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By George, she’s got it! Annoying yet affable, Kate Greathead’s George is a captivatingly mediocre antihero.

There’s nothing very remarkable about George or his family. They have their issues. George’s mother, Ellen, has become increasingly disconnected from him over the years, though she remains intimidating to him. Ellen is separating from George’s father, Denis, because Denis’s enthusiasm for luxury fashion has been draining the family funds. Then there’s George’s older sister, Cressida, who is unabashedly straightforward and critical of George, and, like his mother, regards him with a hint of contempt. Despite this friction, the unassuming George manages his family dynamics with seeming nonchalance. In fact, he rarely makes a fuss about the events in his life, and only occasionally shows passion for a goal or project, such as a college major in philosophy, before quickly returning to his habitual listlessness. This passivity even applies to his on-again, off-again relationship with his girlfriend Jenny, who, like the members of his family, oscillates between having patience with him and finding him tedious.

The Book of George unravels George’s life in episodes that highlight his misadventures from ages 12 to 38. The epigraph, excerpted from a letter from the mother of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to her son, sets the narrative tone: Johanna Schopenhauer tells Arthur that while he has “everything that could make you a credit to human society . . . you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable.”

Greathead’s delicious deadpan delivery, with its understatement and ironic humor, is irresistible. The Book of George can take its place next to other novels with lovably frustrating main characters like Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove.

Kate Greathead’s delicious understatement and ironic humor makes The Book of George an irresistible portrait of a lovably frustrating mediocre man.
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Rejection: Somewhere on the continuum between a casual date rebuff and a duo-destroying divorce, we’ve all experienced it. In Rejection, Whiting and O. Henry Award-winning author Tony Tulathimutte raises the experience to an art form. In seven connected stories, he chronicles several characters’ vivid responses to being turned down, or turned away. 

By vivid, I mean frequently TMI-delivering. Colorful descriptions of body parts and the multiple ways they can interact tumble off the page, and if depictions of sadism and ersatz semen (complete with a recipe) are off-putting, you might consider something more PG. On the other hand, if you can roll with the aforementioned, the book is frequently downright hilarious. 

In one story, the protagonist is a cartoonishly hyperactive tech bro, whose latest invention is living room furniture that also functions as workout equipment, allowing the user to crush out 300-pound leg presses. (Unfortunately, his team hasn’t yet worked out the “stinky/soggy upholstery” problem.) In another chapter, Tulathimutte documents a multi-hour consensus meeting in a university’s “queer-friendly vegetarian-friendly 420-friendly co-op,” weaponizing and satirizing political correctness in extremis. 

As one might expect from a graduate of both Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tulathimutte has a facility with verbal stunt-piloting that at times borders on the dazzling. Not every writer can pull off a sentence like this one, describing social media as “the give-and-take of giving takes where no one could take what they’d give.” The structure of Rejection is distinctive as well, riddled with group text messages, acronyms and the jargon of those raised with the internet. Pro tip; Boomers and Gen Xers might want to keep a browser tab open to Urban Dictionary for easy reference.  

Right at the end, Tulathimutte throws one last curveball reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, a little literary Ouroboros that may cause the reader to question the legitimacy of the entire narrative that precedes it. Clever trick, that, in a clever book aimed at clever readers. 

Tony Tulathimutte’s facility with verbal stunt-piloting borders on the dazzling in Rejection, a novel in seven stories that chronicles vivid responses to the experience of being turned down, or turned away.
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Over two decades of writing books, author Danzy Senna (Caucasia and New People) faced the same obstacle again and again: “I kept coming up against the problem of my work being uncategorizable and me being uncategorizable.” At 53, Senna has earned critical acclaim, but she’s still keenly conscious of “being a writer who doesn’t fit into the binary world” in terms of how the American public consumes art and how publishing companies package race and fiction for publicity. As someone of mixed race who writes about the complexities of race, sex and class, she explores subjects that the industry has yet to gain comfort handling.

At the same time, living in Los Angeles, Senna was constantly aware of the “glittering television world” surrounding her. This parallel cultural universe was not just co-existing with the scruffier literary world she inhabited; it had “sort of taken over everything in our public conversation.”

Curious about what lay beyond the literary landscape, Senna decided to dip into television writing—and in the process, she found the seed for her fourth novel, Colored Television.  Speaking to BookPage by video call from a sunny, mid-century modern den in her home, Senna talked about the origins of her novel, and how her life, past and present, has fed into her art.

“It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

At first, there was just a kernel, an observation about her TV meetings: There was something inherently humorous and provocative about them. The network employees Senna met with were just sort of “cravenly thinking” of Senna’s mixed identity. “It’s almost pure, in a way, compared to the literary world—the way they think about how to market you.” Tongue only sort of in cheek, Senna remarks with a chuckle, “It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

Then, a few years ago, Senna recalls, in the midst of the renaissance of television, and an accompanying hunger for diversity on screen, the story of struggling literary writer Jane Gibson came to her nearly fully formed. “I thought it would be funny if this character kind of hit a wall [as a novelist] and was ready to sell her soul to Hollywood.”

While there are “autobiographical undercurrents” in the book, Senna has a way of mining experience as a starting point and then letting the imagination and satire take flight. In writing fiction, “I’m looking for the story that didn’t happen within the story that did . . . taking a shred of truth and then mining it for the fictional possibilities,” she says. Her softly cutting, satirical sensibility is a key part of Senna’s brand and drives the process of transforming experience into fiction through embellishment and intentional provocation.

