What I really wanted was to understand where Bigfoot came from. What would research reveal about the folklore and anthropological backstory of Bigfoot? Was it an actual zoological possibility or a human-wide cultural delusion, a manifestation of a universal desire to believe in the unbelievable? While I had my doubts about Bigfoot, the point wouldn’t be to prove or disprove whether it existed, but to try and set aside my own convictions, unpeel the oniony layers of belief, and understand something about Bigfooters and the culture that shaped them.
I spent the better part of a year going on “expeditions” to suspected Bigfoot haunts across the country, attending conventions and festivals, and taking part in one Bigfoot film shoot. Knowing as little as I did, I thought America itself might poke its head out from behind Bigfoot’s shadow.
In September 2020 — perhaps fueled by an interest in apocalyptic fiction prompted by covid-19 lockdowns — “Parable” appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for the first time, 27 years after publication.
Butler didn’t live to see the renewed interest in her ninth novel — she died in 2006 — but she indicated that the issues faced by the characters in “Parable” and by the United States today were inevitable.
“The Fetishist,” the delightful, fantastic, fabulous and unfortunately posthumous second novel by Katherine Min, might be the first literary work by an Asian American woman to “deal squarely with queasy questions of desire and politics between a white man and an Asian woman.”
For survivors of trauma, the mercurial nature of memory can bring about untold grief, especially in the search for some kind of certainty about what happened and why. That mutability has shaped many a survivor’s story. In Katia Lief’s psychological suspense novel “Invisible Woman,” it also frames a larger mystery, unsettling two women who once shared their promising lives.
Blood is a compelling example of how science communicated with clarity, relatability and wit can satisfy our needs of belonging and care, which have been mastered and sometimes manipulated by the wellness industry. With the transparency of science, Gunter shows that bodies become more, not less intriguing. She acknowledges that doctors have let women down grievously: by disbelieving them, dismissing their priorities, excluding them from research, co-opting them into experiments without consent, making health decisions on their behalf and, frankly, treating them no better than sheep. But rather than rejecting science, activist researchers, clinicians and patients must continue to row back this “medical disenfranchisement”, armed with books such as Blood and evidence about their bodies.