to do each morning. Alice hadn’t bothered to learn his routine. Cow care and husbandry fit nowhere in her long skein of interests.
She wiped her chin clean and rinsed her bowl, pushing back ruffled curtains above the sink as she did so. The world beyond the kitchen window was cloaked in a gray veil. She’d read once that fog was a cloud kissing the earth, and that certainly seemed an appropriate description this morning. She’d never seen fog that settled so thickly; an old doghouse, which she knew to be only twelve paces from the back of the house, was lost in the low congregating clouds.
She felt awe, but no surprise. The phenomenon seemed a natural result of their elevation. After all, Saw-Whet had the courtesy of meeting the clouds halfway; the Valley was only a valley in comparison to the peaks that surrounded it.
In the mud room she found a rumpled sweatshirt next to the shoe rack, exactly where she’d dropped it two days earlier. She pulled it on and slipped into her favorite boots, pushing the edges of her flannel pajama bottoms down into its soft leather. With her hand on the knob she paused, considering. A flashlight hung from one of the coat hooks. She didn’t think it would be much help in such a cloak of fog, but taking it felt like the smart thing.
Alice was big on doing the smart thing.
The small hand on the clock tapped toward seven when she stepped outside, but the sun seemed reluctant to rise. An oppressive gray pushed down on the fog from above. Nearer the ground the atmosphere was the color of dirty cotton. It chilled her skin and felt damp and thick in her lungs.
“I wouldn’t call it pea soup, but I’ll be lost in ten steps for sure,” she said out loud. It was an impromptu experiment in how the fog handled sound. She was a little disappointed with the results. “Nothing,” she reported. “No echo. No dissipation. Oh, well. Let’s see what you do with light.”
She turned on the flashlight, aiming it first at her feet then bringing it up slowly until it illumined the small swatch of world straight ahead. While the fog ignored sound it toyed with light, scattering its particles, reflecting them back, transforming the air into a glistening haze. Then, less than twelve feet ahead, the dense fog wall swallowed the light entirely. She turned in place, scanning the flashlight up and down, marveling at the effect.
Until she realized that she was surrounded by nothing but fog and mist and the dissipation and absorption of light; she could no longer see her home.
She’d been walking in small steps during her experiments, but she had no idea how far she’d gone, or even the direction she was traveling. She knew that when she left the porch she’d started walking right, which meant that, looking back on the house, she should be nearest
the left corner. She shone the light around again, squinting through the haze, trying to pick out a hint of beams, a shimmer of glass, the wild blackberry bush that grew against the left side.
“I should probably turn the light off,” she whispered. “That would be the smart thing to do. The light makes it harder to see.” Though this logic rang true, and though Alice Taft was a logic fanatic, her thumb refused to move toward the off button. Instead she shifted the play of the beam toward the ground and chose a direction. “Twelve steps,” she instructed herself. “If there’s nothing in twelve steps, I’ll turn slight right and take another twelve.”
This is what she did. Twelve steps, nothing, turn, twelve steps more. Six times she followed this pattern. Midway through the seventh she realized she was going in a circle. She tapped the barrel of the light against her thigh and tried to reason though a new solution. “I should stand still,” she told herself. “The sun will burn off the fog soon enough.”
She backpedaled after a pause, not liking the idea of simply squatting on her haunches and waiting for the slow fingers of morning to peel back the veil. “I could pick a direction and stick with it. The entire property is fenced, so it’s not like I can wander into the wilderness. If I don’t find the house, maybe I’ll find the front gate, or the barn, or some other marker that’ll set me right.”
She nodded, agreeing with her own logic. “Pick a path and follow through to the end.” Her heart tripped over the last word, and though her feet were rooted she felt her body trip with it. “Destination,” she corrected. “Follow through to the destination.”
She scanned the light over the ground, hoping one last time to find a familiar rut or a stray plank of wood that would set her course. Nothing jumped out. In truth, she didn’t expect anything to. They’d lived on the ranch for only two weeks, so to Alice the ground was foreign even in the full light of day.
The old Caldwell ranch was a hundred and twenty-acre mix of field, gorge, lake, and mountain knees, with the front ten marked off for the homestead and the back one-ten for free-ranging cattle. When not in school, Alice had been too busy unpacking her room to explore this new world. Before this she’d known nothing but neighborhood living, and ten acres seemed a vast and foreboding expanse that required a bold spirit of adventure. A spirit she couldn’t conjure on a whim. Now, twenty paces into her straight-line course, she was officially farther into the property than she’d ever gone, and she hoped that her adventurous side would show itself.
Forty paces in she had to acknowledge that in all probability Alice Taft didn’t have an adventurous side, and an unguided walk through this fog was the most foolish thing she’d ever done.
Fifty-two paces in, she heard the first scuttle of footsteps behind her.
She whirled, flashing the light as far as it would go but catching nothing. “Scat!” she yelled. She stomped her feet as she turned. Then, coming full circle, she quieted herself and listened.
In the distance she heard the soft lowing of a cow. Beyond that, nothing.
“Just a raccoon,” she assured herself. “Or something else small and harmless.”
She reset her direction by turning her back to the lowing and then continued the count. Sixty-six paces in, she heard a giggle.
“Hello?” she called.
Her first thought was of neighborhood children, but she was quick to remember that there was no neighborhood. There wasn’t even a neighbor, not as far as the eye could see.
Another trill of giggles, this time to her left. At the same time small feet scuffed the ground ahead of her.
“Hello?” she asked again, fear forming sharp edges along the short word.
A shadow pushed against the fog. A lump of a thing. Too tall for a raccoon. Too small for a child.
Alice screamed.
She lifted her feet into a run. The ground seemed to reach up and pluck at her toes, forcing her to stumble. Wanting her to fall. Whispering the knowledge that once it had her, it wouldn’t let go. But she refused it; she caught herself again, and again, and again, until she finally found the momentum to break free.
Her feet pounded the earth. Her counting had shattered behind her, and she quickly lost track of how far she’d gone. It seemed a full half hour had passed since she’d stepped through her front door, yet the fog persisted in throwing up its damp wall. She breathed it in, thick and odorless. Swallowed it down in icy gulps. Swung her fist to beat it back, only to find it always out of reach.
Grass gave way to sand. Then sand gave way to water.
Alice stopped abruptly at the water’s edge. The toes of her boots pressed into soft, black mud. Water lapped silently, edging forward with the force of invisible waves, greedy to wet the soft brown leather and seep through the stitching around the soles. She pulled back. The mud tightened its grip, then released with a wet sigh.
A giggle rippled over the water, and this time she heard words, unrecognizable, undeniable, caught in the fall and rise of sound. Calling. Chiding. Daring.
Feet shuffled behind her. Softer than before, as if the tipping of the smallest toes across sand. Gooseflesh pricked the hairs of her neck. Alice didn’t dare turn. She saw in her thoughts that lump of a shadow pressing ever closer. A scream clawed at her throat, wiry and furious, but it found no breath for escape.
A dog barked. Once. Close.
The water pulled back. With a hiss so did the shadow, though she couldn’t bring herself to watch its retreat.