“I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton. And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

The novel gains further complexity through its supporting characters, whose takes on making and selling art amid American racial dynamics represent different parts of Senna’s own experiences and perspective. One of these characters is Hampton Ford, a successful Black producer Jane meets with. While his name calls to mind the HBCU Hampton University and ties him to civil rights activist and Black Panther member Fred Hampton, it’s meant to be a bit ironic, conveying a certain kind of racial consciousness, while also drawing a contrast between Hampton’s upbringing and where he landed. “I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton,” says Senna. “And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

As Senna explains, Hampton’s perspective is defined by “fear and the idea of scarcity,” a sense of precarity even in times of success. It’s the realization that, while “the white gaze looks at you [now] and says that you’re valuable,” as a Black artist, you know that being in vogue and in demand may not last: “A year from now, they may have moved on.” Senna says that this “sense of fleeting interest in your story” cultivates “a kind of desperation . . . that I think every writer of color has felt.” In the wake of the publishing industry’s retrenchment from its promises during 2020’s vaunted summer of racial reckoning, it’s easy to see how this perspective is reflected in a broader social reality.

While Senna is sympathetic to Hampton, her satire cuts sharper in other places. One of Colored Television’s defining passages is a gutting of a certain kind of tokenized nonwhite, neoconservative thinker often celebrated in white circles—a type exemplified by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer for The Atlantic who previously thought of himself as Black but no longer does. Williams once declared to Senna, she reveals, that her own identification as Black was “a legacy of slavery.” In the novel, Jane delivers the perfect takedown of Williams’ disavowal of race: “Once you declared you didn’t believe in race, it seemed, you had to declare this rather banal idea everywhere you went—so it became a way of believing in race even as you pretended not to believe in race. It was an ‘out damn spot’ situation—the more you tried to wash your hands of race, the more the bloody spots emerged.”

Senna’s point of view is informed by growing up as a mixed-race girl in Boston, where she came of age in the 1970s and ’80s. As she so effectively captured in her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, those were turbulent and difficult times for her family and their community. Boston was infamously resistant to integration. “It was like [what] my mother calls . . . the ‘Deep North,’” she says. To get across what it was like to be a mixed-race person or a Black person in Boston at the time, she says, “you would have to say you were from Alabama in the ’50s . . . it was so racially fraught.”

Senna’s mother, poet Fanny Howe, is a prolific writer from a wealthy, white New England family. Her accomplished editor father, Carl Senna, is a Black man from a somewhat murky, unrecorded working class background in the South. The two had a contentious divorce when Senna was 7. After living through that tension, when it came time to apply to college, to Senna it felt “like leaving the scene of a crime.” She applied to schools in California, and chose to attend Stanford University, just outside Palo Alto and thousands of miles away from the difficulties of home.

Senna’s memoir was a bit of her own personal reckoning, and it stirred up pain that stuck around for a while. Today, she looks back on her hometown with equanimity, saying, “I go back and I sort of have a lot of affection for it.” The older she gets, the more she realizes, “that was a formative thing. I don’t think I would have had the same level of politics and consciousness had I been raised in a different kind of environment.”

She’s also glad to have returned to writing fiction, which gets her “closer to these eternal and subconscious truths about race and family. The problem with memoir is you can stick to the facts, but the truth of the story changes over time. Your relationship to the facts changes. . . . So the true story is always changing, but the made-up one remains true.”

Read our review of Colored Television.

In the author's biting and hilarious fourth novel, a literary writer pushing the limits of her patience and her pocketbook gives Hollywood a shot.
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There’s no little irony to the release of Danzy Senna’s Colored Television. It’s come just when all those beleaguered novelists who thought writing for TV would make them some real money are realizing that writers’ rooms are the latest creative labor bait and switch. Instead of wealth and acclaim, they’re faced with impossible demands, zero respect and such dismal pay that they still have to take a second job to cover rent.

Jane Gibson and her husband Lenny belong to that class of people now called the precariat. These folks work, and may indeed be talented, but they find it tough to make a consistent living. Jane has published one novel and she’s been trying for a decade to produce a follow-up. She teaches, without tenure, to make ends meet. Lenny, supremely disdainful of just about everything and everyone, is an artist whose paintings don’t sell. Because of this, they suffer from a genteel homelessness; when we meet them they’re housesitting, yet again. This time their benefactor is Jane’s old friend Brett, who’s making a killing as a showrunner. Jane and Lenny have two young children to care for, too: Finn is bright and possibly autistic, and Ruby is now old enough to feel the effects of her family’s essentially vagabond state.

Then, almost miraculously, Jane finishes her book, a doorstopper about mixed-race Black and white Americans over centuries. She has a personal connection to the topic, since she’s biracial. But when she presents the fruit of her labor to her long-suffering agent, it’s rejected (unsurprisingly, to the reader). Shocked and desperate, Jane decides to pinch Brett’s agent. Instead of a book about mixed-race people, she’ll develop a TV show about them: “The Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies,” exults a TV producer she meets with.

Senna’s sense of the absurd is impeccable, evident throughout Jane’s time in what Hollywood types call “development hell,” and building toward a moment near the very end that will make you gasp, “Oh no!” The book is hilarious even as the reader senses the despair beneath the laughs. Colored Television is the perfect story for our times.

Read our interview with Danzy Senna about Colored Television.

