Tomorrow is International Women’s Day and here in the U.S., it’s Women’s History Month all March long. In that spirit, let’s spotlight some graphic novels and comic books that feature fascinating, beautiful, and badass trans girls and women!

Apsara Engine by Bishakh Som This award-winning anthology collection features unnerving supernatural stories about all kinds of women as they navigate the dangers and thrills of modern life.

Bad Dream by Nicole Maines and Rye Hickman Maines portrayed Dreamer, the first trans superhero on TV, on The CW’s Supergirl. Now she has written this graphic novel about her groundbreaking character, Nia Nal, who has suddenly inherited powers she doesn’t think she was meant to have.

The Bride Was a Boy by Chii Chii tells her life story in this upbeat memoir, exploring how she was raised as a boy, transitioned into the woman she always wanted to be, and slowly fell in love with a man who adores her exactly as she is!

Enjoying what you’re reading? Support the work we do as an independent media resource by becoming an All Access member, and unlock our entire library of articles and a growing catalog of community features. Sign up now for only $6/month!

Sorting through library news (or any news, really) feels a little like sticking your hand into a pit of hungry alligators. It’s mass firings of federal workers, bad management strategies from someone who isn’t authorized to manage anything at the federal level, book ban legislation…the list goes on. I’ve waded through the chaos and found a few news stories that managed to stand out from the blaring cacophony of WTF-ery. Time to pay attention.

In a shady-ass move, the Library of Congress released a list of proposed subject heading changes on February 18th, which included changing “Mexico, Gulf of” to “America, Gulf of” and changing Denali to Mount McKinley. They also set February 18th as the deadline for public comment submissions, even though the list was only posted earlier that day. When you consider how long it normally takes to make changes to existing subject headings, this rapid turnaround is hella sus.

Hoopla Cuts Back on “AI-Generated Slop”

Hoopla has announced it will do more to prevent the spread of low-quality AI-generated books on its platform. Although the exact details of the plan are unclear, hoopla has already implemented measures like revising its collection development policy, giving librarians a way to contact hoopla directly to better manage the catalog, and removing “summary titles” from all vendors, with the exception of series like CliffNotes. This is all well and good, but considering the sheer number of low-quality and AI-generated titles already in their catalog, hoopla has its work cut out for them.

Valentine’s Day is over, which means we’re no longer in the throes of Cuffing Season. But some of us—including the characters in this book—are desperate for love all year round.

I picked up this thriller the day after Valentine’s Day, and it was the perfect post-love season read. Forget about pure love and romance. None of these characters can be trusted, there are surprises around every turn, and nothing is what it seems.

Enjoying what you’re reading? Support the work we do as an independent media resource by becoming an All Access member, and unlock our entire library of articles and a growing catalog of community features. Sign up now for only $6/month!

Cross My Heart by Megan Collins Rosie Lachlan has not had it easy. A year ago, she was dumped in her wedding dress. Then she discovered she needed a heart transplant. Now she’s got a new heart, is working at her parents’ bridal salon, and despite everything she’s been through, she still dreams of her happily ever after. Things have been tough for Rosie, but being so near death has given her a new perspective on life (and a fresh cotton candy pink hairstyle). But Rosie is the type of person who has her little fixations and obsessions. Ever since her heart transplant, she’s been obsessed with learning more about her donor. She’s convinced her heart donor was Daphne Thorne, the wife of famous author Morgan Thorne. Rosie starts to e-mail with Morgan anonymously through DonorConnect, and the more she discovers about him, the more she’s certain she is right about who her donor was. And if Rosie has Morgan’s wife’s heart, maybe she and Morgan are meant to be together.

My father has crossed many borders. Born in northern Việt Nam under French rule in 1933, he was educated in a French Catholic school. More than eighty years later, a widower, he could still sing fragments of French songs when we sat together at the dining table. The meal I could prepare which he most enjoyed was filet mignon, medium rare, with a glass of red wine. He had a cupboard full of Louis Jadot Beaujolais, for when he liked something, he bought it in bulk. When he stopped being able to eat meat and drink wine, I took the last two bottles of Louis Jadot and brought them home with me, where they remain untouched. Perhaps I will drink one when he passes away. Perhaps I will open the second decades from now and see what I remember when I taste it, even if all I will taste is spoilt wine. 