“Who’s there?” A voice asked. A male voice. Young. Cautious.
Alice opened her mouth to answer. Still, the breath required didn’t come.
Ahead of her the fog seemed to condense and darken. Then the darkness pulled together, solidifying into a broad, uneven shadow that, after a moment more, broke apart and solidified again.
“Who’s there?” the voice asked again.
This time Alice could assign a human shape to the voice. Then the shadow became a boy and she could assign a face. Her breath flooded back through her chest with a gasp of relief.
“So?” he asked. At his hip, a dog growled. It was a nightmarish beast, as black as the shadow it had emerged from. Its wide back was level with the boy’s waist.
When Alice found her voice it came out hesitant and small. “Is he… safe?”
The boy pressed his hand to the top of the dog’s square head. “Shana here’s a she.”
“Oh. Sorry. She?”
“She’s safe enough. As long as you’re not trespassing. And she keeps them away.” He nodded toward the lake as he stressed the word them.
“Keeps who away?”
“Not who,” he corrected. “What?”
“Exactly.”
Alice realized that he was studying her. Not in the ostentatious way Sylvia had inspected her the day before. It was furtive, his eyes flicking in an erratic pattern as if unsure where to land. When they did settle it was on her pajama pants. A soft smile mashed across his lips.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ll walk you home.”
Alice resented that smile. It seemed too much like the result of a joke that was on her, and she didn’t find any bit of this experience funny. “I can find my own way,” she argued, bending to stuff the bottom hem of her pants back into her boots.
“Yeah? Which way is your house from here?”
Of course she didn’t know. By process of elimination she assumed it wasn’t in the direction he’d come. With slow reluctance she turned her back on the lake and squinted into the fog. Then she lifted her left arm and pointed with a shaky finger.
He shook his head. “Not even close.”
“Oh, really,” she breathed. “How do you know?”
“You head in that direction, you’ll just skirt the edge of the field and find yourself at the north edge of your property about… thirty minutes later?”
With a sigh Alice motioned for him to lead on.
“I’m Kellen, by the way,” he said. He snapped his fingers twice as he began to walk, encouraging Shana away from the lake’s edge. “We’re neighbors. In case you were wondering.”
“Kellen Slade?” She felt her step falter as she recalled Sylvia’s words; it was that same feeling of being taken aback. She accidentally leaned into Shana as she sought to right herself. The mastiff leaned back, its muscular shoulder pressing into Alice’s hip.
“That’s the whole of it. Our ranch is about,” he pointed a thumb past his right shoulder, “a quarter of a mile that way.”
“What do you raise?”
“Pigs, mostly.”
Alice faltered again. She bit her lip to force her mouth from gaping.
“I think I’ve heard your name passed around school this week,” he continued, “but maybe you can remind me. In case I’ve heard wrong.”
“Oh. It’s Alice.”
“Like Alice Kyteler, the Irish witch.
“The witch?” Another faltering step. She started to think she would never find her footing around this boy. She’d only tripped over her own feet before around William Ollan, a filtered vision of green-eyed perfection. Kellen was a construction of long lines and sharp angles, his dark hair shaved down to stubble. Nothing like William. But there was something about him that set her off kilter.
“Most people mention Alice in Wonderland,” she finally said.
One shoulder rose and fell in an easy shrug. “I suppose that would’ve been more fitting, considering your tendency to fall down rabbit holes.”
“I – I don’t fall down rabbit holes.”
“What were you doing out here, then? Didn’t your mom ever tell you not to go out in the fog?”
“No. Why should she?”
He gave her a tight-mouthed stare, his eyes insisting that the answer was apparent; that, really, there was no point in asking the question.
“Well, what about you?” she asked. “You were obviously out.”
“With Shana. Like I said, she keeps them away. Then we heard you scream, so we ran over. I mean, we don’t need another neighbor dredged from the llyn.”
“Another? What do you mean?”
Kellen rolled his lips over his teeth, fighting the urge to elaborate. The ghost of an unpleasant memory settled over his dark eyes.
Shana let out a keening whine and pushed her body against his. In turn he leaned his hand into the thick solidity of her neck. “Well,” he said. He blinked rapidly and shaded his eyes from a sudden burst of sunlight. “Here we are.”
Alice also shaded her eyes. The fog had burned away with a breath-stealing suddenness and the old, whitewashed home lay no more than twenty yards ahead. Behind them the fog rolled back. Back, Alice imagined, toward the lake; toward the llyn, as Kellen had called it. Water rejoining water.
“If I never see fog again,” she whispered.
“You will,” Kellen said. “Just know to stay inside next time, Alice sans Wonderland. There’s no white rabbit on the other side of that abyss.”
She rubbed her face, hard, and pulled her hands through her loose hair. “Enough with the Wonderland references, okay?”
“Done,” he agreed. “I need to head back, anyway.”
“Already?” she asked. Something visceral inside of her wasn’t ready for him to leave. The idea of being alone felt hollow. Frightening.
She’d felt like this since moving to the valley. Hollow and afraid. Those feelings had taken brief flight during their walk from the lake but now they returned, threatening reinforcements.
“I mean,” she continued, “you don’t have to run off. I’m not all that horrible. I promise.” “Didn’t think you were,” he assured her. “But, I clean out the pens on Fridays, and it’s kind of an all day job.”
“Pens?”
“Yeah. Pig pens.”
“Was that really where you were born?” She blurted. Two seconds too late she slapped her palm to her mouth.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she moaned. “I really am that horrible.”
A smile mashed across his lips; the same smile that had pressed his face when he’d noticed her pajama pants. This time she recognized it for what it was: an easy humor with an absolute lack of condescension. It was a smile that refreshed her soul.
He rubbed a hand over his stubble of hair, allowing the smile to fall into something crooked but equally real. “Welcome to Saw-Whet Valley, Alice. If you can survive the gossip, and the wildlife, you may find it a nice place to live.”
“I – yeah,” she sighed.
With a soft tilt of his head he turned. The sight of his back pushed an urgent gasp into her throat.
“Wait!”
He stopped. Turned around. His smile tilted in the opposite direction and his lips parted slightly, ready to form a forthcoming response.
“I – I guess I’ll see you Monday? At school.”
“It’s not a holiday, so I don’t see there’s much of a choice.” And still that smile, lopsided but expansive in his narrow face.
“Right. Well. Maybe…” Again she faltered, though this time in words instead of steps. She curled her fingers into the opposite palm, rubbing away the last bit of chill left by the fog.
“Maybe,” he finished, “you can join me for lunch. If you’re not completely sold on sitting alone.”
“Oh!” She laughed softly, and in that warm exhale of breath she felt the last bit of cold exit her body. In its place something that resembled contentment blossomed, rich and full. “That sounds… tolerable.” She tried on Kellen’s relaxed, lopsided smile, finding it an easy fit.
He started to turn away again. Paused. Regarded her with a long, appraising lift of his brow. “The Celts believed that pigs were sacred, you know,” he said. “To be born in a pig sty was a foretelling of greatness.”