Danzy Senna’s tale of a novelist’s venture into Hollywood is hilarious even as the reader senses the despair beneath the laughs. Colored Television is the perfect story for our times.
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The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin—dubbed the “Nazi Olympics” for providing an international platform to the genocidal regime—produced lasting memories, including the triumphs of Black American track and field star Jesse Owens and the “Boys in the Boat” rowing team that beat Germany in a dramatic upset. Less remembered is the wide speculation at the games that Helen Stephens, a U.S. runner who won two golds, might actually be a man.

She wasn’t. But the phony controversy was symptomatic of a panic in the Olympics establishment. Not long before the 1936 games, two top track and field athletes who had competed in international competitions as women said publicly that they were men (we would say now that they had come out as trans). A handful of Olympic leaders, including Nazi sympathizers, immediately drew the wrong conclusions and called for mandatory medical exams to determine sex prior to sports competitions.

In The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, author Michael Waters sensitively tells this forgotten history and reveals its modern resonances. The book connects the struggles of those two athletes, Zdenek Koubek of Czechoslovakia and Mark Weston of Britain, with the relatively open attitude toward queerness in pre-Nazi Central Europe, the resistance within the early Olympics movement to women’s sports, and the failed effort to boycott the Berlin games.

The Other Olympians is full of surprises for contemporary readers. For example, anyone who mistakenly thinks Christine Jorgensen was the first person to have gender affirming surgery will learn very much otherwise. But Waters’ detailed description of the outspoken Koubek’s life before and during his transition is the heart of the book. He emerges as an overlooked pioneer.

Koubek, Weston and other trans and queer people profiled here never wanted to compete against women after their transitions. Yet an entire regimen of sex testing was built on the unfounded belief that men were somehow masquerading as women to participate in sports contests. Decisions made in the late 1930s created sports competition rules that still exist today, as debate over trans athletes rages in school board meetings, courtrooms and legislative sessions. Waters doggedly chronicles where the debate originated and calls for what he believes is overdue change.

The Other Olympians doggedly chronicles the lives of pioneering trans athletes and the historically fraught 1936 Olympic Games.
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Mike De Socio loves the Boy Scouts. In Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ+ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts—and America, De Socio, an Eagle Scout, details how Boy Scouts gave him, a nerdy misfit, the space to thrive. He is also queer, coming out while in college in 2015, the same year that the Scouts lifted its ban on gay leaders and two years after it had lifted the ban on gay Scouts. De Socio learned he was not alone: Boy Scouts had provided a safe haven for many other queer Scouts, a haven that was repeatedly taken away because of a policy that they had no idea even existed.

Taking its title from the Boy Scout Oath, Morally Straight weaves detailed journalism and De Socio’s deeply personal memories in its recounting of the effort to lift bans on LGBTQ+ Boy Scouts and their leaders. It starts with the story behind Dale v. Boy Scouts of America, the 2000 Supreme Court case that allowed the Scouts to discriminate against queer boys and men.

At the heart of De Socio’s book is the work of Scouts for Equality (SFE), an activist group formed in 2012 after the Scouts expelled lesbian den leader Jennifer Tyrrell. Headed by Zach Wahls and Jonathan Hillis, two straight Eagle Scouts, SFE evolved into a broad-based alliance of LGBTQ+ and straight Scouts, parents and supporters that eventually persuaded the Scouts to rescind their policies.

Under Wahls and Hillis’ leadership, the SFE became a juggernaut. In their early 20s, both men  were uniquely qualified to take on the BSA. The son of two lesbian mothers, Wahls was already a LGBTQ+ activist and the author of My Two Moms. Hillis was a prominent youth leader at the BSA’s national level. Ironically, both credit the Boy Scouts with developing the moral courage and leadership skills that made SFE possible.

Morally Straight is both clear-eyed and optimistic. BSA is now a broader tent, accepting gay, trans and even female Scouts. But, as De Socio’s own experiences show, it still grapples with how to give its members the space and tools to remain true to who they are.

Morally Straight weaves detailed journalism and author Mike De Socio’s deeply personal memories in its recounting of the effort to lift bans on LGBTQ+ Boy Scouts and their leaders.

As the Texas legislature attempts to ban books; dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion; and threaten LGBTQ+ people with draconian laws, poet and author KB Brookins’ debut memoir, Pretty, arrives when we need it most. Brookins is a Black, queer and trans writer and cultural worker whose previous work includes two poetry collections, Freedom House and How to Identify Yourself With a Wound. Pretty details their experience navigating gender and Black masculinity while growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, exploring how they have moved through a world of cisgender Black and non-Black people, from their biological parents to their adopted family, from classmates to lovers, and from their gender transition through adulthood.

Brookins spent their youth challenging binary spaces and expectations. From early childhood to the present, they have desired to be seen as pretty, and this book is the search to find out what that means for them: “Though not gendered, we often associate prettiness with womanhood, femininity, and objects we see as dainty,” they write. “I’ve never been interested in womanhood, but I’ve always wanted to be treated softly, like a fat pleasantry to the eyes.” Through often striking prose and imagery, Brookins questions the restrictions involved in those associations: “When I was femme, my prettiness was canceled out by Blackness. When I was butch, my prettiness was seen as invalidating my masculinity. Who taught us that masculinity can’t be pretty? Who taught us that Blackness was devoid of prettiness and delicacy?”