By then, my father will have long ago passed across the last border any of us will see. I know of at least two other borders that he crossed during his life. In 1954, as a newlywed at twenty-one with his seventeen-year-old wife, my father left his childhood home and moved south across the border, where Việt Nam had been partitioned into a communist north and anticommunist south following the defeat of French colonizers by Vietnamese revolutionaries. My mother’s entire family chose to leave the north, along with eight hundred thousand other Vietnamese Catholics fearing communist persecution. My father’s family chose to stay, so my father left behind his parents, his younger sister, and three younger brothers. He would not see them again for forty years. Ulysses was away from home for only twenty years. Does my father’s journey away from home and back to it four decades later deserve the name of an epic? If not, what form should my father’s story take?

The question of form and its relationship to a life lived interests me as a writer and as a border crosser, as my father’s son and as a father myself. A half century after my father left his childhood home, I visited the compound. My aunt had married and moved out long ago, but my three paternal uncles still live there, along with many of their children and grandchildren. From my youth until my visit and past then until the present, my parents have sent home money to the relatives every year to help them survive. On this visit, I gave all the adults envelopes of cash, the amounts determined by my father, and thought about what my life would have been like if my parents had never left in 1954, or in 1975, when they fled from Sài Gòn and crossed yet another border to the United States. If I am inclined to see the journeys of my parents as heroic, the writer Amitava Kumar pushes back against the praise for those who cross borders: the immigrants, the refugees, the undocumented, the expatriates, the tourists, the settlers, the conquerors. He writes that “It is not the immigrant but the ones who stay behind who are the true unvanquished.”

It is safe to say that perceptions of migrants are contradictory. In their countries of origin, they are sometimes celebrated for having embarked on adventures and sometimes criticized as having abandoned their homes. In the countries of their arrival, they can appear as terrifying threats in another people’s history or be welcomed as fresh blood. If they face hostility and suspicion, migrants might feel the need to insert themselves into their new nation’s chronicles of conquest. The migrant’s heroism can then harmonize with their host nation’s self-image, as well as affirming that nation’s hospitality and generosity.

We are delighted to announce that Elijah Bailey will receive this year’s George Plimpton Prize and that Julien Columeau and Sana R. Chaudhry will receive the Susannah Hunnewell Prize. The prizes will be presented at our annual Spring Revel on April 1 in New York, cochaired by Laurie and Oskar Eustis and MCed by Lena Dunham. We’ll also be honoring Anne Carson with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature, which will be presented by Ben Whishaw. Prizewinners are selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors.

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent by recognizing an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Jesse Ball, Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Yiyun Li, and Ottessa Moshfegh.

Elijah Bailey’s story “Social Promotion,” published in issue no. 247 (Spring 2024), follows a girl who performs in an original, half-improvised school play written for her Great Black Women of History class. Bailey was a John and Renée Grisham Fellow in fiction at the University of Mississippi. The Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

“Social Promotion” by Elijah Bailey is laugh-out-loud funny, narrated by Derajanae in a voice full of comedy, pathos, and joy. She is at an awards ceremony at a “last-chance alternative school” in a former office space with “one of them spinning doors you can trap people in,” sitting behind her teacher who makes “a bigger deal out of everything than it is” and next to her mother and baby sister, Racey, who wears a onesie with cars on it. Derajanae has written a play to be performed at the ceremony, but first she has to listen to a boy who can’t read call out the names of the winners. “Sound it out,” she thinks. “Guess better.” He has yet to say her name.

Derajanae got kicked out of her last school “for fighting too good,” and she’s due at the park for a fight right now—but first she has to star in her play as Sojourner Truth. “Me and Miss Marie had to compromise on the play,” she says. “She ain’t want no foul language and no making light of violence. During rehearsal she kept pecking at it and pecking at it until it was only kind of mine.” We watch the play unfold as a raucous farce; naturally, Derajanae manages to make it more hers. During the applause, she thinks, “I had done something big and good, and my ears were burning hot.” But the story isn’t over yet. Keeping the reader in what feels like a gentle suspense until the end, Bailey has the last word, a surprise that resonates in layers—it’s first funny, then more and more profound.

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

From William Stixrud and Ned Johnson’s The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child: A Workbook (Penguin Life):

Below we’ve listed some research-backed statements about what an accurate model of reality looks like:

    …

What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl’s diary, with its tiny lock and key, testifies to the impulse to keep parts of ourselves hidden, but it’s impossible to look at a locked diary without imagining breaking it open.

