Page 425 – Electric Literature (2024)

When I teach Carmen Maria Machado’s story “The Husband Stitch,” the first in her collection Her Body and Other Parties, to my fiction workshops, it’s unlike teaching any other story. For one thing, the men in class don’t speak. I’m not sure if, like me, they don’t know what to say, something I admit before we begin. “I don’t quite know how to discuss this story,” I say. “I’m really having us read it because I love it.” Or maybe they feel like they shouldn’t because it is, among other things, a story about being a woman. The conversation limps along, uncharacteristically weighted with all the things the students are thinking and not saying. Often, one woman admits she cried when she read it, and when I nod and ask why, she says she doesn’t know. Always, a student says that she sent it to all of herfriends.

I have that impulse, too, to share it, which is why I have my classes read it. There is a truth in the tales that I recognize viscerally but have never been taught. Machado’s narrator tells the story of meeting the young man she knew she would marry, their mutually desirous marriage, the birth and raising of their son, and an inevitable betrayal by her husband whom she loves. “He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt,” the narrator says. “He is not a bad man at all. To describe him as evil or wicked or corrupted would be a deep disservice to him. And yet — ” The title refers to the extra stitch sometimes given to a woman after the area between her vagin* and anus is either torn or cut during childbirth. The purpose of the extra stitch is to make the vagin* tighter than it was before childbirth in order to increase the husband’s pleasure duringsex.

I was first introduced to the husband stitch in 2014, when a friend in medical school told me about a birth her classmate observed. After the baby was delivered, the doctor said to the woman’s husband, “Don’t worry, I’ll sew her up nice and tight for you,” and the two men laughed while the woman lay between them, covered in her own and her baby’s blood and feces. The story terrified me, the laughter in particular, signaling some understanding of wrongdoing, some sheepishness in doing it anyway. The helplessness of the woman, her body being altered without her consent by two people she has to trust: her partner, her doctor. The details of the third-hand account imprinted into my memory so vividly that the memory of the story feels now almost like my own memory. Later that year, Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” was published, and sometime after that, I read it, and the details of Machado’s scene were so similar, down to the laughter, down to the words “don’t worry” (though in Machado’s story they’re directed at the woman), that I’m not sure now what I remember and what Iread.

Reliable information about, or even an official definition of, the husband stitch is conspicuously missing from the internet. No entry in Wikipedia, nothing in WebMD. Instead there are pages and pages of message board entries and forum discussions on pregnancy websites, and a pretty good definition on Urban Dictionary. In James Baldwin’s 1979 New York Times piece, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” he writes, “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circ*mstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.” How can a practice like the husband stitch be warned against if there’s no official discussion of it, no record of it, no language around it, nothing to point at, to teach? Every time a woman received a husband stitch, is it in her medical file? Does it say, “2nd degree perineal laceration repaired + husband stitch”? Or might the record leave off the extra stitch, whether it happened or not? I asked three male friends in medical residencies in different areas around the country if they’d heard of the husband stitch and only one had, but not from medical school; he knew it from Machado’s story. And yet it happens, based on the chatter on message boards, women’s chatter, which I have been conditioned to approach with skepticism, a category of information I might dismiss as an “old wives’ tale” (a term with its own troubling connotations). It happens evennow.

But this is not an essay about the husband stitch. It’s an essay about believing and being believed.

My mother has always had a flexible relationship with facts. She is constantly solving mysteries, including (often incorrectly) the mystery of what you’re about to say next, or the mystery of someone’s motivations. Sometimes in recalling these instances, she’ll substitute in her solutions for the truth, her prediction for what I actually said. “I thought you said you weren’t taking the baby to Portugal because of Zika,” she’ll say, and I am exhausted by the prospect of unraveling all of the inaccuracies. “No, that’s what you said,” I say, like a child. “I said I am taking the baby to Portugal and there’s no Zika in Portugal and the reason people worry about Zika in the first place is if you’re pregnant and neither I nor the baby are pregnant.” But of course she’s not confused, though there are times when she is; in this case she’s knowingly using incorrect facts to tell me her emotional truth, that she doesn’t want me to take the baby to Portugal because, like me, she’s afraid of everything. The truth that she is afraid of everything is as real as the truth that there’s no risk of Zika in Portugal. Both are true. By working backwards from her emotional truth I can understand why her facts arewrong.

Machado’s narrator tells a story from her own youth, when she’s certain she has seen and felt toes among the potatoes at the grocery store. Her mother thinks she’s misunderstood the word. Potatoes, not toes, she tells her, but the narrator remembers the detail of the way the toe felt when she touched it. Her father lays out the logical case against the existence of toes among the potatoes, a clean, five-point position: she knew the grocer, why would he sell toes, where would he get them, what would be gained from selling them, and finally, why did no one see them but her? She reflects on this, “As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes. As a girl, I consented to his account of the story, and laughed when he scooped me from the chair to kiss me and send me on my way.” Machado is teaching us that truth and logic only occasionally overlap. When you start poking at the idea of an absolute truth, a truth unfiltered through someone’s perception, it can fall apart entirely.

“Of all the stories I know about mothers, this is the most real,” Machado’s narrator begins, and goes on to tell a story of a mother and daughter traveling to Paris. The mother falls ill and the doctor sends the daughter to get medicine, a task which takes so long, a meandering cab ride, the doctor’s wife making pills out of powder, that when the daughter returns to the hotel she finds her mother gone, the walls of their room a different color, a hotel clerk who doesn’t remember them. Then the narrator says there are many endings to this story, one in which the daughter persists, stakes out the hotel and starts an affair with a laundryman in order to finally discover the truth: that her mother died from a highly contagious disease and in order to prevent widespread panic, the doctor, cab driver, his wife, and the hotel employees conspired to erase any trace of the mother and daughter’s existence there. Another ending to the story is that the daughter lives the rest of her life believing she’s crazy, “that she invented her mother and her life with her mother in her own diseased mind. The daughter stumbles from hotel to hotel, confused and grieving, though for whom she cannot say.” I would tell you the moral, the narrator says, but I think you alreadyknow.

We are taught to value simple, elegant truths. In science, philosophy, theology, and politics, we apply Occam’s razor, the idea that between competing hypotheses, the simplest one is the right one. That the daughter is crazy is a much simpler explanation than that a whole cast of characters conspired to hide her mother’s death and erase their existence, simpler than the introduction of a contagious disease, simpler than the construction and remodeling done to the room. And yet—

In class, I don’t say to my students, “Do you feel it, too? Or can you imagine it? The perils of living in a world made by a different gender? The justified and unjustified mistrust? The near-constant experience of being disbelieved, of learning to question your own sanity? How much more it hurts to be let down by ‘one of the good ones?’” Instead I say, “What effect do the horror tales have, placed associatively where they are in the story? What effect do the stage directions have? What would be lost without them? Do you see how they’re braided together? These are tools you can use in your own stories.”

One night we had a thrilling summer storm, bright and crashing, wind and rain blowing into the house from every direction. I wanted to open all the doors and windows wider and run around, but it was better for the house, the wood, to close them tight. We hadn’t been in the house long, and it was the first time in this house we’d had to close all the windows. In the morning I smelled gas, strong, unmistakable. “I smell gas,” I said to my husband. “I don’t smell it,” he said. He had a friend come over. “Why are you having a friend come over,” I asked, “when it doesn’t matter if he can smell it or not, and none of us can fix it?” His friend didn’t smell it, either. I called the gas company. The gas company employee didn’t smell it, either. He waved his reader around and it blasted off in three places, substantial leaks behind the stove and in the basem*nt. “Always trust a woman’s nose,” the gas company employeesaid.

Yes, I thought, believeus.

Then, No, I thought, I’m not a f*cking witch. Believe anyone who smells gas. If someone smells gas, believethem.

But what if this story had a different ending? What if his reader hadn’t picked anything up? What if there had been no gas? I was so relieved there was gas, so afraid I was crazy. If I smell gas and there is no gas, am I different than if I smell gas and there is? Am I crazy, then, and does my value come from not being crazy? Does my value come from being right? If there is no gas, am I not right? Does it mean I didn’t smell gas or does my experience of smelling gas stillremain?

Why are we disbelieved? Why am I skeptical of women’s chatter? Why does my husband think I don’t smell gas? Later, in the same piece, Baldwin writes, “There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.” Maybe this is why we don’t believe women. If their experience is true, we can’t stand to see our role init.

Once, after class, a student approached me urgently. “That happened to my mother,” she said. “I didn’t want to say it in class, but they did that to her. The husband stitch.” Her eyes were wet, unblinking. “It’s real,” shesaid.

Yes, I said. It’sreal.

I n 2009, Marco Roth started a minor controversy by declaring in N+1 that the so-called “neuronovel”—the novel that deals in detail with the workings or malfunctions of the brain—was “another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview.” By Roth’s account, “the rise of the neuronovel” signaled the death of the novel. His primary target was Ian McEwan, specifically his novels Saturday and Enduring Love, both of which offer neurological explanations for psychological behavior and social circ*mstances. Roth’s list of neuronovelists also includes Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn), Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances), and John Wray (Lowboy).

