Sarah McCarry's Blog, page 5

PUNK reprint + HAGS launch party w/Jenny Zhang & Kate Zambreno

To me, punk is a plural, rather than a coherent, series of forms or formations, that can and should resist institutionalization.

Mimi Thi Nguyen and Golnar Nikpour's sold-out chapbook Punk is back! You can order it here. All profits from the sale of this edition go to benefit Maximumrocknroll, a monthly DIY fanzine based in San Francisco, CA dedicated to international punk rock. MRR's long history--the magazine started as a radio show in 1977, published its first issue in 1982, and maintains an enormous archive of records and zines--and large, obsessive, all-volunteer staff has made its coverage the most consistently expansive in punk. Through its nearly forty-year-long history, MRR has been known for its international coverage, and for explicitly interjecting leftist politics into punk discourses. Now approaching the 400-issue benchmark, MRR continues to champion the values of the DIY punk underground by remaining fiercely independent and not-for-profit.

& if you're in New York, please join me, Jenny Zhang, and Kate Zambreno at Word Bookstore in Brooklyn on September 5th, where we'll be celebrating the release of Jenny's Guillotine chapbook Hags. There will be cake.

flood tide

1. The other morning my boyfriend asked me if it had rained the night before and I said I didn't know, I had been asleep to deeply; and then I remembered that I had dreamed my apartment flooded, the sheetrock peeling from the walls in wet blistering strips, the ceiling crumbling into a waterfall; in the dream I had called the super and he had stood in the wreckage with me and said Perhaps it is time for you to move on and I had said Thank you, yes, I think you're right. My dream apartment had no furniture or books and was larger than the real apartment I live in now, a vast empty room alive with running water. I guess there must have been a storm, I said, the morning after.

2. I run and I run and I run. My body is changing, the muscles under my skin like live wires. I am tired in a way I have never been tired before. I want to believe it is an exhaustion only of the body. At night I lie awake looking at my twitter feed, at image after image, the tear gas, the guns, the tanks moving in; I think, How long, how long can we watch and do nothing. The images from Gaza, the images from Ferguson. The same tear gas canisters lined up side by side. Are we supposed to go to work, in the mornings? How? How do we go to work in the mornings? How do we pretend we are not carrying a grief the size of a lifetime? A grief as big as our own gore-soaked and ruinous history of engineered despair? I ran fifteen miles without stopping and came home and I cannot tell which tanks they are anymore, which tanks in which country, the clouds of gas rising in the night, haloed blood-bright with floodlights, erasing the bodies, the clouds that could be anywhere, the bodies that could be anyone's but my own, weeping helplessly in its white skin, a saltwater sack, a body out of danger and unmarked, unremarkable. We are unsurprised by the events; that does not take away their power to undo us.

3. Hedy Epstein, 90-year-old Holocaust survivor, outspoken supporter of the Free Palestine Movement, arrested during the protests on Monday; the activists arrested with her sang her "Happy Birthday" on the way to jail.

4. Over the weekend, the Perseid meteors falling; I would have counted them if I could have seen them, through the storm that will not lessen, but they fell and I did not mark their passing, and the earth turns again, away, spinning through the vast and lonely dark.

5. I go to work in my new job in an office, in clothes I bought for the office, a disguise, a trick at being a different person, a person who is quiet and does not complain, and does not bring a heart swollen over with anguish every morning, who does not carry this sodden weight up and down the stairs every day, who has already gotten in trouble for not caring enough, for being efficient but insufficiently emotional, who cannot say How can anyone care about anything, now, except this, how can anyone care about anything but the nights that fall again and again, the gas clouds, the tanks, the bodies of the people who stand in front of this onslaught and say We are done with this and we are strong, we are strong as the roots of the mountains are strong, as the body is strong, as hope is strong, we are a strength that cannot be fathomed or unmade, we are strong in the face of betrayal after betrayal after betrayal; we are strong enough to, after everything, choose to build a world out of love. We are strong enough to choose hope. We are strong enough to clean up the streets every morning after, strong enough to search through the rubble for the little that is left that was once ours. I am not that strong; I live in the shadow of that strength, and the least I can do is find ways to make myself worthy of catching at its edges.