Alice laughed. “Yeah? Didn’t they also believe in dragons and fairies?”
“Don’t you?” he asked over his shoulder. His gaze drifted in the direction of the lake as he walked away.
Alice’s gaze followed his. Though she couldn’t see the lake from the house, she could see a lingering remnant of fog fighting against the rising sun. Water returning to water.
What else had returned?
The chill returned to her fingers with a biting fierceness. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her sweater, clinging desperately to her
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With ‘The Big Life,’ Millennial Women Get a New Guide
Across from her sat Alessandra Biaggi, 30, the former deputy national operations director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, who wants to run for office eventually. “The wait-your-turn thing resonates with me so much, especially with politics, because that’s what I’m getting from people,” Ms. Biaggi said.
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Sarah LaFleur, 33, the founder and chief executive of MM.LaFleur, a clothing brand, said: “I grew up in Japan, and I thought I wanted to be in politics, too. But it just wasn’t a thing you heard often.”
“That’s exactly the problem,” Ms. Biaggi responded. “Little girls should grow up and be like, ‘I want to be a nurse, a doctor, a politician.’ It should be normal. We need women at the table.”
She added that she wants to open the door to more women joining politics but struggles with the tension between being herself and what she imagines people think she should be.
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“It’s amazing all these stale ideas that get stuck in your head,” Ms. Shoket said.
Earlier that day, at NeueHouse, a co-working space in Manhattan, she had reflected on her own evolution. “When I left Seventeen, I felt very strongly that I had something to say for the generation that grew up with me into the next stage of their life,” said Ms. Shoket, 44, who had been at CosmoGirl for eight years before joining Seventeen in 2007.
“We had had all these deep emotional conversations about how you navigate the terrain of adolescence,” she said. “Why did that stop when you turned 20?”
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“The Big Life” is a guide for women in their 20s and 30s who are hungry for a job they love, a supportive network of friends, respect from their bosses and partners who want all those things for them as badly as they do.
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A book had long been on the table, and Ms. Shoket decided it was time to write it. But before she did, she wanted to brush up on the topics that matter to women in their 20s and 30s. So about a year ago, she decided to host a dinner with a few of them.
“It went for hours and hours,” she said. “We talked about relationships, about pressure, about equality. We talked about where their ambitions come from and what they hear from their parents.”
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She decided to have more dinners. Eventually, she formalized the questions that kept coming up into a list that covers work idols (“Who is your icon of where you’d like to be in five years?”), generational differences (“How do you think differently about work than your parents did?”), imagined deadlines (“What do you feel you must accomplish by the time you’re 30? And what will happen if you don’t?”) and more.
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In the first few pages of her book, Ms. Shoket encourages readers to host their own get-togethers. “It shouldn’t just be the six or eight women I can fit around my dining room table who could benefit from talking about this,” she said. “This should be a conversation that’s happening at dining room tables, propped up on pillows on floors, on little fold-up tables sitting in front of the TV, everywhere.”
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With its community-building component and its message of fighting for the success-happiness-support triad, “The Big Life” may inevitably inspire comparisons to Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book, “Lean In.”
“I think that ‘Lean In’ and Sheryl Sandberg did a phenomenal job of starting a conversation about women and ambition at exactly the right moment,” Ms. Shoket said. “But I felt when I read it that it really didn’t connect with millennial women.”
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In the chapter on finding a “Big Love,” Ms. Shoket, who is married and has two children, writes: “Having a child is serious business, but there is no reason you should be worrying about nannies and school pickup schedules at this stage of young Big Life.” The most practical parts of the book are tips on getting the first job, mastering the interview and dressing for success.
When it comes to dating, she advises young women to approach relationships the way they do their careers: with patience for the process and with no expectation of settling.
Ms. Shoket assumes her readers want a new world order — one in which they are unafraid to jump from job to job, from one opportunity to the next. “They want to move up and around, move fast, cover a lot of ground,” she said.
She says she still struggles with the question of how to be taken seriously as a woman in industries dominated by men (something Ms. Sandberg reckoned with in “Lean In” that remains just as relevant for the younger generation).
For Ms. Shoket, millennials are not only the focus of her book, but also the group that will spur the changes Ms. Sandberg advocates — but not in the ways Ms. Sandberg may have predicted.
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“This generation of women is like: ‘What do you mean lean in? You lean into me,” Ms. Shoket said.
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NEIBA Considers Funding Author Tours
Booksellers from the Cape and Islands region of Massachusetts sparked a lively conversation at a March 24 gathering of the New England Independent Booksellers Association (NEIBA), asking the organization to consider “pooling funds” to support larger regional tours for authors who otherwise only read in major cities.
The idea, which came from Jeff Peters of East End Books Ptown in Provincetown, Mass., was one of the many discussed at NEIBA’s “All About the Books” education program in Harvard Square. Peters said that publishers, when it comes to author tours, often overlook more sparsely populated areas. Fellow attendees shared past and current examples of ways that booksellers have tried to address the issue.
NEIBA executive director Steve Fischer suggested that Peters and fellow Cape booksellers draft a regional tour proposal for Patrick Dacey’s forthcoming novel The Outer Cape. The story follows the return of two sons to their childhood home, a village on Cape Cod. Fischer said the book is a natural fit for booksellers and readers in the area. Once drafted, the booksellers' proposal will then be shared with Dacey's publisher, Henry Holt & Co.
“I intend to pursue it," Peters said. "This would be something that I think would help booksellers and authors."
Dacey appeared at a morning program that gave 10 veteran and first-time authors a few minutes to present their upcoming releases to over 100 booksellers. Authors included Estep Nagy, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, and Susan Tan.
The session closed with a rousing ovation for Dartmouth historian and president emeritus James Wright, whose Enduring Vietnam (St. Martin's/Dunne, April) draws on 160 interviews to tell the story of Vietnam War combat veterans and their families.
During the afternoon open forum, American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher was upbeat on advocacy issues, noting Amazon’s decision last week to pay sales tax in all states. He urged members to step up their opposition to Amazon's use of tax credits.
Attendees also participated in a conversation on ways to make bookstores “an inclusive place for dialogue and discovery.” The ABA is conducting the sessions with its regional associations nationwide, and will present its findings later this year.
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May/Thriller Short Story: “Chasing Hair of Gold” by Ashley Earley
“Chasing Hair of Gold” by Ashley Earley is the First Place-winning story in the thriller category of the 12th Annual Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards. For complete coverage of this year’s awards, including an exclusive interview with the Grand Prize winner and a complete list of winners, check out the May/June 2017 issue of Writer’s Digest. And click here for more information about entering the 13th Annual Popular Fiction Awards.
In this bonus online exclusive, you can read Earley’s winning entry.
Chasing Hair of Gold by Ashley Earley
Her hair looked as if it was made of gold. I liked watching it whirl behind her as she walked in the winter wind. It flowed out from under her hat and danced around the nap of her neck as she walked along the curb. I wished she was alone, but she had a friend beside her, who I considered not to be particularly as interesting. Her friend must have said something at that moment because the girl with the gold hair smiled at her friend. It lit up her face, brightening it and causing her to look more radiant.