Roth argues that these novelists are capitulating to deterministic biological accounts that reduce the complexity of life to mere physiology. That’s where I think he got the story wrong. These writers don’t reduce life to biology. They play with biology to experiment with literary form; they include physiology as a category of human experience, and they explore the mysteries inherent in the fact that we are physical creatures whose brains play unknown roles in the making of our fantasy lives, our sense of self, our feelings, our identities, and consciousness. Even McEwan’s Henry Perowne, the hyper-rationalist neurosurgeon who narrates Saturday, wonders “that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre.” Philosophers and neuroscientists call this “the hard problem” — figuring out how the wet stuff might make consciousness.

I might not agree with Roth, but he coined a great term — neuronovel — and recognized a genre on the rise. Simultaneously, a genre I’ll call the brain memoir — an autobiography in which the brain’s role in the making of identity is central — has also been flourishing. Dozens and dozens of neuronovels and brain memoirs have been published in the last couple of decades. These are some of my favorites.

I should admit: I’m biased. I’ve published a brain memoir, and I’m publishing a book about the “rise” of both genres next spring. But anyone, even those who don’t have a stake, can enjoy these books about the humanbrain.

1. Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move?: Inside My AutisticMind

Mukhopadhyay was sixteen when he published his first book of poetry and nineteen when he published his memoir. Publishing a book at age sixteen is a remarkable achievement, but that’s not the primary reason age matters when it comes to Mukhopadhyay’s books. His youth is significant because it represents the development of the culture’s response to autism. Mukhopadyhay has become a spokesperson for neurodiversity — the idea that there is value in the neurological differences between one person and another. He’s a profoundly social writer, inviting readers to get intimate with the way his mind works. Not so long ago, it was widely believed that autistic people, particularly non-verbal ones like Mukhopadhyay, couldn’t communicate at all. Mukhopadhyay’s lyrical, sure-toned writing is one of many recent memoirs that force us to rethink brutal history of autism and imagine a more just and compassionate future.

2. Siri Hustvedt, The BlazingWorld

In The Blazing World, Hustvedt tells the story of Harriet Burden (Harry for short), an artist who takes elaborate revenge on the sexist art world by borrowing the bodies and identities of three different male artists — and disseminating her work under their names. As one of the novel’s narrators describes Burden, “The woman was chin-deep in the neuroscience of perception, and for some reason those unreadable papers with their abstracts and discussions justified her second life as a scam artist.” Harriet is interested in making art that elicits discomforting and eccentric neurological experiences. Hustvedt emphasizes Burden’s didactic mission. She conceives her exhibitions quite literally as laboratories. She wants her audiences to feel, in a visceral sense, the fundamental relationality involved in being an organism — a relationality that entwines biology, identity, social life, andculture.

3. Thomas DeQuincey, Confessions of an English OpiumEater

In his famous Confessions, DeQuincey delights and despairs in opium’s effects. “A theatre seemed suddenly opened up and lighted in my brain,” he writes. He recognizes his visions as the product of brain chemistry, but sometimes feels certain they are remaking “objective” reality — the one we share — in the image of his fantasies. In his preface, DeQuincey worries that his “moral ulcers and scars” will be revolting to an upright English audience, who wince at “the spectacle of a human being obtruding.” He needn’t have worried. His obtrusions made him a literary celebrity. Some things haven’tchanged.

4. Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods andMadness

In An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Kay Redfield Jamison stresses a problem with writing about her bipolar disorder central to any memoir about neurological difference: “I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it.” Jamison’s professional identity — as a research psychologist and a writer — is linked fundamentally to her illness. The difficulty she describes, “weaving” the disciplinary methods of science with her emotional experience is cultural more than intellectual. Throughout her memoir, Jamison demonstrates the many ways the symptoms of mania allow her to approach her research and writing with imagination andenergy.

5. Ellen Forney,Marbles

Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me tells the story of its author’s evolving identity in response to a bipolar diagnosis. Marbles portray its characters’ brains as part of an ensemble of images that define their search for what it means to suffer as a result of neurological conditions beyond their control. Forney is explicit about her urgent need for knowledge about the brain as well as her awareness that this knowledge can only be hypothetical and contingent. Forney offers a vivid example of her chosen form’s capacity to transform ideas through images, with her depiction of a page from the DSM as a dreamlike carousel, a pictorial metaphor designed to encompass her ambivalence about her bipolar diagnosis. Forney uses the carousel to parody the DSM’s linear list of bipolar symptoms. On her carousel, depression curls up under a pony; “mixed states” tears the pony in two, clinging to its upper torso and balancing precariously on its back; mania stands on the pony with a single foot, her head bumping against the merry-go-round’s ceiling.

6. Miguel de Cervantes, DonQuixote

People — or critics like Harold Bloom — like to say Don Quixote is the first modern novel. If so, it may also be the first neuronovel. As Sancho Panza narrates the story of his squire’s antic wandering, he attributes his deranged fantasies to two related sources. He has read too many books. As a result, his brain is “dried up,” “cracked or broken,” “full of wind.” At one point, the nobleman from La Mancha tells Panza his “brain is melting.” In the original Spanish, the word is cabeza, meaning both head and brain, but also the brain as an abstract concept, as opposed to the actual organ inside the head. Like all the best neuronovels, Cervantes plays around with the relation between that physical organ and the immaterial experiences of mind andself.

7. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled

Ishiguro has told interviewers that his most audacious novel — people love it or hate it — is an experiment with writing in “the language of dream.” Each section begins with Ryder, the novel’s bewildered narrator, waking up from sleep he can never get enough of, and finding himself in a world where closet doors lead to art parties, where strangers turn out to be his wife and child, and where there’s a city full of people who are certain his opinions about aesthetics will save them. It’s an experiment in disorientation, and I guess that’s why so many readers find it frustrating. But to me it’s a page-turner. If I pick it up, I can’t put it down. Ishiguro is amaster.

8. Paul Beatty, TheSellout

Beatty’s narrator tells his hilarious LA story about reviving both racial segregation and slavery from inside the Supreme Court, while he smokes outlandish amounts of artisanal weed he’s been growing, along with watermelons, back in LA. This is a story told by a guy who’s incredibly high, a guy experimenting with his brain chemistry while he addresses the most sober institution in the United States. It’s also a story told by a guy whose father was a fairly unhinged academic who conducted psychological studies on him, starting at an early age. The narrator’s father is like Dr. Frankenstein or Jean-Jacques Rousseau with his creepy fantasy about raising the perfect little girl. He experimented on his son to explore some hazy theories about the construction of race and the internalization of racism. Beatty turns the hard problem into social satire about the racism that plagues Americanculture.

9. Richard Powers, The EchoMaker

The Echo Maker tells a story about a man with a rare neurological syndrome called Capgras Syndrome, embedded in another about a breed of crane whose nesting habitat is threatened by real estate development. As a result of brain injury sustained in a car accident, Mark Schluter awakens with the delusional belief that his intimates — especially his sister Karin—are impostors. It features a character based on Oliver Sacks, a neurologist famous for turning his patients into stories. Power’s lyricism is key to understanding his novelistic response to neuroscience. Powers begins the novel not with the accident, the coma, or the awakening, but with a lyrical description of cranes returning to the small Midwestern town where the Schluters were raised, a passage that begins with a “sky, ice blue,” that “flares up, a brief rose” as the “nervous birds, tall as children, crowd together” on a river “they’ve learned to fly by memory.” When Mark finally speaks, his sister asks his neurosurgeon a crucial question about the combination of his echolalia and disorderly speech. Does the apparent nonsense mean anything? “Ah! You’re pushing up against questions neurology can’t answer yet,” he replies. And that’s where literature comes in. Powers opens his novel with a lyricism that depends on the interplay of words to create novel meanings, to transform skies into roses and cranes into human children. Literary language, he seems to be suggesting, shares with Mark’s echolalia a capacity to blur the boundaries between sense and nonsense — or to create speculative knowledge that works as much through feeling as it does throughthought.

10. David B., Epileptic

In David B.’s graphic memoir Epileptic, he portrays an impossible fantasy: that he might find a doctor who could “transfer” his brother Jean-Christophe’s epilepsy into him. He fantasizes that an exchange of brain matter might enable him to feel what it’s like to be his brother. “I fantasize,” David B. writes, “that I could take on my brother’s disease if a resourceful scientist were to transfer it into my skull.” It’s a fantasy of overcoming the explanatory gap, a term coined by philosopher Phillip Levine to describe a persistent obstacle to understanding consciousness from a neurobiological point of view: nobody can explain how immaterial experience — self, consciousness, cognition, memory, imagination, affect — emerges from brain physiology. Throughout Epileptic, he struggles to empathize with Jean-Christophe. In his fantasy, brain science will rewrite his failure and undo the mutual alienation of two siblings. But no scientist is that resourceful.

11. Thomas Harris,Hannibal

Harris’s Clarice Starling hunts Hannibal, the brilliant psychopath, only to become his willing abductee (though at novel’s end readers are primed for a sequel that will unravel the plot of its gothic melodrama). Harris wrote four Hannibal books, two of them adapted into films starring Hopkins. While Silence of the Lambs (1991) was the more critically successful of the two films, the brain-eating scene in Hannibal (1999) is legendary. Both books were international bestsellers, but their details tend to be obscured by the notoriety of the films. As a novel, Hannibal is not well remembered for its pervasive discussion of theories about the mind and memory. Lecter fancies himself an expert on human minds, both a theorist and a practitioner, one who believes he alone possesses the keys to the brain: “The memory palace was a mnemonic system well known to ancient scholars and much information was preserved in them through the Dark Ages while Vandals burned the books. Like scholars before him, Dr. Lecter stores an enormous amount of information keyed to objects in his thousand rooms, but unlike the ancients, Dr. Lecter has a second purpose for his palace; sometimes he lives there.” In the novel’s most famous scene, Hannibal feeds a drugged Starling the brain of her professional rival, with the intent to control hermind.

