Write what you know, workshop teachers and mentors are forever imploring us—but did they really mean we should write about writers? Spy, bullfighter, healer, saint, rebel, doomed heiress, gold-digger, disgraced demagogue: These are characters readers can sink their teeth into. But is there anything remotely engaging about a hero who earns (hah) a living (hah hah) by tapping at a keyboard and doom-scrolling for reviews?
Apparently, there is.
Sarahland, the debut story collection from Sam Cohen, links disparate stories through a unique framework: each story features a character named Sarah. This architecture allows Cohen to explore a variety of topics from heartbreak to youthful self-discovery. The stories stand alone, but by linking them with Sarahs, the collection manifests something more complex.
Craig Taylor, a Canadian who lived for many years in Britain, arrived in 2014 to write New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time, an ambitious and entertaining attempt to channel the city’s collective voice. It’s a collection of interviews, oral histories somewhat in the mode of Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian Nobel prize laureate and practitioner of what she calls “documentary literature”. Alexievich has collected testimonies from people who experienced the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the Afghan war and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The book avoids the fantasy game of proposing any specific vision of what aliens might look like — thus no Wookiees, E.T.s or little green Martians — and focuses on how they might behave. Kershenbaum predicts that some aliens will exhibit social cooperation, technology and language (“Teatime with our alien neighbors may be possible after all,” he writes). He even posits that aliens will share the quality we hold most dear: intelligence. “We all want to believe in intelligent aliens,” he writes. “It seems inevitable that they will, in fact, exist.”