Reading Lists

These books ask what it means to belong, to stay or leave, or to exist in-between

Photo by hannah grace via Unsplash

This is the first list I have written for Electric Literature since the tragic passing of EL’s former Deputy Editor, Jo Lou. Years ago, I wrote a small press column for BuzzFeed Books, and when that publication shuttered (an experience too common for anyone working in media), Jo helped me find a new home at EL by agreeing to give a quarterly column a shot.

And, home is the right word. Jo, as an editor, was a writer’s dream come true. She gave me space to cover the weird and wonderful small press books I love, would occasionally forward me something from a press or publicist—always a suggestion, never a mandate. Jo got it. She got why people write, she got why people read, she got why we all want to talk about it. And, she got why it matters to make the discourse better, smarter, and just more interesting.

In this list, the theme is place. Returning to Beijing, San Antonio, Denver, or Euphoria, Maine. Running from Chicagoland, rural Pennsylvania, from ecological or emotional disaster.

Place means something different to all of us, and in many of these books, place is intrinsically linked with home. When a wildfire sweeps through a coastal community, a group finds refuge—and community—on the rocky banks of the Pacific. When a girl’s mother dies, the place she lives no longer feels like home. These books ask questions about what it means to belong to somewhere, whether you are welcomed or not, what it means to stay or leave, or to exist in-between.

I remain grateful for the opportunity to read what others write about place, especially as it’s a topic that appears frequently in my own fiction. Jo, wherever she is now, knew how much it mattered to provide space for these ideas and explorations. I think she’d want us to keep writing, keep reading.

Press 53: I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever by George Choundas

A man’s uncle tells an epic (and ever-changing) tale of his prize-fighting rooster, a trio of sisters shows such a deep love to a daughter that the force of their emotion endures beyond the grave, and middle school classmates move on from their youthful cruelties to adult lives tinged with regret. In these dozen stories, George Choundas explores connections, some going back decades and spanning familial generations, and others fleeting, like a pedi-cab driver who trades a fare for a date. Even the shortest stories in the collection have a resonant emotional unfolding. An excellent entry into the category of short form.

Tin House: Wanting by Claire Jia

When Ye Lians’s childhood friend Wenyu returns to Beijing after years away in America, what could be a happy reunion turns into a lament of past hurts, questions about choices made, and an opening to explore paths not taken. In Jia’s braided novel, Ye Lian’s story is paralleled with that of Cheng, a talented mathematician who, to his peril, rejects assimilating as an international student at a university in Illinois before returning to China. The stakes are high for all of the characters—livelihoods, marriages, identity, and even life itself is on the line as they wrestle with how the West has infiltrated and shaped their lives. In Wanting, it is America that exists as the exotic other. A stunning novel that beautifully explores how our desires to have more can destroy what we already have.

Jaded Ibis Press: Curtains of Rain (Cortinas de Lluvia) by Anel I. Flores

In returning to her hometown of San Antonio, Solitaria has to confront her biological family while being supported by her found family. It has been a decade and a half since a violent exorcism perpetrated by her biological family forced her to leave. The novel follows Solitaria through a period of becoming, as she learns to understand her past self and recognize her power in her present self. In every interaction, she is reconciling versions of herself. Curtains of Rain also holds a deep acknowledgment of the borderlands between the US and Mexico, where the geographical lines are inconsistent with lived experience. A gorgeous queer novel from an emerging voice.

Trident Press: The Pot Job by Bart Schaneman

When a start-up cannabis store in Denver is robbed, the owners round up a crew to track down their product. Operating in the contemporary gray area of legal weed, the shop owners have little choice but to take matters into their own hands. A longtime friend to the owners is Henry, an out of work journalist who, after returning to Colorado from a stint in South Korea, currently lugs kegs at a brewery, but takes a better paying job as a budtender—and he smells a story. The Pot Job is a modern western that combines the cannabis industry with the ennui of a not fully committed ex-at returning to the US, full of casual lawlessness and page turning-action. Shaneman’s narrative of Henry as the western hero is a refreshing impulse toward introspection.