12. Christopher Isherwood, A SingleMan

Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964) is an early neuronovel — and a particularly prescient and sophisticated one. Its protagonist, George, is a professor grieving for his lost partner, Jim. His grieving is solitary. The hom*ophobia of his world curtails communal mourning rituals. In response, he narrates himself in ecological terms, as an organism, his brain and body commingling with an environment fundamentally changed by the loss of his most intimate companion. George wrestles with his brain throughout the novel. He worries that his students see him as “a severed head carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.” He laments that they “don’t want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below the neck.” As he tries to sleep, “the brain inside the skull on the pillow cognizes darkly” — enabling him to consider “decisions not quite made,” decisions “waking George” can’t face. When he sleeps, “All over this quietly pulsating vehicle the skeleton crew make their tiny adjustments. As for what goes on topside, they know nothing of this but danger signals, false alarms mostly: red lights flashed from the panicky brain stem, curtly contradicted by green all clears from the level-headed cortex. But now the controls are on automatic. The cortex is drowsing; the brain stem registers only an occasional nightmare.”

About theAuthor

Jason Tougaw is the author of The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism (Dzanc Books). Portions of this list are excerpted from his forthcoming book The Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience (Yale University Press). Tougaw blogs about art and science at californica.net.

Getting There

Begin your journey when a boy in class asks you if you’re from Afghanistan. That’s where all the Muslims are, he says. When he inquires if you have an Uncle Osama, ignore him with the air of a nine-year-old who doesn’t have time for these petty questions. After all, your fourth grade teacher put your desks together only because she thinks you will set a good example for the class troublemaker.

Transportation

Navigate an atmosphere that is not quite clear of the smoke and rubble left by the Twin Towers. With the media panic surrounding the Middle East, you will discover how easily activated your own panic button has become. Brown bodies in the tri-state area will vaporize, their own families uncertain of their fates. The shadows they leave behind will appear in your night visions as you lieawake.

Dining

The Indian boy in school will get asked by the social studies teachers to bring his mother in for show-and-tell. She will talk about Hinduism and why they don’t eat cows. She’ll bring gulab jamun for everyone to try and your classmates will shriek with disgust as they pluck apart the gooey balls. The boy who inquired about Uncle Osama will now ask if your mom makes this dessert at home. You will scrunch up your face and say that that you’ve never even heard of it before, to which he will reply, that’s good because even your food is probably better thanthis.

Shopping

Your sixth grade teacher will talk about why the Twin Towers fell, and hand out TIME for Kids articles for you to share with the person sitting next you. You’ll see pictures of women in black niqabs and shouting men with unibrows. The caption reads: Protesters in Saudi Arabia wearing traditional Arab clothing. Kathryn C. and Catherine B. both will ask why you don’t cover yourhair.

Climate

At 17, pack up and head west with two suitcases, one full of short sleeves and capris. When you land in San Francisco, you’ll discover that you did not pack nearly enough outerwear to survive the Bay Area in August. Bundle up in a gift-shop I Heart SF hoodie and tuck the sandals into the back of your dorm closet. The resident advisor will assure you that the layers will be shed by September. We call it Indian Summer, she’llsay.

Now that you’re far away from the person you were, imagine a new version of yourself that escapes all religious and ethnic labels. In the mirror you will see urban brown stretching towards a California chic that could only decorate pale skin. You are compelled by magazines glossed with translucent blue eyes, wispy hair and summer freckles. The hope that you will one day unravel into a person that is worth loving will give you solace after the flood of night terrors evaporate away with thesunrise.

Language Barriers

Think about Mahmoud Darwish and Rhythm and Poetry. Think about a victim of systematic racism, marked by years of historic oppression, submerged in a genre invented by people who are also stained bottom-up by bloody water. Muslims will be surprised to learn that you can memorize rhymes in the bleached language of the colonizers but the history and complexity of your Arabic has been wrung dry by the dread of a transcontinental banishment. You are only completely fluent in apologetics.

Popular Attractions

Get involved in politics very early in your college career. Your parents were always apathetic towards social justice. We can’t change what the world has become, they would say. But now, student groups send you back to the West Bank border with a rifle resting on the taxi’s open windowsill right beside your temple. Flash mobs for Syria, mock checkpoints for Palestine, protests for Egypt. Apathetic students brush by while white boys with ponytails shout at them to brew up a disorderly civil unrest that fails to materialize.

You will be a useless volunteer for these causes. Hold a stack of quarter-sheet flyers and chat with other bored advocates. You will get tired, not from lack of sleep, but from the fake smiles you force and the sideways glances that scan you. Go sit on a bench by yourself and watch the sea of slumped shoulders and book bags blur by. Your attempts at identity transformation are never complete orwhole.

Sightseeing

The television lays out blueprints of your faith to serve as guides for the construction of a religious fundamentalist, and you are not quite sure what these fundamentals are. Panic consumes you under the looming threat of surveillance, both by the government and your own peers. And despite the performances you put on to assert your national loyalty, to self-define your religious fundamentals as something perfect and beautiful, you will still be diminished to a veil and beard. You have always been dissolved in hom*ogeneity, tangled up in a role-play, encoded in an alienation you couldn’t uncover untilnow.

Rest Stops

Cry in the shower about your sh*tty grades. Smash a dish in your apartment kitchen because your roommates’ friends are over and you can’t breathe. Take a bus to Oakland because you are so sick of this goddamn city where no one cares about you or where you go. Get off the train and realize you still have nowhere to go. Try not to cry. Read The Lord of the Rings and think about MiddleEarth.

You’ll wonder if your parents ever felt as displaced in America as you have in your own body. You’ll call your mother to tell her that she is the reason why you moved across the country. Your constant state of dispossession begins to feel likehome.

Arts &Culture

You are a hastily assembled structure that constantly needs the approval of others to stay composed and intact. You, who cannot breathe when you speak in front of strangers. You, who cuts herself to see the blood of the Intifada from which her parents fled. You, who reads and reads and inhales and soaks up every word, movement, and face but still cannot project half of what you takein.

Attend a gallery fundraiser for a Middle Eastern children’s charity. Meet one of the main organizers, a Colombian-American with clear eyes and baby skin. She tells you Subcomandante Marcos was a supporter of Palestine, and you tell her that you are a supporter of The House on MangoStreet.

Getting Back

The departure from your hometown makes you study yourself, explain yourself, and doubt yourself. And when you finally return, you mother will fill you with pita and shorbat adas after you’ve cried yourself empty. Remember she spends her days sweating the salt of the Dead Sea, tries to cleanse you of demonic shadows until your high-maintenance body thwarts her. Muslim women tuck grief into their wombs and let it cultivate, hardening into a child of despair that can only be cut out with a sword. We somehow hold together with the faith that someone will hold our hands as we stumble through darkness.

B y now you’ve heard the news that the favorite social-media platform of trolls everywhere (President included) will soon afford its cabal of miscreants twice the space to rant, rave, and make typos. Yes, Twitter is undercutting everyone’s favorite excuse for backing out of an argument—“sorry, can’t do this in 140 characters”—by doubling maximum tweet length to 280. To that, we offer a resounding WHY PLEASE NO. But we also can’t help but wonder: What will this mean for the blue-checked literati? What will the fiction writers of the world do with the extraspace?

Back in 2009, Electric Literature published “Some Contemporary Characters” by Rick Moody, serialized fiction written in 140-character bursts. Three years later, The New Yorker, which gets all its best ideas from us, followed with “Black Box” by Jennifer Egan. (You’re welcome, David Remnick!) David Mitchell tried again with “The Right Sort” in 2014, which became the first chapter of his book Slade House, and surely there were many since and inbetween.

It’s fun to experiment, but let’s be honest, do we really want our stories carved up into sentences of arbitrary length? The answer is yes! We are Oulipian sycophants who need rules tocreate!

In that spirit, we’re hosting a 280-character fiction contest. And we’re asking you to be inspired by doublewide tweets not only in form, but in content: the story must be about something getting magically, randomly, inexplicably, or mysteriously bigger, longer, or just… more. Think Mary Poppins’ bag, that dream where you find another room in your apartment, House of Leaves, the story of Hanukkah, the feast of Cana, or clown cars. Feel free to steal any ofthese.

Submit your tiny story via our Submittable by Monday, October 16. The prize is publication in Electric Literature. We’ll also tweet the best stories, if Twitter ever gives us280.

There is an oft-repeated story in most biographies of Sylvia Plath, concerning her return to Smith College after her suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. It was the start of the 1954 spring semester, and Plath was meeting, for the first time, the young woman who had occupied her dorm room during her illness — Nancy Hunter, later Nancy Hunter Steiner, who would go on to become Plath’s close friend, and pen a short memoir about their relationship, A Closer Look AtAriel.