6. But no one, no one should have to be that strong. No one should have to find strength among the bodies of their children. No one.

7. It is almost time to go running again. I find, more and more, that I have nothing left to say.

what I did at space camp

I am working on not thinking about what is happening in Gaza for a little while because if I think about it I stop functioning so why don't I tell you about space camp.

In Wyoming the sky is huge, bigger than you thought a sky could be. Every morning I woke up at six--yes, really, I did this--and ran out into the fields around Laramie, and sometimes I saw people walking their dogs and they waved to me and I waved back, but mostly I didn't see anyone at all. During the day I went to space class and learned about quasars and stars and orbital mechanics, and how to read a spectrograph, and how to find exoplanets, and why it is silly to write a story about aliens from another galaxy when there are so many stars and so many planets in this one. On Thursday we studied neutron stars while the ground invasion began, and to tell you the truth I don't remember much about neutron stars. We ate all our meals in the college cafeteria, where they had the New York Times for free, and I read the paper in the mornings while I drank my cafeteria coffee and ate my steam table eggs, but by Saturday reading the paper made me want to throw up and so I tried not to read the paper anymore.

I made friends at space camp even though no one was as excited about the three-dollar whiskeys of Laramie, Wyoming as I was, and we went for a hike in the mountains and looked at rocks and flowers and things I had forgotten about, like trees, and we drove up to the top of a different mountain and visited a real telescope, an actual astronomers' telescope, and I got to take pictures of a star and look at its spectrograph and talk to the nice young lady astronomer, and in a lot of places my phone didn't work and so I couldn't look at the news anyway. At space camp I said that I liked astrology and Armageddon and there were long silences after I said both those things but come on, if you are watching Armageddon for the science that's a problem I can't help you with. The instructors were nice to me despite these failings. And I spent most of the second half of the week trying to reconcile talking about things that are so big and so far away with living in a world where--well, you know. Texting my friends during class Is your heart breaking right now because my heart is coming the fuck out of my body in pieces and How are we supposed to do normal things when this is happening. My friends texting back I don't know I don't know I don't know. How can anyone talk about anything else? How can I? We do.

The Hubble Deep Field is a picture of a tiny piece of the sky--a really, really tiny piece, a literal pinpoint in a part of the sky where before we never saw anything at all. There are ten thousand galaxies in that speck, ten thousand galaxies so far away from us that what we see is their image as they were at the beginning of everything. That made me cry, too, and I wasn't sure at that point what I was crying about but what else do you do but keep going. It was cloudy a lot when I was in Laramie, big lightning storms that you could see coming from hundreds of miles away, but on our last night the sky was clear and the stars were bright, and I looked up and there across all of it was the faint pale smear of the Milky Way, and I tried to think of the last time I'd seen it and I couldn't remember. Guess what? That made me cry some more.

Now I am home and back to my real life, and the cat was very happy to see me and did not even pretend to be snotty to punish me for my long absence, and some moments it feels like the world is ending and other moments I am okay. I don't know how we live with it. I thought maybe in writing this down I would come up with an answer. One thing I learned last week is that blue stars are hottest and red stars are cooler, and so sometimes the way we talk about looking at things is exactly the wrong way to talk about them as they really are. I am glad to be home but already I miss the dark.

If you want to go to space camp yourself it's called the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop and it's amazing. Dirty Wings came out while I was there and you can buy it here and you can buy the audiobook, which is narrated by one of my oldest friends, here. I wrote about why I wrote it here. I am telling myself it's okay to take a break from the news for a while so I'm going to tell you to take a break if you need one, too. If you live somewhere you can see the stars tell them I said hi.

xoxo

sarah

Goths at Sea

We came back from sailing yesterday and I am quite tan and missing a chunk of one finger and my shins are bruised green from my ankles to my knees from whacking them on things and all I want to do is get back on the boat and go out again.

