Who else gets unnaturally anxious about the books you’re packing before a big trip? 😅 I’m running late on my reading pre-trip and am trying to figure out whether to bring a Brisbane-based hardcover all the way to Australia…
The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction edited and translated by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay brings to print a previously untranslated, iconic Bengali sci fi novella from 1935: The Inhumans by Hemendrakumar Roy, a satire that has never gone out of print in its original language but has never been translated despite its well-earned place in the Radium Age of science fiction. Chattopadhyay adds three other early short stories as a bonus. Together, we get a collection of excellent classic sci fi with a non-Western perspective.
The Inhumans is a strange novella, featuring some classics of the early sci fi genre—story within a story, secrets in the predatory jungles of Africa, science’s potential to over-reach—but with a uniquely anti-colonial undertone. The story is at turns absurd, funny, and scary as our narrator comes face-to-face with a secret civilization of “advanced” human beings hidden in the African wilderness. As for the short stories, they’re a wonderful mix of myth and science, magic and sci fi, that I really enjoyed. Fans of classic, early sci fi will enjoy this, but so will most sci fi readers, and I’m glad that more classics that aren’t originally in English are finally becoming more widespread and accessible.
Content warnings for fatphobia, violence/body horror.
My anticipatory dread of good events has increased with the general lack of care and masking: an anxiety and certainty that someone will give me or my partner Covid and we won’t be able to go to Australia, or that something else will sweep this trip out from under us. We’re generally safe but there’s a limit to how much our masks protect us if others aren’t wearing them. Part of me won’t be excited for the trip until we’re on the plane.
The Moon That Turns You Back is a beautiful new book of poetry from Hala Alyan centered around loss. She writes of death, of the displacement of her grandparents, parents, herself, of miscarriage. She writes of the inability to return, of what it means to live in America while war strikes at home, of her grandmother Fatima. The poems are beautiful, and she experiments with form and structure in compelling ways. It’s a superb book of poetry.
Content warnings for grief, death, miscarriage.
The debut novel from acclaimed short story author Kelly Link, The Book of Love, is an enjoyable slow burn of a fantasy novel (even if it could have burned a little faster). Three teens—Daniel, Laura, and Mo—wake up after being dead for a year. The man they thought was a music teacher and his demonic partner Bogomil tell them that no one will remember they were dead…But the three will have to figure out how to do magic and find a magical key if they want to stay not-dead long enough to reintegrate themselves into their own lives. Only thing is, Laura’s sister, Susannah, has something to do with why they’re dead, but now she can’t remember. Only thing is, a deadly goddess is arriving in town—and she wants to get to the key first.
The book was beautiful and rich, tactile and surreal. The town of Loveside feels real to me, like I could walk there and out to the Cliffs and see Mo’s house where his grandmother wrote all those romance novels, like I could walk in her rose garden. The characters feel like real, well-developed people, from rebellious, self-destructive sister Susannah to the owner of the local coffee shop. The magic in the book is made of near-limitless potential, and their discovery of their abilities and the ethereal, web-like nature of the storytelling reminded me of Erin Morgenstern’s work. I was deeply invested in finding out how the three died, who was trying to get the key before they did, and who was secretly unreal, because all of the characters felt so deeply realized.
But I do have critiques. As you all know, I strongly believe that few books need to be more than 400 pages. This book, which rings in at 625, was no exception. The beginning was very, very drawn out, and while the character and atmosphere kept me dialed in, I was being to get impatient. And I love long, atmospheric fantasies, so I’m more patient than many readers are. I genuinely believe the first half or so of this book could be cut in half and concentrated down. This pacing leaves room for a lot of eerie moments and strange happenings, but also makes the final climax feel rushed (even though it’s actually quite well-placed) and starts to take some of the sting out of big twists.
This is The Book of Love, and there is a lot of love in it—and a lot of queer, kinky love, which I did appreciate. Mo and mysterious immortal Thomas were a hot couple, even if they suffered a bit from instalove. I really liked Daniel and Susannah, but I think the amount of time given to the two young troubled teen lovers and the time given to Susannah’s tumultuous and difficult relationship with her more orderly sister Laura should have been switched. But then, I love a good sister story.
Overall, I really enjoyed Link’s work, which had the same ethereal, satisfyingly magical feeling as her short stories do; but it could have been a lot shorter, not just for the reader but for the sake of a tightened narrative. Those with the patience will enjoy this slow-burn fantasy with a ton of atmosphere and a heart-warming emotional core.