As the story goes, Hunter had spent her time in Sylvia’s room feeling “haunt[ed]” by its former occupant. Plath had taken on a legendary status at Smith, thanks to both her brilliance as a student and her suicide attempt. According to Steiner, “…as the months passed I grew familiar with the details of the Plath legend through the speculative gossip that raged at the mention of her name.” In Plath’s absence, Hunter formed an image of her as a “girl-genius… as plain or dull or deliberately dowdy, a girl who rejected all frivolity in the pursuit of academic and literary excellence.” Now, meeting this mysterious figure for the first time, at a campus luncheon, Hunter was so taken aback by Plath’s appearance that she blurted out, “They didn’t tell me you were beautiful!”

This snapshot from Plath’s college years already contains the amalgamation of myth, rumors, misinformation, and surprise turns that has hallmarked Plath’s literary and personal legacies since the publication of Ariel in 1965. It’s all there, from the sudden mysterious disappearance (“speculative gossip, [rage] at the mention of her name”), to the wild projections of the missing woman (“dull…deliberately dowdy”) to the gobsmacked reactions to Plath’s actuality (Surprise! She’s beautiful!). Plath is always either under– or overwhelming her readers — Janet Malcolm famously wrote in The Silent Woman that Plath “disappoints her” in photographs. She’s looking for a red-haired witch who “eats men like air,” and all she gets is this lousy housewife, clutching her babies, hair done down in braids. Jessica Ferri, writing of handling those very braids when she worked in special collections at the Lilly Library in Indiana, exclaims, astonished, “There was so much ofit!”

In my own life, more than once, I’ve been asked “Who’s that, there, on the cover?” while handling my dog-eared copy of Plath’s Unabridged Journals, which plainly state her name. When I reply, “That’s Sylvia Plath,” the response is almost always the same — it can’t be. They are looking for a magical witch, a goth girl, a myth. The image of Plath, smiling in her Smith graduation robes, causes cognitive dissonance and, ultimately, disappointment. It’s the same cognitive dissonance we, as a culture, collectively suffer about Sylvia Plath, and indeed about any woman lauded for her intellect who also has the nerve to inhabit a body: That’s her? Isn’t she a little too beautiful? Isn’t she not beautiful enough?

This pattern plays out in reaction to Plath’s image each time there is a new Plath publishing “event.” The latest is the U.K. edition of Plath’s Collected Letters, which sports as its cover art a photograph of a twenty-something Plath grinning for the camera in a white bikini. I first became aware of the cover, and its accompanying outrage, in a Facebook post from a well-known American poet, in which she (and, in the comments, other well-known American poets) expressed deep anger and exhausted frustration at the inherent sexism the choice apparently symbolized. Last week, I woke to Cathleen Allyn Conway’s piece about exactly this, in which she not only critiques the cover art for the Letters, but also that of a half-dozen other Plathbooks.

As I write this, all of those books, sometimes in multiple editions, stare back at me from between their bookends on my desk, reminding me that the politics of Plath somehow always end up as the politics of reduction and essentialism. Conway notes that the same bikini shot appeared on the cover of a recent edition of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, a collection of Plath’s prose; she lumps this cover in with a widely criticized edition of The Bell Jar as “proto-chick-lit” imagery. Presumably she would prefer covers like that of an earlier edition of Johnny Panic, whose psychedelic colors underline the idea of “mental illness” while also reinforcing the popular conception of Plath as a magical witch. While Conway does write “the rationale is that pictures of smiley Plath counterbalance the darkness in her work, lending extra tragedy to her illness and death,” she dismisses the notion because “this kind of correlation is not made for male authors.” This assessment fails to take into account another possible reason for including photographs of Plath that aren’t, frankly, morbid: they paint a fuller, more accurate picture of the living woman, rather than highlighting her tragicdeath.

In his introductions to Johnny Panic, to the heavily abridged 1982 edition of Plath’s Journals, and to her Collected Poems, Plath’s estranged husband Ted Hughes claims that Plath had one, singular “true self” which she hid from everyone but him; her poetry and prose, he says, were an attempt to put this “true self” into writing. Ariel, Hughes once said, “is just like her, but permanent,” an incendiary statement that would invent and bolster two absurd facets of the Myth of Sylvia Plath: that the “I” of the Ariel poems was the “true” Plath, and that the book itself was a finished thing — a mausoleum which you could enter at will, encountering the dead woman at every turn, enshrining one bleak version of Plath in the cultural mindset. Conway rightfully takes Hughes and his sister Olwyn to task in her piece, pointing out that they actively tried to construct Plath as an hysterical lunatic in the wake of her suicide; there can be no doubt about that. Unfortunately, in her assessment of Plath’s image, her “true” self, Conway is netted in the same dull trap that Hughes built and set in his public writing about Plath. According to Conway, Plath had one definitive look that was deeply connected to her true self, and it wasn’t a blond woman in a bikini. She quotes a 1954 letter from Plath to her mother, Aurelia, that states “[my] brown-haired personality is more studious, charming and earnest,” then extends this notion with her statement that, “We know brunette Sylvia was how Plath wanted to present herself.”

And herein lies the real problem: We don’t actually know this at all. One line in a letter to a worrying mother in Eisenhower’s America (who, as other texts describe, was shocked and dismayed when Plath dyed her hair blond in the first place) does not a “true” self prove. Moreover, this furthers Hughes’ dangerous idea that Plath, or any of us, has a single, definitive “self,” an idea we visit almost exclusively upon the heads of women writers. We celebrate Whitman’s celebration of himself, with its numinous notion that “I am large, I contain multitudes.” We have no problem reconciling the idea that he was both queer and a hetero-braggart who claimed to have fathered six illegitimate children, yet we take to task a photograph of a bikini-clad Plath in her college years — as though she could not possibly be both the genius she was, and a woman who was body confident, sexy, happy to smile for thecamera.

Conway notes that Robert Lowell, Plath’s contemporary, is always pictured sitting gravely in a library or a study, with a back wall of books, as though this is the only way we can understand a writer or take them seriously. But to understand Plath at all is to know her as a woman of her time, which demanded that a woman of Plath’s race and class choose a single narrative — marriage and family — and stick with it, as she so famously chronicled in The Bell Jar. In pursuit of this end, women had to be experts, if not slaves, to material culture, as exquisitely documented in Elizabeth Winder’s Pain, Parties, Work. To deny Plath’s love affairs with beautiful things is to deny the reality of the conditions of herlife.

But it’s also to deny the part of her personality that was not bleak, that was not morbid, that was not dictated by her illness or her marriage. She loved Revlon’s “Cherries In The Snow” lipstick and nail lacquer, and always dotted her clothes with a pop of red — red ballet flats, red scarves, the famous red bandeau headband Hughes ripped from her hair the first night they met, as a souvenir. These were a result of the world she occupied, but they were also extensions of her passion for aesthetics, for fashion and fine art — the current Plath exhibition at the Smithsonian contains the multitude of excellent paintings she produced in the Smith College studios. When Esther Greenwood, Plath’s Bell Jar protagonist, goes to the roof of her downtown Manhattan hotel and tosses the beautiful clothes she took with her for her summer job as a guest editor for a fashion magazine, item by item over the sleeping city, she isn’t doing so because she’s become some kind of ascetic, or because she now understands her true self, and beautiful things have nothing to do with it. She does it because she lives in a world that demands she be either/or, that makes no room for both/and. Rather than choosing a self, she begins the terrifying process of giving up any self at all, which culminates in a suicideattempt.

I’d like to believe that by now, the room for both/and exists, but reactions to the image of Plath in a bikini — which, incidentally, is a holiday snapshot taken by a boyfriend, not the calculated and manipulated result of a photoshoot — bode otherwise. This picture of Plath is not, as Conway claims, “a visual antithesis to the ambitious, intellectual poet.” It was taken, in fact, the summer she dated Gordon Lameyer and Richard Sassoon, who loved her equally for her physicality and her extraordinary intellect, and whom she loved for those things, in turn. The dialogue between the carnal and the intellectual was one Plath started as a very young woman, and did not give up until her death. At no point did she see these as mutually exclusive; she often described her love for Hughes as being the force it was because he embodied the physicality and intellectualism and artistry she both possessed and craved inanother.

The reality, and it’s astounding to me that I have to write this sentence down, is that we can take a writer who wears a bikini seriously. I have three in my closet;, the most recent of which is a vintage-inspired red-halter. I bought it because I love red; I love red partly because I love Sylvia Plath. I wear “Cherries In The Snow” lipstick to the classes I teach, to parties, to intimidating meetings with condescending men, and when I do, I invoke her, just a little bit — for inspiration. For luck. For permission, which she gave me, which she gives me — to be brave. To try and astound. To say the things no one wants to say, or hear. To be beautiful, and to be smart, and sexual, and to never, ever fall into the foolish trap that these cannotcoexist.

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body and Other Parties has been shortlisted for the National Book Award, and readers everywhere are talking about her intricate stories. Machado’s collection is dark, disturbing, sensual and sexy. Her work refuses to fit neatly into a category, and includes elements of psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. In these eight stories, fables and classic fairy tales mix with a meditations on Law and Order: SVU, Girl Scouts lost in the woods, and a liposuction procedure.

