The Weekly Weird-off: Atomik Aztex vs. Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

Welcome to the Weirdathon's Weekly Weird-off! Here your word gladiators will be fighting to the death (did I forget to mention that part?) to determine which weird book is the weirdest. The first battle proved to be intense, and the second battle carried on that tradition. This debate features Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster and Even Cowgirls Get The Blues by Tom Robbins. Each contestant is allowed to rebut their opponent's answer before moving on to their answer. Ding ding ding, let the fight begin!

Heather - Based On A True Story VS. Whitney - Imaginary Book Club

INTRODUCTIONS 

Heather: In Atomik Aztex, the Azteks rule the world after beating back the attempted Spanish conquest of Mexico. Zenzontli, an Aztek warrior on his way to Saint Petersburg in World War II is having visions of himself living in an alternate reality where the Spanish beat the Azteks and he works in a slaughterhouse in Los Angeles.

Whitney: Even Cowgirls Get The Blues is an epic adventure story starring Sissy Hankshaw, a woman born with abnormally large thumbs. She pursues a career as a professional hitchhiker and travels the United States. In the process of traveling, she encounters a pretty promiscuous group of cowgirls managing a ranch under the leadership of Bonanza Jellybean and an escapee from a Japanese internment camp. the migratory patterns of whooping cranes are disrupted by the cowgirls, and chaos ensues.

WHAT ARE SOME STRANGE THINGS THAT HAPPEN IN THE PLOT?

Heather - Answer: The Azteks think that all time is cyclical. Everything that is happening or has happened or will happen is occurring at the same time. There are multiple universes that can be moved into easily. That leads to lines in a book set in the 1940s like, “..we exist simultaneously in all the happiest moments of our lives and these go on shining forever like the stars, as Mayan pop singer Juan Lennon put it, “Instant Karma’s gonna get you. We all shine on. I wanna hold your hand.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

What isn’t weird in this book? The Azteks are still powering their economy through human sacrifice. They want to fight the Nazis primarily because big fat Europeans make such good sacrifices. In fact, one Aztek in the book is injured by being hit by the body of Nazi officers being thrown off a pyramid after the sacrifice.

Whitney - Answer: Everything is strange!! The entire plot centers on the premise that a young woman with abnormally large thumbs could reasonably make a career out of hitchhiking back and forth across the United States. Somehow this makes her famous, and she becomes the muse/inspiration for the eccentric billionaire head of a women’s hygiene product company. Seriously. At the same time that you’re reading about the Legendary Sissy Hankshaw, you’re following the cowgirls on the ranch - a motley crew lead by a woman called - seriously - Bonanza Jelly Bean.

The cowgirls end up in a war with the FBI because they “kidnap” a massive group of migratory Whooping Cranes!! There’s just nothing here that is reasonable and normal.

IS THE FORMAT OF THE BOOK WEIRD?

Heather - Rebuttal: Going to war over Whooping Cranes seems as good a reason as any to me! It is at least slightly better than going to war just to collect human sacrifices by the thousands and then complaining that your priests are just going through the motions and not doing it with style.

Heather - Answer: The format of the book is straightforward but there are huge paragraphs full of run on sentences with minimal punctuation. The Azteks also use a strange form of spelling. They never met a word that they couldn’t work a K into. “Cyklikal konceptions” is a common spelling in this book.

They also don’t always make a distinction between which version of Zenozotli you are reading about at any given time. As the book gets nearer to the end, it is harder to tell when one version stops narrating and the other starts.

Whitney - Rebuttal: Psh, run on sentences sounds like Steinbeck to me. Nothing particularly weird there. And if we can applaud Tolkein for making up a whole series of complex languages in one of the greatest series EVER, then I’m pretty sure that some wonKy spellings are acceptable!

Whitney - Answer: The novel is designed in a series of 121 short sections, including a whole lot of random segments. I'm a particular fan of how Robbins incorporates jokes, puns, metaphors and some literary trickery basically designed to confuse the reader.

He even includes a bonus (made up? IDK) parable in which Confucius, Buddha, and Christ fail to find the sweetness in a jar of vinegar, but Pan and his harem of fertile women find sweetness. Why we needed a parable in the middle of a novel that didn’t really involved any characters mentioned anywhere else in the book? Who knows? Tom Robbins knows.