Tin House: Great Disasters by Grady Chambers

Caesar, Ryan, Ben, Neil, David, and Graham have been friends since their Chicagoland boyhood, but when they enter high school, their paths—and who they are to one another—begin to crystalize. There is nothing particularly remarkable about the group of young men nor their alcohol-fueled escapades. Yet, set against the backdrop of the September 11, 2001 terror attack, the group is rocked when a member of their friend group enlists in the military. Told from the perspective of Graham, the novel perfectly captures the glittering wreckage left behind from teenaged and 20-something relationships. As Graham makes his way into adulthood, the choices his friends have made around him—like parenthood, military service, sobriety—throw his own decisions into a starker relief. An homage to coming of age in the 2000s and a brilliant exploration of what it means to grow up.

West Virginia University Press: Epic and Lovely by Mo Daviau

Nina Simone Blaine—and many others in her circle—has a deadly (and fictionalized) genetic condition called A12, present specifically in those born to much older fathers. In Nina’s case, it’s the 40 year age gap between her Texas beauty-queen mother and her long-dead lounge singer father that has caused her A12. Now, Nina is pregnant after being told her genetic condition would make it either impossible or lead to dramatic health complications to carry to term. The biological is father is also A12—in addition to being wildly irresponsible, emotionally stunted, and sexually sadistic. In Epic and Lovely, Nina must grapple with her decisions about her birth family, the relationships with the rest of her A12 cohort, and the physician who has studied them, all while she figures out how to keep her baby safe. An original voice.

University of Wisconsin Press: Town College City Road by Patrick McGinty

Kurt Boozel is like a lot of working class kids: just trying to make good on his smarts and escape a small town. Kurt’s math talents lead him to a regional university on scholarship, where he desperately tries to fit it and ultimately ends up in NYC, slogging through a finance job. Yet while Kurt is making money his parents could never dream of, he’s unhappy. Closeted in high school, he is out to his Wall Street finance bros, but not to his parents. On a treacherous drive from the city to his Pennsylvania hometown—while considering selling his maybe reckless, maybe life-changing investment in crypto—Kurt has to come to terms with what kind of man he is, and the kind of man he wants to be. Town College City Road takes a nuanced look at class mobility, considering both what we gain, and what we lose.

University of New Mexico Press: Waiting for Godínez by Daniel A. Olivas

Many readers will be familiar with the structure of this play in two acts, a retelling of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In Olivas’s version, Jesús and Isabel wait for Godínez in a public park; ICE believes Jesús is undocumented, and while he is rounded up nightly, his incompetent yet still powerful captors don’t lock the gates, and he returns to Isabel. In the park they meet Piso, a literary agent who refuses email attachments (a relatable nod to the literary world). Olivas has a knack for levity, even as Waiting for Godínezunspools one part of America’s tragic rejection of Chicanos. It is also, like much of Olivas’s work, a celebration of the diverse Mexican and Mexican-American diaspora. Great writing infused with humanity.

Dzanc Books: Guest Privileges by Gaar Adams

While journalist Gaar Adams is living in the Persian Gulf, he finds a thriving queer community. Despite the deep lack of protection for queer people—including state sanctioned torture and the death penalty—there are vibrant LGBTQ+ spaces all across the Gulf, some more clandestine than others. From a barbershop, he finds a cruising spot, and from there he learns to navigate the rules of being gay in the Gulf. Yet, part of what Adams is ultimately negotiating is what it will mean for his personal relationships that this network of queer men are largely, like himself, not citizens of the nations they inhabit. He is, after all, ultimately looking for lasting love. Wonderfully textured, Guest Privilegesis layered with a nearly impossible balance of the terror of being outed and the joy of living authentically.

