Akwaeke Emezi talks to Elle about their latest book title, ghosts, and getting plot ideas from their dreams.

Thailand is a premiere destination for gender-conforming surgery — a sign that the rest of the world’s healthcare systems are badly broken for trans people.

What is the future of academia, read through the lens of “quit lit”?

“Governmental fiat had the power to turn fable into fact.” The story of the Chagossians, their quest to return home, and the imperial powers arrayed against them.

Malala Yousafzai likes Ms. Marvel.

Sometimes, now and then, I am just very much in the mood for a really good pan of a book.

Elaine Hsieh Chou has had enough of the trope of Asian women in films being nonexistent, slutty, or both. (Her book Disorientation is excellent btw! A rare satire that I enjoyed!)

“I am frightened by my own affection toward Sox.” On the new Lightyear movie, which is pretty good, and the IP dystopia we currently live in, which is real real bad.

Vilissa Thompson on Lizzo’s use and correction of an ableist slur, and how the response to her erased Black disabled people.

Navigating the red carpet as a wheelchair user is an exhausting nightmare.

Thanks to BookTok for getting me more books with sprayed edges. Appreciated.

On resorts.

From all I know of her, Lisa Lucas is a tremendous person, and I loved this article about her work and the broader work of making publishing more inclusive.

This is a story about poop. Well, IBS. Well, bodies.

Here’s what happens during a craniotomy.

Naomi Kanaka explains why literary fiction refuses to write about the labor and financial side of things.

“break my back like a glowstick daddy” Katy Waldman on Kaitlyn Tiffany’s new book about One Direction fandom (which I loved).

Young children explain why their preferred shape of chicken nugget is the best one.

I really enjoyed RRR and was super grateful to this newsletter (the author of which ALSO loved the movie) for unpacking its shortcomings around caste and nationalism.

Here’s what’s going on with the weird fake texts you may be receiving now.

Becca Tilley was nervous about coming out to all of Bachelor Nation. She’s been very touched by the reception she’s gotten.

This is a story about feral peacocks in a Canadian town. Some people are like “yay, feral peacocks!” and other people are like “omg something has to be done about these feral peacocks.”

One big reason your groceries are so expensive? The ocean freight industry is engaged in crazy-making systems of obstruction and price-gouging against truckers.

Marina Warner talks about the work of fairy tales and the work of memoir (and the role of cruelty in each).

I loved this story about the Future Library.

Long live the food-themed romance novel.

Have a glorious weekend, friends. I wish you very much swimming and lots of good books.

The post Not Quite the Millions Book Preview Yet: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Before anything else, both of these authors have tremendous passion for the work. Though Emezi’s memoir ranges widely through years of their life and numerous places they’ve lived, the constant in good years and bad is their (sometimes single-minded) commitment to their art:

People can say a lot about me, but everyone knows the work is my beginning. I work myself like it’s a madness and maybe it is. It’s how I world-bend: it is my hammer, my heated metal, my anvil, my forge, my weapon.

(And yes, as you can see, Emezi’s writing continues to be truly gorgeous.)

In an early chapter of Dear Senthuran, Emezi says that they are going to describe the spell they have cast to achieve the success they’ve achieved. The spell is to believe in themself and keep doing the work, and when they achieve one of their dreams, they set a new dream and work like hell to achieve it. They make full use of the flexibility of the word “work”: “work” as an action verb for the effort and drive they put into creation; “work” as a noun that describes the product of their creativity; “the work” to encompass both.

Prescod-Weinstein similarly radiates her love for the work that she does. I have to admit that I…. had a harder time understanding some of what she was talking about (extremely science) versus what Emezi is talking about (litrature and mental illness and relationships). Surprise! I do not 1000% understand theoretical cosmology and astrophysics. Who knew! The first half of The Disordered Cosmos covers Prescod-Weinstein’s work and the questions she’s trying to answer, and they are about ten miles above my head. I read this portion of the book feeling more like I was weaving a brand new net than capturing knowledge in a pre-existing net.

But! What’s very clear, both in the early parts of the book where Prescod-Weinstein is talking about science, and in the second half where she’s talking about the profession, is how much Prescod-Weinstein loves her field. Even when I didn’t understand the science, her devotion to and enthusiasm about it shone through every word.

