Happy March! This month, I bring to you two fairly recent debuts—one story collection and one novel—along with a brand-new craft book and a classic novella. I hope you’ll find at least one to enjoy from the pile!
Lot by Bryan Washington
Bryan Washington is a writer I’ve been hearing other writers rave about for a while, and after listening to his gorgeous story “Arrivals” on The Writer’s Voice podcast, I finally sought out his 2019 debut collection, which lives up to its stellar blurbs from Jamel Brinkley and Justin Torres. Lot centers queer Black and Latino young men coming of age and explores gentrification’s impact on their neighborhoods, especially on one young man’s family’s struggling restaurant. This character—along with several others who might be his friends and neighbors—recurs as a protagonist coming to terms with his relationships with his family and the changing face of Houston as well as his attraction to men.
I see Lot in conversation with both Brinkley and Torres’s debuts, as well as Edward P. Jones’s 1992 first collection Lost in the City. Just as a gentrifying Washington, D.C. is a major character in Jones’s book, Houston provides the predominant unifying structure in Lot; the story titles each refer to one of the city’s streets, neighborhoods, or key geographic features. Washington distinguishes himself in the sheer dynamism and energy of his narrative voice. I’m hard pressed to find a better description for it than this excerpt from Justin Torres’s blurb: “I love the urgency, honesty and vitality of Washington’s voice.” Here’s the start of the story “Shepherd” to give you a taste: “Gloria blew through our lives on a Wednesday, and our mother told us to treat her like pottery, to not ask questions, to creep around the house like ants before their queen.”
If I had to put my finger on the book’s beating heart, I would choose these lines from “Waugh”: “I only know what I know. But I know that when you choose, you choose for yourself.” No matter the specifics of each character’s crucible, they all must confront the consequences of only being able to choose for themselves.
Other stories I found especially memorable include “Bayou” and “South Congress,” though this collection reads well cover-to-cover. Washington has also gone on to publish two novels and quite a few additional stories in The New Yorker, so there’s plenty more to read if you are drawn to his work.
How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang
This historical debut novel from 2020 focuses on siblings Lucy and Sam, who are forced to strike out on their own when their father dies during the latter days of the California Gold Rush. At a broader thematic level, the book is concerned with the longing for and meaning of home for Chinese-American immigrants’ children—many of whom, like Lucy and Sam, were born and raised in the hills of the American West during this time period but experienced discrimination and disenfranchisement because of their Chinese ancestry.
The novel is immediately remarkable for its lean, poetic style, with sentences akin to polished bone or gold nuggets glinting under a desert sun. For some, it may feel overwritten at times, but I found this only to be the case for me in the first chapter, which suggests that it may have simply been a matter of allowing my reading ear to acclimate to the voice. Zhang also notably avoids using pronouns for Sam, who would be recognized as transgender today. In the early going, this was a little distracting, as it led to some unusually clipped sentences, but I came to appreciate its effectiveness as a stylistic choice that illuminates Sam’s experience while avoiding projecting anachronistic contemporary language onto it. An example: “Sam squares small shoulders and sets out across the creek, red shirt a shout in the barrenness.”
The book’s greatest strength is its inventive structure. I initially expected to stick with one character and move chronologically through a narrow window of time, but at key hinge points, the story jumps both backward and forward in time and incorporates a rather unexpected narrator at one point as well. The wider angle these temporal and narrative shifts provide makes for an engaging read and an especially powerful ending. Another unusual macro-level craft move involves the chapter titles. The chapters are named with simple, elemental words—Gold, Plum, Salt, Skull, Wind, Water, and Blood—and repeat in no discernable pattern aside from the fact that some key image or event related to the title word appears within each chapter. These words accumulate new associations as the book progresses and their meaning is constantly reinterpreted.
If you enjoyed Victor LaValle’s Lone Women, this book is a great companion to that one.
1000 Words by Jami Attenberg
This brand-new release by accomplished novelist and memoirist Jami Attenberg has been hailed as the new Bird by Bird, and the comparison is apt. It is far less a nuts and bolts craft book and far more a collection of pep talks through the psychological blocks that often impede writers from practicing their craft. The book took root in a spontaneous accountability challenge between two writing friends who were trying to motivate themselves to write 1000 words a day for two weeks and has grown into a vast, supportive writing community of 37,000 subscribers via Attenberg’s Substack, CRAFT TALK.
The book’s format is quite flat-footed and accessible, both for reading straight through as I did or for nibbling over time; Attenberg divides it into four writing “seasons” or modes—spring as preparation and research, summer as a time of intense drafting, fall for reflection, and winter for big-picture thinking—and populates each section with many of her own short essays interspersed with short letters from dozens of famous contemporary writers. Here’s a short excerpt that appeared on LitHub. These mini-essays put me less in the mind of polished gems and more in the mind of the kind of beautifully ordinary stones one might pick up at the coast and bring home as a reminder to pay attention to the more understated and pocket-sized forms of beauty that might be right underfoot. If you are a writer, you’ll likely find much to resonate with and motivate you in this book’s many exhortations and encouragements.
Attenberg’s Mini-1000 Word challenge actually begins today, March 2nd, and ends March 7th, if reading about this book inspires you to participate! (I’m signed up.)
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
In a nod to Yiyun Li’s rule, mentioned in last month’s newsletter, of trying to read a work by a dead author for every work she reads of a living author, let me balance these three recent works with a classic novella by the late Gabriel García Márquez. García Márquez is perhaps better known for his longer novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude (one of my all-time favorites) and Love in the Time of Cholera (which I still haven’t read).
Chronicle of a Death Foretold can easily be read in one sitting, and I had not even heard of the novella until I learned that it was an inspiration for Akwaeke Emezi’s novel The Death of Vivek Oji, which I recommended in my “Best of Summer” post. In this interview with Jennifer Baker, Emezi talks about being intrigued by the challenge of sustaining a narrative that effectively begins with its ending and works backwards. As per its title, Chronicle recounts a death about which most of the town knows is likely to happen before it occurs. García Márquez puts the reader in nearly the same position as the villagers by informing us of the impending murder in the first sentence: “On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.”
In addition to slowly revealing the facts surrounding the murder, the book explores the various reasons for characters’ attempts and lack of attempts to avert it—including, tragicomically, those of the killers themselves. As such, the story is as much about the villagers’ inaction and complicity as it is an excavation of the murder itself and its motives. The story also eschews (at least in my memory, though perhaps I’ve overlooked or forgotten something) the magical realist elements for which García Márquez is famous. What is fantastic about the book is the gut-wrenching realism of a foreseeable tragedy that could have been stopped but wasn’t.
New(s) Flash
Before I go, I do have two new flash fiction stories recently out in the world to share with you, both about teaching. “Orientation“ appears on A Public Space’s website as the winner of the Stories Out of School Contest judged by Karen Russell, which is a great honor, and is forthcoming in print. (If you haven’t read Russell’s novel Swamplandia!, you should go check it out now.) The other, “Object Lesson,” was published online at Okay Donkey and is a piece I initially drafted at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop last summer and first read in an earlier form at the Tin House Summer Workshop.
Hope this finds you well, and as always, happy reading!
Jules