While Brookins searches for answers to these questions, they continuously remind us of how hostile the U.S. is to Black and trans people: “As the perception of me changes before my eyes, I realize that it is a specific sadness—embodying patriarchal masculinity in a country that wants your blood more than it wants you to breathe.” We need words and stories like this. By describing their movement through the world, Brookins simultaneously critiques the conditions that oppress Black and racialized people who seek radical self-acceptance, and refuses the state’s malicious attempts to criminalize gender and sexuality.

Pretty offers far more than just pretty words—Brookins tells their side of the story as an act of resistance against those who would silence them. This book is as much a story of self-discovery and survival as it is a love letter to their younger and current self.

As Texas threatens LGBTQ+ people with draconian laws, KB Brookins’ memoir, Pretty, is an act of resistance against those who would silence trans writers.
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A romance is all about the final payoff: After pages of will-they-won’t-they teasing, readers anticipate the moment when everything falls ecstatically into place and our lovers end up together. Kate Young’s Experienced takes this model and twists it, leading readers on a wholehearted, fun exploration of dating and love in the 21st century. After her girlfriend Mei suggests they take a break so the newly-out Bette can casually date and get the full single experience, Bette goes on an awkward odyssey of first dates. Her journey is silly and relatable, and stays away from romance cliches—although that isn’t to say that the book doesn’t end happily.

Bette tries to be chill about the break. After a bit of confusion and hurt, she decides the best course of action is to actually get some dating experience. With her roommate Ash and Ash’s token straight-guy boyfriend Tim, Bette begins crafting her dating app profiles. They choose the best pictures—though Ash and Tim have to convince Bette that she really does look hot in some of them—and write cool, ironic responses to the prompts. Soon after, Bette starts dating a lineup of strange, sexy characters running the gamut of British lesbian baddies. The most memorable is Bette’s first date, Ruth, a PhD student and experienced casual dater who gives Bette the recipe for success and, in a twist of fate, helps her realize what she really wants from a relationship.

Chapter titles that count down to the date when Bette and Mei are supposed to get back together lend Experienced a sense of anxiety and longing that will be all too familiar to 21st century daters. Young’s charming British English pairs with a young millennial’s quirky, anxious interiority for a fun, surprisingly profound read. Romantics, if you’re lonely or even if you’re happily in love, this novel will be a treat. 

Kate Young’s charming British English paired with her young millennial protagonist’s quirky, anxious interiority makes Experienced a fun, surprisingly profound read.
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Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s debut novel is a quiet but profoundly moving coming-of-age story about a young gay man in mid-2000s Nigeria. It’s an at first straightforward novel that deepens as it progresses, building toward an ending befitting its protagonist—a young man continually moving through different versions of himself.

Blessings opens in 2006 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. When Obiefuna’s father catches him in a moment of tenderness with another boy, he immediately sends him away to boarding school. Life at school is strictly regulated and often violent. Older boys abuse and terrorize the younger boys without consequence. Obiefuna, fearing that his sexuality may be discovered at any moment, does what he thinks he has to in order to survive.

Though the novel continues to follow Obiefuna through his early years at university, his time at the boarding school takes up the most space and carries a hefty emotional weight. At times it may feel as if the story drags, but the beautiful and complicated third act reveals that Ibeh knew exactly where he was going all along. He captures the uneven importance of memory and experience, the way certain events can haunt a life without our knowledge. Obiefuna’s relationships to himself, his family, his lovers and his country change dramatically over time, a shift that Ibeh weaves almost invisibly into the prose.

Interspersed between chapters from Obiefuna’s point of view are ones told from his mother Uzoamaka’s perspective. These feel less immediate and vivid, but do add a poignant narrative layer, giving readers a glimpse into what goes unspoken between mother and son.

Blessings is an excellent work of queer fiction, full of characters who are neither good nor bad, but simply human beings in constant flux. Ibeh writes cruelty onto the page alongside tenderness, crafting scenes of domestic gay love with the same attention and detail he gives to scenes of emotional and physical violence. He offers us a precious glimpse of the world as it truly is for so many queer people: not tragic, not perfect, not all suffering or all joy—but worth living in and telling stories about.

Blessings offers a precious glimpse of the world as it truly is for so many queer people: not tragic, not perfect, not all suffering or all joy, but worth living in.
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The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, is set in 1961 rural Holland. At 30, Isabel is living in the house where she was raised after the death of her father forced the family’s move from the city and into a furnished house their uncle Karel found for them. Isabel lives a circumscribed and watchful life, guarding her dead mother’s things, suspecting the maid of theft and fending off the attentions of a flirtatious neighbor. Of her brothers, Louis and Hendrik, she is closer to Hendrik, although she disapproves of his friend Sebastian, suspecting a deeper connection. Of Louis and the steady stream of girlfriends he introduces to her, she thinks even less. Until Eva.

The siblings meet Eva at a dinner out. With her clumsy manners and brassy dyed hair, she hardly impresses, and Isabel is shocked when Louis brings her to the house, telling Isabel that Eva must stay there while he goes away on business and showing Eva to their mother’s room. Even under Isabel’s watchful eye, things begin to disappear—a spoon, a bowl, a thimble. More alarming to Isabel is the overwhelming attraction she feels to Eva, an attraction that spills into an obsessive, intensely depicted sexual relationship.