The cover for Her Body and Other Parties picks up and intensifies the ambiance of the book. Kimberly Glyder, who has created numerous covers for Graywolf, Scribner, Little Brown, and more, captures Machado’s unique voice with a striking and sinuous image. Her design captures the simultaneous violence and sensuality in Machado’s work, in which women’s bodies both desire and disappear in fantastical and disturbing ways.

I talked to Machado and Glyder about the process of creating the cover, and in the process, discovered that this beautiful image has asecret.

Liz von Klemperer: What, if any, were your expectations for thecover?

Carmen Maria Machado: I had a Tumblr that I put together of visual inspiration, so when the time came I sent it to Kimberly. I also filled out a questionnaire my publisher gave me that included key words, images, and things I absolutely didn’t want on the cover. I suggested the colors black, white, grey and green because of the green ribbon in the first story, “The Husband Stitch.” In terms of themes, I just wrote “women” and “queer women,” and then I suggested the image be mid-century to modern, but the book isn’t really time period–dependent.

LVK: What were the things you absolutely didn’t want on yourcover?

CMM: I said “no dudes!” for obvious reasons. Nothing pink or girly either. I just don’t think it would be appropriate for the tone of the book. I also wanted to avoid women with Spanish fans, or salsa dancers. Nothing like that. I’ve noticed this happens a lot with women of color, and it just wasn’t what the book was about. I wouldn’t want that imagery on my book just because I happen to be Latina. They also asked for word associations and I said dark, moody, sexy, sensual, erotic, haunted, physical, death, ghost, decapitation, mouth, lips, organic, and sex at the end of theworld.

LVK: Wow, that’s pretty thorough! Could you talk more about being apprehensive about your book cover being too derivative of your identity as a queer, Latinawoman?

CMM: It’s complicated because booksellers want to sell your book, and obviously writers have their own ideas about what their book is about. My wife is a publicist, and we talk a lot about selling a book and packaging it for sale, and it’s an interesting dynamic between what’s going to sell and what’s not. A problem that happens a lot is that the people who want to sell your book want it to be pinkish or girly. I know Asian women take issue with publishers who put an Asian fan on the cover. So I’m really sensitive to imagery that is drawing on stereotypes or pat imagery that connects to the author’s identity, whether it’s gender or race or anything like that. For me luckily it wasn’t an issue with Graywolf at all, but I do know cases where that is a problem with the publisher, and I feel really grateful that I didn’t have to deal with it. But I was worried about it enough that I felt the need to mentionit.

LVK: What was your first reaction when you saw the cover design Kimberlymade?

CMM: She sent me two different covers at first. I had mentioned in the questionnaire that the image of the ribbon around the girls’ neck was unique to my book. I also mentioned the image of ghosts with bells in their eyes, which is from my Law and Order story. We ultimately chose the first option I mentioned, but with different colors. The black background was originally coral and green, and there was also pink and orange. The option we scrapped was a watercolor image of a woman’s face with bells for eyes. The watercolor image didn’t resonate with me, but I loved the other one. I wasn’t sure about the colors, though, so I threw it into Photoshop to mess with the colors and I realized I liked a dark background with a green ribbon. I sent that back to the publisher and suggested the color change. They made the edit, and I loved it. It was pretty low stress, compared to experiences I’ve heard with other publishers!

LVK: Many of your stories feature women who disappear. I’m thinking specifically of “Real Women Have Bodies,” “Eight Bites,” and “Especially Heinous.” How did you go about envisioning these bodiless characters, and what that process waslike?

Carmen Maria Machado: The imagery in “Real Women Have Bodies” is pretty straightforward. That story started with the play on words in the title, which is real women have curves. But what if real women just have to have bodies? What if the physicality of a body was validated someone as a “woman?” What would happen if women started to lose their bodies? There are actually a lot of moments of physicality in that story. For example, the moment where she looks through her fingers and she can see her bones. I was thinking about being a kid and putting your fingers on a flashlight and seeing your flesh glow orange though the shadow of your bones. That’s where the image of seeing through yourself camefrom.

I just read Roxane Gay’s new memoir Hunger, which is about how fat people are highly visible and completely invisible, and it really resonated with me as a reader and as a fat woman. It’s very strange. Women’s bodies are both put on pedestals and scrutinized down to every detail, but also we are blacked out of various conversations and elements of culture. That’s true of all women, and I think when we look at different iterations of non-white women, of queer women, of fat women, there are all these ways in which things are complicated. I feel that that state of being scrutinized and invisible is an incredibly real way to think about gender and the body in our current situation and probably forever. I think that’s why that imagery popsup.

LVK: Yeah, the cover really does justice to that idea. As in, how do you depict a body that’s disappearing? I love how Kimberly’s illustration is a red corset, cinching a waist. The green ribbon is loosely coiled around it, which to me indicates absence and emptyspace.

CMM: You know it’s also a neck, right? If you look at the illustration it’s actually a lower part of a jaw and the muscle of a woman’s face. But it also looks like a corset. That’s what’s so amazing about it! It’s sogood!

LVK: Wow! I see itnow!

CMM: Yeah, it’s inspired by an old medical illustration and turns into an optical illusion. It’s either a neck with a jaw but it looks like a corset and the ribbon is either being tied or untied, which is unclear, which I really like. There’s a lot coming out of it, you can read it in a bunch of different ways and it has so many dimensions.

LVK: Thanks for clarifying, that adds so much to the image. Is there anything else you’d like toadd?

CMM: I’ve always loved collaboration and other artists working from my words. This is a really cool example of how that worked beautifully.

Liz von Klemperer: I talked to Carmen yesterday and she said in the Graywolf author questionnaire she mentioned words like dark, moody, sexy, sensual, haunted, physical, death, ghost, decapitation, mouth and lips. How do you interpret such disparate images?

Kimberly Glyder: I was struck by the medical image I found because the woman is looking up, exposing her neck. It has a sensual feel to it but it’s also quite haunting and spooky. I’m usually not entirely literal and also try not to be too conceptual. Words like “haunting” and “decapitation” might not draw a viewer in, and I’m specifically trying to look for visuals that will be beautiful or at least engaging on a cover. I want to intrigue people, but don’t want to scare anyone away. I thought that this image is a nice balance between all of the words Carmen mentioned. Originally I’d had a line across the throat, which I turned into the green ribbon, which I think is more evocative and beautiful.

LVK: I originally thought the image was just a corset, and then Carmen pointed out that it’s also a neck. That took me a minute to figure out, and I like that it’s not immediately apparent, and that you have to mull itover.

KG: Yeah, I think that that’s an interesting way to look at the cover because, like her writing, it is nuanced and can be interpreted multiple ways. There’s a lot of raw, graphic detail in her writing, so to me this diagram is a pretty interesting take onthat.

LVK: The book in general is so dark but there’s a delicate aspect to it that I see translated on the book cover. How did you balance those two tones of the book, and translate violence and the sensuality so effectively?

KG: Going into the book I was prepared for a disturbing read, because the questionnaire Carmen filled out was very dark. I was surprised, though, by all these moments of sensuality. Specifically the story the cover is based on. The ribbon is tied around the woman’s neck, and there’s something that’s very, as you said, delicate about that. So I was trying to find a balance. I wanted people to be drawn into the imagery, but not be literally scared off. I didn’t want it to look like a certain kind of genre, and I really wanted it to be open enough for people to be curious but intrigued enough to buy and read thebook.

LVK: I also read Deb Olin Unferth’s Wait Till You See Me Dance, and the cover you created for that collection is distinctly different. It’s more paired down and simple, and has a different vibe. How do you bring your own style to book covers while giving each one a unique look toit?

Kimberly Glyder: The thing about Graywolf books is that they’re all so incredibly diverse and interesting. There are so many visuals I can pick up, and I look at every book as a completely unique project with a completely unique style. A consistent through line in my work is that I do a lot of hand lettering and drawing, but I do try to approach each project as a unique challenge.

LVK: What’s a common challenge that you come up on when you’re designing bookcovers?

KG: It’s very different and depends on the publisher. I had a great relationship with Graywolf because they fit me with the right books, and I also think that they trust me as a designer and trust my part in the creative process. Other publishers try to do this, but there are a lot more people weighing in in terms of sales reps and marketing people. It can get very difficult the more people are involved. It can really strip down your design sometimes. Most of my Graywolf covers have been chosen as-is and they go out in the world and they’re exactly how I would hope they wouldbe.

LVK: It sounds like the process of designing a book cover is fairly collaborative with the artist, author, and publisher weighingin.

KG: When I do book covers I look at the information that’s given to me but it’s also very much a solo project, and I don’t think of it as collaborative. I’m just given a manuscript and a lot of publishers don’t give you information from the author, so many times I have nothing, I’m just told to design the cover. Although it feels like a solo process, I am always thinking about the buyer and about how people will engage with the cover either if it’s online or in a bookstore. I want it to be engaging enough that they will want to pick it up. So in that way I am being directed, but I’m also outside of the publishing process. My personal work consists of drawing and painting, and it’s exclusively my own and not something that I’m being directed todo.

LVK: Is there anything else you’d like toadd?

KG: I had a great time working with Carmen, and I’m excited to hear what she has to say about theprocess!