The girls wore backpacks slung over their shoulders, indicating that they were walking home from school. I had not realized the time. I just knew when to come outside to see her. I got this feeling around the same time nearly everyday—this feeling lets me know when she was about to walk by my house on her way home from school. It was like I could sense that she was close by. She walked with a friend who happened to live two houses down from me. So, everyday for the last few weeks, I’ve been watching her.
At first, it just started out as a coincidence. I would happen to be passing by a window just as she was walking by, or I was out at the end of my driveway getting the mail. But then, as I began to notice her more, it turned into an everyday affair. I waited to see her. My eyes would glance at the clock as the hour drew near. After a while, watching her from my living room or dining room window wasn’t good enough. I wanted a clear view. So then, I started walking to my mailbox at the same time every day and started working on my truck more— though it was perfectly fine.
I used every excuse I could think of to see her.
I anticipated when she would pass by. Sometimes she was a few minutes late; sometimes a few minutes early. I preferred it when she was early. I preferred it when she and her friend walked slower so I could stare at the girl with the gold hair longer. I preferred it when she wore her hair down so I could watch it flow out behind her. I preferred her over her friend and wished she would walk home alone—just once.
I was “fixing” my truck again today with my garage door open, so I could watch her walk by. Not finished with their conversation, I noticed that they slowed their walk just as they were passing by my house. They were getting closer to the not-particularly-interesting friend’s house and were trying to prolong their inevitable separation. It was only Thursday; they would see each other again tomorrow morning.
They were walking on the opposite side of the street. The girl with the gold hair was walking alongside the curb while her friend walked on the sidewalk. I wanted her closer. I wished she was closer so I could see her more clearly. I wondered why she was walking beside the curb, basically in the road rather than on the sidewalk.
She did this almost every day, and I wondered why everyday. Was there a point to it? Did she have a reason?
I stepped away from my truck when they walked out of sight, wiping my greasy hands on the white rag that I had draped across the side mirror as I went to exit the garage. I wasn’t done looking at her. I paused at the edge of the garage, looking for her. I had a bush just outside the garage on the right corner, giving me the perfect cover. Even if they looked back, it was unlikely that they would catch me staring after them.
I watched as the not-particularly-interesting friend left, telling Her goodbye before running up her lawn to the front door. The girl was alone, yards away from me. I wished I could touch her golden hair. I wished she wasn’t so far away. I wished she and I were somewhere not so public. I wished I could get her completely alone so I could touch the hair that I was becoming obsessed with.
I watched her walk alongside the curb until she became really small, and I could no longer tell that her hair was gold.
#
She was walking home from school again. And today was different. She was alone. She was walking home alone for the first time since I noticed her all those weeks ago. I stood by the mailbox, attempting to look nonchalant as I mindlessly flipped through my mail.
The way she moved almost seemed fluent. Each step she took was so relaxed. I wondered if she thought about where she was going—about every step she took—or if she just moved gradually like it was natural. It was as if she moved with the breeze—as if it carried her forward and made her graceful. My eyes moved up her body as she walked by my house, taking in every movement she made, drinking her in. The way she moved made me feel a strange hunger that I didn’t quite understand.
My eyes cease their travel when I come to her hair. I drank every part of her and liked it, but I loved her hair. Her golden hair was something straight out of a storybook. She had the hair of a princess or a goddess. It was amazingly beautiful. Every time I laid eyes on her gold locks, I felt the strange desire to run my hands through it; to grip it; to smell it; to cut it and keep it for myself.
It was a peculiar thing to think about, but I couldn’t help myself. I just loved it so. I wanted it for myself.
She was alone. I could have her hair if I really wanted it. Now was the time. Right now. This very moment. I could act now. Snatch her away from the street and drag her inside my home before anyone noticed. People rarely looked out their windows, right? I lifted my eyes from the envelope in my hand to scan the driveways behind the girl. There was a red BMW in the driveway of 1478, but all the others were empty. What were the chances that they would look out their window and see me dragging a teenage girl into my house?
She was getting closer now, and my heart started to beat faster when I thought about how we would be mere feet away in just a few moments. I put the envelope in my hand under the stack of mail and proceeded to pick at the magazine that was now on top to act like I was taking interest in it, rather than her hair and the way she moved.
She noticed my staring and gave me an awkward smile with a nod of the head to say hello. Taken aback, my heart leaped in my chest. I smiled back, and immediately wished I hadn’t. I did not want to alarm her. I did not want her to know that I was watching her because then she would avoid me. I didn’t want that. I wanted her close.
I offered an awkward wave before turning on my heel and walking back up to the house, still pretending to look through my mail as I went. All the while, I was sneaking glances back over my shoulder with the hope of not getting caught, and with the hope that I could catch one last glance at her before she was out of sight.
Her smile and nod had caught me off guard, but I would not allow her to slip through my fingers again. Who knew when I would get another chance to have her alone. I would not let another opportunity like this go. I would not make the same mistake twice. Next time I saw her alone, I would make her and her golden hair mine.
#
It was Saturday. I wouldn’t see Her and her gold hair again until Monday afternoon. I had a whole forty-eight hours to fill up. On the days that I didn’t see her, the time dragged by slowly. I tried not to look at the clock because it did me no good. She wouldn’t pass by my house today. Despite knowing that I wouldn’t see her today, I still glanced out the window every time I passed one.
I had missed my chance. If I had acted on my urge, she would be with me now. Instead, I was walking through the house alone, giving myself meaningless tasks to fill up the time. I desperately wanted to fill the time and silence. I felt like I was inching toward something that I could not turn back from, though what, I did not know. I felt like my time was being wasted away. I could almost feel myself unhinging. My patience was thinning. As well was my tolerance of being in my own home.
Deciding that I could not remain cooped up any longer, I grabbed my coat from the rack beside the door and snatched up my keys before walking out my front door. My truck was parked in the driveway rather than in the garage today. Since I knew I would not need to quickly slip outside to give my truck a “tune up” before She arrived, I decided that there was no incentive for me to park in the garage. After getting behind the wheel, I pulled my phone out with the intention of finding my grocery list. Sad as it was, it was the only thing I could think of to pass the time outside the confining walls of my house.
I drove in silence; not in the mood to crank up the radio. I didn’t necessarily want time alone with my thoughts—it was just that I couldn’t stand to listen to rubbish right now. I end up deciding to roll down my window to let my arm hang outside. The night air felt good despite the chill that crept up my jacket sleeve. My face and neck were exposed to the chill, but I didn’t mind since I was only a few moments away from pulling into the store’s parking lot.
The list of things I needed was short. Toothpaste, tomatoes, and cucumbers, as well as frozen pizza. An odd collection of requirements that would surely get me a strange look from the cashier at the checkout counter. As I roamed through each section in the store, my eyes wandered to the few people that were shopping. It was rather late to be shopping for groceries, as it was nine o’clock, but I was doing the same thing, so I found it best not to judge why they were here. Though, the more I walked around, I started to realize something… I saw Her face everywhere. Everyone I looked at resembled her. The only thing that distinguished that they weren’t her was that they did not have her golden hair.
