Erupting Voices

Gina María Balibrera

Growing up in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in the 1980s and ’90s, Gina María Balibrera was curious about her father’s homeland of El Salvador. It wasn’t until 2005, though, when as a college student she secured a research grant for a fiction writing project, that she was able to visit. During that trip, she saw an exhibit at the Museum of the Word and Image in San Salvador commemorating the survivors of La Matanza, a 1932 anti-communist massacre in which thousands of largely Indigenous Salvadorans were slaughtered.

Balibrera’s The Volcano Daughters (Pantheon, Aug.) revolves around this atrocity, which decimates an Indigenous village in the shadow of a volcano. The story follows two sisters in the community, Graciela and Consuelo, each of whom spends time in the orbit of a generalissimo dubbed El Gran Pendejo (based on the Salvadoran president Maximiliano Hernández Martínez). A spiritualist obsessed with the mystical powers of color (white being the “color of heaven”), El Gran Pendejo seeks to “cleanse” the country and civilize the darker Indigenous population. Balibrera jokingly describes the general’s philosophy as a menacing version of Gwyneth Paltrow’s new age spirituality. “His appeal was just broad enough for him to be able to inject these horrible, fascist ideas,” she says.

After the sisters miraculously survive the massacre, each escapes El Salvador and becomes an artist. Graciela pursues an acting career in Los Angeles while Consuelo, a painter, strives to fulfill her own ambitions in Paris.

Four Indigenous women who were slain in the massacre narrate sections of the novel from beyond the grave. Balibrera, who settled in Ann Arbor in 2011 after attending the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program, neither wished to sensationalize nor elide the attack. She found inspiration in Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now, in which Castillo criticizes, in Balibrera’s words, a “tendency to write away from tough scenes.” Over many drafts, Balibrera strove to “write through” the massacre, filling in an overlooked tragedy of El Salvador’s history by giving voice to its victims, both living and dead.

Unorthodox

Jessica Elisheva Emerson

Shortly after moving into Los Angeles’s Pico Robertson neighborhood in 2005, Jessica Elisheva Emerson heard a juicy tale about wife swapping among the area’s modern Orthodox Jewish community. Emerson, who previously worked in the entertainment industry after receiving a journalism degree from USC Annenberg, wanted to hear more. “Nobody ever told me a firsthand story,” Emerson recalls, “but some people had really good details.”

The anecdotes inspired Olive Days (Counterpoint, Sept.), which Emerson slowly worked on over a decade. It begins with a modern Orthodox woman named Rina who reluctantly accompanies her husband to a swingers party. The novel follows Rina over roughly one year after the fateful night, which prompts her to conduct two affairs and reassess her religion and marriage. “You’re like Updike, but Jewish,” one of her MFA professors told her, describing her depiction of adultery in an early draft of Olive Days. “You can’t unhear something like that,” Emerson says.

Counterpoint assistant editor Dan López praises the novel for the way it “speaks to the universal double bind so many women find themselves in between duty and desire.”

Emerson’s story elucidates the grueling domestic responsibilities of modern Orthodox women. “Shabbat marks time,” she explains. “Your whole week is about getting ready for this one day, then recovering.” Though Rina adheres to her community’s religious demands, she’s not a believer, and Emerson was fascinated with whether there is “value in piety without belief.” An atheist who remains deeply invested in Jewish cultural rituals, Emerson says she can feel “untethered” without them.

Olive Days’ title refers to scenes from Rina’s teenage years when, at a sleepaway camp in California, she would laze under olive trees, staining her shirt and tasting the overripe, fallen fruit. “It tells you everything about this character that she would put a raw olive from the ground into her mouth to see what it tastes like,” Emerson says. Emerson, who lives now in Tucson, Ariz., has six olive trees, though she regards them in a less sensuous light. “They’re beautiful, but they’re an enormous pain in the ass.”

Bridge to Nowhere

Priscilla Morris

At one point in Priscilla Morris’s Black Butterflies (Knopf, Aug.), set during the 1992–1996 siege of Sarajevo, a bombarded resident recounts a fable of three brothers building a bridge across a wide river. The river keeps on washing the bridge away until a local deity tells the brothers that to succeed, one of them must wall his wife into the bridge’s foundations. The Balkan fable resonates with “the situation of being in a siege and literally walled into your own city,” Morris says.

Originally published in the U.K., where it was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Black Butterflies opens in spring 1992 as Zora, a Bosnian Serb, decides to stay by herself in Sarajevo—despite the mounting threat of war—after her husband accompanies her ailing mother out of the country. Zora, a painter, clings to her art as she endures the increasingly dire conditions.

“There was this outpouring of artistic activity and production in Sarajevo during the siege,” Morris notes, “and it was very much an act of resistance.”

