Maria Judite de Carvalho's AND HOW HAVE YOU BEEN (Tr by Margaret Jull-Costa)

To read and savor a story a day from And How Have You Been, Two Lines Press' latest and last collection of Margaret Judite de Carvalho's short fiction, is to subject oneself to a slow and precise beating, one perfectly aimed and precisely calculated blow at a time. At the conclusion of each incisive little portrait of an unusual and pivotal moment in a suddenly vivid character's life comes a denouement that, while not in the least bit funny (except when it sometimes, bitterly, is), the reader is doubled over and gasping, with de Carvalho and translator Margaret Jull-Costa looking down at her, tsking and eyeing one another with disappointment that one turned out to be such a lightweight.

(What's the opposite of a punchline? Even though what de Carvalho does is more worthy of that term than anything else I've ever seen?)

Finally, after an awkward moment or two, one of them stoops slightly and deigns to offer a graceful hand to help their victim to her feet, might brush off a little dust, if she doesn't have a newly-chipped nail to attend to, then everyone wordlessly parts company in a swirl of impeccable mid-century skirts, leaving unspoken the obvious certainty that all three will reassemble for another round tomorrow. The reader can already hear the ominous clicks of their tasteful heels approaching in the distance as she opens the book again, as she is compelled to do. 

This, of course, makes the title of this collection perhaps the most viciously funny one I can recall encountering. Picking up this rather hefty paperback for the first time, I didn't realize just how condescending this title's question was meant to be. Even before seeing that the "you" is in italics, the reader is being challenged by the vast array of characters whose bitter little moments she is here to snoop on. They know they've got a voyeur, that she's probably trying to escape her own distressing or disappointing or maybe even traumatizing present with some nice glimpses into an imaginary Continental past.

Not so fast. 

I've been wholly ignorant of Maria Judite de Carvalho and her oeuvre; this is why things like subscriptions to specialist publishers like Two Lines Press (publishers of this volume), Charco, NYRB, my beloved Open Letter, etc are the some of the best money a reader can spend. Yes, you're letting someone else pick some of your reading (which, what do you think you're doing looking at YouTube/Instagram/TikTok/etc book content?), but that someone is a person who gets to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair and other such events, who has had to hustle to get the grant money to pay translators and buy rights and rent warehouse space and pack up shipments and... so it's gonna be someone who really loves books, and I mean really loves them, because that skill set means they could be making more money doing pretty much anything else, but they're doing this instead. So they tend to have reliable taste while also venturing further afield than I ever could. So anyway. I would not be currently dusty on the ground desperately stanching a nosebleed and missing all my lunch money without my having gotten myself a Two Lines subscription for Christmas. And I'll do it again this coming Christmas, based even just on this, to say nothing of the many other excellent works that subscription has brought me -- some of which I haven't read yet; some of which I'm saving for Halloween. 

I'm still fairly ignorant of de Carvalho (I'd love to find a biography of her!), which made my experience at her hands such a bevy of surprising blows. For instance, the first third or so of And How Have YOU Been consists largely of domestic scenes and relationship dramas -- what once was and possibly still is, in her native Portugal, regarded as "women's fiction" but then, suddenly, "The Jungle in the House" takes a turn for the subtly science fictional and, depending on your interpretation of the ending, possibly magical realist, as a painting hanging in a family home that depicts a range of extinct predator and prey animals like lions and deer and tarantulas (I did say subtly science fictional; at least for now in 2026 while I write this. Your mileage may vary, future reader) begins to influence the family's well-being in somewhat dramatic ways -- or does it?

And then "My Father was a Millionaire" takes us into a realm I'm used to exploring with someone more like T.J. Bass. Its heroine is the first successful revival from a kind of suspended animation, but she isn't exactly dazzled by the technological wonders and incredible social progress prevailing in her new surroundings. This is Maria Judite de Carvalho, here to remind you that in this future, the ladies still wear deadly, pointy-toed, thin-soled, high-heeled girl shoes. The better to kick you in the crotch with, smiling enchantingly all the while.