My heart rate quickens every time I think I see her, but then my heart sinks every time I realize it isn’t her. I should have acted. I should have stolen her for myself when I had the chance! How could I have given up such an opportunity? I should not have allowed her to slip through my fingers—given her up.
My anger boils, banishing the chill that I had felt after walking past the freezer section. I want her here. With me. I want her hair in my hands. I shouldn’t have let this happen. I shouldn’t have let her walk by me without taking action. I felt like I was letting her slip away now, as I walked past all the people that suddenly wore her face. I considered reaching out and grabbing the woman that stands in front of the dairy section, oblivious to my thoughts.
She wears Her face. I wonder if she smells like her. The only thing that causes me to keep my distance is the woman’s auburn hair. It wasn’t Her hair; therefore, it wasn’t really her. This was the only way that I could differentiate who the real Her was.
I wish I knew her name, I suddenly think as I rushed past the woman, without grabbing her as I fantasized. The girl with the golden hair—I didn’t know her name, though I wish I did. I only knew her, as well, Her and as the girl with the golden hair. I’ve been waiting for the friend that she walks home with to say her name, but she never has, or she never said it loud enough for me to hear. I get in line to checkout, my thoughts still on the possibilities of the girl’s name. Hannah, Sarah, Clare—none of them sounded right. None of them fit her.
After going through checkout—and getting the predicted odd look from the old guy behind the counter—I take my bags and head for my truck. I roll all of my windows down to feel the cool air as I drive back home. Now it is nearly ten o’clock, and there is almost no one on the road, giving my eyes the freedom to wander. Once I’m away from the streets and the lights are far behind me, a corn crop pops up on the left side of the road with an empty field on the right. Roads like this would seem lonely to most people. But, to me, it looked like a place where dark things happened. Terrible things were done in the dark when no one wanted to be caught.
As I got closer to the end of the crops, I began to hear booming music. I slowed down, searching for the source of the sound. I started to see cars lined up in front of the cornfield, followed by lights, and then, a few moments later, I hear laughter and the hum of conversation. I decelerated further, my truck crawling along at 25 miles-per-hour when I spot a few figures dance and move about the cars that are lined up in front of the crops. High school kids were always having parties in the oddest places in this town. When their party was broken up at one destination, they moved to another ludicrous location the very next weekend.
I shook my head as I watched the figures disappear back into the corn. Eventually, as I drove further past the corn, there weren’t any more cars. But then, at the very edge of the cornfield, I saw another figure stumble out from the stocks. No one else was anywhere near the figure, and the figure was far from the cars. I flicked on my bright lights to get a clearer look at the figure.
And I’m amazed to see that the figure was the very person that I hadn’t been able to shake from my mind the entire day.
I nearly slammed on the brakes. Having no plan, I quickly turned into the field. I parked a little ways from the edge of the cornfield. My eyes were on Her the whole time. I watched her from my car, unsure of how I should go about this. I couldn’t leave. I would regret it as I did last time.
Without allowing myself to think about my actions any further, I unbuckled and got out of the car to make my way to her. My steps were quick, my mind was running wild with possibilities, my blood was soaring with excitement, and my eyes remained locked on her. She took a long gulp from the plastic cup in her hands, making herself even more vulnerable to me. She hadn’t seen me yet, and she seemed to be too intoxicated to fight back.
I had so many things I wanted to say when I reached her, but I fought every word back and did what my instincts were practically screaming at me to do. She didn’t see me until I was practically standing right next to her, and at that point, it was too late. I was already reaching around her to cover her mouth with my hand. She sucked in a breath to scream just before my palm firmly covered her lips. Her voice was muffled against my hand, her screams not nearly loud enough to alert anyone from the party. I wasn’t going to let her slip through my fingers this time.
“Hey, Amy! Where’d you go?” a voice from the corn called over the music. I tensed with the realization of how close the voice was.
Amy? Could the name of the girl in my arms possibly be Amy? I didn’t have the time to confirm with the wide-eyed, golden hair beauty that I was about to take away. She began to furiously struggle against me, clawing at my arms while attempting to scream around my hand. I tightened my arms around her before dragging her away.
#
She had bitten my hand, forcing me to release her from my gripping hold. She was now free inside my house, but all the doors and windows were shut and locked. There was no way she would get past me to make it outside. I was doing circles on the first floor, listening for footsteps as I checked under tables and behind curtains and doors. She would not get away from me. Not now. Not when I finally had her.
“Amy?” I called, trying her name on my tongue for the first time. Her name was said as a question because I was not sure if it was her actual name and because I was hoping that she would respond to give hint to where she was. I was met with nothing but silence, leaving me tempted to call out to her as my girl with the golden hair. She was mine now. I had her, and I wouldn’t let her leave me. Ever.
I heard a faint sniffle and followed the sound to a closet. I yanked it open to reveal the tear stained, red-faced beauty that I had been watching all these weeks. Except, she didn’t look as beautiful as she normally did. Her gold hair was matted, and crazy rather than perfect and flowy; her eyes glazed and red with tears rather than smooth and bright, and her lips were wet with fallen tears. Her lips were also parted with sobs that she was trying to quiet with her shaky hands.
As I stood over her shaking form that was curled into the very back of the closet, I couldn’t help but ask, “Is your name Amy?”
“Pl—please, no,” was all she said in response, her sobs causing her voice to tremble with the same fierceness as the rest of her body.
Her lack of screaming disappointed me slightly. I wanted to hear her panic in screams; instead, she was sobbing in denial. I reached out to her, my hands itching to touch her gold strands. However, I hesitated when she winced away from my hand. I want to see her hair in the light, I abruptly decided. I reached for her arms instead and snatched her up out of the coat closet. She immediately began to struggle against me, clawing at me and attempting to bite me once again. But I wasn’t going to let her get away with that a second time and kept her a good distance away as I dragged her into the next room—the bathroom. I had a pair of handcuffs waiting on the counter, where I had set them down in between dragging her into my house and searching for her after she had gotten away.
She began to scream between her sobs as I struggled to hold her back from the door while trying to get ahold of one of her hands. Between my attempts, she managed to thrust her hand behind her to slap me. Furious, I pushed her, nearly knocking her straight into the tub. She fell in the spot between the toilet and the tub, clutching her head after it hit the side of the tub. She looked up at me with fear and curled into herself as I stepped closer. I snatched up her hand, and as I bound her to the sink, I found myself wondering what she could be thinking right now.
Now having her attached to the sink, unable to run or resist me, I crouched before her. She cringed back as far as she could, choking on her sobs again. She must have realized that screaming won’t do her any good. I reached for her hair again. All the anticipation that had been building over the last several weeks had been leading to this moment. I had her now.
She couldn’t get away. She wasn’t going anywhere. She wasn’t going to slip through my fingers—only her hair would slip through my fingers.
I finally touched her hair, burying my hands in the gold locks that I had been obsessing over—dreaming about both night and day. I brought the gold strands to my lips, kissing them, smelling them, marveling over them. It was everything that I had envisioned.