I still like math and the potential it holds to help us craft a compelling cosmological tale. I still think the times table is a miraculous thing, thirty years after I first learned it. I still love that we can use math to understand and describe the history of the universe itself. And I want little children of every shade, gender identity, sex identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, romantic orientation, (dis)ability, and religion to have access to that cosmos, to have fun with it, to find joy in it…. Access to a dark night sky — to see and be inspired by the universe as it really is — should be a human right, not a luxury for the chosen few.

Perhaps in part by virtue of being marginalized in their chosen fields, Emezi and Prescod-Weinstein are both keenly aware of the importance of different modes of knowing. For Emezi, this centers very much on their physical body and spiritual essence. They identify as ọgbanje, a kind of Igbo trickster spirit that is born into the body of a human child. They feel particularly close to the world of spirits and gods; at times closer, it seems, to that world than to our physical world, where they are read through lenses that do not pertain to them. At times this way of knowing themself can lead to an instrumentalizing view of other people that I found hard to read, in part because I often struggle with the genre of memoir and the way it (perhaps necessarily; certainly often) transforms the people in the writer’s life into side characters in the writer’s story, rather than full protagonists of their own. For instance, in a story they tell about traveling home and being taken to the shrine of the deity Ala:

Back at my human father’s clinic, the pastor exulted over how the day had gone. “God opened the way for us,” he said. “We encountered no problems! I am sure that our purpose was to speak about Jesus to that woman.” I remember marveling at his vision of the story. These four men — my father, the red neighbor, the pastor, the contact — they had all been moved by my deitymother, pawns in a mission they were completely unaware of, thinking they were serving their God when really they were carrying out Ala’s will. The contact had kicked up a fuss when it was time to pay him, emphasizing over and over again that he wouldn’t usually do anything like this, he was a Christian, he didn’t like these fetish things.

I thought, What else could my mother do for me if I asked? Who else could she move, so smoothly that they would have no idea they were even being used?

A theme throughout The Disordered Cosmos is the validity of traditional and indigenous forms of knowledge, which Prescod-Weinstein asserts ferociously from within a field that resists any kind of knowing that doesn’t come through white Western male intellectual history. She uses the example of the Native Hawaiians who have, for years, resisted observatories that have been placed on Mauna Kea, without regard for the indigenous traditions that hold that land sacred. When she was offered an opportunity at a year-long job at Mauna Kea that would have positioned her to get into a good PhD program, counterbalancing her mediocre grades that came as a result of the structural challenges faced by many marginalized folks at universities, Prescod-Weinstein turned it down in solidarity with the Native Hawaiian protestors. Her recognition that other modes of knowing than her own are valid–indeed vital!–and her pursuit of that truth at the expense of her career prospects are examples I hope to always carry with me and aspire to.

Regrettably, trauma has played all too large a role in the lives of both these authors. Prescod-Weinstein speaks with eloquent rage about her own rape by a more senior person in her field, and the lasting damage that experience has wrought on her career and her psyche.

I want to have the power to eject this memory: to force it far, far away from me. By that I mean I would like to have the power to eject this memory into the nuclear inferno that is our sun. The sun is, effectively, a series of nuclear explosions, mostly converting hydrogen into helium. Better this memory blow up inside the sun than inside of me. But this memory is written on my body so instead I have to trace the lines of force that are available to me. I look to see what work is possible. For years, I had nightlong knife fights where I was the only person present.

Emezi is often oblique about their trauma, but they are explicit about its impacts: dysphoria, chronic pain, recurring suicidal ideation. Dear Senthuran is grandiose at times, and at other times it speaks of so much pain that it is very nearly self-annihilating. But it’s clear that Emezi is claiming the space to be grandiose in ways that have rarely been tolerated by people like them–Black, trans, immigrant–though white straight men are given all the latitude in the world to self-mythologize.

In the dark of night, my demons don’t tell me I’m worthless. They tell me I am too powerful, that no one will ever want me for it, that I don’t deserve love or happy endings because I chose too much, I ate too much of the world, I refused to starve and as punishment, I will be starved.

Dear Senthuran (I keep writing Death Senthuran, which feels apt) and The Disordered Cosmos remind the reading public (I hope) of the fact that society’s exclusionary structures come at a cost: the cost of people who did not, like Emezi and Prescod-Weinstein, have the luck and the wherewithal to keep working and writing in their fields. The cost is disproportionately borne by those for whom the system was not made, but in the end, everyone within the system is the poorer for it.

The post It’s the Wanting to Know That Makes Us Matter appeared first on Reading the End.