Whiskey Tit: Child of Light by Jesi Bender

Thirteen year old Ambrétte has a complicated family. Her father is a brilliant electrical engineer, but his work in the 1880s and 90s takes him away from their home. Her brother is just as smart, though his dogged loyalty to their father creates tension. Ambrétte’s mother, who would much rather be living in Paris than upstate New York, is somewhat aloof; she’s more interested in Ambrétte as a spiritual medium than as a daughter. When Ambrétte forges a friendship with another lonely girl, an orphan, her mother deeply disapproves. Child of Light, set mostly at the tail end of the gilded age, explores extreme class differences, how propriety gets in the way of meaningful relationships, and how magical thinking puts up barriers to connection on one’s current material plane. Beautifully written and artfully plotted, Bender’s Ambrétte is unforgettable.

SFWP: Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir by Caroline Hagood

It’s COVID lockdown in Brooklyn, and in between playing ponies, judging her kid’s talent shows, eating cornichons, and applying postcolonial discourse to Paw Patrol on long, sleepless nights, Carolyn Hagood (or someone like her) has just landed on the tenure track. In this speculative memoir, amidst the absurdity of parenting and while still being a daughter to her own parents, one of whom has cancer, sandwich-generation Hagood tries to write her “Heavy Tome.” It’s meant to be a penultimate work of great literature, but instead comes out in short, episodic bursts. Packed with consideration of important texts and literary theory, the Hagood of this speculative memoir is just as comfortable with the inner workers of Ulysses or Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacra as she is letting a dog lick peanut butter off her face—all while a goblin spurs her along. Wry and canny, thoughtful and provocative, reading Hagood is a true joy.

Restless Books: A Wilderness of Mirrors by Olufemi Terry

Emil has a plan to become a neurosurgeon, but he takes a year off from his studies to live with his widowed aunt and cousins in Stadmutter, a fictional town in an unnamed country that parallels South Africa. Away from his hometown, he is thrust into a world of drugs, intellectualizing, and racial tension. He is in Stadmutter at his father’s insistence he get closer to the family, but said family is not interested. It’s uncertain what Emil wants and who he wants to be, but he opens himself to exploring. As he spends time with a wealthy operator of Haitian and German descent and a PhD student who’s struggling with her identity, Emil finds himself caught up between the two and a charismatic leader of a political movement. Terry perfectly captures how youthful decisions—or indecisions—can have radical impacts on the rest of our lives.

Two Dollar Radio: Absence by Issa Quincy

The unnamed narrator of Absencehas his experiences threaded together by a favorite poem of his mother’s. People share letters and stories, tell of their experiences, and even confess to him. There is the dark secret of a former teacher, the son of a wealthy Indian businessman who is on the outs with his family, and an empathetic Boston bus driver. The narrator becomes a collector of stories; he’s one of those people who, whether it’s projecting an open heart or some other kind of vibe, people are drawn to and called to share. The pastiche of letters and encounters have a richness of detail which rings of reality, and of loss. Crisscrossing continents and delving into deep backstories, Quincy’s novel is ultimately a testament to why personal narratives, even fictional ones, matter.

Littoral Books: Euphoria by Dave Patterson

In Euphoria, Maine, formerly the epicenter of an ice harvesting industry, people stay, return, or are dragged into town either by a romantic partner or the romance of circumstance. A young mother sees a giraffe outside her window after the zoo’s gates have been breached; the message from the city is to shoot the wild animals, but she does not. A woman does a secret fire dance at midnight, only to find her neighbors and husband were a rapt audience all along. A man whose wife is dying of cancer connects with a father and son via a remote control plane he flies across a foggy Maine beach until it crashes. In these ten stories, Patterson finds empathy in every character, all connected by the town of Euphoria, and the mastery comes with not knowing if it’s love or loss until the very end of each.

Modern Artist: I Watched You From the Ocean Floor by Erin Cecelia Thomas

Bookended by two stories where displaced people are living in tents due to a climate-change fueled fire and no practical employment for people who care about the arts, these eleven stories look at different kinds of exile. When her father starts taking pleasure in butchering after her mother’s death, a girl hides in the barn with her favorite chicken; a teenager wants to drown in a swimming pool after her best friend dies in a lake; a grocery store worker tracks down missing carts and finds a woman who has secretly been building a massive art installation from the mesh of the baskets. I Watched You from the Ocean Floor is a beautiful missive to the people we love and the people we’ve lost.

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