What to do then, with the published diary? With its lock removed, its interior offered to the world not only as exposure but as form: a genre beholden to the insight that rises from immediacy rather than retrospection. Many writers’ diaries have been published, but far fewer have been published in their lifetimes—and none carry the singular acuity, wit, and electric grace of Helen Garner’s. An Australian national treasure known for her novels of domestic nuance and entanglement (Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach) and journalism of grand sorrow and fierce controversy (The First Stone, This House of Grief), Garner has given us diaries that read like they are inventing a new language made from utterly familiar materials: fresh, raw, vibrating with life. “Like being given a painting you love gleaming with the still wet paint,” as the writer Helen Elliott put it. They are seductively loose and nimble, delivering shards of experience rather than an overdetermined narrative, pivoting from sharpened skewers of observation (“The writers’ festival. It’s like being barbecued”) to a clear-eyed claiming of pleasure (“tear meat off a chicken and stuff it into her mouth”), swerving from deep reckonings with romantic intimacy and dissolution to sudden, perfect aphorisms hidden like Easter eggs in the grass: “Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.”

The writer Catherine Lacey once brilliantly described the difficulty of writing about experiences you’re still living as “trying to make a bed while you’re still in it,” but as I read Garner’s diaries, I kept thinking that perhaps not every bed needs to be made. Sometimes we want the unmade beds, with messy sheets and sprawled out bodies stretching and spooning, the fossils of curled hairs on the pillow, the faint salt of dried sweat.

Far from reading like B-roll footage, these diaries feel magnificent and sui generis, beholden to no rhythms or logic but their own, simultaneously seductive and staggering, a blend of pillow talk, bar gossip, and eavesdropping on therapy. They offer an intoxicating, astute account of the deep emotional movements of Garner’s life over two decades— two marriages and divorces, the flowering of her literary career, and her daughter’s coming-of-age—but they always live in the weeds, built of the grain and texture of her days. No small part of their brilliance stems from their faith that there is no meaningful separation between these realms of inquiry: that reckoning with human purpose and the anguished possibilities of human love always happens within, and not above, the realm of “trivial” daily experience. Which is to say: in their form as well as their content, they reveal where meaning dwells in our lives (everywhere), and how we might excavate it. “In my heart,” Garner has said, “I always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote.”

Been too busy to keep up with all the comic book news lately? I’ve got you covered!

News From DC and Marvel

A hearty and heartfelt congratulations to Jenny Blake Isabella, best known for co-creating Black Lightning, who came out as trans earlier this month.Captain America: Brave New World opened to mixed reviews and massive receipts.Rob Liefeld did not have a marvel-ous time at the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere and is now making it Marvel’s problem — namely, by cutting all ties with them.The Thunderbolts* trailer debuted during some football game earlier this month.Michael B. Jordan’s position on Jonathan Majors’ domestic violence conviction is deeply unfortunate, to say the least.Variety ranked its 100 greatest TV performances of the 21st century (so far). I won’t spoil it entirely, but superhero fans should definitely check out Numbers 71, 64, and 13.If you’re a fan of both Marvel and My Hero Academia, you’re going to want to check out these Japanese promotional posters that combine both franchises.

News From the Wider Comics World

Akio Iyoku, one of Dragon Ball‘s executive producers, recently did an interview about the role that franchise creator Akira Toriyama had in the anime’s development.ND Stevenson, best known for creating such popular graphic novels as Lumberjanes and Nimona, is venturing into prose novels. Scarlet Morning, the first of an illustrated duology, will be released this September.Book Riot’s Megan Mabee has thoughtfully rounded up some great teen sci-fi comics for your reading pleasure.The Binc Foundation has awarded scholarships to four comic book retailers to be put towards attending the ComicsPRO comic industry meeting later this month.

I love everything Billy-Ray Belcourt has ever written, so it’s no big surprise that his latest, a collection of short stories, blew me out of the water. I had a rare experience while reading this book where I kept putting it down, thinking, “I cannot possibly read another sentence as beautiful as this one.” And then, a paragraph later, another sentence so utterly alive and breathtaking that, once again, I’d have to pause for a moment before continuing. If you are looking for stories that will make you feel alive, stories that confront Canada’s colonial violence but never center it, stories that are animated, always, by deep love—you need to read this book ASAP.

Enjoying what you’re reading? Support the work we do as an independent media resource by becoming an All Access member, and unlock our entire library of articles and a growing catalog of community features. Sign up now for only $6/month!

Coexistence by Billy-Ray Belcourt These stories are mostly (though not exclusively) set in and around Edmonton. Belcourt’s narrators are mostly queer Cree men—artists, poets, professors, and students—struggling with how to live and love and how to use language to describe and make sense of their living. One story details the beginning of a relationship; another a different relationship’s end. They take place at literary festivals and in drab motel rooms, on highways and in living rooms. Every story is pulsing and clattering with aliveness. Every story is a beautiful and specific expression of Indigenous love. I’ve always admired the way Belcourt writes theory into his fiction. His characters take thinking seriously but they also belly laugh. They use theory and scholarship as a way to remake language and remake the world, but they wrestle just as meaningfully with the systems of oppression that affect their material realities. In these stories sex and poetry are equally important; the life of the mind and the life of the body are not separate. It makes for incredibly intimate reading. How do you make a poem? How do you fall in love in the wake of ongoing colonial violence? What does it mean to listen well—to your mother, your students, your lover, yourself? Does art matter? How do you rebuild your life after being released from prison? What about the prairies and the ghosts that live there, the Alberta wind, your childhood home? What are they telling you about how to live? These questions are not abstract, as they live in the bodies of Belcourt’s characters and in the language they use to make sense of the world.