Also have to note - the book is told from the perspective of a character who is NOT IDENTIFIED UNTIL THE LAST THREE PAGES. The perspective is "Dr. Robbins", and is told both from the person omniscient and first person, which is further confusing. You get both the perspective of a distant overseer and the perspective of the characters most intimate feelings, thoughts and perspectives. Also, Tom Robbings (author, not narrator) interjects in a first person perspective WHENEVER HE FEELS LIKE IT. Breaking the fourth wall all over the place.

ARE THERE ANY INTERESTING CHARACTERS?

Heather - Rebuttal: Speaking of made up things in the middle of a novel that didn’t really need to be there, in this book there is a long and graphic and detailed description of the death of the narrator of the book on page 150 of a 200 page book that ends with the explanation that it probably didn’t happen. It might have, but probably not. Then he goes on narrating.

Heather - Answer: All of the characters in this book exist in both timelines. Zenzontli narrates and keeps the focus mainly on himself because he is self-absorbed like that. He is The Keeper of the House of Darkness of the Aztek Socialist party. He is a warrior. He keeps European Christian slaves but considers himself enlightened because he enjoys paella occasionally and lets his slaves ramble about their God without killing them immediately. He considers himself to have been assassinated when someone steals his soul by taking his picture so he volunteers for high risk duty since he is fundamentally already dead.

In his Los Angeles incarnation, he slaughters hogs by the thousands, organizes for the union, and kills his supervisor and makes him into sausage.

Whitney - Rebuttal: I must say, I enjoy some paella occasionally… I also think that the killing your supervisor and making him into sausage was the plotline for an episode of the X Files I watched last week (you’d have to sub chicken for hogs). And there were something like eight other things happening in that episode of the X Files! Sounds pretty straightforward to me…

Whitney - Answer: Before we talk character descriptions, let's just talk character names: Sissy Hankshaw, The Chink, The Countess, Bonanza Jellybean, Madame Zoe... I could go on. This is the motherload when it comes to creative and wacky (and WEIRD) character names.

I’ve mentioned the thumb thing right? The entire character of Sissy Hankshaw is defined by how the her thumbs gave her the freedom to come and go as she pleases via hitchhiking! She then becomes a model! And then the muse of another wacky character, and finally a cowgirl… and a mystic.

But first, an aside with Bonanza Jellybean… This is a woman whose entire life has centered on a goal of becoming a cowgirl. She got in trouble as a child for shooting a pair of sneakers - “Self-defense, she pleaded…”It was a out-law tennis shoe. Billy the Ked.”

And then there is the Countess. How exactly this person came to be in charge of a multi-million dollar feminine hygiene product company is very unclear, when he’s basically a very old gay man is unclear. What his interest is in those particular products? Unknown. His interest in Sissy? Unknown. Seems to be something about the thumbs.

The whole cast of characters here is insane… I could go on, but I’ll save something for y’all later on when you pick up the book.

Heather - Rebuttal: I applaud Bonanza Jellybean for having a dream and following through. It takes practice to be a cowgirl. There is all that shooting and riding and roping. Studying from childhood is just smart career planning - not weird at all.

Sissy Hankshaw is just making the most of her assets, her thumbs. Again, it is a good career choice.

IN ONE NONSPOILER-Y SENTENCE, DESCRIBE A "WHAT THE FUCK" MOMENT

Heather: After the whole story of Zenzontli’s multiple existences, the book ends with a story about how monkeys mess with your interior life and that isn’t a spoiler because the ending of this book has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anything that has come before it.

Whitney: Had heartless you forgotten all about those poor kidnapped Whooping Cranes?

SUMMARY

Heather: Atomik Aztex combines multiple universes, alternative realities, human sacrifices, suicidial military missions, trepanation, union organizing, slave collecting trips, taco trucks, slaughterhouses, the Warren Commission, Cokie Roberts, and the Beatles into a World War II story that may or may not have happened in the way it was described. Maybe it was the just the monkeys messing in his brain.

Whitney: With an excess of self-awareness, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is chock full of ridiculous characters, bizarre and dangling plot lines, and nonsensical asides. Dealing with everything from free love, drug use, animal rights, the benefits of feminine body odor, religion, and more, there’s very little you would find in Cowgirls that isn’t weird. While you might find the plot to Atomik Aztex sprinkled over a handful of Sci-Fi specials, I don’t think you would find any piece of Cowgirls anywhere... unless perhaps you’ve done quite a few more drugs than I’ve ever been exposed to.