Every morning was cloudy and every afternoon was sunny and the ocean goes so far around you when you are out on it. Sailing a forty-five foot boat with two people is sometimes stressful if one of the two people has no idea what she is doing, or at least it is for the person who has no idea what she is doing, but I learned to put the mainsail up by myself and take it down again, and I learned to steer when the boat was under sail--which is not hard, at least not in good weather, which was thankfully all we had, but it feels different--and I rowed the dinghy out and pulled the stern anchor up by myself too, which is not easy, especially not when a fishing boat with some tourists in it has parked itself on top of the stern anchor and all the tourists are watching you labor mightily with great curiosity, and you are thinking to yourself that if any of them says anything to you, just one thing, you will paddle the dinghy five feet over to their boat and punch them in the fucking face, and maybe they can tell you are thinking that since they are very quiet.

When we came back yesterday the captain of the sailboat in the neighboring slip was at home, and he had us over; he has lived on board his boat with his wife for fifteen years, and they have gone all around the world together, and he showed us pictures and we drank rum and listened to Mark Knopfler, a musician universally beloved by seafaring gentlemen of a certain age--and to be honest, in my limited experience, being on a sailboat does make a person have inexplicable urges to put on music she would never listen to otherwise--and maybe it was the rum, or the Mark Knopfler, but suddenly living aboard a sailboat did indeed begin to seem like a fine thing, and not having any possessions or encumbrances, and going about from port to port as one pleased, and having a lot of good stories about frightening weather and other people who don't know how to drop the anchor correctly. In reality if I lived aboard a sailboat with another person it is highly unlikely that we would both survive the week, and I am frightened of large waves and can barely swim, but I like to pretend that I am more generous and adaptable than in fact I am. And they were really marvelous pictures. J and I ate fish and chips at the harbor and I said Do you think all these people can tell I went sailing and J said I think they might all be tourists. In my heart I knew I just looked filthy but I chose to believe I looked tough and sea-minded instead.

On the second day of sailing we anchored just off the island, and J went ashore to record things, and I sat on the boat with the ostensible purpose of ensuring it did not drag its anchor and crash into anything--had it done so, I am not entirely certain I should have administered this crisis in a particularly competent manner--but with the actual goal of drinking some wine and putting on Lana del Rey and watching the sun set magnificently into the silvery mass of the Pacific, which I did at once to great effect. I have no idea which life decisions led me to that glorious point, but I am going to assume it was all of them, and so: no regrets. For all the valleys, there are mountains, and if they are difficult to climb, the labor of getting to the top does nothing to obstruct the view once you summit.

As before: you can order Jenny Zhang's Guillotine chapbook Hags, and I will send it to you as soon as I'm back in the city, and you won't even believe how good it is. Dirty Wings comes out on the 15th, and you can preorder a signed copy from the wonderful people at Word bookstore in Brooklyn or win a copy too from the delightful Courtney Summers. If you are in New York you can come to the launch party on August 7, with some Special Guests; more about that soon. That is assuming I come home, which is up in the air at this point.

xoxo

sarah

where I am now

It's ninety degrees in New York right now and nine million percent humidity, and I am on the opposite coast, looking out at the Pacific.

Tomorrow morning I am going to get on a sailboat and go to an island with no people on it, only mostly-tame tiny foxes the size of cats, and that feels like a good choice. Even after six years of living next to the Atlantic my heart always says there is only one real ocean.

You can still order Jenny Zhang's Guillotine chapbook Hags, and I will send it to you as soon as I'm back in the city, and you won't even believe how good it is. And my second book, Dirty Wings, comes out in a week, and you can preorder a signed copy from the very wonderful people at Word bookstore in Brooklyn, and if you like stories about girls and bad decisions and running away and running toward, and love and death and rock and roll, I think you will like it. You can win a copy here too, from my excellent and very talented friend Courtney Summers, whose books you should be reading too if you haven't read them already.