There’s something about seeing a book that’s been well-worn. The annotations, dog-eared pages, and cracked spines tell a story entirely separate from the one between those creased covers. A book has a life of its own, and with any life comes the effects of age. It’s easy to get precious or self-congratulatory about one’s investment in literature, but books that have been handled, hauled around, creased, marked up, and carefully taped back together remind us that reading is also an act oflove.

Back in early September, we fired up the hashtag #ReadtoShreds to seek out the most loved-to-bits books on the internet, and the result made us want to dig through our bookshelves to find more, more, more. (Well, not my bookshelves. I’m disqualified from this hashtag because I laminate all my paperbacks.) Take a look at some of the highlights, and be sure to share some of your own with us on Twitter and Instagram. And if you already have, who’s to say you can share justone?

It started with Benjamin Samuel’s bruised and battered high school copy of The Catcher in the Rye, which probably looks a lot like all of our high school copies of thebook.

As promised, here are the Hitchhiker's Guide books I've #ReadtoShreds! Stay tuned, I have… a LOT more of these

 — @j_zimms

Our editor-in-chief, Jess Zimmerman, set the tone with these Hitchhiker’s Guide paperbacks. All the trademarks are there: missing covers, yellowed pages, a brittle spine on the verge of givingup.

Passed down from my great aunt @Electricl*t #ReadtoShreds

 — @maastacos

A book passed down from generation to generation? This is the very definition of a book with a history and story of itsown.

@Electricl*t My #ReadtoShreds is Red Peony by Lin Yutang. Found it in my grandfather's library, read it 3 times & he finally gave it to me.

 — @pluiedautomne

This copy of Red Peony is either awe-inspiring or as horrific as a crime scene photo, depending on who youare.

My @electricl*t #readtoshreds both have something spilled on them, not pictured my disgusting copy of Play It as It Lays

 — @alicebolin

I had this exact edition of Anna Karenina but my copy remained pristine (because I never read the book until years, and at least one new edition,later).

A #ReadtoShreds stack from my old pal @zzrellis. Apparently that's my copy of The Goldfinch. We love us some Tartt.

 — @HalimahMarcus

Ryan Ellis’s stack of books reminds me of those quiet, used bookstores you stumble into on a whim with stacks of books from floor to ceiling, all of them so weathered they’re unreadable and you’re pretty sure its where books go todie.

Morgan Parker’s copy of Invisible Man is stripped bare, its pages as naked as it was when the book-block was firstprinted.

Favorite in middle school and still going strong @Electricl*t #readtoshreds

 — @LattMewis

I still haven’t read Dune but this picture from Matt E. Lewis makes me want to see what it’s allabout.

@Electricl*t #readtoshreds

 — @alanna_cotch

readtoshreds: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, after many semesters of teaching, held together with tape, clips, rubber band @Electricl*t

 — @alanna_cotch

When is a book officially retired from circulation? Is it when the spine no longer holds the pages and, like Alanna Cotch here, a reader has to use tape, rubber bands, and more to keep itwhole?

Heather Scott Partington with a life hack: If a book’s length and size is too intimidating, cut it into more readable, less overwhelming pieces.

@Electricl*t my #ReadtoShreds are three of my all time favorite books

 — @sarahpaol

Oh you better believe these books have seen somethings.

@Electricl*t I hated this the first time I read it. So glad I gave it a 2nd chance! Have had 3 copies since! (+a 1st edition) #ReadtoShreds

 — @BananafishJenna

Jenna Jimmereeno wrote another Franny and Zooey’s worth of annotations in her copy of Franny andZooey.

My @Electricl*t #readtoshreds is this copy of Invisible Cities I found on the sidewalk in college. My companion to 38 states & 13 countries.

 — @lucekel

Contributing editor Kelly Luce’s copy of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities has traveled and been taken along to perhaps as many cities, places as varied as those found in this experimental classic. This is what a book looks like when it is with you forlife.

I call this one — from author, Ryan Britt — the end of an era. A book truly devoured, read through so completely it no longer is abook.

H i. I’m Rahawa Haile, an Eritrean-American writer and lifelong Star Trek fan. I’m joined by Nicole Chung, a writer and editor who’s still a little disappointed she couldn’t attend Starfleet Academy and troll Wesley Crusher. She and I both wanted to write about the new Trek series in anticipation of a mostly white/mostly male flood of episode reviews and thinkpieces. Since Star Trek: Discovery used leads who were women of color to promote the show and its commitment to diversity, who better to give feedback thanus?

Star Trek: Discovery streams on CBS All Access on Sundays at 8:30 p.m. ET. If you want to watch and yell about it with us (not at us, please), we’re on Twitter at @rahawahaile and @nicole_soojung. But if you haven’t watched it yet, be aware that this conversation will contain many, many spoilers.

Nicole Chung: Hi Rahawa! Maybe before we get to SO WHAT DID YOU THINK?? about the long-awaited Star Trek: Discovery, we should talk about what brought us to sci-fi and Star Trek in the first place. I’ve been rereading favorite books with my older daughter, who certainly doesn’t need me to read to her, but I did not go through all that labor only to sit on the bench while she reads my favorite books by herself. Somehow I hadn’t realized just how many of the books I’d want to read aloud with her would be sci-fi and fantasy, from A Wrinkle in Time to The Lord of the Rings. Which seems like a silly thing to have overlooked! These books were life-giving to me as akid.

Still, you can’t necessarily draw a line from loving Madeleine L’Engle to attending a small-town Star Trek convention (which I did, in early high school; my Starfleet Academy class ring no longer fits). When it comes to my love of the Trek multiverse, I must point the finger at my dad. We’d watch whatever Trek was currently on CBS on many a Saturday night, and often we’d stick around for very late Original Series reruns. We owned all the movies. Dad still loves Star Trek in all its iterations — except for NuTrek, about which we argue with no bitterness (he says “it’s Star Trek for people who don’t know anything about Star Trek”; I agree to a point, but don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing, and I find the new cast utterly delightful).

I have a hard time ranking the Treks because they are so different, but Star Trek: The Next Generation is my sentimental fave and Deep Space Nine is the one I’m most likely to rewatch nowadays — I think it is the strongest and also the weirdest of all theseries.

Rahawa Haile: I met Star Trek as a young girl in love with all things “space” as many children are. I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, proceeded to watch Deep Space Nine, and gave up a few seasons into Voyager. At 16, I was so thrilled for Enterprise’s premiere I begged my mom to buy me a small bottle of Alizé so I could pretend it was Romulan ale (I settled for “Cool Blue” Gatorade); it was to be a short-lived excitement. Enterprise was terrible. I came late to Star Trek: The Original Series. An episode here and there, sure, but rarelymore.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine felt like a revelation. As an eight-year-old in Miami — three hours south of the rocket launches at Kennedy Space Center — watching Avery Brooks, a black man, command a space station meant everything to me. It stilldoes.

Watching Avery Brooks, a black man, command a space station meant everything to me. It stilldoes.

NC: Brooks was so good throughout that entire series, and it was such a strange role — boilerplate Star Trek storyline at first, and then things got wild. The weirder that show got, the more I lovedit.

I would have been excited about Discovery anyway, but two women of color leads in a Star Trek series seemed, well, too good to be true. I have been grappling with the fact that I was fully ready to be pandered to with this series, as a longtime sci-fi fan who’s not white. (When you’re usually ignored, honestly, a little pandering can be welcome.)

For me, it was thrilling just to see promo photos of Sonequa Martin-Green (who plays Michael Burnham) and Michelle Yeoh (who plays Philippa Georgiou) in their new uniforms, on the bridge, looking badass. I got choked up seeing Michelle in the captain’s chair. In their first scene together, when they’re walking through the desert on an alien world, discussing the mission and whether Martin-Green’s character is ready for her own command — it was about as happy as television has ever mademe.

I was fully ready to be pandered to with this series. When you’re usually ignored, a little pandering can bewelcome.

RH: Right. But I wish everything about Discovery didn’t feel so…opportunistic? The CBS All Access subscription. Their treatment of Yeoh (death) and Martin-Green (incarcerated). If the allure of diversity in this series — which their promo material relied on heavily — lies not only in who is seen but who has agency, the show is off to a very questionable start.

NC: I would like to talk more about this, because I too was rather dissatisfied — and it wasn’t just the early death of Yeoh’s character, though that was one disappointing result of larger plot and character issues. As you point out, just having people of color on the show is not enough; you also have to write them well, give them the kind of background, development, and agency nonwhite characters lack on so manyshows.

I couldn’t understand why Martin-Green’s character would throw away seven years of camaraderie and mentorship to knock out her captain and attempt a mutiny, for example (even to save lives?). That move just felt rushed, like we’d need more backstory and a better grasp of the characters in order to fully understand it. Yes, Michael was triggered by a run-in with the Klingons, who killed her parents — but it seemed too great a leap to have her attack Captain Georgiou in thepilot.

As for Georgiou, she was allowed to be seen nurturing her crew, being an encouraging mentor... and yet, somehow, she was not shown to be a very good captain? She was rather hapless during the battle, anyway, until the (white, male) admiral showed up. Now the captain of Discovery, the ship where Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is headed, has in Jason Isaacs’s Lorca a captain who is in it to win it, and you could read this as a decision to give us yet another white male captain who can do the job an Asian woman couldn’t.

It doesn’t sit well with me that these two women I was so excited to watch in this universe had such a strange, almost nonsensical beginning and a relationship I just could not figureout.

Just having people of color on the show is not enough; you also have to write them well, give them the kind of background, development, and agency nonwhite characters lack on so manyshows.

RH: Yes! I called Martin-Green “Michael Thrace” (a reference to the Battlestar Galactica reboot’s Kara Thrace) at one point because of this impulsiveness. If you’re going to part ways from Roddenberry’s utopian vision that starkly, give me the character development to back itup!

I’m uncomfortable with how much this series is indebted to the Battlestar Galactica reboot. I don’t care how impressive the CGI was: Episode two did not earn its battle. No episode two does, because television is not the movies. Visuals are not the reason Star Trek has enchanted viewers for 50 years. I need more than 40 minutes of set-up to care about the people in a battle like the second episode’s. My lifelong history of rooting for previous Federation leads does not mean Discovery gets to skip the heavy lifting of building characters in favor of shootouts. Action is meaningless if I know nothing about those who are actedupon.

I’m disappointed as much as everyone else by Yeoh’s death. Charlize Theron received endless praise for learning to fight during the filming of Atomic Blonde, but oh my God does Michelle Yeoh deserve an Emmy for managing to act like she doesn’t possess her legendary fighting skills in thisepisode.

NC: Yeah, as I keep saying to everyone, there’s no way Michelle Yeoh loses that or any fight IRL, sorry. And I liked the BSG reboot, except for the last bit of the series finale and literally two episodes I always skip (BSG fans can probably guess which ones), but I don’t think it’s a model for StarTrek.

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RH: I tweeted that I don’t think Discovery knows what science fiction show it wants to be yet. It’s streaming on a subscription service meant to lure established fans; it’s promoting(ish) women of color leads meant to entice wider audiences; it’s action-driven and shiny because it believes it has to be as visually immersive as the recent films. I want stronger writing and more exploration.

Two scenes stuck out the most to me from the Discovery premiere. The first was when Martin-Green’s face looks almost golden in her spacesuit. That look of awe — that is what I’m here for. The other was in the brig, when her cell was about to be exposed to the vacuum of space. “How does a character face death?” will always be an interesting question. Watching her before she found a way out — her body language, her silence, everything — is what gives me hope for this series. (Although I’m a little surprised she didn’t close her eyes for the scene! Same with Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy. Readers, if you’re ever about to be exposed to the vacuum of space, please close youreyes.)

Overall, I think my kindest takeaway is that Martin-Green has the range. She can be stoic. She can be emotional. She can be a reserved soldier. She can lie. This is more dexterity than most Star Trek characters usually get to show. That kind of depth just isn’t written into them. These next few episodes are going to matter a lot. I want to see how she interacts with her fellow crewmen. Great emphasis has been placed on the novelty of having a series told from the POV of a character other than the captain, which might be neat, but is also incredibly vulnerable to the chemistry between Martin-Green and the rest of the crew. Can you imagine a DS9 told from Odo’s POV versus, say, Bashir’s? A TNG told from Worf’s POV versus Data’s? We’re talking about wildly different shows that would get old or stale for different reasons at different times.

I hope Discovery doesn’t waste Martin-Green. I hope it isn’t a show about her having to prove herself over and over again. Star Trek is about connections, successful or absent. I hope it shows ussome.

I hope Discovery doesn’t waste Sonequa Martin-Green. I hope it isn’t a show about her having to prove herself over and overagain.

NC: I’ve wondered about perspective on Discovery, too, because while other series have centered the captains, they’ve also been strong ensemble shows with different episodes unfolding from different characters’ perspectives. On TNG, I appreciated weird little episodes like “Suspicions,” which gave us a whole episode of Dr. Crusher playing detective; or “Data’s Day,” all about Data and his friendships with O’Brien, Keiko, and Crusher. I don’t know that a serialized show leaping from conflict to battle to shocking twist can do that kind of storytelling or perspective-shifting. And maybe we don’t miss it so much if Michael turns out to be the wonderfully developed character Martin-Green deserves! But it’s another one of those things I tend to think of as quintessential Star Trek, and it’ll feel odd if we don’t see itlater.

RH: Let’s talk about the Klingons. I’m deeply disturbed by how flat they made them, how singularly intolerant. They may as well be DS9’s Jem’Hadar. The slogan “Remain Klingon” has made waves across the fandom as an allusion to the political climate in America. But listen, are the Klingons in Star Trek: Discovery the other or the bigots? Are they both? Because if so, I feel like I’ve just walked into someone telling me black people are the real racists. Who does the show want them to be? And, based on that answer, what does it mean that they’re the villains?

NC: That’s such a good point. It’s a little disappointing after the world-building with the Klingons I grew up watching on TNG, who were sometimes allies and sometimes not, but always complex and compelling. I thought the “Remain Klingon” rallying cry signaled the Klingons are meant to be the bigots, but the portrayal was confusing! I kept thinking of Worf’s line from the DS9 episode when Sisko and crew go back to Kirk’s Enterprise and witness the encounter with the Tribbles; they see some Klingons and note how different they look, and Worf is like, “Yeah, we don’t talk about that.” These Discovery Klingons were pretty much unrecognizable to me, which would be okay if the portrayal wasn’t so one-dimensional sofar.

How Leonard Nimoy’s Spock Taught Me to Be a Writer

Of course, even on other Star Trek shows, whole species are often whittled down to a single trait: the Romulans are sneaky, the Klingons are warlike, the Cardassians are ruthless, the Ferengi are greedy. And yet within those broad strokes you see individuals (I guess I’m thinking about Garak now, because I am rewatching DS9 as I write this) who get to be full, interesting characters, of but also distinct from the general cultural stereotypes.

I’ve been trying to think of a sci-fi offering that’s been especially good when it comes to race and culture (both literal aliens, and also actors of color in all sorts of interesting roles). I keep going around, arguing with myself about whether sci-fi does race better or worse than other types of stories. I am not sure. It’s probably a silly question. But I ask it because sci-fi is where I’ve sometimes felt just slightly less invisible than I do in other genres (cozy mysteries, love stories, literary fiction…). I guess I’ve always appreciated Star Trek for its “diversity,” even when I have wanted a hell of a lot more ofit.

I guess I’ve always appreciated Star Trek for its “diversity,” even when I have wanted a hell of a lot more ofit.

RH: I hear you. DS9 excelled at portraying Ferengi (Rom) and Cardassians (Garak) who broke away from stereotypes. My gut reaction is to say, yes, of course sci-fi handled race better than other stories, but I wonder how much of that is still true; there’s an argument to be made that comics are currently doing this better and more consistently than just about any format out there. Televised sci-fi today can bring us representation in ways that are important within the context of their stories, sure, but that are also intrinsically tied to the historically exclusionary nature of thatmedium.

My takeaway from episode three is that this Star Trek is going to do whatever the hell it wants. No one trusts anyone. The captain might be good or bad. Whatever sense of camaraderie might develop among the crew will take longer than most old fans are used to seeing. I hope they stickaround.

I f the Nobel Prize in Literature were a TV show, last year would have been the season it jumped the shark. The selection of Bob Dylan—Bob Dylan! Not even Leonard Cohen!—outraged some, confused everyone, and embarrassed the hell out of The New Republic’s Alex Shephard, who reported on the betting odds with a piece entitled “Who Will Win the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature? Not Bob Dylan, that’s for sure.” Shephard hedged his bets this year, gamely including such literary luminaries as Kanye West and Bruce Springsteen on his list, albeit at noodds.

But if the Nobel Prize in Literature were a TV show, this year would be the season everyone assures you is worth sitting through last year to get to. Kazuo Ishiguro, the British novelist who won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his The Remains of the Day, isn’t exactly a surprising choice—by which I mean Americans have heard of him, and his work has even been made into a movie. Two movies! But it’s also just surprising enough. Ishiguro didn’t appear on the list of top betting odds; favorites included Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Canadian national treasure Margaret Atwood. But he’s an undisputed master of the craft of fiction, a luminous writer praised by the committee for his “carefully restrained mode of expression” and “great emotional force.”

That tension—between restrained expression and great emotional force roiling beneath the surface—is especially characteristic of The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro’s best-known novel. The novel’s narrator and sole voice is an aging butler, so the restraint of the prose is also a form of character development; the experience of reading the novel is one of working down inch by inch through that reserve to touch the torrent of feeling it’s holding back. But the same tension appears in Never Let Me Go, in which a secluded and heavily supervised English boarding school turns out to have a dark secret, and An Artist of the Floating World, which like Remains of the Day is told through the reminiscences of a single flawed narrator considering—and concealing, and revealing—the worth of hislife.

“I quite like language that suppresses meaning rather than language that goes groping after something that’s slightly beyond the words,” Ishiguro said in a 2015 interview with Electric Literature. “I’m interested in speech that kind of conceals and covers up. I’m not necessarily saying that’s Japanese. But I suppose it goes with a certain kind Japanese aesthetic; a minimalism and simplicity of design that occurs over and over again in Japanese things, you know. I do like a flat, plain surface where the meaning is subtly pushed between the lines rather than overtly expressed. But I don’t know if that’s Japanese, or if that’s just me.” Whether or not it’s Japanese in origin, the Nobel committee agrees that it’s global in impact. Maintaining the delicate balance between careful prose and emotional heft is a deft trick, and Ishiguro deserves to be recognized.