People often say that life imitates art, but sometimes art imitates reality television shows. It make sense that reality TV has crept into so many of our favorite horror novels. After all, these unscripted TV series have become such a huge part of our lives. Who isn’t watching The Traitors, the campy and suspensive reality competition show where contestants murder each other to win? Sounds like the perfect setting for a horror story, does it not?

Here are three horror novels that turn the world of reality TV into a dark, twisted place. Or at least…slightly more dark and twisted than it is usually.

Enjoying what you’re reading? Support the work we do as an independent media resource by becoming an All Access member, and unlock our entire library of articles and a growing catalog of community features. Sign up now for only $6/month!

Grim Root by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam Two of the books on this list are inspired by one of the biggest mainstays in reality TV, The Bachelor. Who can blame authors for wanting to write horror based on that show? What’s more horrifying than agreeing to marry a man you barely know after only, like, two dates? Especially when he’s been dating 20ish other women at the same time? In Grim Root, a Bachelor-like TV show gets ghosty when the contestants find themselves spending a week in a haunted house. But when the bachelor dies, all bets are off.

Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen This novel is about a reality TV dating series called The Catch which is definitely not anything like The Bachelor (except it totally is). The bachelor is down to his final four ladies, and the crew heads to a remote island in the Pacific Northwest to film their next round of dates. What could possibly go wrong, right? Little does the cast and crew of The Catch know what awaits them on the island. Patricia might be a little furry and a little violent. But mostly she’s just misunderstood. All she really wants to do is cuddle.

Having written this column since mid-2021, I sometimes forget what I’ve covered. In some ways, I haven’t written anything new in the world of book censorship because the tactics, goals, and outcomes have not changed much at all over the course of this significant era of censorship. The guide to 56 tasks you can take to end book censorship? It’s literally the same guide as every other “how to fight book bans” guide since 2021, but it’s repackaged as a more granular checklist to make attending to those tasks easier. You’re still ultimately showing up to board meetings, voting, and sharing verified information about the latest news in book censorship.

This week, rather than drafting something fresh, let’s take the time to look back at some of the Literary Activism columns you may have missed from the previous several Januarys and Februarys. Catch up on what you may have missed, and remember that there is nothing new in the book—just different names and faces trying to get their 15 minutes of manufactured outrage fame. We are seeing the results of these actions play out and if you’ve been watching or engaged, nothing is surprising. That doesn’t mean it isn’t infuriating, disgusting, or not in need to pushback. It just means that the groundwork’s been being laid so it is simply not surprising in the least.

Be Your Own Library Advocate (2024)

“Public libraries are not play places. They are not cooling centers or warming centers or mental health clinics. Public libraries are not bars, nor are they essential services. Public libraries are places of information and access to information. They are places that ardently defend the rights of every person to seek out that information. This is fundamental and yet not highlighted or underlined enough. Public libraries are cornerstones of democratic and civic engagement, not safety nets for broken systems elsewhere. They might take on those roles, but that’s not their purpose.

No one else can raise your social value for you. You have to do it yourself. You have the data here to support it.”

The Millions’ seasonal previews have become anticipated, admired, and extremely useful events in the book world. Sophia Stewart, an editor at The Millions and Publishers Weekly, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about how it gets made.

The Millions has been doing comprehensive previews for a while. How did you come to be a part of it?

It really is amazing that The Millions has been publishing its Most Anticipated book previews for 20 years—the first one had something like 15 titles, most of which were by big-name authors. Since then, the lists have evolved to be more thorough and to spotlight emerging authors or small press books that might not enjoy the same marketing muscle as the big names at big houses. I joined The Millions as deputy editor in early 2022, and within a few months became the editor of the site, at which point I took over the Most Anticipated previews. I published my first preview at the start of 2023.

In her new gripping memoir Catherine Simone Gray reckons with the questions what happens when survivors become mothers and what if we give half the attention to understanding our pleasure as we have to our pain? Gray reminds us that even amid pain, our bodies can teach us new truths about our capacity to heal and experience pleasure. Proud Flesh rewrites the body of the mother beyond the borders—bold, defiant, and heart-stoppingly true, it’s an unputdownable memoir and a force of nature.