Content warnings for homophobia and homophobic language, child abuse, grief/death, depression, body horror, miscarriage mention.
I love E. Lily Yu’s writing, and this collection of her short fiction is great from beginning to end. Her concepts in Jewel Box range from fantastical to absurd, from myth to sci fi, and every story is different and yet compelling. They play with imperialism and the violence of capitalism and greed, with people who yearn for something new, with terminal illness and grieving, with the fierce isolation of marginalization. They’re all different, but those common threads bring them together into a collection I found hard to put down.
My favorite story is probably “Green Glass: A Love Story,” a short, decadent, devastating story about the cruel obliviousness of the ultra-rich and their luxuries; I also loved “The Urashima Effect,” in which one man sets off to found a space colony in what promises to be an excruciatingly lonely mission, knowing his wife will someday join him there. But all of the stories have their treasures—cats seeking revenge, a streetlamp in love, a bitter regime of wasps taking over a civilization of bees, a merchant with eyes for sale, a barn full of stairs, a unicorn in Central Park. This collection had me hooked from the first page, and I’ve officially added E. Lily Yu to my “I’ll read anything they write” list.
Content warnings for sexual harassment and assault, violence, death, terminal illness.
I have become a huge, tremendous fan of the surreal socio-political horror Sarah Coolidge identifies as “narrativa de lo inusual,” a growing Latin American genre led by women like Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez. So I was thrilled for this collection, Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories, which gathers together 10 stories in that landscape, including tales by Mariana Enríquez (tr. Megan McDowell), Claudia Hernández (tr. Julia Sanches & Johanna Warren), and Mónica Ojeda (tr. Sarah Booker & Noelle de la Paz).
The collection didn’t disappoint. A pair of teenage best friends become obsessed with serial killers and wonder why Argentina doesn’t seem to have any; an older woman finds an alien being in her yard (or is her mind going?); a travesti sex worker comes up against a squadron of nuns with a dark secret. All of these stories play at the edge between dark social commentary and speculative fiction—magic or impossible things might happen, but it’s the people who are horrifying, who we should be scared of, in this descendent of the gothic and magical realism genres. This compact collection is a superb introduction to 10 talented authors (and their translators) and the new genre being born in Latin American speculative fiction, but all fans of speculative fiction, spoopy stories, and horror will enjoy this collection.
Content warnings for violence, homophobia, fatphobia, revenge porn, suicide attempt, miscarriage, sexual assault, child abuse, ableism.
Trying to put my anxieties and fears to the side and remind myself that yes, the future is scary, yes things could always fall out from under me, and yes, my sleep has been terrible, but I am blessed, my loved ones are alive, and on my 30th birthday I’m going to hold a koala, so my life is still good.
From around the world, Irena Rey’s translators make their way to Białowieża Forest. They’re ready to translate her magnus opus in their carefully practiced pattern: sitting in the midst of that strange forest, the last bit of the primeval forest that once spanned Europe, they will all translate together, under Irena’s watchful eye. But shortly after their appearance, Irena disappears. In her absence, they’ll be desperate to find meaning (as translators generally do) in all the things she’s left behind, and their search blooms into a feverish mess of conflict, confusion, and the slow reveal of secrets the author’s been keeping from them this entire time.
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft starts slowly, but builds steam. It’s written by “Eli,” the Spanish translator, who is perhaps the most devoted to Irena and her rules, who is horrified when her fellow translators begin to snoop, edit, rebel, and reveal information they’d been holding back. In a swirl of fungi, ethical quandaries, and cult-like worship, Eli writes a novel in Polish that has been translated for us, years later, into English by Alexis, one of her fellow translators.
Because increasingly, we realize: we can’t trust Eli, disturbed the others’ insistence on breaking her united, clean vision of Irena and of who they are to each other. But if we can’t trust her, why would we be able to trust her translator, English herself, the character that Eli hated the most? In this literary entanglement reminiscent of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, we realize more and more with each chapter that maybe Eli isn’t telling us the truth, that maybe Alexis is editing a little too freely.
Once that ambiguity was introduced, I was hooked. The beginning was slow, but I’m okay with that. We have to think we can trust Eli and Alexis for just long enough to begin to doubt. And then you can see the riddles between the lines, the signals Eli’s missing, the misinterpretations floating through the group. It’s a vivid, fascinating novel and psychological thriller about their slow unspooling.
Content warnings for violence, gaslighting.
“To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide—a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.”
—Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking