Good?

Good.

The book is E. R. Ramzipoor’s The Ventriloquists. Based on a true story, The Ventriloquists is about a small team of Belgian resistance fighters who embark on a scheme to make fun of the Nazis. That’s their only goal, make fun of the Nazis, make occupied Belgium laugh at the Nazis. Every one of them goes into the caper with the understanding that they will not survive. Except, in the end, some of them do. The lesbians survive.

I should stipulate that this is not the only virtue of The Ventriloquists — far from it. Right before I started reading The Ventriloquists, I was having a conversation with my mum about how I don’t like historical fiction. “It’s so samey,” I said. “I’m tired of reading about Nazis,” she said. “Not all historical fiction is about Nazis,” I said. “OH ISN’T IT?” said my mum, which I had to admit was a compelling counterargument. Then I came home and started reading a book that wasn’t just historical fiction but historical fiction about (resisting) Nazis, and that was the fall (in love) before which pride goeth. Ramzipoor has a wonderful narrative voice, and I was captivated by the story nearly from the first page.

The Ventriloquists is the story of a team of resisters who are tapped (by Nazis) to make a fake version of a Resistance propaganda newspaper that secretly is designed to sap the energy and will of the Resistance. But the resisters, led by the vivid and energetic Marc Aubrion, decide to do a propaganda mission of their own. They will make a spoof version of the Belgian collaborator newspaper Le Soir, which pokes fun at the Nazis, at Hitler, and the whole German propaganda machine. They have nineteen days to do it. At the end of those nineteen days, their newspaper will come out and they will all, presumably, be sent to prison camps and/or killed. Some of the caper crew are figures from real life, like Aubrion. Others, like the queer brothel madam Lada Tarkovich, are Ramzipoor’s inventions.

One of Ramzipoor’s projects in this book is to write queer heroes back into a history that works so hard to erase and deny queerness. The Ventriloquists is very centrally a story about queer resistance, which is another reason I have emphasized the fact that THE LESBIANS SURVIVE. When it becomes apparent that a particular judge, a woman called Andree Grandjean, can help the endeavor, Aubrion urges Lada to go seduce that judge. He says that if she gets Grandjean on their side, then something good will have come from her being queer. But she tells him, sternly, that her queerness is already good; and the book backs her on it. The lie is the bad thing. When Lada decides to seduce Grandjean anyway, and something good comes of it, the good outcome is queer joy, and the bad cause it sprang from was Lada’s intent to deceive — the exact inverse, in other words, of what Aubrion perceived to be valuable / shameful.

(Lada Tarkovich, by the way, is fucking terrific. If I hadn’t loved the tone and writing of this book, which I did, I would have stayed anyway, for Lada Tarkovich. In many ways, Aubrion is the star of this book — vivid, visionary, odd, kind, imaginative — but Lada is the type of character I would die for. She hides her idealism imperfectly, under prickles and pragmatism.)

On the other side of things is a gay Jewish forger, David Spiegelman, who has been forced into service for the Nazis on pain of meeting the same fate as the rest of his family. He works for August Wolff, a Gestapo officer who is responsible for, among other things, overseeing book burnings. Though he has hitherto been a good servant to the Nazi occupiers, Spiegelman secretly casts his lot in with Aubrion and the others, finally discovering a way to use his talents for mimicry in the cause of good rather than evil. He’s serious, and afraid, and angry, and he is trying to find some way — in a world that tells him over and over again that he’s unimportant — to matter.

The Ventriloquists is the story of one of my favorite types of heroism, small compared to the scope of the evil it faces, but shot through with grandeur in its belief that humans can survive and keep fighting, no matter how dark the times. It’s a story about outcasts and queer nerds who act to the utmost of their courage, intelligence, and resource to beat back the darkness for their fellow Belgians. And the lesbians survive.

The post A Review of a Nazis Book Where the Lesbians Survive appeared first on Reading the End.

“Elegy of a Lanthornist,” by M. E. Bronstein (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 6700 words) excerpts the annotated journals of a historian of the Lantern Isle and the Lantern Poet, who wrote most famously an elegy of his beloved Lady Firefly. The historian, Isabel Hayes-Reyna, disappeared after apparently suffering some kind of breakdown, and her journals are consequently fragmented and strange; the footnotes carefully explain what elements of her narrative are likely to be true and which are fancy.

The story follows Isabel’s dawning realization that the Lantern Poet, whose work she has loved all her life, may not have spoken the truth about his lady love. It’s a nifty parallel to the structure of the story, as the reader also has to read past the authority of the academic who annotates and explains Isabel’s work and life. The question of this story is about the disconnect between art and life, and there is a question of violation that lies at its heart: When an artist depicts another person, what is being taken from that person? What pieces of her story are being left out? Bronstein takes up the question in a wonderfully, creepily literal way; the story’s final lines will leave you shuddering.

Having read An Unkindness of Ghosts, I expected to be thoroughly heartwrenched by Rivers Solomon’s “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” (6970 words, Tor.com) — and I was, although not in the ways I expected. The story opens with an enslaved girl, Sully, killing all the people who owned her, after the man of the house was killed in the Civil War. But her act of murder unsettles the etherworld, and it sends a girl named Ziza, who was alive before and dead before, and now is alive again. For every life Sully took, the etherworld gives her back a new life.

I loved Ziza, and Sully. Sully is so bruised and angry from the life she’s lived that she struggles to imagine a life for herself, while Ziza is all vision and hope. She is curious and fun and in love with the world, and I cherished her for loving Sully and helping Sully to see her own worth. Eventually, they form a community, Sully and Ziza and the other ghosts, and find ways to protect it. (Necromancy, for once, really does pay!) “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” has so much murder and sadness in it that it feels weird to say it’s life-affirming, but I felt genuinely life-affirmed and hopeful, reading it. It’s the story of a woman coming to realize that her life and her world are worth fighting for.

If you enjoy reading analyses of why everyone on Twitter noisily insists they want to be murdered by hot women they admire (I do), you’ll definitely want to check out Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s “Sweet Dreams Are Made of You” (2417 words, Nightmare). As with “Elegy of a Lanthornist,” it’s told in a nontraditional story structure, with clips from Wiki posts and news articles interspersed with second-person narration. It’s about a virtual reality game called “Vore,” wherein a girl with no name devours you and a partner (you have to bring someone else with you if you want to play).

File this one firmly under “weird shit” and do not read if cannibalism unnerves you — but Wolfmoor does an incredible job, in this short piece, of making the reader uncomfortable (with cannibalism) while quietly also introducing the idea that Things Are Not Right (like, even not-righter than consensual cannibalism).

You may file a complaint, or expound on your concerns, but understand that if you dream about the girl, if you dream about the game outside our facilities, there is nothing we can do. Some people find the experience so intoxicating they become addicted.

No, of course not you.

It probably says something about These Troubled Times that I’ve got two stories in here about women committing mass murders. But there is something ineffably good about the idea of women created for bondage breaking free of their constraints and just fucking shit up to the limits of their capacity. “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” is gloriously creepy and nightmarish.

Nightmare is a new addition to my short fiction reading schedule, and I have been very delighted with it. This issue featured two stories that I loved, the second of which is Letitia Trent (great name)’s “Wilderness” (5900 words). Horror always works best for me when its events are as close as possible to the real world, where a few things just aren’t quite right. “Wilderness” takes place in an airport, with all the rarefied weirdness of airports. Krista is traveling alone, and her plane keeps getting delayed; and as the delays continue, the passengers start to become aware that something has gone wrong outside the airport.

“Wilderness” is decidedly Shirley Jackson-ish, a higher compliment than which I cannot give. Trent’s writing is wry and detached and humorous:

The blonde woman spoke energetically about her two dachshunds, Buckeye and Alexis. They liked to eat the carpet, she said, so she had soaked the edges of the carpet in Tabasco sauce, which was, incidentally, the same color as the carpet. The pin-curled woman asked how they managed to walk on the carpet if it was soaked with Tabasco sauce. The blonde shrugged, as if this were a mystery to her as well, though a boring one that she had no interest in pursuing.

It makes the wrongness of the airport wait particularly unnerving. And like Shirley Jackson, Trent isn’t interested in giving us any answers. The story feels like the first act of a play whose second act we can imagine all too well — we get to see all the heightening paranoia, all the possible early signs of catastrophe, and then Trent gives us a wink and drops the curtain. I loved it.

What about you, friends? What short fiction has captured your fancy this month?

The post Shortly Ever After: September 2019 appeared first on Reading the End.

It’s also the start of the second half of the year, which is a good time to reassess goals. Looking back on the first half of 2019, I know that I have struggled — and I think a lot of people have — to keep hope alive in the face of political obstacles that often seem insurmountable. I know that I have needed the knowledge that other people are still hopeful, and still fighting. I know that there are going to be some weeks where I can get by, and other weeks where I feel like all the skin has been flayed off my body.

So this is my new goal for 2019: One day out of every week, no matter’s happening I’m going to be hopeful. I’m going to say hopeful things and make hopeful choices, and I’m going to believe that fighting for justice will have an impact. Because if there is one thing the arc of human history does teach, it’s that change is slow, and it depends on people not giving up.

This doesn’t mean I won’t be fighty on other days. I’m still going to call my elected officials when stuff comes up, and I’m still going to protest concentration camps, and all that stuff, and that will be day-of-the-week agnostic. The only change is going to be that one day out of every single week, I will believe with all my heart and with no doubt that we are going to win, and America is going to become the country I want it to be. If I have to fake it I’ll fucking fake it. This whole thing isn’t a marathon, it’s a relay, and my goal for the second half of 2019 is to carry the hope baton one day a week.

(If it goes good I may up it to two days a week! Who knows!)

I’m picking Wednesdays because Juneteenth was on a Wednesday this week (and I love Juneteenth), and also because the middle of the week seems like a good time to try for hope. I’d love it if other people wanted to pick out hope days too. And I’d extra love it if you’d drop a line in the comments and tell me how you keep yourself going when everything looks so goddamn grim.

The post On Wednesdays We Wear Hope appeared first on Reading the End.