WINNER

The rebuttals!! My young heart can hardly take the ferocity! Even Cowgirls Get The Blues sounds ridiculous and delightful and oh so readable. But Atomik Aztex covers so many weird bases all in one books and sounds like no book I've ever heard of before. Wow, they both sound weird. Regardless, Heather wins the weird e-book bundle this round! Thank you both so much for playing!



Who would you declare winner in this battle of wits and words?

The Weekly Weird-off: The People of Paper vs. The Colored Museum

Welcome to the Weirdathon's Weekly Weird-off! Here your word gladiators will be fighting to the death (did I forget to mention that part?) to determine which weird book is the weirdest. The first battle will feature The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia and The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe. Each contestant is allowed to rebut their opponent's answer before moving on to their answer. Ding ding ding, let the fight begin!

 Sal from Motion Sick Lit      VS.    Cass from real life/Twitter

INTRODUCTIONS 

Sal: The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia is a novel that is in no way easy to categorize. According to Plascencia, the novel is “a war-novel, a memoir, it’s about immigration, it’s a meta-fiction, and it’s a love-story.” The heart of the novel is built around Federico de la Fe and his daughter, Little Merced, who leave Mexico for the United States after Federico’s wife, Merced, leaves him due to his bedwetting. Once in the U.S., Federico bands together with the locals, forming a group called the EMF who wage a war “against Saturn, against sadness, and against omniscient narration.” The novel is written in three sections, each including several chapters. Each chapter enlists the perspectives of a variety of characters, including Saturn, the omniscient narrator. The pages are laid out in columns, and, at one point, words are blacked out or, in certain editions, are cut from the page. The narrator himself makes an appearance as well. Weird in plot, characterization, genre, organization, and style, I cannot think of a book stranger than The People of Paper.

Cass: George C. Wolfe’s 1985 play The Colored Museum uses the absurd, the strange, the abnormal, and, of course, the weird to excoriate African-American stereotypes. The one-act play features 11 scenes or “exhibits,” such as a time warping airplane spaceship, two models who have chosen to live inside the hermetic safety of Ebony magazine, and a young girl who has given birth to a giant egg. The characters regularly break the fourth wall, forcing the audience to be accountable for what they see on stage in the exhibits of the “museum.” The result is affecting, funny, and often disturbing, an experience that stays with you. The Colored Museum’s weirdness is put to great use to confront the audience (or the reader) with the absurdity of racism itself.

WHAT ARE SOME STRANGE THINGS THAT HAPPEN IN THE PLOT?

Sal - Answer: The better question might be “what normal things happen in the plot?” because there aren’t many of those and far more of the weird. We have a woman composed of paper, a moment where a character crawls through the ‘sky’ to confront the author, fictional biographical information about Rita Hayworth, and fictional versions of various persons within the life of the author. Not only are the characters weird and quirky, from Little Merced’s love of limes that cause the enamel on her teeth to rub off to the fact that the EMF gang are really just flower pickers, but the line between fiction and reality becomes blurred to the degree that one is never sure just how much is fiction and how much is memoir. The characters give themselves lead sickness (how, I will not say), and there is even a prophetic baby. If I could, I would just present the text of the novel here, but, in the interest of space, I will simply let my answer stand as is.

Cass - Rebuttal: Anyone can make up stories about Rita Hayworth (have you heard that her mother was actually a blue cow named Bessie?), but The Colored Museum features a Josephine Baker-type murdering her philandering boyfriend on stage with a letter opener before telling us about a dream she had where she ran naked through Sammy Davis Jr.’s hair.

Cass - Answer: There is no plot, only a steady stream of exaggerated “types” as characters who express and expose raw truths. We are taken on Celebrity Slaveship, an airplane staffed by the cheerfully numb stewardess Miss Pat, where the audience--playing the part of the slaves on the plane--are made to denounce African drumming and promise, “I will not rebel.” We watch “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel,” and learn ingredients like “[a]ll kinds of rhythms/lots of feelings and pizzaz” and “rage/till it congeals and turns to jazz” bake up a batch of something most unexpected. We meet two wigs (yes, actual wigs), LaWanda and Janine, who plead their virtues to an unnamed Woman who is trying to decide between them. We even meet little Normal Jean Reynolds and the giant egg she has birthed after being raped by the garbage man and locked in a dark room by her mother. Each exhibit’s mixture of the surreal and the real emphasizes the absurd horror of the truth.

