THE Southern Rocky Mountains are capped in snow and plainly visible from Colorado’s South Platte River Valley, where Denver is located. This is where fiction writer Kali FajardoAnstine was born and raised and where she still calls home. Denver and its surrounding area is also the setting of her two books, both published by Penguin Random House imprint One World: the story collection Sabrina & Corina, which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award, and her new novel, Woman of Light, released in June.
Although the sun shines brightly the morning we’re set to meet, the spring air in Denver is crisp. Fajardo-Anstine picks me up from my hotel in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, rolling up in her compact SUV. She is sporting a Southwestern chic ensemble: a pair of boots, fitted jeans, and a glamorous black blouse. We’re about to embark on a tour of her personal landmarks in the city.
“I began writing the novel long before Sabrina & Corina, when I was still a teenager,” she tells me as we pull out into traffic. The second oldest of seven children, FajardoAnstine recalls strangers expressing dismay at the size of her family. “But what really got some people,” she says, “is that my parents had six daughters and only one son. I remember people saying they felt sorry for my parents for having so many girls. There was an awful subtext there, that our lives as daughters weren’t as valuable as sons.”
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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
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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.