All this is to say, Maria Judite de Carvalho is the very, very feminine Philip K. Dick that I didn't even know I needed. Minus, you know, the agency-lacking figurant women, and the vicious virago women who are just out to undermine the haplessly bumbling men, i.e. her gender politics, even in her most wildly science fictional stories in which we have colonized both Mars and Venus, are way, way better than dear old PKD could even understand the need for, and her science fictional ideas are at least as good as his, if not better.

She also conveys, even better than PKD did, the profound sense of alienation lurking under the surface of everyday life, the way ordinary scenes can charge into the stuff of our worst sci-fi nightmares with just the barest shift of perspective. 

Before sitting down, though, she picked up the lighter belonging to Ivette or Arlette and that she had nudged underneath the armchair and she studied it closely. It was nothing special, just an ordinary lighter made of silver-plated metal. She placed it on the round glass-topped table and left. She felt as if something had drained all the color from the world which was suddenly entirely black and white (a very discreet black and white, with no strong contrast), a transformation that had arrived unannounced. She could vaguely see people, the ones who had been there and others too, and they seem to her as if they've been cut adrift, with no roots or even an aura that would allow them to reach out to her or even touch her. They suddenly seem so strange, those people. Talking like mannequins, walking about like mannequins, and with her ending up being one of them, however imperfect.

Tell me that's not straight out of Ubik, say, or a Mercerist interlude in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, or maybe a late encounter with some fellow humans already afflicted with one of Palmer Eldritch's Stigmata? Or did we wander into some Thomas Ligotti by mistake? But no, it's just an ordinary woman playing hostess to a cocktail party. 

So she's absolutely the answer, not only to "what if PKD had been a woman" but also to "what if PKD had encountered some initial success back when he was trying to be a mainstream/literary fiction writer." He would have been free, as de Carvalho was, to write whatever the hell he wanted, including science fiction. Ah, what might have been. 

Meanwhile, we did get Maria Judite de Carvalho, and you'd better believe I'm going to read everything of hers I can find. I've already acquired her novel. Grace Period, for instance, and I've got my eye on the other story collections Two Lines has already published. And if it hasn't been translated yet, I'll get back with the program of learning more Portuguese. Because I don't want to miss a thing. 

She knew that her brothers made fun of her, and that her parents, when they thought she wasn't looking, would watch her with furrowed brows or moist, uncomprehending eyes. She knew all of this and other things too, but she could do nothing to help them. They were strangers with whom she lived, and they always had been, and she felt as disconnected from them, even from her mother, as one of those fallen branches she sometimes spotted being carried along by the river, far from the banks, with no chance of getting caught up in the reeds. All right, she was there among the four walls of her room, but it almost came to the same thing.

Did somebody get the license plate number off that truck? Call an ambulance. 

Brock Clarke's AN ARSONIST'S GUIDE TO WRITERS' HOMES IN NEW ENGLAND

Before I'd burned down the Emily Dickinson House, they seemed to be normal, healthy, somewhat happy Americans who took vacations and gardened and who'd weathered a rough patch or two... Now they looked like skeletons dressed in corduroy and loafers. Their eyes were sunken and wanting to permanently retreat all the way back into their skulls... Why do we hurt our parents the way we do? There's no way to make sense of it except as practice for then hurting our children the way we do.

I'm rarely as mad as a book as I am at the "wildly and unpredictably funny", "Absurdly hilarious... searingly funny", "wacky and wildly imaginative novel" that "sizzles" and is "funny, profound... a seductive book with a payoff on every page" that is also a "darkly comic" "deadpan satire of all things literary" as all of the dumb little blurbs sprayed all over the book cover of later printings of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England proclaim it to be. And not, as one might expect, because these blurbs are misleading or mere puffery or in any way inaccurate (for all that they are wholly unnecessary; the title alone was plenty, Brock Clarke. You had me with the title). It's because they are. And also because they really, really aren't. 