IS THE FORMAT OF THE BOOK WEIRD?

Sal - Rebuttal: Of course, anyone could make up stories about Rita Hayworth. Anyone could make up stories about Sammy Davis’ hair as well. As for cutting her ex-boyfriend’s throat with the letter opener, I hope it offered the answer she was looking for.

I’m not so sure that novels without plot are all that strange, as Naked Lunch featured a very fragmented, non-linear plot to the point that the urban legend was that Burroughs composed it while in a state of heroin withdrawal and, upon completion, threw it up into the air, publishing it however it had landed. And it seemed entirely plausible! While I will give you the fact that wigs are extremely strange, I have seen many wigs do what they like when I take my grandmother to the beauty salon. They certainly seem to have their share of attitude. And while your play certainly seems to hammer on the surreal, mine seems to function in a similar manner through both metafiction and its brand of magical realism.

Sal - Answer: The People of Paper is published in three sections and include a large cast of characters. The sections are typically divided into columns with a header letting you know which character’s point of view is represented. Saturn, the omniscient narrator, is most often given his own left-side page while the other characters have their right-handed side to add their points of view. There is a little bit of overlap sometimes, giving the reader multiple perspective on the same event, and it is both in physical format and in the format of storytelling itself that the format of the book is weird. As the prophetic baby comes to realize his powers, the EMF gang try to hide their thoughts from the omniscient narrator under the leadership of Federico de la Fe, blacking out large sections of text. The novel is, in some ways, a text about the process of the creation of the text itself, which has a long Greek work that I can’t currently recall, never mind pronounce. Finally, one of the more humorous uses of format comes when the author learns that his ex-girlfriend is dating a new guy, and this new beau’s name is, in some editions blacked out, but, in others, is punched out of the page.

Cass - Rebuttal: Well, thankfully, The Colored Museum is not Naked Lunch, which allows it to actually be good. As for The People of Paper, an interest in the writing process may be useful for a writer, but it is not unexpected; a play that is both a play and something else at the same time surpasses expectations.

Cass - Answer: The Colored Museum is a play that does not consider itself to be a play. Instead, it is a live museum, made up not of acts but exhibits. Characters in exhibits revolve offstage through “small panels, doors, revolving walls, and compartments” that have been built into the walls. There is smoke, there are drums, there is “Respect” by Aretha Franklin. The audience is a character, as tied to the fiction and facts depicted as the actors themselves. One meta exhibit, “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” confronts the theatrical legacy of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun, which was the first play written by a black woman to be performed on Broadway. After the Greek tragic character Medea shows up and Willie-Lee-Beau-Willie is shot by the Man, the cast breaks out into a gospel song, asking, “Oh why couldn’t he be born into a show with lots of singing and dancing/[...]into a show where everybody is happy.” The Colored Museum knows history, and it goes to great lengths to ensure the audience/reader is held accountable for that history.

ARE THERE ANY INTERESTING CHARACTERS?

Sal - Rebuttal: Well, to be fair, The People of Paper is about a lot of things...immigration, romance, a father-daughter relationship, and it just so happens that writing is one of those things. Aside from the incredible frustration that a play of this sort must cause for stage managers, I do not know if it is necessarily so much strange as unorthodox. Waiting for Godot is, in its way, self-referential and fairly meta, and there are many novels that, in their way, function as historiographic fiction. Even Shakespeare, writing over 500 years ago, wrote plays that contain plays, satire, history, and plenty of post-modern effects. Even in terms of history, Shakespeare wrote several plays built around historical events, so it is not something that is necessarily very new.

Sal - Answer: The People of Paper has nothing but interesting characters. Part of what makes The People of Paper so memorable is the detail Plascencia employs, and each character has their own kind of quirks or characteristics. As I mentioned before, Plascencia himself appears as something of a caricaturized version. Even he sort of satirizes his own romantic experiences, making himself seem more histrionic, coming to hate Caucasians for his girlfriend’s new taste in men, so even then there is a kind of reflection on race and stereotype.  As I also mentioned before, Little Merced’s love of limes, the fortune-telling prophet-baby, the bed-wetting divorcee, but that’s not all there is. The novel also includes a Saint hiding from the Church, living his life as a luchador. The “protagonist,” if there is just one, is Federico de la Fe, and even he is strange in his obsession with Placencia himself, who is, in turn obsessed with the EMF gang and their world.  Ultimately, Federico manages to control his bed-wetting by collecting burns on his body, and the story of Federico finds some parallels within Plascencia’s fictionalized account of his own experiences. Needless to say, it’s a real motley crew that the novel includes, and part of why I still remember this novel almost two years later is because of the detail that Plascencia includes in his characters.