Van der Wouden may be familiar as the author of the 2017 essay “On (Not) Reading Anne Frank,” which explored what it means to be a Dutch Jewish writer and her complicated relationship to Frank’s legacy. As Isabel and Eva’s connection unfolds, Van der Wouden’s true subject comes into view: how ordinary people were implicated in the ethnic cleansing that took place during World War II. Even in peacetime, Isabel and her peers are quick to notice people who appear different, with a fierce disgust that Isabel risks turning on herself as she comes to terms with her sexuality. A novel of redemption as much as revenge, The Safekeep has the pacing and twists of a thriller, while delving into the deeper issues laid bare by the Holocaust.

In Yael van der Wouden’s mesmerizing debut, The Safekeep, Isabel lives a circumscribed life in her dead mother’s house until her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay, alarming Isabel when an obsessive attraction develops between the two.

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Come and Get It (13 hours) follows the colliding stories of students, resident assistants and professors at the University of Arkansas—and it’s full of intrigue, betrayal and a lot of drama. The audiobook is read by Nicole Lewis, who also lent her voice to Kiley Reid’s hard-hitting debut novel Such a Fun Age.

Lewis’ narration drips with nuanced sarcasm. She gives a vibrant voice to Reid’s clever prose and cutting social commentary. Word choice and accents matter in Come and Get It, and Lewis takes full advantage of the audiobook format to give characters their own unique voices, expertly acting out their evasions, backhanded compliments and double-entendres. Listening in feels like hearing a friend share a piece of enthralling, complicated gossip from their undergraduate days.

Darkly funny and provocative, Come and Get It is absolutely absorbing. Listeners will get lost in the story: Reid writes unabashedly about the unique dramas of university life, and Lewis’ dynamic choices as narrator make it difficult to turn the audiobook off.

Read our review of the print edition of Come and Get It.

Darkly funny and provocative, Come and Get It is absolutely absorbing. Kiley Reid writes unabashedly about the unique dramas of university life, and Nicole Lewis’ dynamic choices as narrator make it difficult to turn the audiobook off.
Interview by

It’s common practice among many publishers to leave translators’ bylines off book covers—an act of erasure that reinforces the widely held belief that original texts are sacred and thus superior to any translation. Jennifer Croft, who is best known for her translations of Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s books, is challenging readers and critics to rethink this flawed paradigm.

“Our contemporary notion of authority depends upon the existence—still—of a single trustworthy individual. In literature, this figure is the author, the inimitable person who chooses and disposes words,” Croft writes in “Superlichen,” an essay published in Orion Magazine in 2023. “In this mystical-commercial understanding of literature, translators are necessarily suspect. They adulterate the truth, making it impossible to trust. When translators are truly necessary, they’re ideally neither seen nor heard. That way we can tell ourselves that the Original has remained mostly unscathed on its journey into English.”

But books thrive in translation. They reach new readership, and in some cases, the quality of the original text can even improve. Croft, who won the International Booker Prize in 2018 for her translation of Tokarczuk’s Flights, urges readers to consider translation to be co-creation, a labor of interdependent individuals who are building a completely new work of art.

“The translator is the one who writes every single word of the book that you end up reading,” Croft says, speaking from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on a late December morning—the kind of gray day that’s well suited to a discussion about her puckish, unnerving debut novel. “The writer is obviously the person who’s behind everything, which in a way, of course, is true. But I feel like people aren’t fully grasping the essentially, fundamentally collaborative nature, that [a translated work] is a co-authored book. So I really wanted to show that playing out in an exaggerated, humorous way.”

“What is a faithful translation? What is your duty to a text and a person and a vision and also a readership?”

The Extinction of Irena Rey, which earned Croft a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022, is the story of eight translators who are initially introduced not by name but by their languages of translation (English, Spanish, Serbian, etc.). It’s 2017, and they have convened at the idyllic home of (fictional) world-renowned Polish author Irena Rey. Her house resides at the edge of the Bialowieza Forest, a primeval wood spanning the border of Poland and Belarus. Over the course of the next several weeks, they will translate her presumed magnum opus, Grey Eminence.

Translators aren’t always in contact with an author while translating, but Irena prefers to be highly involved in the process. The translators are forbidden from translating other authors—except two Polish poets widely considered untranslatable—and they must follow Irena’s many house rules, which include no drinking, no eating meat and so on. It is full isolation, full adoration, full commitment to Irena’s genius. But suddenly, Irena vanishes, and the translators are left reeling.

Having lost their moral center, the translators move en masse from room to room, from forest to pub and back to Irena’s house, wondering if Irena’s dead and completely freaking out. It’s such an ominous, claustrophobic setup that the reader would be forgiven for not realizing at first just how funny it all is. There’s a lot of shrieking and kissing and running around with a frantic narrative pace that resembles an old episode of “Scooby-Doo.”

During the gang’s search for clues, they come across some postcards, which only serve to further confuse them. “Postcards are like translation,” Croft says. “There’s the inherent hybrid and potential for clashes between the one side that has the picture and the other side that has the message.” There’s also the potentially troubling political significance of the type of imagery that is selected to represent a place, which can be stereotypical or limiting, “and then it may end up forcing the place to become more like the postcard.”

Croft explains that when postcards were first introduced in the 1860s, they were a revolutionary innovation that allowed more people to send mail, which previously had been a luxury exclusive to the upper classes. “[But the elite] were horrified by the idea that the hired help would be able to read their words,” she says. “I love looking at old postcards, because sometimes you can sense there’s a code happening or a private reference that you just cannot possibly understand.”

