The books we love coming out this week include new titles by Stephanie Foo, Sarah Weinman, and Maud Casey.
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
Foo, radio journalist and former producer of This American Life, recounts her astounding story of living with complex PTSD (C-PTSD), a diagnosis that describes the psychological pain experienced by those who’ve suffered recurring traumas. To find her “redemption arc” and reckon with her trauma, Foo felt she needed “to tease apart the careful life I have crafted for myself, the one that is threatening to unravel at any minute.” She exceeds her intention by delivering a heartrending portrayal of the physical abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her parents, immigrants from Malaysia (“If you are beaten for hundreds of mistakes, then every mistake becomes dangerous.... The world itself becomes a threat”). Foo also writes of the therapeutic work she undertook in her adulthood to heal and the agency she’s gained from it. “C-PTSD is a wily shape-shifter,” she writes. “Each episode is its own odyssey... requiring new bursts of courage.” What takes this brilliant work from a personal story to a cultural touch point is the way Foo situates her experiences into a larger conversation about intergenerational trauma, immigration, and the mind-body connection (“I was casting abuse and bad parenting as a central theme across my community—was this perpetuating a negative, unhealthy stereotype?”). This is a work of immense beauty.
Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free
In this mesmerizing account, Weinman (The Real Lolita) does a masterly job resurrecting a stranger-than-fiction chapter in American criminal justice. In 1957, unemployed veteran Edgar Smith was arrested for bludgeoning 15-year-old Victoria Zielinski to death in Mahwah, N.J. Smith, who testified in his own defense at his trial, was sentenced to death. In 1962, after conservative intellectual William F. Buckley learned Smith was an admirer of Buckley’s magazine, National Review, Buckley began corresponding with Smith, leading to an unlikely friendship and financial support for legal efforts to spare Smith’s life. Smith, who published both a book about his case and a mystery novel from behind bars, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder during a retrial, and in 1971 he was released for time served. In 1976, Smith stabbed a woman nearly to death in California. (During his testimony at the subsequent trial, he admitted to killing Zielinski.) Weinman’s dogged research, which included correspondence with Smith, who died in prison in 2017, and a study of Buckley’s papers, enable her to craft a deeply unsettling narrative about how a clever killer manipulated the justice system to his benefit. This instant classic raises disturbing questions about gullibility even on the part of the very bright.
City of Incurable Women
Casey’s enlightening latest (after The Man Who Walked Away) imagines the lives of female “hysterics” confined at the Salpêtrière, a 19th-century psychiatric hospital in Paris. The work, unshackled from traditional elements such as plot, characters, or earned endings, alternately reads like a prose poem, a fever dream, and a compendium of primary sources. Casey wanders among the thoughts and histories of a chambermaid, a foundling, and a seamstress, juxtaposing their motives, thoughts, and dreams with accounts of their rapes by previous employers and sexual exploitation by their doctors who “disguise it as science,” as well as the dehumanizing doctors’ case notes, which mention tattooing the patients with the name of the hospital. The first-person plural narration, meanwhile, blurs the women’s identities (“None of us wanted to fall, but then we were falling”). Illuminating illustrations and references to the real people who inspired the story add texture to a distressing account of a dark history, and Casey’s rich imaginative leaps make for tantalizing and affecting portraits. It defies convention and revels in searing, gorgeous language. In fact, this is worth reading twice.
Dead Collections
Lambda Literary Award winner Fellman (for The Breath of the Sun, in the LGBT Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror category) returns with a delightfully eccentric story of a trans vampire and archivist. Sol Katz lives in the basement archive of the Historical Society of Northern California, where he works as a historian while staying in the safety of the sunless offices except for visits to the blood transfusion clinic and nighttime meanderings along the San Francisco streets. His work is interrupted by a visit from Elsie, the widow of Tracy Britton, writer of the popular sci-fi television series Feet of Clay. Elsie has come to donate Tracy’s documents and memorabilia, and quickly falls in love with Sol as their archival work together progresses. Fellman’s description of Sol’s Feet of Clay fandom sprawls into the show’s universe and characters, charmingly evoking the fan fiction genre. Rife with dry humor and a creative mix of narration, texts, emails, and Facebook threads, the novel expertly balances the humorous and the heartfelt. Fellman thoughtfully examines gender, sexuality, and belonging through an unforgettable main character, who explores what it means to truly embody himself. This bold and self-aware story delivers the goods.
