By day it was all chalk, sheep and beech trees, big skies and isolated villages; at night the bright ribbon of the Milky Way arched above, soft moonlight bathing the fields, earning the AONB a Dark Sky Reserve designation. I’d stand in the garden in midsummer blackness, watching the dusty dart of the unromantically named C/2020 F3 Comet (AKA Neowise) while it was visible in the northern hemisphere, and unlocking an old obsession with constellations, our solar system and the Apollo missions.
Dantiel Moniz’s sparkling debut story collection, Milk Blood Heat, is vibrant and alive, full of energy and desire and with a sharp focus on the body. Two girls float adrift in the sea. A naked man stands on his bathroom scale. A woman looks at the remains of her miscarriage. Milk, blood, or heat appear in every story, functioning as the beating heart of the book. Through these three elements—each of them so clearly connected to the body—Moniz creates an honest, unflinching look at her characters’ innermost thoughts and desires.
Over the course of three novels, Melanie Finn has taken readers to settings as far-flung as picturesque Swiss towns and rural Tanzania. In her fourth, “The Hare,” Finn mostly traps us in an uninsulated, mice-infested cabin in Northern Vermont. This is not a cheery book, but like those Vermont woods in winter, it shimmers with a stark loveliness.
Let’s get this out of the way: “My Year Abroad” is not Chang-rae Lee’s best novel. Not even his second best. But can we agree that even Lee’s worst novel would be better than most authors’ best efforts?
Not the first modern trans memoir, but perhaps the first with literary ambitions, Conundrum helped establish one way of thinking about what it means to be trans. It’s an early example of the “wrong body” narrative (the phrase shows up on the first page), the story by which the truly trans person always knew she was a woman (if assigned male at birth) or a man (if assigned female). It’s also the kind of now-obsolescent narrative by which genital surgery, and only genital surgery, confirms trans women as really and only true women: Morris’s longed-for operation, in Morocco, becomes “the climax of my life.” Her preface to the 2001 reissue called the volume “a period piece.” Between the lead-up to surgery, the wrong-body story, and the occasional nostalgia for Empire, Morris’s memoir might now seem so dated as to provide no help for the present—except that it does, and not just for its rich style. Conundrum remains a sympathetic guide, not so much to present-day transgender struggles as to trans joy.
I forget tradition, a tray of sticky dates passed around the kitchen table, bismillah
in our mouths before we ravenously break the dusk, chew and spit back the pits.