“Why the obsession with motherhood?” writes author and journalist Gabriela Wiener in her book Nine Moons, translated by Jessica Powell. And it’s a question so many writers turn their minds to. It’s perhaps not surprising. Motherhood, in one way or another, affects us all—even the not having or the not doing can create tensions, pain, and societal implications that many have to grapple with. But perhaps more interestingly to writers and other creative minds, it overlaps with so many other significant subjects in our lives, like power and wealth; race, gender, and sexuality; language and culture; science and the environment, among others. Among the many books to choose from, I found that I was personally drawn to titles that were more international, translated from languages other than English. I’m grateful to the talented translators of these motherhood memoirs. Their work allows me to read more widely and think deeply and intentionally about what it means to be a mother all over the world.

6 Motherhood Memoirs

Breathe by Imani Perry In Breathe, author, critic, and historian Imani Perry writes movingly about what it means to raise Black sons in America. It is at once a letter to her sons, a memoir sifting through her life and her son’s formative years, and a resounding challenge to society to see her sons—and all Black children—as precious and deserving of humanity. At one point in the midst of Breathe, Perry writes, “I live for the life of the mind and heart.” It’s a simple statement in the midst of so much that’s insightful and profound in the collection but it struck me as a perfect capturing of the book. Breathe is a thoughtful and intimate glimpse into one of the brightest minds writing today but there is an equal amount of care and heart. It’s a special combination that I’ve treasured.

Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Jessica Powell Gabriela Wiener is an award-winning Peruvian journalist and author who is known for her wild explorations of sex, identity, and gender. Her personal accounts in the book Sexographies, also translated by Jessica Powell, range from infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison to detailed encounters at sex clubs and being whipped by a dominatrix in public. In Nine Moons, she approaches her pregnancy and motherhood in a similar full-bodied approach. One of my favorite early images in the book is her growing pile of books on motherhood next to her recent research on various sexual subcultures. Her work is fierce and funny and brilliant, and it’s a necessary and exhilarating addition to the genre as she discusses so much that is often left unsaid in other books about motherhood—like her abortions and her lust.

Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes by Jazmina Barrera, translated by Christina MacSweeney I loved Jazmina Barrera’s debut work of nonfiction, On Lighthouses, translated by the legend Christina MacSweeney, where she melds memoir and literary history while examining what lighthouses mean to her and more widely to us all through the works of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ingmar Bergman, and many others. So it’s no surprise that I would love her exploration of pregnancy, motherhood, and art. Like On Lighthouses, Linea Negra is a memoir and also so much more. Barrera chronicles her own pregnancy and early motherhood while also reflecting on representations of motherhood in art and literature. I was particularly struck by the collection of resources she presents at the back of the book—poems, short stories, interviews, and essays—that she read while breastfeeding, the act of the artist feeding herself as she feeds her child. This urgent and intimate book is one of the most stunning I’ve ever read.

An enduring love of food has a way of seeping into every corner of your life. As a foodie and a bibliophile, I personally can’t get enough books centered around bold flavors and the culinary world. Books with food themes are as irresistible as candy at the grocery checkout counter for me. If you feel the same way, you’ve come to the right place. I’ve got six new works of nonfiction for foodies for you, plus four upcoming books to preorder now. You’ll find no cookbooks here—although reading a cookbook from cover to cover can often be a surprisingly engaging exercise. Instead, I’ve rounded up books with scrumptious true stories to tell about ingredients, dishes, cuisines, and cooking.

Got a sweet tooth? Check out books on the history of candy and the current movement to preserve heirloom strains of chocolate. More of a fruit lover? Read thoughtful reflections on mangoes and oranges. Can’t get enough restaurant drama? You’ll love juicy memoirs by celebrity chefs and fine dining insiders. No matter which books you choose, be sure to have snacks on hand because this food writing is sure to stoke your appetite.

From food history to travelogues to lyrical essay collections to personal memoirs, these enticing works of nonfiction are sure to give you lots of new ideas to chew on.

New Nonfiction for Foodies

Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao’s Soul by Rowan Jacobsen Chocolate is highly valued in cuisines across the globe. But the vast majority of the chocolate we consume comes from one strain of cacao, the heartiest and easiest to grow, and it is primarily now grown in West Africa. There’s a big movement to change the way we look at chocolate by protecting and cultivating wild, ancient, and heirloom cacao beans across Central and South America. In Wild Chocolate, food journalist Rowan Jacobsen takes readers on a gripping adventure through the Amazon in search of these endangered cacao beans, following a quirky cast of (real!) characters including farmers, activists, chocolate makers, and more, all working to preserve and celebrate the magic of wild cacao. Full of fascinating history, dangerous travels, and delicious food writing, Wild Chocolate will send you on a quest to taste single-source heirloom chocolate for yourself.

Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover by Sarah Perry In a delectable combination of food history, pop culture, social science, and personal memoir, writer Sarah Perry pens 100 microessays in Sweet Nothings, each centered around a different candy. Perry investigates the charm and staying power of candy, including classics like Werther’s Originals, divisive favorites like candy corn, luxury chocolates like Ferrero Rocher, and lesser-known international delights. It’s a far-reaching collection that draws on colorful nostalgia and a love of all things sweet.

Abdulah Sidran (1944–2024) was born to a family of Bosnian Muslims during the occupation of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Croatian fascist Ustaše. After World War II, the region became, under Tito, a part of the new socialist republic of Yugoslavia, and Sidran’s father, Mehmed Sidran, became a Communist Party functionary. After Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet-led alliance known as Cominform, Mehmed became one of the suspected Soviet sympathizers arrested en masse by Tito’s government. The following excerpt recounts a “family meeting” in the years after Sidran’s father returned from his imprisonment  in the forced-labor camp of Goli Otok, a formerly uninhabited island in the Adriatic Sea. You can read more of the Review’s selections from Sidran’s memoir, Scraps, in our new Winter issue, no. 250. 

The roof was leaking again. Dad stopped coming home, and Mom lined the floor with bowls and pots and pans and other dishes everywhere the water was dripping. Because the water dripped so much, Mom got up in the night to empty the containers and returned them to the same places. We always heard when she got up in the night, and we knew what she was doing as soon as she put the dishes back and the drops of water sounded different, falling into the now empty containers. The worst was when the roof leaked over our beds. We had to move them wherever and however just so the water wouldn’t drip on them. Mom said, My God, what have I done wrong? Whenever we heard Mom crying at night, we knew Dad had come home. Mom said, At least don’t wake the kids. Can you promise? Dad pretended not to hear her and said, Conference. Women to the other room. So we had to get up and go over to the table, and Mom took Dina to the other room. Dad sat at the table and cracked his knuckles. Ekrem, Edo, and I sat in silence, waiting for Dad to talk. Dad said, Lest you think I’m drunk, Ekrem will lead the meeting. Ekrem asked what was the agenda, even though it was nighttime, and then Dad took the floor and spoke about his life and communism. You boys will live to the year 2000. By then communism must prevail, you got that? We got that even though we were sleepy. Have you read Germinal, he asked me, and I lied that I had. He told us how he’d gone to school with nanule on his feet and how we had no right to ask for anything beyond that, even though we didn’t ask for anything. While talking, Dad walked around the room, and then he sat down again at the table or on the couch. When he waved a hand from the couch, we knew the meeting was over. To these meetings, he always brought new words. Always a different one. One night he kept saying pretermit, others, permanently or withdrawal. We didn’t know what those words meant, but we used them to tell one conference from another. Ekrem said, You know, that night he kept sayin’ competent. I said, I know.

Mom was crying in the other room, but you could barely hear it because she held a pillow over her face. Dina asked, Why are you crying, Mom? We’ll be happy one day, too. Everyone has to be happy one day. Mom said, When the soil covers me, that’s when I’ll be happy.

In early March, a new production of Moby-Dick will open at the Metropolitan Opera. In some ways, Moby-Dick already has everything an opera needs: narrative drama, memorable characters, high stakes, and even the high seas. But to adapt Herman Melville’s classic text—sometimes called the most famous novel no one has ever read—into a three-hour stage production was no small feat. (Remember, after all, all those chapters in the middle about whale anatomy and theology?) Gene Scheer wrote the libretto for Moby-Dick, and composer Jake Heggie wrote the music; it was originally commissioned by the Dallas Opera. It was first performed there in 2010, and has since gone on to audiences in San Francisco, San Diego, Calgary, and elsewhere. We talked to Scheer about the process of adapting Moby-Dick into an opera—and doing the same for Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which comes to the Met in September. We touched on the nuts and bolts of staging whaleships, borrowing from and changing Melville’s language, and the surprising similarities between opera and silent film.

 

INTERVIEWER

Were you at all overwhelmed by the prospect of adapting Moby-Dick?