In honor of the centennial of women’s suffrage, the New York Times is running an obituary series called “Overlooked,” where they write obituaries of people whose lives and deaths were overlooked by the Times the first go-around. (link)

Nothing quite like Myriam Gurba interviewing Akwaeke Emezi. I just read The Death of Vivek Oji and it was SUPERB (though with some content warnings if you want them). (link)

In this time of pandemic, the scramble to preserve endangered languages has taken on even greater urgency. (link)

“A defining characteristic of trauma, though, is the way it burrows like a tick into the subconscious, erasing the traces that might hold it accountable. You might not even know what’s pulling your strings.” Jess Zimmerman on living through this pandemic. (link)

Ellen can be a queer icon AND a boss who fostered an abusive workplace; and we can hold even our faves accountable for their racism and bad behavior. (link)

Self-hatred and self-consciousness are becoming A Lot in a specific genre of literature. (link)

Vivian Stephens is a founding mother of the romance genre, but she was pushed out of the genre’s history. https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/vivian-stephens-helped-turn-romance-writing-into-billion-dollar-industry/

“What does it mean for the canon of horror to almost exclusively be white? Is this intentional or not?” (link)

Likewise, who decides what counts as true crime? (You know the answer.) (link)

Lisa Lucas, the departing director of the National Book Foundation and soon to be publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books, talks about how she got to this point in her career, and how publishing is changing. (link)

The fandom of teenage girls deserves to be taken seriously. (link)

Numerous staff writers have left the CBS show All Rise, which centers on a Black female judge, because of the showrunner’s dismissiveness and ignorance around racial issues. (link)

Nonfiction publishers don’t pay for fact-checking. This is a mistake. (link)

In positive news, I have had the blessed experience of telling some new people about New Leverage, which is a great reminder to us all to watch Leverage if you haven’t already! The pilot is fuego, and every episode is about criminals doing a con to deprive wealthy jerks of their ill-gotten gains. You’ll love it! Watch it ASAP!

The post Untitled Links Round-Up Game appeared first on Reading the End.

Imagine my surprise when Pet is the gentlest of reads. Admittedly it’s dealing with a really hard issue — child sexual abuse — but it does so with such hope and tenderness. When I say that Pet is a kind read, I mean that its author is kind to its characters, and its characters are kind to each other. There’s a fundamental belief that everyone is trying their best and deserves the benefit of the doubt on that account.

But, okay! What’s the book about? Pet is set in a community called Lucille that has solved all of its problems. Lucille used to be like our world, with lots of suffering caused by not caring about each other, but Lucille had a revolution in the last generation and got rid of all that stuff. How exactly they managed such a revolution is not explained, as Pet is in setting more parable than futurefic. Jam, who rarely speaks and often signs, has two loving friends and a supportive school environment, and everything is hunky-dory until she bleeds on one of her mother’s paintings and a creature called Pet emerges from the drawing into the world. It explains to Jam that there’s a monster at her friend Redemption’s house, and that it’s a hunter come to find and destroy that monster. Jam doesn’t understand how that can be, given that the angels of the revolution got rid of all the monsters. But Pet insists that it’s so, and enlists Jam’s help to find who the monster is.

The good: I loved the setting, and it truly was a balm to me to read a book in which everyone is careful and gentle with each other. When Jam’s not ready to discuss something with her parents, they don’t push; when she knows that Redemption is angry with her, she gives him space to be angry. If you know me, you know that I love boundaries, and Pet prioritizes respecting people’s boundaries. Lucille is also a wonderfully diverse world, with different languages and cultures bumping frictionlessly into each other; though Lucille has excellent medical care (we learn that Jam didn’t run into any problems getting medical care to support her gender transition as a small child), it’s unlike many fictional utopias in that it doesn’t vaunt the elimination of disability as a marker of utopia. On the contrary, Jam’s excellent librarian, Ube, uses a wheelchair to get around.

I also, predictably, am in strong favor of raising awareness about child abuse, especially child sexual abuse — which is implied to be part of what’s going on in Redemption’s house. Pet is one of a small number of YA books that talks about child sexual abuse as it actually happens, including the likelihood that victims will be met with skepticism if they report what’s going on. We also see Jam go to the library to learn from reputable sources about what it looks like when a child is being abused. Yay for research!