The implications of obscured, divided or layered interpretations run rampant in Croft’s novel, which opens with a preface titled “Warning: A Note from the Translator.” We learn that the book is a work of autofiction by Spanish (whose real name is Emi), subsequently translated by English (real name Alexis). Alexis’ translator’s note is dismissive, even derisive, and her footnotes are deliciously scathing. As a translator, she’s doing the unthinkable: sharing her true feelings about the book and even illuminating choices made in the translation process. (For example, when Emi refers to her own “pubis,” Alexis adds the footnote, “Here I have preserved her ridiculous word.”) Their feud renders the story’s perspective so canted, so untrustworthy, that we have no idea which version of events to believe.

“What we do enriches the cultural ecosystem, the linguistic ecosystem. The original text doesn’t even really matter that much.”

Even without quarreling co-authors, autofiction as a genre is a thorny bramble between memoir and fiction, memory and embellishment. The genre is particularly popular with French- and Spanish-language readers. Croft’s first book, Homesick, is a work of autofiction that she wrote in Argentine Spanish while living in Argentina, and it was only sold to an English-language publisher under the condition that it be published as a memoir, presumably because American readers aren’t as comfortable with the gray areas between truth and fiction.

“[Homesick] was kind of inspired by my childhood but [is] definitely not a factual account,” Croft says. “I think that frustration of always talking about what is true and what is not probably fed into the writing of [Irena Rey]. I think also I may have rebelled and made it even more outlandish. Obviously I’ve never fought a duel in a forest.”

The duel is only one of the many ludicrous outcomes of the translators’ search for Irena. It’s also, importantly, between two women: Emi and Alexis. “I actually wrote my PhD dissertation about duels in 20th-century fiction. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t find a single example of a women’s duel, or even a duel between a man and a woman,” Croft says. “A classic dueling premise is to fight over an ethical question. In this case, English and Spanish are fighting—well, at least Spanish believes that they’re fighting over the nature of truth, essentially. What is a faithful translation? What is your duty to a text and a person and a vision and also a readership? How do you truthfully or faithfully convey a sacred message to the world?”

The duel occurs in the Bialowieza Forest, which serves as a classic source of menace and myth. Forests exist in fiction to haunt us, and this one feeds off a history of violence, with corpses from World War II providing nutrients for a fungal network that subsequently feeds the trees and understory, which then feed the deer that feed the Polish villagers, and so on. In fact, the original title for the novel was Amadou, the name of a fungus that parasitically infects trees, serving as an essential decomposer in the forest, and which can also be used as both tinder and fabric.

“Obviously I’m an advocate for translation, and I love translators,” Croft says. “But I also wanted to think about the potentially darker side of translation in a lot of different ways, which goes hand-in-hand with thinking about the power of the translator.” However translation alters the original, or even betrays it, “what we do [as translators] enriches the cultural ecosystem, the linguistic ecosystem. The original text doesn’t even really matter that much. What matters is this potentially really lovely afterlife that [a work] can have, and all of the echoes and reverberations that it can have throughout that ecosystem.”

The concept of a literary afterlife opens us to seeing books as living, changeable works of art, in which language can die and be reborn in translation. Certainly by the end of The Extinction of Irena Rey, the structures that uphold notions like artistic celebrity and all-powerful genius have rotted through and collapsed, and from the remains, something new grows.

Read our starred review of The Extinction of Irena Rey.

Jennifer Croft author photo © Nathan Jeffers.

With her mischievous debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft draws readers deep into a gnarled forest in which eight translators search desperately for their beloved, vanished author.
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Far too often, translators’ bylines go missing on book covers and in reviews. The author is seen as the one true artist, whose translators exist in service to them. Jennifer Croft, the International Booker Prize-winning translator of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk (and many other authors), has become a leading advocate for changing this perception, encouraging readers to view translated books as acts of co-creation rather than pale shadows of their original text. In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation, and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.

As the book begins, the eight translators of world-renowned Polish author Irena Rey have arrived at the author’s home at the edge of the Bialowieza Forest, a primeval, endangered wood that sprawls across the border of Poland and Belarus. All the translators are initially referred to by their languages of translation (English, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, etc.), and the narrator of these events is Spanish, who insists that the translators are wholly devoted to the author and her original text. “Irena’s works were eternal,” Spanish says, “but our translations were no more enduring than socks.” As they prepare to translate Irena’s new novel, Grey Eminence, they cocoon themselves in her world, fully isolated and committed to her unusual rules. But Irena’s behavior is bizarre. She’s reluctant to give them the manuscript, and after a couple of days, she vanishes. The translators are left scrambling to figure out where she went, and over the course of “seven toxic, harrowing, oddly arousing, extremely fruitful weeks,” they race from one clue to the next, terrified and paranoid, getting more and more lost in the proverbial woods.

Croft’s novel employs a beguiling structure that serves to undermine any sense of truth we might try to reap from Spanish’s version of events. Spanish’s book is not a memoir but a work of autofiction, and it has been translated by English, who has illuminated the book with a vicious preface and copious footnotes, often mocking Spanish and offering a peep show of (some of) the changes made in translation. The reader is left to wonder which writer, if any, can be trusted.

Through this trippy mix of high concept and high tension, Croft takes a real chunk out of the convention of deifying the author as an all-powerful genius to whom translators must be beholden. Reading The Extinction of Irena Rey is like encountering a mischievous forest spirit, full of riddles and gloriously disorienting, then somehow getting back out of the woods alive.