Morris, who grew up in London to a Bosnian mother and Cornish father, splits her time between Ireland, where she teaches creative writing, and Spain. She based the story on the experiences of two of her relatives who escaped the siege and settled in England: her maternal grandfather, who never recovered from the trauma; and her great-uncle, an artist who, despite losing his life’s work when his Sarajevan studio burned down, thrived in his new home by making art.

As the city hunkers down, Zora works obsessively on a large painting of Goat’s Bridge, which straddles the Miljacka River outside Sarajevo. A vision of hope, beauty, and unity, the painting stands in contrast to the dark fable of the entombed woman.

Morris played around with how to write about her family’s wartime experience for years: as a journalistic piece, a short story, even a children’s book. When she began the novel, the protagonist was male, but the Zora character came to her after returning from a research trip to Sarajevo. “I was really struggling, depressed and worn down by all these war stories,” Morris says. The breakthrough made her feel reenergized, and revealed a promising path forward.

Hanging It Up

Tom Newlands

When Tom Newlands was furloughed from his job in London as an art handler during the Covid-19 lockdown, he grew homesick for his native Scotland. A voracious reader who says he especially appreciates American literature and its “tradition of working-class and voice-driven writing,” Newlands, who was born in Perth, unexpectedly began a novel set in a place close to home, a postindustrial town in Fife. The manuscript became Only Here, Only Now (HarperVia, Nov.), and he compares writing it to “driving a train and laying down the train track at the same time.”

The train was speeding ahead. “My creativity comes from ADHD,” says Newlands, who is also autistic and wrote the first draft of the novel—more than 120,000 words—in three months. “The writing taught me a lot about the way my brain works.” Newlands successfully applied to the Breakthrough Writers’ Programme for underrepresented authors, including those who are neurodivergent. Through the program, he met his future agent, Sophie Lambert of C&W Agency, who says she was struck by the novel’s “fresh, smart, and vulnerable” protagonist.

Set in the 1990s, Only Here, Only Now covers four years in the life of Cora Mowat, the only daughter of a wheelchair-using single mother. The spirited Cora has symptoms of ADHD and describes her life in an isolated council flat as “all chaos and fighting and shite in your hair.”

Newlands recalls talking with a group of Scottish teenagers during their visit to London and being surprised at “how much they hated where they came from.” Cora, similarly, wants nothing more than to leave her “manky wee hellhole,” as she describes it in the book, for a bigger city like Glasgow. Though she can’t envision her future, she “thinks it might be somewhere over the horizon,” Newlands says.

He originally envisioned, and is still contemplating, a Zolaesque cycle of novels that would follow Cora through the years. “I know what happens to the characters, so it’d be great to sit and write it one day,” he says. While he admits to looking back fondly on his art handling days, he doesn’t miss the exhausting work. “I’d much rather be writing.”

Proof of Concept

Ruben Reyes Jr.

As a student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Ruben Reyes Jr. remembers visiting professor Kevin Brockmeier telling him that all writers have obsessions. Several of Reyes’s are evident across There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven (Mariner, Aug.), his collection of uncanny tales about the Salvadoran diaspora.

Reyes, whose parents emigrated from El Salvador, grew up in California’s San Gabriel Valley and majored in history and literature at Harvard. The interdisciplinary major, he believes, prepared him well for the high concepts and deep character work in his fiction. “If you want to hear the story of a marginalized person,” Reyes says, reflecting on his desire to understand certain Salvadoran people and communities, “you have to do a lot of work, because the historical archive is full of gaps.”

Reyes attempts to fill the generational silences he’s grappled with throughout his life in stories like “Variations on Your Migrant Life,” a choose-the-outcome tale about the agonizing decisions facing an El Salvadoran family. Reyes emphasizes that though migration is usually discussed as a choice, “it’s often a response to systems.”

Metamorphoses are another obsession. In the collection, a man wakes up one morning to find he is a famous reggaeton star, a vulnerable migrant is captured and turned into a cyborg domestic servant, and an abuela transforms into a puppet. Though Reyes loves the “quiet family dramas” of literary fiction, “the high concept or the metaphorical approach is my entry point to bigger questions.”

Threaded throughout the collection are a series of speculative vignettes titled “An Alternate History of El Salvador or Perhaps the World,” in which, for example, the 16th-century Spanish conquistadors were driven away. These brief entries lend an epic sweep to Reyes’s fantastical character studies.

Or, as Mariner associate editor Jessica Vestuto puts it, “Ruben can build a world, then destroy it, and then show us how to make sense of the pieces in just a few sentences.”

