From the British Museum’s Public Domain Shakespeare Gallery: Peter Simon after Henry Fuselli with a stipple engraving of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV, Scene I.
For reasons that seem entirely unconnected, I am advising three fiction projects, and all three of my students are writing fantasy novels and two of them are writing about fairies specifically. At my suggestion, we are reading Chris Adrian’s novel The Great Night, which I typically teach an excerpt from. The novel has been described as a reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream but I think of it as a sequel about those same fairies, Titania and Oberon centuries later and in San Francisco, living under a hill in a park. It is a little like a vast love spell written as an open letter about lovers, which is also a not terrible way to describe Kelly Link’s debut novel, The Book of Love. They are co-conspirators in my mind. The Book of Love is out February 13th.
My open tabs? James Butler in the LRB writing about two books that take on the role of mass protest now. CNN’s coverage of the man-made famine in Gaza now, with people eating tree leaves like they did during the siege of Paris. Isaac Chotiner interviewed a pediatrician who has been helping patients in Gaza under impossible conditions. Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz on how the only people with a day after plan in Gaza are the settlers, and it is not a good one. The AP’s investigation into how many American food companies use prison slave labor thanks to a clause in many state laws that allow it if the work is punishment for a crime—Vermont, where I live, just changed the language in its constitution around this. That clause and the industry resulting are the reason for the prison industrial complex in the US. I’ll add this nice story about a Palestinian restaurant in Brooklyn, and how its owners and the community around it began talking to each other about the current crisis. I am grateful for the efforts of these Black pastors and their congregations to pressure the US to end the killing and destruction of Gaza. Please call or write your lawmakers to support an end to the violence, which protects no one. Except perhaps Netanyahu.
Out in stores now and very exciting to me as a reader: Venita Blackburn’s Dead In Long Beach, California. I’m a huge Venita Blackburn fan, this is some incredible news. Also out is Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel Martyr, and Aube Rey Lescure’s River East, River West.
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Something I’ve been impressed by is what I jokingly refer to as the elder crossfit crowd here in Eastern Vermont and New Hampshire along the border. I joke but I also observe: these are my aging mentors, as it were. And so I liked finding this story about the man who began rowing in his 70s and is now in his 90s, as I’ve been rowing again, much as he does. It is very soothing to me. I feel as if I’m going somewhere, even though I’m not. If you don’t know this about me, I rowed crew in college, just as a novice in my first year, but it was one of the best things I’ve ever done for my health and friendships. For some reason the erg is more interesting to me than my treadmill and it also gets my phone out of my hands—I can’t text and row. I’ve just learned that the Concept 2 Rower is made here in Vermont and so it’ll even be a local business I’ll support when I buy my now inevitable personal machine.
In shallower news: Much to mine and Dustin’s surprise, we are watching Monarch, the Godzilla series. It’s a sort of intergenerational adventure, shuttling back and forth between the past and the present, and it alternates between good and just completely wild story structures that would feel more at home in a book about fairies, to be honest. And as there are fairies in the Godzilla universe, perhaps they will appear soon. There’s a great deal of romantic triangle/secret family stuff that suggests Godzilla researchers are not particularly faithful in love or they at least need to be in open relationships or poly.
Please let me know in the comments if you have any fairy related novels or news or anything else of interest here and thanks for reading.
This is a strange choice but the book that comes to mind is Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor. Can a fairy be code for a shapeshifter, be code for queer liberation? You tell me. Thanks for these thoughtful links and recs
For me, THE fairy novel is probably John Crowley’s Little, Big. Like all of his books, it’s more about possibility and implication than what actually, concretely happens, which I think is the right way to approach a fairy story. None of the rules a swath of modern fantasy wants to apply to them, like Seelie vs. Unseelie or summer vs. winter. Just elemental beings going about their business, which is incidentally quite terrifying or beautiful (or terrifyingly beautiful) to humanity.