The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World
Poet Puhak (Guinevere in Baltimore) delivers a lyrical and astute assessment of the political maneuvers, battlefield strategies, and resilience of medieval queens and rivals Fredegund and Brunhild. Members of the Merovingian dynasty, noble-born Brunhild and her sister-in-law Fredegund, a former slave, fought vigorously as active queen consorts and then regents to enlarge their respective shares of Francia (modern-day Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and parts of Germany and Switzerland) in the sixth century. Brunhild sought to improve her realm with infrastructure projects and political alliances and exhibited her negotiating skills in the Treaty of Andelot, which allowed her, her daughter, and daughter-in-law to avoid being forced into a convent and stripped of their extensive lands in the event of widowhood. Meanwhile, Fredegund chillingly orchestrated at least a dozen assassinations, including murdering a bishop during Easter Mass and sending two enslaved boys with poisoned daggers to murder Brunhild’s husband. Puhak skillfully draws on contemporaneous sources, including letters, poems, and a vividly told yet obviously biased account by Brunhild’s devoted ally, Bishop Gregory of Tours, to create her thrilling history. The resulting is deeply fascinating portrait of the early Middle Ages that vigorously reclaims two powerhouse women from obscurity.
Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses
Wildlife filmmaker Higgins (David Bailey: Look) uses discoveries about animal perception to explore human senses in this eminently entertaining look at the natural world. Adopting the simplest definition of sentience as “our ability to sense the world around us,” Higgins “reflects on how each of the sentient beings with whom we share the planet offers a different perspective on how we sense” things. She covers a mind-boggling array of creatures with confounding abilities: there’s the peacock mantis shrimp, which has an unusually large number of photoreceptors and can detect colors that humans cannot, but is less able to distinguish subtle changes in shading; the goliath catfish, whose entire skin functions as a tongue and shows “that our sense of taste is more diverse than we could have imagined, and its reach extends beyond that of our tongue”; and the star-nosed mole, who teaches “much about our sense of touch through an organ we normally associate with our sense of smell.” Higgins does a great job at describing scientific studies and their results, and at connecting them to humans, making for a moving and perspective-shifting examination of “the everyday miracle of being sentient.” Fans of David Attenborough’s documentaries or the works of Helen Scales will savor this delightful study.
Last Exit
College students discover they can manipulate the inherent uncertainties of reality to step into alternate universes in the brilliant latest from Hugo and Nebula Award winner Gladstone (This Is How You Lose the Time War, written with Amal El-Mohtar). Heroine Zelda and her friends use this “knack” to search for a better world, one “where history turned out different.” Instead, they find the rot, a hungry evil that devours every world it touches—and, in a terrible miscalculation, Zelda’s lover, Sal, is lost to the rot. Ten years later, Zelda’s on the road, alone, and working to stamp out the rot wherever it creeps into her world. When Sal’s 17-year-old cousin, June, demands answers about what really happened to Sal, Zelda takes June into an “alt”—and discovers that Sal, or whatever she’s become, is coming home. Now Zelda must bring her old friends back together to travel to the Crossroads, where worlds meet, in hopes of sealing off the rot forever. Gladstone weaves magic and mathematics in vivid and poetic prose. There’s a wonderful diversity of characters and relationships, with deep insight on how the characters’ differing traumas and marginalizations influence what they want out of the alternate worlds. The result blends fantasy, horror, and science fiction to produce a stunning, insightful novel that wants a better world just as much as its protagonists do.
Why Argument Matters
Critic Siegel (Against the Machine) offers an invigorating reflection on the nature and value of disagreement. Arguments are central to human imagination, he writes, and a “true argument” consists of two aspects: “an intense concern for the matter at hand that extends beyond merely winning or losing...and the ability to live the thoughts and emotions behind the counterargument.” In Siegel’s view, arguments are different from disputes, debates, and quarrels—they’re “justifications for ways of living,” and, “like art,” are creative processes that take root when alone. He cites several surprising examples to prove his point: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and René Descartes’s A Discourse on Method, both of which were conceived in solitude. Siegel also covers the rhetorical turns of Barack Obama’s speeches and John Locke’s thoughts on logic, and explores whether art is an argument in and of itself (“The proof that art is... lies in the degree to which a work of art gives rise to argument”). Whereas the concept of argumentation is often seen in terms of combat and victory, Siegel suggests, the “most relentless, intellectually merciless arguments are acts of caring about the world” because they are in service of working toward a better life. This sharp and taut outing is a lesson in a well-constructed argument itself.