Ghost Tour

Del Sandeen

When Del Sandeen began This Cursed House (Berkley, Oct.) in March 2021, all she knew as that it would be about a cursed family. She completed a draft a year later, in early 2022, after hearing about Berkley’s open submission program. “What do I have to lose?” Sandeen recalls thinking. She submitted her “not completely polished” manuscript on the last day of the window, and it resonated with Berkley executive editor Anne Sowards, who says Sandeen’s “mashing up of atmospheric historical horror with themes of race, colorism, and family secrets” was exactly the kind of idea-rich page-turner she was looking for.

The protagonist, Jemma Barker, is a Black teacher from Chicago with the ability to see spirits. She receives a vague offer for a well-paying job working for the Duchons, a prominent African American family in New Orleans, and accepts what she assumes is a tutoring position for their children.

Upon Jemma’s arrival, the glamorous, light-skinned Duchons look down on their darker-skinned new hire even as they reveal the true nature of her employment: they need her to break a fatal curse on their family. Jemma agrees to help, investigating the curse’s origins, digging into the family’s antebellum history, and uncovering her personal connection to the clan.

Sandeen was born in South Korea, where her father was stationed in the Air Force, before the family moved to Florida when she was a toddler. She set the novel in the 1960s as a nod to her favorite movie, the 1997 Southern gothic Eve’s Bayou, and because the colorism espoused by the Duchons was more prevalent in that era than today. Sandeen mentions how certain Black clubs excluded people based on the paper bag test, “where people had to be whiter than the shade of a paper bag.”

The self-hating Duchons commit unpardonable acts, but the novel doesn’t preclude the possibility of forgiveness from those the family has harmed. Still, Sandeen insists that for the Duchons, apologizing is just a start. “You guys are not even close to finished,” she says, reflecting on the troubling legacy of violence and colorism represented by the family.

Screen to Page

Navid Sinaki

As a multimedia artist whose work explores queerness and Persian mythology, Navid Sinaki draws on his fascination with the lurid pre-Revolution Iranian films of the 1960s and ’70s, which he first saw as a student at UC Berkeley. “They really changed the way I thought about my country and my identity,” Sinaki says.

Sinaki’s Medusa of the Roses (Grove, Aug.) has the louche vibe of the Iranian melodramas that appealed to him, as well as Hollywood film noir and Persian and Greek mythology. Anjir, the protagonist, is carrying on a clandestine affair with another man, Zal, who disappears after recovering from a vicious homophobic attack. The lovers were set to leave Tehran for Isfahan, where Anjir had planned to transition so they could legally live together as a couple, homosexuality being banned in Iran.

“I wasn’t trying to write a story in which it was someone trying to leave Iran,” says Sinaki, who was born there shortly before the Iran-Iraq War intensified, prompting his family to emigrate to California, where he was raised. Instead, Sinaki wished to portray a character with a complicated relationship to both his birthplace and his lover.

The constant threat of violence accompanying Anjir’s illicit encounters with Zal expresses themes that have long been important to Sinaki. “For me, sex and death are inherently intertwined,” he says, referring not only to persecutions in Iran but also Western cultural representations of homosexuality. “Growing up in the U.S., my examples of how love affairs ended were either Brokeback Mountain or The Laramie Project.”

Grove VP, executive editor Amy Hundley places Medusa of the Roses alongside classics of American queer literature like Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and John Rechy’s City of Night. Editorial assistant Joseph Payne adds that the obsessive Anjir’s “ribald vulnerability rang truer to me than any other queer character I’ve seen committed to the page.”

In addition to writing, Sinaki works for a Los Angeles company that puts on summer screenings at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, projecting old movies onto a mausoleum. It’s a perfect gig for the author of a dreamy, death-haunted noir.

Draft Day

Elizabeth Staple

In Elizabeth Staple’s media relations role with the New England Patriots during their 2007 undefeated regular season, she answered Tom Brady’s fan mail, transcribed press conferences given by the notoriously reticent Bill Belichick, and tried to keep players on message. “That team was stacked with superstars, which can be positive or negative, depending on how good they are at controlling their mouths,” Staple says. In other words, she had experience shaping a narrative before embarking on her first work of fiction.

The Snap (Doubleday, Aug.) is an NFL workplace novel with mystery elements. As it opens, Poppy Benjamin, longtime media director of the Syracuse Bobcats, is managing multiple crises: the once-stellar squad is on a losing streak; then its legendary head coach, Red, dies under suspicious circumstances; and Poppy receives an ominous note threatening to expose her past transgression. The novel shuttles between the Bobcats’ dumpster fire of a season and their Super Bowl run 15 years earlier, when Poppy, an intern, was starstruck by the wolfish Red.