#
Her hair looked as if it was made of gold. I drank in every part of her, my eyes starting at the top of her head before descending to the ends of the beautifully vibrant strands. She was perfect. Her golden hair was something straight out of a storybook. She had the hair of a princess or a goddess. Every time I laid eyes on her gold locks, I felt the strange desire to run my hands through it; to grip it; to smell it; to cut it and keep it for myself. Instead, I marveled over it as I gently dragged the brush through her wildly tangled hair. It was amazingly beautiful, and it was just as soft as I had imagined.
Tears and sweat had caused her hair to stick to her cheeks. It was a tangled, sticky mess that I was hurrying to correct. I wanted to make her look like the princess I had been watching from my garage. I no longer had to watch her from afar. I would make her hair perfect again and be able to watch her from only a few feet away. I could be as close to her as I wanted now. I did not have to worry about her slipping through my fingers anymore. She would never leave me now.
I had her displayed in the chair in the corner of my study—where I knew I would see her everyday. I was still unsure if her name was actually Amy. She had not given me the pleasure of knowing for sure as I strangled her, even though I had asked her time and time again, so now, she would forever be known to me as the girl with the golden hair. And it was such as shame, considering how much time we would be spending together now that she was mine, forever.
Once I was done untangling her tousled hair, I selfishly took a fistful of her hair and brought it to my nose. I took in her scent—fear mixed with desperation and sweat and death. I let her hair slip through my fingers and stood, taking her in now that she was perfect again.
She would never leave me. I could stare at her golden hair for as long as I desired.
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An Unassuming Heroine Envies Her Harvard Classmates the Confidence of Their Convictions
Selin — the language-intoxicated, 6-foot-tall Russophile daughter of Turkish immigrants — arrives at Harvard in the mid-90s, almost appallingly innocent. In the year we spend with her, she flirts with one classmate, in her stilted fashion; smokes a few cigarettes; travels to Hungary to teach English; dances perplexedly at a club — “It went on and on, the dancing. I kept wondering why we had to do it, and for how much longer.” Mainly, she reads — but how she reads. Batuman is wonderful on the joy of glutting oneself on books. In “The Possessed” she describes devouring “Anna Karenina” sprawled on her grandmother’s “super-bourgeois rose-colored velvet sofa, consuming massive quantities of grapes” and tearing through Babel while baking an ill-fated Black Forest cake; her memories of the Red Cavalry sequence forever mingled with “the smell of rain and baking chocolate.” A dictionary is a fetish object in “The Idiot,” and Batuman conveys Selin’s all-night reading benders with druggy fervor. Her instincts are, in general, excellent — she is Selin, more or less — save the odd, unhappy decision to repurpose details, characters, conversations and even whole scenes from her previous book: judging a beauty contest of boys’ legs at a Hungarian summer camp, being given chase by a wild dog. Too often, the novel reads like a greatest-hits version of “The Possessed.”
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But the real pleasures of Selin’s company come from her differences from the author, not their commonalities. She’s not the type to fire off manifestoes on the sterility of M.F.A. fiction (not yet, at least); she scarcely knows what to think and envies her classmates the quantity and confidence of their convictions. “It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions,” she says of a friend. “Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened.” Selin is amazingly passive and almost seems miscast in her own life as protagonist. She’s a born Watson, a Boswell; her gift is not for the living, but the telling, for the shaping of a story. Inevitably, she gravitates to larger, louder personalities: worldly Svetlana and Ivan, a math scholar from Hungary — and the novel’s reluctant leading man.
Selin comes to believe she has two lives — one at school, the other in her cryptic email courtship of Ivan. The idea that our most important and exciting experiences occur in private, in secret, Batuman tells us, is from Chekhov, whose ghost presides benevolently over the book. Selin could be any number of his gentle, ineffectual intellectuals, whose very gentleness and ineffectuality make them so important, according to Nabokov. “In an age of ruddy Goliaths it is very useful to read about delicate Davids,” he remarked in one of his lectures at Cornell. “All this lovely weakness, all this Chekhovian dove-gray world is worth treasuring in the glare of those strong, self-sufficient worlds that are promised us by the worshipers of totalitarian states.”
But does Batuman judge Selin more harshly? The title, “The Idiot” — as with “The Possessed,” cribbed from Dostoyevsky — seems like an unfair indictment of gentle, hardworking Selin, but at its root, “idiot” is a benign word, even a strangely sweet one. It originally described someone who doesn’t serve in public life (from the Greek idios, pertaining to the self), someone who is a private individual, who belongs to herself. And so much of Selin’s heartache hinges on her efforts to bridge distances between her private and public selves, between her and other people, using the same tools we all reach for: language, travel, jokes. Sex belongs on this list, too, but Selin — and “The Idiot,” in fact — is curiously prim. I wondered about this; why this reticence about desire in a book about falling in love, and as a teenager at that? I wondered, too, why here, as in “The Possessed,” so many of the book’s more emotionally charged scenes happen offstage and are conveyed to us in summary, if at all. Batuman is an energetic and charming writer and, perhaps, there are wages to this kind of charm — namely in remembering to relinquish it when you need to, remembering to risk being messy, boring or obvious to get at those truths only fiction, she tells us, can access. But for all these moments of evasion, there is more oxygen, more life in this book, than in a shelf of its peers. And in the way of the best characters, Batuman’s creations are not bound by the book that created them. They seem released into the world. Long after I finished “The Idiot,” I looked at every lanky girl with her nose in a book on the subway and thought: Selin.
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March 26, 2017
Adventures in Comics and the Real World
America Chavez’s rise to prominence took some twists and turns. Joe Casey and Nick Dragotta created her in 2011, but she gained popularity as a supporting character later, in two series by two other creative teams (whose writers and artists are also men). With her solo title, the heroine and writer are now in sync. (Mr. Casey and Mr. Dragotta will be presenting an upstart version of their creation in All-America Comix, starring America Vasquez, being published by Image this year.)
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Last year, DC Comics introduced Kenan Kong, a Chinese teenager with the powers of the Man of Steel, in New Super-Man. The cover of Issue No. 1 is by Viktor Bogdanovic.
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DC Comics
A Latin experience is also at the heart of La Boriqueña, a Puerto Rican heroine created by Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez last year. As a young fan, Mr. Miranda-Rodriguez said that he did not find characters who looked like him, but he managed to forge connections with alien all-American heroes, billionaire orphans and warrior women. Now, as a father of two, he demands more. “When you grow up, not seeing yourself, it slowly eats away at you,” he said.
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Noble, the flagship character of a new superhero universe from Lion Forge, coming in May. He is shown here on the cover of Issue No. 1, drawn by Roger Robinson.Credit
Lion Forge Comics
In the world of independent comics, Love and Rockets, by the brothers Gilbert and Jaime (and sometimes Mario) Hernandez, has been one of the most consistent depictions of Latinos. Fantagraphics has published the series since 1982. “One of the conscious decisions was to have people of color because that’s what I knew growing up,” said Gilbert Hernandez, who is Mexican-American. He noted that the younger generation, which is always more progressive, has come to expect multicultural depictions.
