Months before Karen Cheung’s The Impossible City came out, I met her in Hong Kong after years of circling each other’s orbits of mutual friends. When the subject of her book came up, she said, almost right away, “You don’t have to read the first twenty pages. I’m telling everyone not to.” Months later, I was faced with two choices: respect her agency as an author, never read the first twenty pages, and exist in the world as she wants it to be; or read the first twenty pages and text everyone I know to read this book but to skip the first twenty pages, which are not for us.
It’s fine, but it’s not for us: this is what we often conclude in group chats where we send each other links to the latest books and coverage about our hometown, usually published in widely respected foreign outlets by foreign correspondents or anglophone journalists who, by the nature of our work and social spheres, are also our friends or professional acquaintances in the region. We roll our eyes at trite symbolism, tired references, tone-deaf histrionics, or dramatic geopolitical spin, and then, having exhausted our private complaints, we retweet the article or order the book in question for our friends scattered around the world anyway. I can’t name the last memoir written in English by someone my age from Hong Kong that was published by a major English-language publisher; I don’t share the dewy sentimentality that emanates from Cheung’s personal writing, but I sent my friends her book because I know how a homesick person feels when they are reaching for lifelines that might bind them to a concrete place where, once upon a time, life happened.
It’s been three decades since a slim volume of 11 interconnected stories, cobbled together for a few thousand dollars to keep the IRS at bay, changed the landscape of American literature. Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son is one of those books you read in a single sitting, again and again. It’s a repeat offender, in the best sense of the term. A professor at Brooklyn College handed me my first copy in the late 1990’s—he said only this: “Read this. I’ll say no more.” I read it often, and I’ve been handing it to students, friends, and family members ever since. As we reach its pearl anniversary, I can’t help but connect this book with Matthew 7:6 and not “casting your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot, and turn again and rend you.” Such is the wisdom of this small, epiphanic book about a drifter, druggie, drunk, and ne’er do well as he slowly finds himself working out of drug addiction and acedia and toward a hard-earned, sober redemption and reengagement with the world.
The fish truck stayed gone, but in the Philly neighborhoods, the fresh fish came back. An outfit called Fishadelphia buys fish from the New Jersey docks, then drives it to a high school in North Philly where it’s packed into coolers, which people take home to their own porches, where neighbors pick up their assigned fish. Fishadelphia’s founder and executive director is Talia Young, whose PhD is in ecology, who’s a visiting assistant professor in environmental studies at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and whose goal in life has never been to sell fish.
“I’m sort of a scientist,” she says. “I’m not doing science but I can. I’m an academic by default, I’m a teacher for sure, I’m sort of an activist, and technically I’m a business person but I know nothing about it.”
So why is she selling fish? “I’ve spent my professional life figuring out how to occupy a space that includes the environment, science, and social justice,” Young says. Scientists don’t usually combine science with activism, worrying that the combination would undermine a reputation for unbiased research. Young, however, has only ever cared about finding the nexus between her three interests and, she says, “Fishadelphia is the closest I’ve come.”
My mother rarely made Southern food when I was growing up even though she is from the South. She said it was because her mother never taught her. That always seemed likely: My grandmother was a sweet but anxious woman from the small town of Pickens, South Carolina, so poor that her family could not “set a table”—that is, with matching cutlery. A 1940s housewife who felt trapped in her home, curious about the world but left to a life of domestic drudgery. One can understand her wanting to conceal the secrets of her one magic power: cooking.
Tales of terror, by their very nature, take the things we cherish and turn them against us: a beloved pet wants to kill us (“Cujo”), our home is cursed (“The Haunting of Hill House”), the baby we’re expecting turns demonic (“Rosemary’s Baby”). Yet, of all the horror tropes, is there any that’s scarier than dolls and puppets that come to life?
Grady Hendrix creates a whole new kind of toybox hell in “How to Sell a Haunted House.” This ingenious novel is a twisted story of malevolent puppets and dolls that have a problem with real estate deals. (Yes, there’s comic relief.)
Secretly, I know
my name is Moon Whisperer.
Tonight, I lie awake,