I think buying a wrap in a pharmacy is incredible. I once bought a huge wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan. It came with a sachet of extra mayonnaise tucked into the packaging even though it was already heavy with mayonnaise. I bought it and a thin can of Coke Zero and ate and drank while walking, like an actor. It’s usually a kind of chicken prep inside the wraps I like but it’s so unrecognizable to the mouth and the eye as to be moot, the name, the food question, and likewise the preparation who knows. A wrap is chopped foods folded up in a bib of parcooked very flatbread. Once folded, it looks like a handmade food tube with hospital corners at the ends to stop the food tumbling out when it’s lifted vertical to eat. I eat it, or someone else eats it, and thinks of drastic things coolly. The best wraps are cave fish and peter forever outside time. That goes for a lot of what’s happening when I’m inside of a big pharmacy. I feel outside of time and outside of my life. I go into a big pharmacy when it’s dark outside. I buy a wrap and a fizzy drink with my earbuds in listening to my music. My music lends the whole thing a cinematic thing. I’m the crushed protagonist buying a corpse-like wrap and a thin can of Coke Zero on another planet the same as this one. I’ll take my earbuds out to pay unless there’s a self-checkout. A self-checkout’s good for buying food at the pharmacy. The fantasy ennobles whatever and lifts what from the outside looks miserable but is not. When I have food in that’s bad for me I’ll bolt some of it then bin the rest and pour bleach over it in the bin so I can’t fish it out later and eat it, then I’ll smoke the first cigarette from a new pack then go to the sink and hold the rest of the pack under the cold tap on full or I’ll have a first few pulls on a cigarette and pluck it from my mouth and flick it some irretrievable place. The expression on my face won’t change; when there’s no one around I needn’t be convincing. This is very realistic; my feelings happen internally. I’ll have half a glass from a bottle of wine then upend the rest of the bottle into the sink. I like making whatever bad thing irredeemable because I don’t trust future me to be consistent with current me. I know I’m inconsistent and this can be frightening. Self-love is an unobservable phenomenon that cavils forever. I should be punished but not killed outright. I bought a big bag of Doritos in Blackheath in the morning and started eating them in rough stacks outside the shop. I then sharpish turned and emptied the rest into a bin there and used the empty Dorito bag as a shiny mitt to force the Doritos deep into the bin, then. Everything else in the bin groaned and shifted downward. When I’m alone I’ll buy processed foods and unrefrigerated premixed alcoholic drinks. Once, my mouth was full of Dorito pulp and room-temperature vodka maracuja drink outside a späti in Berlin in the summer, great. Cool Original Doritos have a remarkable savory flavor I can’t place. The bag has a lot of blue and black on it, as well as dramatic photos of the Doritos. Blue and black are inedible executive colors. They mark the contents as exclusive and ambitious. I think it’s Cool Ranch flavor in the U.S., a thick dressing. I like processing Doritos with my mouth. Saliva piddles moisten while molars pound to a paste. I compress the paste between my tongue and the roof of my mouth to make now Dorito-flavored and colored spit leach from it and get into me via ducts. The paste remainder forms a curved cast and this is a remarkable temporary food object. I cut the soft cast object into neat nothings with my teeth then and swallow it easily. I’m just getting rid of shapes down a chute. The thing we all go to Doritos for is the intense flavor and astonishing color. Dorito flavor is staggering. It can be easily decoupled from the corn medium inside my mouth. The flavor and the color of Doritos cheers me up no end and the lurid smut on my fingers. I like eating all kinds of cheese puffs. They don’t pique my loathsomeness much as they’re just aerated packing material, a deniable foodstuff at the far end of edible. I eat cheese puffs with an urgency that from the outside looks like mechanical efficiency but isn’t it’s just noise in me, it’s squirming almost nothing perhaps pleasure’s dust there’s nothing to it. The cheese flavor of cheese puffs varies within a small window only, whereas actual real cheeses have many different ones. When an ideal of course ghosts I toss the future after it. Silk Cuts are okay when they’re customized: cover over the perforations with a torn-off glue strip from a cigarette paper or you can clamp two fingers over the perforations while you smoke to make it proper strength. I do something similar with my vape nowadays. I part-block a valve near the mouthpiece of the vape with my fingertip and in this way I can throttle the vapor. The vape mouthpiece is musical-feeling, like a child’s first wind instrument. Stuff from my mouth and lips comes off on the mouthpiece and can gather in the breathing hole but I can always get a pin or a sharp pencil and gouge the stuff out and wipe it on a trouser leg. I keep the vape in one of my two trouser pockets. Sharp lint from my pocket can get in the breathing hole and shoot into my unsuspecting throat when I vape it. I like vaping all of the time. My vape provides me with my home planet’s gas mix without which otherwise I’d suffocate on Earth’s mix. As with my voice my exhalation made visible by vape in it is an