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Extrano, a gay hero from DC Comics who originally appeared in 1988, was recently given a makeover that many fans have preferred over his initial more stereotypical portrayal. This panel was drawn by Fernando Blanco.Credit
DC Comics
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Having creators and characters be of similar backgrounds may also be an opportunity to right past wrongs. Gene Luen Yang, who is chronicling the exploits of Kenan Kong, a Chinese Man of Steel in New Super-Man, is bringing back a regrettable caricature from 1937. Chin Lung was a “yellow peril” villain who personified fears of the East. “DC used an image that dehumanized an entire group of people to sell comics,” Mr. Yang said in an email. The character would be difficult for most writers to tackle, but Mr. Yang has an edge. “Do I think that it’s easier for a Chinese-American writer to do something like this? Absolutely. It goes back to the homework question. Because I’m a Chinese-American, I got a head start on my homework because I lived it.”
A more welcome remake happened recently in the pages of Midnighter & Apollo, from DC Comics, written by Steve Orlando, who is bisexual. Mr. Orlando reintroduced Extrano, a suicidal H.I.V.-positive gay man named Gregorio, who debuted in 1988. Gregorio now shuns his Extrano persona and is more confident. “With a book like Midnighter & Apollo, which from cover to cover is a love letter to queer characters and our struggle to live, be visible and love, it felt right to return to one of the first and reintroduce Gregorio to a new generation,” Mr. Orlando said.
While having diversity among creators and characters is a step forward, more needs to be done, said Mr. Illidge, who also writes for Comic Book Resources (cbr.com), where he spotlights diversity in comics and popular entertainment. “The ultimate answer cannot be that people can only write characters that reflect their experience,” he said. “Part of the answer should be that companies that publish books that contain a significant number of characters of color should have a significant number of writers of color in their talent pool.” Ultimately, “the more diverse voices you have in the room, the greater the worldview you’ll get in your fiction.”
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Angela Carter: From the Magic Toyshop to the Bloody Chamber
Carter’s unconventional background — she described her family as hailing from “the bastard side of Old Father Thames” — surely also played a role in her marginalization. Born in 1940, she spent the war years at her grandmother’s home in Yorkshire and grew up in working-class South London. Her father, a night editor at the Press Assocation, kept odd hours, and her only sibling was a brother 11 years her senior, which left her alone with Olive, her perversely demanding mother, for long stretches of time. Gordon calls Olive’s attitude toward Angela “neurotic,” but “abusive” might be a better description. She coddled her overweight young daughter with sweets and made her sit in public places with a handkerchief behind her head to ward off lice. Olive “didn’t want Angie to grow up,” her future sister-in-law would say, but Olive’s intrusiveness went well beyond overprotection. She kept Angela awake “for company” until her husband came home from work at midnight and forced her to wash with the bathroom door open well into her teenage years. Though they never talked about sex, Angela, who later compared Olive to the mother in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” recalled that Olive would sniff her daughter’s discarded underpants. In “The Bloody Chamber,” Carter writes of “nursery fears made flesh and sinew” and that “earliest and most archaic of fears, fear of devourment.”
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Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
At 17, Carter rebelled. She lost weight — so much that for a time she was at least borderline anorexic — and began to dress in the flamboyant, eccentric style she would cultivate from then on: spike heels, tight skirts, “ethnic” dresses, even green lipstick. When her mother vowed to follow her to Oxford, Carter instead got a job, with her father’s help, as a reporter. Her early work already shows signs of the sharply witty, strongly feminist voice of her mature years. Reviewing an early record by Marlene Dietrich, she wrote that women admire Dietrich “because she looks as if she ate men whole, for breakfast, possibly on toast.”
Carter would one day say that her own work “cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man’s penis.” But she spent the first years of her career trapped in an unhappy marriage to a folk music producer eight years her senior. In her journal, she is brilliant on her domestic miseries: “It never ends, the buggering about with dirty dishes, coal pails, ash bins, . . . I tumble, glazed & bladderful, from bed & swing into the fire-kettle-porridge-bread routine.” She escaped into her writing. “I need to be extraordinary,” she confided to her journal.
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A visit to Tokyo in 1969 brought about her sexual liberation — and the end of her marriage. Her first attempt to be unfaithful was unsuccessful: “Was it my mother rising up in my heart to thwart my desires once again?” She found fulfillment with a Japanese man, Sozo Araki, with whom she shared an apartment so tiny she later said it was “too small to write a novel in.” She worked briefly in a hostess bar, which she called “the front line” of the battle between the sexes, and found that Japanese society gave her a new perspective on patriarchy: “The men in a society which systematically degrades women also become degraded.” She didn’t settle down again until 1974, when she met a construction worker named Mark Pearce, 15 years younger than she. They had a child in 1983, but married only in May 1991, after she was told she had lung cancer, to ensure his custodial rights after her death.
Carter is marvelously quotable, and many of her most trenchant lines have to do with the relations between men and women. Rejecting Elizabeth Smart’s novel “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept,” a lyrical treatment of an unhappy love affair, she wrote, “ ‘By Grand Central Station I Tore Off His Balls’ would be more like it, I should hope.” But Gordon correctly takes pains to distance Carter from the radical feminism of the 1970s, arguing that her view of women was of a piece with the rest of her politics: “She never saw the oppression of women as categorically different from other forms of oppression, and believed that if femininity was a cultural construction, forcing the individual into a cramped and demeaning role, then so was masculinity.” The sexually empowered woman is a dominant trope in her fiction, but she also wrote “The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography,” a feminist work of criticism reinterpreting the Marquis de Sade. “My anatomy,” she declared, “is only part of an infinitely complex organization, my self.” Asked about her favorite women writers, she regretted not naming Dostoyevsky, “the greatest feminine writer who’s ever lived . . . followed closely by Herman Melville.”
Carter’s unbridled imagination reached its height in 1979 with “The Bloody Chamber,” a gorgeously written volume that brings the sexual undercurrents of fairy tales to the surface. In “The Tiger’s Bride,” which opens with the line “My father lost me to the Beast at cards,” Beauty is transformed into an animal through her erotic surrender to the Beast’s tongue. A comically raunchy “Puss-in-Boots,” retold with shades of “The Barber of Seville” and the commedia dell’arte, is the tale of a seduction accomplished with the aid of a trusty feline. (“Love is desire sustained by unfulfillment,” the cat pronounces wisely.) The theme of insatiable desire appears again in “The Company of Wolves,” in which Little Red Riding Hood is an adolescent girl who comes to realize her sexual powers. It’s hard to overstate how profoundly mysterious and moving these stories are, or how radically Carter upends the familiar, creating something altogether new and strange.
