At the end of The Seers, Sulaiman Addonia reveals the meaning of the title. “Seers” are gender-fluid, trans, refugee outsiders. They are the traumatized, deracinated war victims who understand England better than longtime Londoners. In the words of the Seers, “We had to see ourselves the way we are from the inside first, from the moment we were born, before we learnt the rest of the world.”
“This is an important work” is not something you can say about many books these days. But I can and will say it about Frank Pizzoli’s Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work.
What does a real-life backstory matter in a fictional context? In an interview published by The Creative Independent earlier this year, Emmalea Russo discussed her novel Vivienne with Brittany Menjivar. Menjivar’s first question was about how Vivienne’s (fictional) title character was, in the novel’s universe, married to the real-world artist Hans Bellmer. Russo also noted the influence of the late writer Unica Zurn on the novel.
Devika Rege begins her timely, layered, and inquisitive debut novel Quarterlife with an epigraph by Kabir, a 15th century Indian poet. The inscription carries urgency, especially in Hindi. At a literal level, Kabir describes a lover’s red as so intense that the narrator sees the color wherever they look, and in the narrator’s search for redness, they take on the hue. Visually, the verses impart images of sweeping, suffusive scarlet, foreshadowing Quarterlife’s experimental, ever-expanding structure. Thematically, Kabir’s lines convey Rege’s rigor as she reckons with democracy.
V.S. Pritchett spoke in an interview of how Chekhov’s gifts were limited to short forms because he lived in an anarchic and chaotic society, diagnosing the same state of genius to Irish writers like Frank O’Connor and Liam O’Flaherty that came after him. Pritchett said, “the novel depends enormously upon its sense of a stable social structure and the short story does not really depend on there being a social structure at all.” To give form to our fractalizing 21st century chaos, traditional short stories are too neat, wishfully formal, consoling. Adorno believed art worth its salt does not aspire to console. So it may be in the fragments, flash fictions, micro fictions, that we’ll find the form of our current chaos aestheticized.
Billed by its publisher as a “a radical reinterpretation of the Loki myth,” Kurt Baumeister’s second novel Twilight of the Gods is a comic noir about a 21st century Ragnarok in a world where fascism is politically ascendant. The point of view belongs to the Norse god of mischief, rendered cleverly and affectionately by Baumeister as a devastatingly handsome pansexual Black man who sees his current incarnation as carrying implications for his adversarial relationship with top Norse god Odin, who turns out here to be friendly with Nazis, both historical and contemporary.
The Golden Land, by Elizabeth Shick, blends a complex plot, unfamiliar setting, and dual timeline to create an absorbing story. This alone would account for its selection by the AWP for its Novel Prize. But this is a debut novel goes beyond deft storytelling. It’s a tale of family tragedy, of romantic confusion, and of human survival, both physical and emotional.
Jhanvi, the protagonist of Naomi Kanakia’s novel The Default World, refers to an ongoing project of hers as a “marriage plot” a few times over the course of the book. This is an eminently accurate description of what Jhanvi is up to: she’s in the process of trying to marry a tech-bro friend of hers so that his health insurance will cover her gender-affirming care. But it’s also a nod on Kanakia’s part to the territory she’s entered with this book. On the one hand, it’s a spot-on satire of a certain segment of the tech world; on the other hand, it’s a book that’s in the grand tradition of, say, Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.