I know better than to turn to a veddy veddy literary publisher with a name like Algonquin Books for a mere funny read, of course, so I'm not in anyway surprised that what An Arsonist's Guide really is, is an incredibly loving and empathetic argument for the idea that toxic masculinity, while indeed one of the great scourges of our time, does not have to be a life sentence, that, also, it's not exclusively a disorder from which the male of the species alone can suffer (I would argue that the worst sufferer in this novel is a woman) -- indeed, this book might be said to argue that it's high time we rename the phenomenon something more accurate and inclusive like "toxic stoicism." 

Dammit, my sentences are getting long again. But anyway, I'm trying to come around to why this book made me mad, without in anyway conveying the idea that I'm mad because my expectations weren't met or anything like that -- apart from my not having been prepared for what a god damned noble piece of fiction writing The Arsonist's Gude really is.

And yeah, part of my annoyance is really just jealousy, because with this book, my first but not my last Clarke that I'll be reading, Brock Clarke has proven to be exactly the kind of writer I love to hate the most, sweet, smug, punchable author photo and all. It's not just that he's good and he knows it, and is as good as anybody I've ever seen at doing the thing that I most enjoy-yet-roll-my-eyes-at thing of simply taking every cliche that pops into the reader's head as she's reading his work, invert it very simply and neatly, and pointing out that it's true either way, in a way that elicits a rueful chuckle if not a pained guffaw if not a full bout of John Trent laughter (iykyk. Do you read Sutter Kane? I bet Brock Clarke does). Though yes, it's a lot of that. And so I'm sitting here looking at my copy, so laden with book darts right now that it positively sparkles and probably weighs twice as much as it did when I got it* trying to find just the right passages to quote to show you what I mean and I can't decide and that, too, is making me angry.

Which, I mean, that's a pretty good problem to have, really? But... I'm just going to start typing strings of expletives here in a second. So I'll stop for now. I'll be back.

But so, OK. An Arsonist's Guide concerns the life and times of one Sam Pulsifer, a man of around my own age, perhaps a bit younger, who grew up in the nice Western Massachusetts college town of Amherst, MA (home, yes, of Emily Dickinson once upon a time, and also of ZooMass), raised by nice upper middle class parents who mostly kept it together bar a few strange incidents that come to loom very large in Sam's later life but only after, in the kind of dumb teenaged accident that can mark a dude for life even if he hasn't been raised in the tradition of upright New England stoicism that I've already compared to Toxic Masculinity, Sam accidentally does indeed burn down the house where Emily Dickinson once lived, also accidentally killing a couple who were trapped inside and thus forever altering not only his life and his parents', but also that of a boy whose own parents were trapped inside the burning Emily Dickinson House and will have a few things to say or do about it later. Much later. Like after Sam serves a prison term, is released into society and starts sort of half-assedly trying to make good, getting a degree in Packaging Science (the sort of non-subject Subject that writers like Brock Clarke are lucky enough to discover is a thing before any other writers do and get to show off to the rest of us the way an intrepid explorer from a prior generation might bring home a Masai spear or something oops I'm jealous-ing again, aren't I?), establishing a lucrative and respectable career as a designer of containers for products that we all use but never noticed, marrying a beautiful and resourceful classmate and having two beautiful children with her -- all without ever telling his poor old parents that he's even back out in the world yet, until The Plot of the Novel Happens.

And all the Secrets come out. Secrets that Sam has kept from his parents, and they from him. Secrets Sam kept from his beautiful wife and children. Secrets festering darkly in the hearts of a hundred or so letter writers who have certain feelings about certain other famous New England writers and who wish that Sam would give those writers' houses the same treatment he gave the Emily Dickinson House. And the not-so-secret secrets of the poor kid whose parents Sam accidentally killed all those years ago. Not all of these secretes get aired out; not all of the mysteries get solved. But the ones that do, do so to devastating effect, making of An Arsonist's Gude rather more of a cathartic than a funny read. But, let's be real. If I'd known this was going to have Oprah levels of emotional cleansing and warm-heartedness and forgiveness, I probably wouldn't have picked it up.