Cass - Rebuttal: None of the characters in The Colored Museum wet the bed.

Cass - Answer: If you want interesting characters, look no further. There is Junie,the “Soldier With a Secret,” a ghost who has a ghastly way of “healin’ the hurtin’” of his war buddies. There’s Miss Roj, a drag queen who swears they “corn row the hairs on my legs so that they spell out M.I.S.S. R.O.J.” and whose only defense against the gross indignities they face is to snap and dance. There’s a Man and the Kid he once was: the Man kills the Kid, but the Kid isn’t easily defeated. The characters are memorable for digging so deeply into the psyches of cliche stereotypes and revealing a depth that, in hands less skilled than Wolfe’s, would be unthinkable. 

Sal - Rebuttal: You talk about bed-wetting like it’s a bad thing! He was a stressed man. Give him a break. Plascencia confronts his own versions of stereotypes, but I think he does it less-overtly. Also, I prefer not to think about braided leg hair, but that’s just me…

IN ONE NONSPOILER-Y SENTENCE, DESCRIBE A "WHAT THE FUCK" MOMENT

Sal: To speak simply, there are three sections of the novel, and in the third section, due to events within the story, the novel starts completely over, complete with a repetition of the title page.

Cass: “What’s happenin’?”

SUMMARY

Sal: Strange characters, strange events, and strange format, The People of Paper is a reading experience like you’ve never had before. You’ve read self-referential plays, plays that break the fourth wall (even Malcolm in the Middle does that!), and plenty of texts that are built around satire and questions of race. Read The People of Paper, and you’ll see that there has never been a text like it, that encompasses so much and in such a unique way. Your honor, I rest my case.

Cass: The Colored Museum is an incomparable experience. The People of Paper sounds like a decently weird book, but The Colored Museum ate weird for breakfast and made art.

Check out the first exhibit, “Git On Board,” on YouTube.

WINNER

This was a really fierce battle and it was nearly impossible to choose a winner. Despite Cass' spot-on rebuttals and the strangeness on both sides, I think the oddities in the plot and the format of The People of Paper are too hard to refute. Let it be said, though, that The Colored Museum sounds "better." I hadn't heard of either and now I really want to read both. Sal wins the weird e-book bundle this round! Thank you both so much for playing!



Who would you declare winner in this battle of wits and words?

Book Blogger Appreciation Week: Interviewing Literary Lindsey

This week is Book Blogger Appreciation Week! It's a whole lot of fun, check out the site and the hashtag #BBAW on Twitter if you want to find some cool new book blogs. So it's Day 2 of said week, and I got paired up with a random book blogger to interview. And, may I say, I am SO EXCITED to have gotten paired with Lindsey from Literary Lindsey. Her blog is a lot of fun to browse, so go check it out after reading a little more about her below!

TALKING WITH
LITERARY LINDSEY

What are your favorite and least favorite genres?
I am a big literary fiction junkie and I read a fair amount of historical fiction. My husband says I am mildly obsessed with WWII era stories. I think he is exaggerating. I usually manage to read one or two nonfiction books each month, but I’m trying to read more. I tend to stay away from horror and scary mysteries because I will never sleep again.

What's the biggest surprise you've encountered in book blogging?
I don’t know that I would call it a surprise, but I might call it the biggest thing I’ve learned about book blogging. No matter how many followers or comments you get (or don’t), at the end of the day, it’s about you and books. It’s about sharing them with other people, but it’s mostly a way for you to remember what you loved.

What book do you want to recommend to everybody?
I'm going to cheat and pick a few.
For the new parent who feels like they are not doing it right: After Birth by Elisa Albert
For the reader looking for a can’t-put-it-down nonfiction book: The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
For the reader searching for a new series: Flavia de Luce books by Alan Bradley
For the person who doesn’t think they like short stories: A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Ausubel

What are your favorite kinds of posts to write?
I like writing reviews when the thoughts all come together easily. I also love writing reviews with my kids. My son and I reviewed children’s books on Wednesdays for a long time. Now he’s a little older and isn’t always into it, but I’m always game when he is!