Read our interview with Jennifer Croft on The Extinction of Irena Rey.

In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.
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“Cartoonish” is typically a pejorative label. Overexaggerated, outlandish, silly—when a piece of art provokes these descriptions, we expect to be met with sticks of dynamite and eye roll-worthy puns. But the recent elevation of cartoons, from the existentialism of “BoJack Horseman” to the tender lessons of “Adventure Time,” should make us reconsider how we view cartoonishness. Isabel Waidner’s new novella, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, is cartoonish on every conceivable level: The story of Corey Fah is a comedic romp through a queer, absurdist world. Fit with an adorably passive-aggressive deer-spider hybrid, a wormhole-hunting playwright turned talk show host, and biting social commentary about social commentary, Waidner’s novel is a thoroughly enjoyable, envelope-pushing head-scratcher.

Corey lives with their partner Drew Szumski in a capital city loosely resembling London. After winning the Award for the Fictionalization of Social Evils, Corey is tasked with retrieving their trophy, but it’s not so simple as picking it up from the prize committee. The trophy is a neon-beige flying saucer that has a mind of its own, teleporting away from Corey and Drew as they repeatedly try to claim it. On this wild goose chase, the pair meet Bambi Pavok, the aforementioned fawn-spider creature who teleported from an alternate dimension. Still sans trophy and under pressure from the prize committee to do publicity, Corey takes Bambi Pavok onto a cultish talk show where the dimensional layers of this strange world start to fold in on themselves and the story takes a turn from weird to utterly bizarre.

I can say with certainty that Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is the wildest book I have ever reviewed for BookPage. The plot toes the line of ridiculousness in a truly masterful way, never ceasing to surprise, and Waidner’s ultramodern language, a mix of the Queen’s English and Tumblr-speak, results in some strangely beautiful sentences. All the while, the characters are developed in subtle, touching ways. For example, in a socially awkward, quintessentially millennial moment of tenderness, Corey expresses that they would be utterly lost without Drew, who has stood by them throughout their flailing career as a writer.

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is a flashy, punchy whirlwind: Waidner has caught lightning in a bottle.

Isabel Waidner has caught lightning in a bottle with this comedic romp through a queer, absurdist world.

“I’d hate to live in a world where we tell people what they should and shouldn’t write based on the color of their skin.” R.F. Kuang, the award-winning, bestselling author of Babel and the Poppy War series, fans the discourse on diversity, racism and the “right” to tell certain stories with her novel Yellowface, a thought-provoking first-person narrative of a plagiarist.

June Hayward is a struggling 27-year-old straight white author, and as the novel begins, she’s getting drinks with Athena Liu, her Asian American friend whom she’s known since college, to celebrate yet another of Athena’s huge literary successes. However, when the picture-perfect Athena ends up dead, envious June makes a decision that leads her to stardom—and damnation. June edits her dead friend’s manuscript, a cultural saga set in China, and presents it as her own work under a pseudonym that uses her middle name, Song, as her surname.

Despite a few readers’ protestations of possible cultural appropriation, the book is a huge success, and June Song embraces her soaring status in the publishing world. But the questions around June’s authenticity and ethnicity keep getting louder, as more and more anonymous social media accounts wonder if June has the right to pen a story about Chinese culture. June’s followers revolt, and her star plummets. 

Kuang hooks readers from the first chapter with June’s preoccupation with Athena and the life-altering choice to steal her frenemy’s manuscript. June’s theft makes her an immediate antagonist, and her delusional entitlement makes her a compelling unreliable narrator. But exactly how unreliable is June? Kuang casts a light on this question with her adroit representation of June’s disloyal social media following, which lurches from commendation to castigation, and of a publishing world committed only to financial success. 

“I know what you’re thinking. Thief. Plagiarizer. And perhaps, because all bad things must be racially motivated, Racist. Hear me out. It’s not so awful as it sounds,” June assures the reader. Poignant and provocative, Yellowface is an in-your-face satirical novel with layered commentary on discrimination, social media and creative freedom. Kuang allows for numerous sides of our society’s heated conversations about cultural (mis)appropriation and censorship, and examines how judgment is so often clouded by perception rather than shaped by truths. This is a riveting read for fans of Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, Year of the Tiger by Alice Wong and George Orwell’s 1984

Poignant and provocative, Yellowface is an in-your-face satirical novel with layered commentary on discrimination, social media and creative freedom.
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T.C. Boyle has never been afraid to torment his characters or draw from real life, and he does both in Blue Skies, putting his cast through just about every climate-related calamity to make the contours of the crisis so prominent that no one could miss them.

He begins this bicoastal adventure—the action toggles between Florida and California—with, of all things, jewelry. But it’s “living jewelry,” a Burmese python purchased by influencer Cat to wear around her neck. Boyle, the unparalleled stylist, describes Cat’s thought process in gorgeous prose: She thinks snakes are beautiful, “as if somebody had dipped a brush in acrylics and traced the lines that radiated in a widening V from their mouths to draw reticulate patterns across their backs and down their sides.”

Plenty of descriptions as unforgettable as that one follow as Boyle introduces multiple characters and complications, from the self-inflicted to the unforeseen. Cat’s ambition is to gain online followers and show off her Florida beachfront home. She lives there with her Tesla-driving fiancé, Todd, whose job involves drinking and partying to promote a rum brand. To Cat’s chagrin, it also involves a lot of time away from home.

