"I DON'T want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt." So begins Namwali Serpell's second novel, The Furrows: An Elegy-a powerful exploration of grief, memory, and loss that becomes part of a larger story of Black identity and double consciousness-forthcoming from Hogarth Books in late September. Told in two sections with vastly different narrative styles and structures, it begins with the apparent drowning of Wayne, a seven-year-old boy, near Bethany Beach, Delaware. His body is never found; he is missing. The only "evidence" is the story his sister, Cassandra, tells of what happened while they were swimming and he was lost in the waves: "those whirring sheets of water, the foam along their edges sharpening like teeth...the furrows chewing, cleaving deeper."
Although Serpell calls autobiographical links to her new novel "so oblique that it's hard to map things directly," there are connections. The genesis of The Furrows dates back nearly twenty years to when her sister Chisha, to whom the novel is dedicated, died of a drug overdose. "What I took from that experience," Serpell says, "had to do with the grieving process-my refusal to accept her death psychologically and this sense of seeing her everywhere." In 2019 she published "Beauty Tips From My Dead Sister" in BuzzFeed because, as she tweeted, "I think about her every day and this essay explains some of the reasons why." With her sister's voice still in her head, Serpell imagines her advice: "Yes, I'm here every night in your dreams, but, yes, I'm dead. And yes, it's okay that I'm gone. Once the rage of sadness leaves your body, let me go, touch hold my hand." my cheek, hold my hand."
Esta historia es de la edición September - October 2022 de Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Esta historia es de la edición September - October 2022 de Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
THE MEUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY
READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
The Sea Elephants
SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
The Fine Print
HOW TO READ YOUR BOOK CONTRACT
First
GINA CHUNG'S SEA CHANGE
Blooming how she must
WITH ROOTS IN NATURE WRITING, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMILLE T. DUNGY'S NEW BOOK, SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER'S GARDEN, DELVES INTO THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ACT OF CULTIVATING AND DIVERSIFYING A GARDEN OF HERBS, VEGETABLES, FLOWERS, AND OTHER PLANTS IN THE PREDOMINANTLY WHITE COMMUNITY OF FORT COLLINS, COLORADO.