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A judicious and diligent biographer, Gordon faces the obvious criticism that, as a man, he can’t fully appreciate Carter’s work. He argues convincingly that his sex shouldn’t be held against him, noting that Carter “never thought of gender as the most important division between human beings,” and that “almost all writing involves an act of identification” with people who are unlike oneself. Indeed, if there is a problem with this well-researched, carefully assembled book, it’s not that the author is a man; it’s that his approach doesn’t quite measure up to his subject. If Gordon has passionate feelings about Carter’s work, his utterly balanced and evenhanded treatment leaves no air for them to escape. Carter herself was so funny and stylish a writer that one wishes a few more sparks would rise from these cool pages. Thankfully, quotations from her letters and journals are plentiful. In one early journal, she repeats like a mantra André Breton’s line “The marvelous alone is beautiful.” She was both.
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A Czech Astronaut’s Earthly Troubles Come Along for the Ride
Credit
David Jien
SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA
By Jaroslav Kalfar
276 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $26.
In December 1972, as Apollo 17 flew toward the moon, one of the astronauts (no one seems to remember who) picked up one of the mission’s 70-millimeter Hasselblad cameras and took the first-ever complete photograph of the Earth. The so-called blue marble picture became possibly the most widely distributed image in history. It is credited with a profound shift in global environmental consciousness, the view of Earth against the absolute darkness of space giving a simple form to our sense of the planet’s beauty and fragility, and our absolute dependence on its ecology.
The same era, the golden age of manned spaceflight, also saw a cultural preoccupation with the extraordinary psychological situation of the astronaut. What did it feel like to find yourself outside Earth’s life support system, far from the fellowship of other humans? The flip side of the profound loneliness of space is the tantalizing possibility that by transcending physical boundaries, spiritual forms of transcendence will follow. Figures like David Bowie’s Major Tom, the spaceman who refuses to come back to Earth in the song “Space Oddity,” and Bowman, the astronaut in “2001: A Space Odyssey” who is pulled by the alien monolith across vast reaches of space and time, are only the most prominent representatives of a genre that, judging by the success of recent Hollywood movies like “Gravity” and “The Martian,” retains its enduring fascination. The lonely astronaut can be a modern Robinson Crusoe, a white-knuckled survivalist, an existential freak and seer. For J.G. Ballard, who used the morbid figure of a dead astronaut orbiting the Earth in several short stories, the corpses become monuments, Ozymandias-like ruins that condemn the spiritual and intellectual failure of the military-industrial space program.
Jakub Prochazka, the Czech hero of Jaroslav Kalfar’s zany first novel, “Spaceman of Bohemia,” is an astronaut who has left a lot of baggage back on Earth. He is the shining hope of an entire nation, the biggest celebrity in his home country, so excruciatingly aware that his endeavor “will carry the soul of the republic to the stars” that he refuses water before liftoff lest he should inadvertently urinate and “the purity of my mission” become “stained by such an undignified gesture.”
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Credit
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
The reason the Czech Republic is launching a manned spacecraft is the arrival of a strange comet that has “swept our solar system with a sandstorm of intergalactic cosmic dust.” A cloud, named Chopra by its Indian discoverers, now floats between Earth and Venus, turning the night sky purple. Unmanned probes sent out to take samples have returned mysteriously empty. Likewise a German chimpanzee has returned to Earth with no information save the evidence that survival is possible. The Americans, the Russians and the Chinese show no sign of wishing to risk their citizens, so the Czechs have stepped up, with a rocket named for the Protestant reformer and national hero Jan Hus. At many points in the novel, Kalfar sketches key moments in Czech history, and the very premise of a Czech space mission is clearly a satire on the nationalist pretensions of a small post-Communist nation. Financed by local corporations whose branding is placed on his equipment, Jakub is the epitome of the scrappy underdog, grasping for fame by doing something too crazy or dangerous for the major players.
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Stories of Fragmented Lives in the Emirates
Deepak Unnikrishnan
Credit
Philip Cheung
TEMPORARY PEOPLE
By Deepak Unnikrishnan
227 pp. Restless Books. Paper, $17.99.
Deepak Unnikrishnan’s novel-in-stories narrates a series of metamorphoses. Guest workers dissolve into passports, a man begins “moonlighting as a mid-sized hotel” and a sultan harvests a fresh crop of laborers. Elsewhere a man has grown a suitcase for a face, while a teenager’s tongue has fled his body, verbs soon spilling out and assuming forms of their own. All this surreal shape-shifting patches together a mosaic of the frenetic, fantastical and fragmented lives of the South Asian diaspora in the United Arab Emirates, one that recalls the cry of its closest forebear, Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”: “Please believe that I am falling apart.”
What separates Unnikrishnan from Rushdie, and the vast literature of exile that precedes them, are his subjects. “Temporary People” explores the lives of arguably the least privileged class of nomads in the 21st century: guest workers. Joining the South Indian writer Benyamin’s “Goat Days,” a novel of modern-day enslavement in Saudi Arabia, and the British-Emirati director Ali Mostafa’s “City of Life,” a film that weaves together a cross-section of lives in Dubai, “Temporary People” is a robust, if somewhat scattered, entry into the nascent portrayal of migrant labor in the Gulf.
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Bereft of language, status and self in a foreign land, Unnikrishnan’s characters radiate desperation and desire as they perform backbreaking work and cope with second-class citizenship. Well, that’s technically incorrect: They can’t become citizens. Under the United Arab Emirates’ visa system, these “temporary people,” who make up as much as 80 percent of the population, will eventually have to leave. In Unnikrishnan’s imaginings, this ever-present threat of displacement comes to the fore only during his characters’ most naked moments. His depictions of sex are entangled with the ganglia of residency, race, class and gender, as well as the instability and inadequacy of language, the collection’s constant refrain.
Mingling English, Malayalam and Arabic in a series of Kafkaesque parables, Unnikrishnan’s book features a lot of action and even some humor. Unfortunately, his hybrids of language and genre don’t always succeed. The trilingual patois can fall flat, as when each section is called a “chabter.” At times, self-evident themes are laboriously spelled out: “Pravasi means foreigner, outsider. Immigrant, worker. . . . Absence. That’s what it means, absence.” But perhaps one can excuse an overemphasis on this theme in particular: Left to the demimonde of the city, these characters can never forget that the Dubai dreamscape is reserved for locals and Western expats, not those in exile, like them.
Surrounded by injustice, Unnikrishnan’s characters don’t always remain passive. At times risking arrest, they fume, curse, kick and even bite. In each of the collection’s three best stories — “Mushtibushi,” a precocious child’s testimony about a sexually abusive elevator; “Moonseepalty,” the cannibalistic reunion of two estranged friends; and “Kloon,” a clown’s foray into prostitution — the migrant laborer’s growing sense of shame finally explodes.
“Temporary People” pairs well with an older cousin in nonfiction, John Berger’s “A Seventh Man.” In that stirring cri de coeur about migrant labor in Europe, Berger reminds us of a point that is embedded within Unnikrishnan’s stories: Countries that send migrant laborers to global metropolitan centers are often forced to do so. “There should be a transitive verb: to underdevelop,” Berger writes. “An economy is underdeveloped because of what is being done around it, within it and to it.” Unnikrishnan’s collection poses its questions obliquely, but demands explicit answers. What causes a society to look like this?
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