Plus, we’re all extremely relieved it wasn’t Bruce Springsteen.

Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What’s a book you read insecret?

I got my first paycheck in April of 1999. I was 15 years old. I decided I would buy abook.

My sister drove me to the local mall, and I walked into Waldenbooks and scanned the shelves. This was an auspicious occasion: the first earnings of my life. I believed in signs and wonders and wanted to make my own, so I needed to choose wisely. I wanted to possess a book that would define me. I wanted a manifesto. I wished to become a real person by way of something bold and mean andpoetic.

I did not have to search long. The book’s appearance on the shelf was almost audible, as if it were emitting a faint, hellish siren. On the cover were flames and a screaming mouth. The mouth’s teeth were crowded and stained. A Clockwork Orange by AnthonyBurgess.

I must have known I would not be allowed to keep it. I must have known. But I still bought the book, such was my desire to own it. I wanted to own this book and I wanted it to own me. The title was sinister yet playful, wholly mysterious. The cover promised great suffering, greattruth.

I broke into a sweat as I paid for it. I wasready.

When I was born it was clear I would not amount to much in the physical fitness department. I was born with an orthopedic condition that was never definitively diagnosed but resembled osteogenesis imperfecta. My femurs were bowed and required surgical correction with plates and screws. My bones could break with the slightest pressure, and they did. I spent a lot of my early childhood in body casts and wheelchairs. So I knew early on that I would never be able to join the Marines like my dad, or play sports, or ride a bike, or even take gym class like other children.

My family and my church told me it was God’s plan that I was born different. I was weak in body but could be strong in spirit. I could be a shining example of godliness in a world that is sometimes cruel.

Instead, I chose to read. In elementary and middle school I often spent time separate from my peers because of medical issues, and I filled that time with books. Throughout my life, in sickness and in health, holing up somewhere private and reading a book has been my human equivalent of a dog dragging itself under the porch at its final hour, a self-comforting instinct.

High school was better, but by then I had developed scoliosis. For two years I wore a Milwaukee back brace, which was humiliating in its own special way that I tried to ignore. I attempted, and failed, to ignore a lot of things. My parents were zealously protective of me. Their concern was partly due to my medical history, but much of it was a result of the conservative Christian values they followed. Television, music, and clothing choices were strictly monitored. No “weirdo” friends were allowed, though the definition of “weirdo” remained elastic and nebulous. My father was a history teacher at the rural public high school I attended, and he was renown for his disciplinarian ways. The student body totaled less than 400 at the time. I felt watched and I watched. I was a paranoidalien.

The first book I remember reading as a child is a floppy-cover Winnie the Pooh book, but the book that permeated my subconscious before that was the Bible. The Bible is probably to blame for my literary inclinations, what with phrases like,“For now we see through a glass, darkly,” and, “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye…” But as a teenager, around the time I started my first job, I began questioning my religious upbringing. God’s marvelous plans seemed more and more suspect to me. I had learned zero lessons from my physical crucible. I was no more enlightened than anyoneelse.

Above all, I wanted to be normal, meaning cool, or eligible for coolness. But this was not to be. I had an acute awareness of my situation. I knew that my peers regarded me as somewhat pathetic. Most of my classmates had known me since kindergarten. Reinventing myself as a forceful character was impossible when everyone saw me as the runty kid bearing up valiantly under her special burden. No matter how smart or how snarky I became, to my high school peers I would always be Tiny Tim with his little crutch and Positive Mental Attitude. The thought horrified me.

So around this age of 15, I decided that if I could not be normal I would be grossly, misguidedly abnormal. And if I could not be abnormal in outward expression, such as in my clothing choices or friendships or speech, I would be privately, spiritually abnormal. Like my hidden bones, I would be invisibly vicious.

Books, I knew, would deliver me to this new state of being. They taught me about the world when the world was unavailable to me. I wanted to read something ugly, detestable. My own revulsion beckoned. I wanted to take a bath in the nastiness of humankind. I couldn’t help myself. It is hard to help the pull toward depravity once you’ve been immersed in the Bible. All that blood and glory. All that revenge and love anddeath.

When my sister and I arrived home from the bookstore my parents called a greeting to us from the living room. As I walked past, one of my parents saw that I held a shopping bag. They asked me what Ibought.

I took the book out of the bag. My mother or father, I can’t remember which, lifted it from myhands.

I don’t know if my dad ever watched Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, but he apparently knew enough about it to know it contained rape scenes and murder. He and my mother were aghast. They were appalled by the book’s subject matter, of course, but more appalled that I had chosen it. That their daughter was interested in a book likethis.

And this, dear reader, told me I had chosen correctly.

I was taken back to Waldenbooks, where I returned the novel. I did not get the chance to openit.

That experience confirmed some things. Firstly, that adults were easily alarmed. Secondly, that the written word was powerful. I had always suspected as much, but to see up close what a guttural reaction a book — a book! an inert, inanimate object! — could get was exciting. Art was dangerous. It had the power to permanently taint you, to muddy up the mind. As I said, I wasready.

Thirdly, I learned that my strategy must be one of patience. I loved my parents and did not want to hurt them, a minor roadblock to my spiritual rebellion. I would bide my time. My lurking curiosity would bewaiting.

I have been lucky. Except for the brittle teeth that followed me into adulthood, most of my physical ailments are over with for now. I can walk without aid or pain, and other than being short I think I look fairly regular. My strange skeleton has offered me a multi-year reprieve from pain and grief, though I know it can’tlast.

I still hanker after transgressive literature. I still search out books that I hope will explain things to me: illness, death, suffering, unkindness. I like stories that are unafraid of these mysteries, and are unafraid of being mysterious.

But for all my teenage aberrant aspirations, I have led a boring life. I stayed in the local area. I got married. I used to be a librarian, for God’s sake. I was boring. I am boring. My outward expression remains benign. I can’t help but be a little disappointed by this fact. I was really counting on my malignant spirit to take me places. People are led to believe, even those who live with illness, that being born with medical issues makes one special or superlative in some way. It does not. Everyone is equally entitled to be an unremarkable human.

Still, I have never shaken the feeling of otherness. No matter where I go, no matter what environment into which I assimilate myself, I remain a paranoid alien. Reading and writing continues to be an escape, a place where I may transcend this infinitely banal and infinitely wonderful life. And I continue to hoard words of all kinds, including my own. When I received my first acceptance for publication, I told no one for a few years. I eventually mentioned it to my husband. He reacted with pleasure and pride, and the moment waslovely.

After a few days, though, I was sorry I told him. That secret had been lending mepower.

Two years passed. I was a senior in high school. At a used book sale I happened to find a paperback copy of A Clockwork Orange.. The pages were coarse and smelled of rancid peanutbutter.

I bought it for $2, no receipt. I vowed to be smarter this time. I kept it in my locker at school during the week. When I brought it home over weekends, I stuffed it under my mattress between furtive readings.

The book did not disappoint. Alex, a kid who seemed very adult to me — it was hard to believe that any fictional teenager was ever my age — brutalizes people with his friends and is then incarcerated. Once the predator, Alex becomes the victim of political machinations, including “reconditioning,” or government-sanctioned torture. After many twists and turns, this conditioning is eventually reversed and, in return for the favor, he publicly endorses the government administration.

In this edition of the book, Alex, both the manipulator and manipulated, remains a bastard. He was an unabashed bastard all along. But so was everyoneelse.

When I finished the novel, I was mystified: why had my parents considered this book so dangerous? I understood it had rape and violence and murder in it. But it was fiction. And even as some wicked layer of me championed Alex’s perverse appreciation of art and independence, I knew the crimes he committed were heinous acts, just as I knew the torture the government inflicted upon him was a heinous act. I had sympathy for his victims. I judged him even as I rooted for him. The book talked to me and I talked back at it. I gloried in some parts and recoiled from other parts. I questioned my own reactions. In other words, I experienced ABook.

Years later I would reread the novel with the missing final chapter. The copy of A Clockwork Orange that I’d picked up at the library sale, it turned out, was the U.S. edition, meaning the final chapter of the novel featuring Alex’s reformation and social assimilation had been excised. I also read Burgess’s introduction, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked,” where he vents his spleen. He hated his own book and the popular attention it received. He loathed Kubrick’s adaptation. In a separate interview he confessed that he wrote the novel in three weeks to make a deadline. All of this behind-the-curtain pettiness makes the book seem even less dangerous now.

But I’d like to think that my first reading of A Clockwork Orange answered my original question of what makes a book dangerous. When we read we consult ourselves: What is the meaning of anything? Do we think what we think we think? Do we like what we think? Should we change what we think? The reader’s brain is led through a guided dream. I think of the Bible, perhaps the most dangerous book of all. How many people have challenged themselves against that text, lost themselves in that dream? Any other book before or since it seems laughably safe in comparison.

In the end, I donated my $2 copy of A Clockwork Orange to a library book sale a few months after I finished it. I probably could have kept it without a fuss. To my slow-motion surprise, I was discovering that my parents were human. Over the preceding two years they had become more flexible, less restrictive. The change was gradual. But they tried, and I could see themtrying.

I gave the book away, anyway. I had possessed the book, and it had possessed me. I figured that my curiosity, a burning sickness that has never left me, had beencured.

It was cured, allright.