I haven't written a word in a week and it feels great, and today I went for a long run and thought about the ways in which running and writing are the same: sometimes you don't know what you can get done until you ask it of yourself, and sometimes the best lesson is the difference between when your muscles ache because they want to work harder and when your muscles ache because they need to rest, and the only way to learn is to keep doing it until you know. Maybe when I get back I will have something profound written down but today it is nice to have my whole brain wiped clean except about where my next snack is coming from. Don't you forget to take breaks, too, and be nice to yourself.

See you in a few days, treasures.

xoxo sarah

Guillotine #7: Hags

Jenny Zhang




Guillotine #7: Hags

"These hags, these great beauties, these mermaids who taunt, who feast, who slash, who steal, these succubae who cannot rest, my mothers, my sisters, my unborn friends, my keepers, my guardians": I cannot even tell you how excited I am to announce the presale of Jenny Zhang's Guillotine chapbook, which is going to blow your minds right out of the water, I tell you what. Preorder it now here; preorder the special edition here. Hags will ship next month and while you are waiting you can keep yourself busy reading every brilliant, beautiful thing Jenny has written for Rookie.

la musique savante manque à notre désir

Some Bad Decisions Happen

My second book is a month away from being out in the world, which is hard to believe, to be honest; this last year has been a lot of things, many of them good and some of them hard and some of them hilarious and weird and unlikely.

If you want to read part of my second book, which is about bad decisions and loving people too much and loving people not enough, and music and sex and death, and your first time dying your hair weird colors, you can do that here. If you want to see the nice things other people have said about it I have listed them here. If you want to win a copy of my second book along with a copy of my first book, signed by me and everything, you can enter a sweepstakes for those items here. And if you just want to buy my second book outright because you dislike the perilous uncertainty of contests and prefer a sure bet, you can order a signed copy from the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people at Word bookstore here, and they will send it to you when it comes out on July 15. They will actually send it to you just after July 15 because on the day my book officially comes out I will be at space camp, but I think that's an okay excuse not to sign your books quite on time.

I have been tired and a little sad, dear hearts, I won't lie, and I took the day off for my birthday but other than that I cannot even remember the last day I went without working. You think maybe writing books will change everything even though you know better but it turns out if you are a crazy person who publishes a book you are still a crazy person, just with a book. But every other day or so I re-ink the K on my wrist in black sharpie and I am running now more than I have ever run in my life, and I can feel my legs getting stronger all the time. Do you know that scene in The Abyss, when Lindsey lets herself drown so that Bud can live, and he carries her under the ocean and back to safety, and the crew gathers around him as he tries to restart her heart, and the minutes pass, and the crew says, "It's over, Bud, let her go," and then in one great burst of love and rage he cries out "FIGHT, BITCH, FIGHT," and slaps her fiercely, and at last she comes alive again, coughing? My best friend and I text that back and forth when we are having a hard time. FIGHT, BITCH, FIGHT. You fight, too. I have been writing this blog for five years now, can you believe that? Thank you for coming all this way with me.

A Conversation with Brandy Colbert

Brandy Colbert's debut novel Pointe is the story of Theo, an ambitious young ballet dancer whose life is upended when her childhood best friend, abducted four years earlier, suddenly returns. Theo is a rich and complicated character, both wise beyond her years and desperately naive, but it's her meticulously crafted and vivid voice that really sets Pointe apart. Brandy Colbert talked to me about ballet, books, and finding her own voice as a writer.

Theo has a complicated relationship with ballet throughout the book--on the one hand, her ambition and her talent give her life a defining focus, and she loves ballet more than anything else; on the other, it's a world that emphasizes her difference and implicitly supports a lot of her unhealthy behaviors (her eating disorder in particular). Was that tension something you were thinking about consciously as you worked on the book? Why ballet?

The ballet came first and then as I kept writing, I worked to weave it purposefully into the narrative. Like, yes, Theo is a serious dancer, so her focus is going to be dance first and foremost, but it would be impossible to ignore the various ways it filters into her life. The recurrence of her anorexia is definitely related to the world she aspires to enter professionally, but I never wanted it to appear clichéd, as obviously not all dancers suffer from eating disorders and not all people with eating disorders are drawn to the dance world. She wasn't pressured by her dance teacher or ballet friends to lose weight, but I felt it was in line with Theo's personality that she'd do whatever it took to be the best and take that to the extreme. And then it was a way for her to gain some control, as she was blindsided by so many things at once--her former best friend being alive and being returned after four years in captivity, along with realizing her connection to his abduction.

It's also a dream to have a book about a black teenage ballet dancer published. I danced for a long time growing up, and although I didn't take many ballet lessons as a child, I was obsessed with ballet books and there were none featuring people who looked like me back then. I labored for a long time over the passage in my book where Theo talks about wanting to be the best and how there are very few black ballet dancers out there, but she won't let that stop her. I never want to be too heavy-handed with a "message," as I think readers should and will take what they want from a book. But it was important to me to acknowledge that Theo knows exactly how far black woman dancers have (or have not) gotten in the professional world, and that she wants people to see her as being at the top of her game, whether or not they factor in her skin tone.

I loved how ambiguous so many of Theo's relationships are throughout the book, and for me so much of Pointe is about her struggle to decide which relationships in her life are healthy and which are damaging. You worked on Pointe for a long time--did those relationships grow more complex as you revised the book?

Oh, they definitely did! I remember after working on it for (what I thought was) a very long time, feeling like the supporting characters were fully fleshed out and becoming real people and my editor was like, "Ha ha ha, no." Well, she was much nicer than that, but she did push me to keep working harder on characterization through each draft. Those revisions were tough and somewhat tedious, but it really helped me see that the characters needed to serve a purpose in Theo's life, whether in her past or present interpretation of how she views the world. I'd say that Hosea and Ruthie probably changed the most from first to final draft, and both ended up taking on roles that surprised me.

You've said elsewhere that you found your voice once you "stopped worrying what people would think of me for writing dark books about complicated topics." Was there one thing that pushed that shift, or was that evolution more gradual?

The impetus was Courtney Summers' debut novel, Cracked Up to Be [IT'S REALLY GOOD --ed.], which I read shortly after it was released in 2009, and that changed the whole writing game for me. I've always been interested in learning a lot about dark stories (maybe best not to mention how many hours I've logged reading up on serial killers and abductions), and when I first started writing YA, I was focused on tackling tough topics but I was holding back. Censoring myself, if you will. It's sort of tragic to look back on all those stifled storylines but all writing is good practice, and thank god for Cracked Up to Be. It was a tough book to get through--Summers' books are some of my absolute favorites, even if they give me serious anxiety while reading--but as soon as I finished, I knew: This is what I want to write.

It still took a while after that, to be a truly honest writer. The characters I wanted to create said and did "unlikable" things and I was worried that no one would want to read about girls with strong opinions who made unpopular decisions and went after what they wanted, even if it wasn't the right choice. I kept reading--books like Living Dead Girl and Wintergirls and Such a Pretty Girl (hmm, there seems to be a theme with those titles, no?--and learned there were many dark, dark books out there for teens that beautifully and realistically covered difficult topics without being preachy, and that maybe there could be a place for books like that written by me. Theo's voice came to me very clearly and I knew right away that I wanted to hang out with her--create impossible scenarios to see how she did (or didn't) handle them.

Can you talk about what you're working on now?

I am the vaguest when it comes to this answer (partly because I am superstitious about discussing my incomplete work, and partly because I'm really bad at talking about any of my work), but I will say it's another YA. It's about a blended family and relationships and and vices and judgment, and how a black teenage girl is dealing with all of that in Los Angeles.