The not-so-good: I don’t like parables, and Pet is extremely a parable. This is a personal preference thing, obviously, because Pet isn’t trying and failing for nuts-and-bolts worldbuilding — Emezi’s making a choice here to write a parable. I’m saying parable not to suggest the book is didactic, although it is a little, but more to say that it spends more time in the realm of symbolism than your average bear. I do not personally enjoy this type of thing. (Would allegory be better to say than parable here? I don’t know. One of those!)

My other main criticism — and I wondered if this was a result of wanting the book to be YA and aging up the protagonist to come closer to the age group that the genre mostly aims at these days — is that Jam is supposed to be fifteen, and she reads to me a lot younger than fifteen. (Redemption does, too, but Jam’s our POV character, which makes it extra-noticeable.) I don’t know exactly how to quantify this, but I felt it strongly throughout my reading of the book, that not only does she seem younger than fifteen, but she’s treated younger than fifteen by the adults in her life. I kept thinking she was twelve or even ten, then flipping back to the start of the book to double-check. Did anyone else feel this way?

Despite this book not being a perfect fit for me, I still admired it as a book and Emezi as an author, and I’m excited for whatever they’re going to do next. (Hopefully not a parable/allegory thing, oh dear, those are really not for me.)

Note: I received this e-galley for review consideration from the publisher, via Netgalley. This has not influenced the contents of my review.

The post Review: Pet, Akwaeke Emezi appeared first on Reading the End.

2019 JENNY IS FUN.

Now that literally everyone but me has done their best of 2018 post, I thought I’d enter the game. You have ceased to care but I CANNOT BE STOPPED. We’re breaking this business down by categories, so let’s get into it. First up: YA!

I read a ton this year, but somehow I don’t feel like I got in as much YA reading as I wanted! Luckily there were some standouts. The Summer of Jordi Perez is a doll of an f/f contemporary romcom, with a fat aspiring fashion designer MC, and plenty of emotional negotiation. It felt like reading an injection of sunshine. Seafire, by Natalie Parker, is the perfect ladies seafaring adventure that I needed to round out my year of reading. If you enjoyed Sarah Tolcser’s excellent Song of the Current series (I did!), Seafire is a good readalike. The girls in it are fierce, and their friendships are the book’s center. It’s also got marvelous worldbuilding. Hugely recommend. (Thanks to Charlotte for the rec!)

I have raved in this space a bunch already about Anna-Marie McLemore, but brace yourself for a bit more raving about her latest, Blanca and Roja. It’s about two sisters in a family that always has two girls; and when the younger one reaches a certain age that I cannot currently remember, one of the two girls is transformed into a swan. Blanca and Roja deconstructs the good-sister-evil-sister trope in ways that are consistently unexpected and lovely. The consistency with which McLemore produces these beautifully written queer Latina fairy tales blows me away. She’s one of those authors who makes me feel lucky to be a reader. (If you liked Sarah McCarry’s books, McLemore is similarly dreamy and gorgeous.)

(Hey, when is Sarah McCarry going to write another book?)

I’ve noticed that the less literary fiction I read, the fewer authors I read from other countries. I’m hoping to change this in 2019! I’d like to read more genre fiction by authors from other countries, even though I recognize that less of it gets published in America even than the heavily-American literary fiction genre. Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, translated by Megan McDowell, came to me via the Tournament of Books, which I was half-assedly trying to participate in by real-quick reading a short entrant before bed. I do not recommend this strategy. Fever Dream is incredibly scary — one of those horror books where you are deeply uneasy from the get-go, and the feeling of unease persists long after the book is over.

Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater reminds me of Helen Oyeyemi a little, in the dreaminess of the writing and the perpetual uncertainty about what’s real. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel about a Nigerian child who has more than one self inside her. I am not sure how else to describe this book. Trigger warning for rape. The writing is unbelievably gorgeous, the book is deeply strange, I loved it.

Occasionally someone will come to me asking for a book rec where the writing, the characters, and the plot are all superb. This is a very hard rec request to fulfill, and I pretty much just always shove Fingersmith at them. But now I have another book that meets these requirements, and it is Esi Edugyan’s wonderful historical novel, Washington Black. Though the first bit of the story is hard to read (it’s set on a plantation in Barbados in the early 1800s), it’s absolutely worth pushing through. Washington Black is a slave who gets taken on as a sort of apprentice and assistant to the plantation owner’s brother, a scientist and abolitionist who is working less on abolishing slavery than he is trying to build an airship. I was absolutely blown away by this book: It explores so many themes and ideas and histories without ever feeling overstuffed, and I wrote down approximately ten million quotes from it because of how insightful and interesting the writing is.