Across the country in California are other members of Cat’s family. Her brother, Cooper, is an entomologist, disparaged as “Bug Boy” by classmates when he was growing up but who now conducts field research to study ticks and other arachnids. Their mother, Ottilie, is so deeply impacted by Cooper’s warnings about harming the planet that she begins cooking with crickets, making everything from cricket cobbler to cricket-infused cookies and brownies.

The disappearance of Cat’s snake is only the mildest of calamities to befall this group. Ever the maximalist, Boyle inflicts one disaster after another to show the perils of climate change. If anything, there’s too much incident. Fewer would have made his point more effective.

But wealth is better than poverty, and Boyle doles out ample riches. The pace never lets up, and he blends many other timely themes into his narrative, from aversion to parenthood to the ruthlessness of the media. Blue Skies may not be top-flight Boyle, but it’s Boyle at his most urgent. “What good was beachfront property if there was no beach?” Ottilie asks. As Boyle warns us, take the planet for granted, and don’t be surprised if, like a snake, its luxuries slither away.

Ever the maximalist, T.C. Boyle inflicts one disaster after another to show the perils of climate change in his novel Blue Skies.
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Few conditions feel more dystopian than toiling away at a dead-end job. But imagine performing menial chores in a massive, vacant research facility so remote that a helicopter is required to get there. Plus, outdoor conditions are so fierce that anyone who steps outside is likely to develop a mysterious “snow sickness.” This is the situation accepted by three people in Sean Adams’ new novel.

Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow. The Northern Institute has lost its funding, and its original purpose has been withheld from its new caretakers: supervisor Hart and assistants Gibbs and Cline. All they know, as Adams describes in engagingly cryptic passages, is that something happened, and authorities concluded it was cheaper to keep the facility open than to shut it down.

Hart takes his supervisory duties seriously. In dry prose reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s unreliable narrators, Hart relates his quotidian tasks: sharing “coffee and light socialization” with his subordinates and assigning the week’s trivial chores, which include testing the stability of the chairs, checking out the doors and so on. In his off hours, Hart reads novels about Jack French, a man who finds himself in dire situations “demanding the kind of exceptional leadership only he can provide.”

The Institute and its surrounding tundra have many eerie qualities, among them an object buried deep in the snow, “something dark [that] glints in the little light that makes it through.” Other distractions are equally perplexing, such as lights that flicker as if in a pattern. Hart feels “a slight static tingle in [his] beard” that “aligns itself with the pulse of the light.” Then one of the chairs shatters.

Adding to the strange ambience is the Institute’s last remaining researcher, the “condescending, pretentious, and often outright batty” Gilroy. All he’ll say about his research is that it can “predict the future of cold,” but Hart suspects Gilroy is holding secrets he won’t share.

The Thing in the Snow gets repetitive at times, but Adams succeeds at building tension while exploring the lengths to which people will go to retain power, the narcissism often embodied by those in leadership positions and the effect of monotony on a person’s memory. Inexplicable phenomena can be devastating to the mind, but as this perceptive novel and any undervalued employee can attest, tedium is just as destructive.

Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
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First off, let’s address the elephant—or perhaps in this case, the elephant garlic—in the room: The Lemon is not “The Anthony Bourdain Story.”

Yes, it opens with a chef/food writer/TV host’s on-location death by suicide, which is discovered by his longtime best friend (also a famous chef). And while there are a few other passing similarities to Bourdain’s sudden and unexpected exit, The Lemon reads more like a bawdy Judd-Apatow-meets-Carl-Hiaasen romp than a roman a clef in the manner of Joe Klein’s Primary Colors.

Nothing in The Lemon is quite as it seems, starting with the author. S.E. Boyd is the nom de plume of a trio that includes James Beard Award-winning food writer Kevin Alexander, journalist Joe Keohane and book editor Alessandra Lusardi. It’s evident that they are comfortable moving about in high-end foodie and media circles, given their facility with dropping real-life names into the mix, from The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik to author Malcolm Gladwell. Even Bourdain himself makes a cameo, as if to ensure he is not mistaken for the deceased fictional chef, John Doe. 

Other names have been changed to protect the innocent (or at least to avoid legal consequences). Chef Paolo Cabrini stands in admirably for Bourdain’s restaurateur friend Éric Ripert, T. Kendall Sun-Ramirez is surely the doppelganger of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (The Food Lab), and Mark Fowler of the TV show “Top of the Morning” bears more than a passing resemblance to deposed “Today” host Matt Lauer.

But the four most significant names to note are Nia Greene, John’s longtime producing partner and agent; Paolo Cabrini, John’s aforementioned celebrity chef pal; Katie Horatio, aspiring journalist; and Charlie McCree, a cross between the Lucky Charms leprechaun and the demon spawn of Chucky. They, and their supporting cast, wrestle among themselves to control the narrative surrounding John’s death, because there’s a potential payoff in the post-Doe media tableau.

The dialogue crackles, the zip line plot slings the reader from one hilariously fraught incident to the next, and the conclusion is as emotionally satisfying as ever an author—or three—could have concocted. Like a perfectly seared slice of foie gras with a dollop of lingonberry jam on an artisanal toast point, The Lemon simply cannot be put down, and when you’ve finished it, you’ll want more.

The zip line plot of S.E. Boyd’s The Lemon slings the reader from one hilariously fraught incident to the next, and the conclusion is as emotionally satisfying as ever an author—or three—could have concocted.

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