What have you read lately that you've loved?

Some of these were read toward the end of 2013, as I sadly haven't had as much time to read for pleasure as I'd like to this year (though the towering piles of books in my house would lead one to think otherwise), but I'd say: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, Uses for Boys by Erica Lorraine Scheidt [IT'S SO GOOD. --ed.], Complicit by Stephanie Kuehn [IT'S SO GOOD. --ed.], The Color Master by Aimee Bender, and Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour.

Brandy Colbert grew up in Springfield, Missouri, and has worked as an editor for several national magazines. She lives and writes in Los Angeles. Pointe is her first novel.

A Conversation With Lyric Hunter

Lyric Hunter is a tremendously clever and lovely person who was one of my very favorite interns during my brief tenure as a Poets' Manager; she also happens to be a brilliant poet herself. She was nice enough to answer a few questions about her first book, Swallower.

To me so much of this book is about having a love affair with France, and with French--what is it that has so ensnared you?

Love affair--I think that must come across in the way I’ve dug into every detail of the city, every aspect of my experience there—and that’s exactly what has ensnared me. Long before I ever set foot in Paris I’d been infatuated with its mythos, its image. Paris is a city designed from top to bottom to be beautiful in every season. Living in it one can see what makes Paris dirty and loud and crazy and different. The war cries of the vendors at the open-air market at La Chapelle. The French obsession with funk music. French curse words, and French attitudes about language, and I’m talking about who can say what, and the cultural significations and urban identities that come with words like wesh and the use of French slang like Verlan. To some extent I’m fascinated by this huge secret club and if I get the pronunciation and tone right, I can be allowed entrance, at least into the vestibule. And to some extent I am initiated, welcomed to the table by friends. I am no longer infatuated, I am involved with Paris.

Your poems move effortlessly between French and English and often mix up both languages in really lovely ways. Do you think in French more, now that you live there? How has being surrounded by that language changed the way you write?

Thank you, I’m definitely writing more in French now and trying to get a more even give and take between my use of both languages. My confidence in my ability to write/speak/think in the language has grown a little. Most recently I’ve been writing in fragments, mixed with longer sentences, in a way reflecting my everyday speech, that toneless, broken, but grammatically correct French of someone who’s still working on perfecting her use of the subjunctive. I’ve learned from working with language teachers that learning new languages has a lot to do with singing, and with music and rhythm

There's so much texture in these poems and also lots of things to eat. Which is not really a question. I just like that I can taste your poetry when I'm reading it.

Yeah, that’s a really fun thing about France--theirs seems to be a meal-centered culture. Roommates eat meals together, meals were eaten together in the studio when I was a study abroad student (I always felt too awkward to sit down with them but I was invited every time). Food is closely connected with my experiences with people--with social situations--in France.

What are you working on now?

While working on lots of different little fragment poems on a variety of subjects, I’m also learning what kind of writer I am, and what drives me to write. I want to do research and I want to have projects, but I find myself so much more driven by landscapes and urban experiences and the questions that language brings up. When I first came back I felt very struck by this idea that since re-tracing all my steps, and re-tracing re-tracing historical landmarks I am walking in the present in the space of memory; it’s a bizarre (favorite French word) deja-vu type of melancholy energy that thrives off solitude and introspection, and which really drives what I write almost more than anything else. I have also more recently been focusing on what is bewildering about France, what inspires indignant rage. I live in an immigrant neighborhood and I worked in schools in working-class, leftist neighborhoods, and many of my colleagues at school are very political. It was the first time I’d ever worked side by side with public school teachers, so I can’t compare experiences country-wise (by which I mean, the French are stereotyped as being generally more leftist, i.e., angry, than the majority of Americans, but I also grew up in New York and my political experience is skewed left anyway) but Paris feels more generally politically charged in a way I can’t say I’ve felt in New York, outside of my personal experience at Cooper Union. In my neighborhood here, in the 18th, while there are good things and not-so-good things, I’ve seen a lot of things that are outside the law, because it’s necessary, and I see a lot of things that make me really angry—from the desperation of a high school in the banlieue trying to keep its students-without-papers from being harassed by the police to just blatant racial profiling on the corner of Barbès and Rochechouart. From being in France and getting to know a political system similar to but historically descended from a different lineage than the American political system, I’ve learned a lot about politics as both an abstract topic of conversation over beers on a Friday night and as the act of just walking down the street and evaluating every move made in relationship to others. How we speak and what vocabulary we use is identification—of origin, of class, of education, of politics—the question I’m considering now is how are the young French using that language to break out of these very rigid and long-enduring hierarchies?