My most-recommended book of the year — although partly because I didn’t read Washington Black until December — is Tara Westover’s Educated. Recommended to me by the wonderful For Real podcast, it’s a memoir about a girl who grew up in a extreme survivalist Mormon family that didn’t get her a birth certificate or send her to school. I can’t overstate how bonkers this book is, and I 90% recommended it to people to ensure that I wouldn’t have to be alone with all the shit that went down in this woman’s life. It’s about the ways abuse can sit beside love in a family, and Westover does not downplay her ongoing trauma.

My other two best-of-nonfiction picks are about gender and race and how they function in our lives. Ijeoma Iluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race is a terrific primer on some of the most common questions and ideas that come up in conversations about race in America. She’s typically sharp and critical, exploring the many, many ways racism continues to shape American life in systemic ways. (If you haven’t yet read her interview with Rachel Dolezal, you should do so now.) Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is an quite-academic book about sexism that’s worth plowing through if you can. I screamed YES so many times while reading it.

The wonderful Bridget put me onto Jade City with her relentless advocacy of it, and I am not sorry she did. It’s kind of a mafia/martial arts/magic story set in an alternate universe where jade gives you magical strength and a group of powerful families controls the country in a delicate balance. Fonda Lee’s worldbuilding is superb, down to gestures and phrases that make her world feel textured and real. I loved it and I can’t wait for the sequel. The Descent of Monsters, by JY Yang, is actually the third in its novella series, but my favorite in the series so far. It’s written partly as a bureaucratic report, which is — of course — the way to my heart. I’ve loved watching Yang grow as a writer over the course of the Tensorate series, and I remain perpetually in delight to see what they do next.

SL Huang’s Zero Sum Game rivals Seafire for making me just feel happy while reading it. It’s just a damn good adventure that reminds you why you like reading. Cas Russell is a math genius and minor criminal who gets sucked into a corporate conspiracy that goes far beyond anything she could have imagined. Grudging respect is built. Math is used to do fights. It fucking rules. (Sequel to follow in 2019 – yay!)

And that’s it for 2018! Did you read any of these? What were some of your favorites for the year? Are you going to read Washington Black or do I need to pester you about it some more?

The post The Best of 2018 appeared first on Reading the End.

Emily Asher Perrin’s Tor.com piece on identifying with uncool characters spoke to my nerdy, rule-abiding heart.

Akwaeke Emezi talks about finding a path to a truer identity, through Nigerian spiritual beliefs and Western surgeries.

This interview with Jia Tolentino reminds me of so many reasons why I dig her. If you’re not familiar with her work, familiarize yourself! She’s got a book coming out!

Gabrielle Bellot writes brilliantly and eloquently on the colonial thinking that produces remarks about shithole countries, and how every country has “a grandeur in spirit worth fighting for.”

A defense of Book Five Capslock Harry.

Millennial culture is this Twitter thread. (Major spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi contained herein.)

Amal El-Mohtar is taking over for NK Jemisin writing an SFF column for the New York Times Book Review. Two excellent reviewers for an excellent column! What a world!

Some elements of the trailer for The Shape of Water made me suspicious, and I decided not to see it. Elsa Sjunneson-Henry (who did see it) explores the film’s failures of disability representation. (One amazingly easy improvement would have been to cast a disabled actress in the main role.)

On good guys and bad guys and how old-time stories didn’t really have them.

“While men weren’t looking, women built a genre that tackles love, sex, pleasure, class, money, feminism, masculinity, and equality.” Romance novels! (With lots of my fave romance authors being quoted, so hooray for that too.)

Mimi Mondal offers a brief history of South Asian science fiction and fantasy.

The grand jury prize at Sundance this year went to a YA adaptation, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Woot!

A twitter thread about how to fight in a dress.

One of my 2018 goals is to read more SFF short fiction. Luckily, I have the writers at Lady Business backing me up, including this MASSIVE post of 2017 favorites. What a time to be alive.

Rebecca Traister is so sensible, even when she’s talking about Katie Roiphe who I find to be mostly nonsense.

This interview with the guy who gets Super Bowl halftime shows on the field in LITERALLY SIX MINUTES is really fascinating from a process perspective.

Have a wonderful weekend, friends, and if you’re a Mardi Gras celebrator, have a wonderful Mardi Gras!

The post Too Sleepy to Think of a Title for My Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.