aspect of me that flees me to be with the world and never to return. I like that there’s formaldehyde in vapes but I don’t like popcorn lung. When the juice runs out I taste burning metal. When the juice leaks into your mouth sometimes oh, it’s very obviously poison I’m pulling in. I know about formaldehyde from alien fetuses and big decapitated heads in jars of it but I don’t know about popcorn lung. It’s a very evocative name and an ominously fun euphemism I won’t look up the reality of. I secretly vape on planes, in cinemas, in concert halls; everywhere you can’t vape you can actually very easily vape without discovery. I palm the vape like an inmate. I ensure the little glowing display’s hidden. I look straight at anyone nearby so if they try looking at me they’ll be met by my gaze before they see that I’m vaping so that they’ll immediately look away. This sort of preemptive gaze is weird, it repulses other’s sight; it relies on being there first, looking first, and on protocol. I pull on the vape and hold it in for as long as possible so that the vapor dissipates in me. By the time I breathe out there’s no giveaway vape opaquing my breath. In circumstances where vaping’s not really okay to do I take care to pull on it when I’m quite sure it won’t be my turn to talk or laugh for about twenty seconds, which is about how long the vape takes to entirely dissipate in me. During this time I smile and nod while I hold it in. I can do it. I presume it’s fine to vape everywhere or I don’t care if it is or it isn’t. I have the gall to do it in someone else’s house just in front of everyone midconversation without asking. If someone says something I feel terribly guilty. I feel for myself via remembered stilled machines still warm to the touch. I’m shadowing myself through a history of my own impersonal sentimentality the pining for which electro-plates the meaningless with a rose zirconium-like. I sat alone on a low stool at a low table in a pub lounge and customized a Silk Cut. The table and the stool were genuinely small. There was an empty blue glass ashtray and a drained pint glass marbled with beer foam scum on the small table which was round and a brown metal spackled with little hammered divots. My hands are seen from an instructional isometric perspective and my concentrating face is in close-up which in this sequence bravely allows itself the ugly repose of the unobserved. I gave an unaffected performance with my jaw slackened. I bulged some. No visible musculature and no visible veining on my arms. What was I? I’d a pad of green Rizla, a purple-and-white Silk Cut ten-pack and a black plastic lighter with a silver cuff. I got a cigarette paper and tore the glue strip off it. I licked the glue strip and wrapped it around one Silk Cut’s midriff to dress the perforations that make it healthy, closed. Then I took up the lighter and ground the striking wheel slowly with my thumb, moving the lighter up and down just above the Silk Cut, milling invisible flint bits over it. Then I smoked the Silk Cut and the flint bits once caught spat glum sparks when the lit tip was on them. The sparkles and the blued smoke dawdling around my head made my head look like a monument to something on the night of its national holiday. This was when you could smoke inside pubs in the UK. When I run out of cigarettes I collect the squashed butts from the ashtray, split them open along the middle with my thumbnail-like minnows, and empty the stinky spent tobacco into a new cigarette paper to smoke. The catch when smoke goes haltingly past my epiglottis is abject but I could be wrong to use those words—abject, epiglottis. The catch resumes disbelief and with it my body happens in my embrace by myself of it. I know it’s a turnstile, I know it admits smoke or not, I know it’s not the pink teardrop. People start smoking for different reasons. I started smoking when I was twelve I rolled Tony and his flunkies’ cigarettes at Sophie’s party in a barn in Wootton and everyone drenched in Lynx or Impulse. I slipped away and walked home when the little brick of Golden Virginia ran out, purposeless. I often walked the many miles home through the countryside in the middle of the night as a teenager, blank I can’t remember feeling anything. There was no one else anywhere. We’d two welcome pedophiles in the village. Jim had no toes but I loved acting. The image of my future radicalizes and pillories my present. I abuse myself in ways. I like eating tinned hot dog sausages drooped onto sliced white, scribbled with ketchup. I like the iron-blood taste of tinned hot dog sausages and their cold makes them seem found, eaten speculatively. I like modeling balloons pumped with blood meal, it seems. Hot dog sausages are a more appetizing prospect than recognizable meats if you’re like me. I eat ultra-processed meat products as a cannibal. The main ingredient in ultra-processed meats is the ultra-processing, the ultra-processing’s culture and its technologies and histories rather than the beautiful pig in the past. Cannibalism is the correct way to be.

 

From Flower, to be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April.

Ed Atkins is a British artist based in Copenhagen who is best known for his computer-generated videos and animations. In recent years he has presented solo shows at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Serpentine Gallery in London, among others, with a survey show at Tate Britain opening in spring 2025. He is the author of A Primer for Cadavers and Old Food.