Do your friends and family know about your blog? What do they think?
Some of them do! I know my mom gets all of my posts and my best friend (who lives across the country) tells me it’s a great way to keep tabs on what is going on in my life when we just can’t seem to catch each other on the phone.

What's the weirdest book you've ever read?
Off the top of my head, the weirdest book I remember reading is actually a short story collection. Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove had some very unsettling tales. There’s a young boy who sees things that may or may not really be there on the lonely frontier, a girl who undergoes a terrifying transition at a silk factory, and a soldier’s tattoo changes based on what he thinks happened during his tour of duty. It was so very weird and I remember most of the stories, which rarely happens for me with short story collections!

Thanks so much for talking with me, Lindsey! I hope you all enjoyed learning about this lovely book blogger!! 

 

10 Books Celebrating Diversity: A Guest Post

or, Ten Books Not Written by Straight White Males

A couple days ago, the Top Ten Tuesday theme was "Books Celebrating Diversity." This is something I feel very strongly about, because publishers need to be publishing work by more diverse people than they do. But something I feel more strongly about is listening to people who are different from me. I didn't want to be another straight white girl throwing out a list about diversity. So I asked a friend whose thoughts, poetry, and taste I admire greatly to share this space with me today. Enjoy Vanessa Borjon Fernandez's list, fill up your TBR, and check out her writing here!

Vanessa Borjon Fernandez

I was recently asked by Julianne to write up a list of ten books that celebrate diversity. I was glad to be asked this favor and immediately thought of some titles I could include, and it turned out to be kind of difficult to limit the list to top ten, but alas, here are ten books not written by Straight White Males™ that are immaculate and should be read urgently if you love literature. (In no particular order, besides #1 because holy hell it is the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read in my whole life. Please go read it right away.)

10. // M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang - There’s so much I could say about this play. Smart and terse and subversive, this play inspired by the opera Madama Butterfly, tells the story of a French general who falls in love with an opera singer whom he believes is a woman but is actually a male. M. Butterfly challenges Western Orientalism’s racism and sexism.

9. // Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros - Reading this book feels like you’re sitting outside on a sunny day and you’re sweating and then the palatero walks by ringing his bell and you get a fresa paleta and then fall in love with someone with big brown eyes and you kiss and the kiss kind of tastes like fresa but then your new amor de amores has to leave for a long time and you go back to sitting outside in the sweltering heat. Don’t know what that feels like? Read this book to find out, or fall in love and eat some ice cream.

8. // Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston - In this book about black love and black womanhood (and a myriad of other things), Zora Neale Hurston tells the story of my favorite character in all of fiction: Janie Crawford. Beautiful and heart wrenching and complicated, this book is so good.

7. // Drown by Junot Diaz - A book of short stories by the famed Junot Diaz (who is as charming in real life as his writing is impeccable). Hilarious, complicated and hopeful—often times these stories are all three at once.

6. // Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler - Read this right now if you love science fiction.

5. // Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson - Read this right now if you’ve already read Lilith’s Brood. Read this right now if you haven’t.

4. // Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster - Holy shit. Reading this book felt like unlearning everything I knew about respectable whiteness in literature, like a dog walked over and took a dump on Walt Whitman and what was left was this ruthless book of fictionalized mythology where the Aztecs have overthrown Europe. Glorious.

3. // The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by Bhanu Kapil - I was left speechless by this collection of prose poems, and I think this is a common occurrence for people who read this book. Let me think of words that come to mind when I recall Bhanu’s poems: pristine, beautiful, traumatic, fragile, glory. Read this book slowly. Live in each word for a while.

2. // Sula by Toni Morrison - I have so much to say about Sula but I will just say this to stay brief: This book taught me the power of female friendships. This book was written by the greatest American writer of all time.

1. // …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him by Tomas Rivera - An amalgamation of short stories and vignettes, Tomas Rivera writes about the lives of migrant workers through the eyes of an unnamed young boy who witnesses the injustices of growing up immigrant and Mexican and poor. Folkloric and haunting and lovely. The last five pages are so beautiful I am left speechless every time I read this book.