As the novel makes clear, being a woman in a male-dominated sports field is exhilarating as well as challenging. Staple, who was homeschooled, was always drawn to sports, partly because “it was a way for me to feel like I was still part of a larger conversation, like I was experiencing the same thing as everybody else.” She worked for Syracuse University’s athletics department while attending college there, and went on to a successful career with the NFL. Still, she faced barriers: three different teams told her they would hire her but already had a woman on staff. Staple suspects they were hesitant to have too many women in the locker room.

“Women’s visibility in sports is on the rise—finally!” says Vintage associate editor Ellie Pritchett, adding, “It’s important to remember that there’s a long, complex history behind our current moment.”

For Staple, writing about office intrigue, betrayals, secrets, and sexual misconduct was liberating. “With public relations, you better come up with something positive out of a pile of garbage,” she says. “It was nice to be able to let it all out.”

Role Model

Kat Tang

“People typically don’t know what they want,” says Kat Tang, whose melancholy satire Five-Star Stranger (Scribner, Aug.) probes the limits of the app-based service economy. “Just because you do what someone tells you to do, it doesn’t mean they’re going to be happy.”

Nevertheless, the novel’s narrator, referred to only as the Stranger, aims above all to make his clients happy by serving as a wingman, fake boyfriend, and even a father. He accompanies people to weddings and funerals or escorts single women to social events (a popular request of his older clients is the opera The Magic Flute). Though the Stranger plays his part to perfection, the novel demonstrates that some emotional needs can’t be met on demand.

Five-Star Stranger explores “questions of identity and intimacy in an entirely new way,” says Scribner VP, executive editor Kara Watson, who describes the protagonist as “part actor, part therapist.” The Stranger leads a monastic existence and has no emotional attachments. His career choice stems from his traumatic relationship with his emotionally distant mother, a failed actor. Tang explains that the Stranger’s dedication to others allows him to avoid “having to look at himself, because he knows how devastating it would be.”

Tang, who was born in China, moved with her family to California when she was five, after her father landed a job in Silicon Valley. She worked as a corporate lawyer in New York City before earning her MFA at Columbia. The program was quite the change of pace from her courtroom days. “You’re writing all this dramatic narrative on the page, and then you look up and think, I’ve spent two years in my room,” she says.

Five-Star Stranger revolves around two of the Stranger’s assignments: his longtime weekly gig playing the “father” of Lily, a precocious nine-year-old girl whose single mother wanted to have a stable paternal figure in her daughter’s life but grows conflicted over the arrangement, and a new role for a blocked writer who hires him to play one of the characters in her novel-in-progress, hoping he can help bring the project to life. Tang gradually exposes the deficiencies of the Stranger’s clinical approach when it comes to meeting other people’s needs. “My conception of care or love is a willingness for things to get messy, to be hurt,” she says.

Desert Women

Lena Valencia

“It can be a real challenge with short story collections to land on an elevator pitch,” says Lena Valencia. But she came up with a pithy one for Mystery Lights (Tin House, Aug.) nonetheless, describing it as a collection of tales about “women in the desert.” Not all the stories fit that description, but those that do leverage the landscape’s sublimity and quiet menace.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the way scale works in the desert,” Valencia says, referring to the disorienting difficulty of gauging a sense of height or distance while gazing across a flat landscape. The unsettling panoramas are ideal for her “unsettled” characters, as Valencia describes them, including the indie horror filmmaker in “Dogs,” who has a disquieting interaction with a pack of stray dogs, and the man to whom she turns for rescue.

After graduating from Bennington College, Valencia worked for the interviews-driven Bomb magazine in Brooklyn, helping to digitize the archives of interdisciplinary conversations. “The project gave me incredible insight into the practice of writing and art-making,” says Valencia, who is currently a managing editor at One Story.

Mystery Lights is an eclectic blend of realism, satire, and the supernatural. In one macabre episode, a sinister nurse terrorizes a retirement home. Tin House editor Elizabeth DeMeo marvels over Valencia’s “painterly ability to work with so many different shades of mystery—the uncanny, the wondrous, the spooky, the otherworldly, the strange.” In “You Can Never Be Too Sure,” for example, a college campus is supposedly haunted by a crazed 19th-century trapper, though a greater danger might lurk in the student body.

Valencia says she was more interested in “staying close to the characters” than in dispelling ambiguity around what transpires. “If a character is scared of a Trapper and thinks she’s seeing the Trapper, the fear is still there, and it’s still real.”

For those who aren’t drawn in by Valencia’s elevator pitch, the collection’s epigraph might do the trick. It’s taken from a poem in Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders and Other Lines, in which a “naked, bestial... squatting creature” gnaws on his own bitter heart. “This tragedy of a creature eating its own heart,” Valencia says, “and the grossness of it, matched the mood of a lot of the stories.”