Lyric Hunter was born in New York in 1990. After graduating in 2012 from the Cooper Union, she taught visual art in Queens. She currently lives in Paris as an English teaching assistant in the Teaching Assistant Program In France. Her poems and drawings have appeared in Poems by Sunday. Swallower (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014) is her first chapbook.

Some Books I Have Been Reading Lately

I am presently on a Susan Choi re-reading bender in preparation for this event (!!!!!!!!), to which you are invited, and if I do not vomit in awe and terror you can buy me a birthday drink afterward, or just say hello, or whatever. If you are not in New York you had ought to read all of Susan Choi's excellent novels yourself anyway; my favorite is American Woman, but her most recent, My Education, is characteristically stellar plus special bonus of hottest sex scenes in a book like pretty much ever.

But also:

Evie Wyld


All the Birds, Singing

240pp. Pantheon. 9780307907769

Jake Whyte is a solitary sheep farmer on a remote British island. Her only contact is with her dog, Dog, and her sheep (unnamed), and that's fine by her. But something is picking off her sheep one by one, and in the process triggering memories of a past she's worked hard to put behind her--for good reason. My bookseller friends Jenn and Molly talked this one up a storm, and for good reason--the writing is flawless, seamlessly moving between past and present, and Jake's voice is rendered in sentences so precise you want to eat them.

Jillian Tamaki & Mariko Tamaki



This One Summer


320pp. First Second. 9781596437746

I had high expectations for genius cousin team Jillian and Mariko Tamaki's follow-up to the completely brilliant 2010 graphic novel Skim, and boy was I not disappointed. Rose and her parents have been going to Awago Island every summer since she was little, where she meets up with her summer-vacation friend Windy, hangs out on the beach, and forgets about the real world. But this summer is different: her parents won't stop fighting, the local teens have secrets of their own, and the gulf between Windy and Rose is growing wider. Jillian Tamaki's spare, evocative illustrations are the perfect counterpoint to Mariko Tamaki's sharp prose; the result is a haunting and beautiful story so vivid you can practically taste the Popsicles.

Anthology



Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History


363pp. Crossed Genres. 978-0-9913921-0-0

There's so much genius packed into this anthology, edited by Daniel José Older and Rose Fox--two of the hardest-working and smartest people on the Internet--that it's hard to know what to highlight. Sofia Samatar's showstopper of an opening story, "Ogres of East Africa," is worth the price of admission alone, but the collection is a nonstop parade of gems, featuring work by well-known writers like Kima Jones, Nnedi Okorafor, Victor Lavalle, and Tananarive Due, as well as a great many folks you'd do well to remember, because you're going to be hearing a lot more about them soon. Each story focuses on people whose lives have been pushed to the margins of history; this loose unifying theme ties the stories together without confining them and results in a body of work that sings. Wonderful and necessary.

And up next: A Bit of Difference, by Sefi Atta; The Witch's Boy, by Kelly Barnhill; An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege, by Heidi Ardizzone (a biography of J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, a black woman who passed as white her entire life, charmed her way into the position, had a great many Glamorous Affairs, dressed like a movie star, and went on to become one of the most powerful women in the rare book world (!!!! I KNOW RIGHT)), and With My Dog-Eyes, by Hilda Hirst.