But I'm glad I did.

*Gently used, from Thriftbooks, after the fearless leader of my favorite online book club praised a non-fiction book of Clarke's a few months ago. I went to get a copy of that book, an essay collection, for fuck's sake, but I saw An Arsonist's Guide and I spent my hard-earned on it instead. So it goes. As it were.

Bao Ninh's THE SORROW OF WAR (Tr Frank Palmos & Phan Thanh Hao, Narr James Langton)

Kien himself would have been dead long ago if it had not been for the sacrifice of others; he might even have killed himself to escape the psychological burden of killing others. He had not done that, choosing instead to live the life of an antlike soldier, carrying the burden of every underling.

I've known more than a few United States veterans of the Vietnam War, listened to them talk about survivors' guilt and how that can color absolutely every aspect of their post-war lives, and that's hard enough for me to imagine -- but what if you were also living out that life in the same territory where you took your wounds, watched your buddies and rivals die? Which was also where you grew up, first fell in love, buried your grandparents or parents? Comparing these experiences is, of course, pointless. So I won't say one is worse than another, but, well, the most emotionally harrowing parts of the only novel I've read about this war from the perspective of the Vietnamese, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War, take place on former battlefields long after the Yanks went home.

Our point of view character, Kien, has, like Bao Ninh himself, finally concluded, after years of failing to re-integrate into daily life in his home city, the much-revived and gentrified Hanoi, that the only real reason he has been forced,  by circumstance and conscience, to carry on, is to record his experiences for posterity. And so he has done, and is doing, for The Sorrow of War isn't just about his experiences of preparation, combat and aftermath, but also of remembering and writing what will essentially become this very novel. The one can be as harrowing as the other, as anyone with PTSD* can tell you. And as difficult to convey in words!

The Sorrow of War, like Slaughterhouse Five, pulls its narrator character unstuck from time, though without any of the (possibly imaginary) relief of S5's science fictional frame narrative. We see Kien on an MIA detail, retrieving bodies after hostilities have ended, in various medical camps recovering from injuries, taking damage from explosions of buildings, trains, planes overhead, with his childhood sweetheart as a teenager, misunderstanding his father as an even younger teen, rescuing one woman from assault and likely rape, failing to rescue another one, encountering still another woman he last saw as a worshipful little girl watching him bravely march off to war with her adored big brother only to find her forced into prostitution as an adult... and Bao Ninh via Kien is there to make sure we feel every second of Kien's pain, guilt, concern, helplessness, rage, love, fear, disappointment and, yes, immaturity and emotional stuntedness. War forces one to grow up too fast in some ways, and stops him from growing up at all in others. We do not see Kien's attitude about women evolve much beyond what it was when he was rolling around in the grass with his gorgeous first love at the age of 17. But he learns every other lesson imaginable, and doesn't shy from showing us that even from his perspective as a lonely middle aged man, he still has some growing to do.

All of this is conveyed with considerable introspection and tenderness by narrator James Langton, whose voice I associate more with the colder and more empirical narratives of science fiction writers like Adam Roberts than with the emotional scenes this book demanded. I mean to say, here, that Langton would not have been my choice for The Sorrow of War but that I would have been wrong. He hits the right note every scene, and even when he sounds like he's at his most detached, still also manages to sneak in subtle hints that it's all an act. I still think I would have rather read this one in print, but I'm poor and my beloved public library only has the audio edition, so that's what I got -- but I did not suffer for it. At least, not in terms of quality.

I suffered in lots of other ways, of course. All of them the ways that fiction intends. And I also got to visit, in my minds eye and through the beautiful words of Bao Ninh, Frank Palmos and Phan Thanh Hao, a beautiful country that I'll never see with the eyes of my body -- at both its best and its worst. Wow.

*And to this I can relate, in my different but still pretty fucking intense way. 

Jerrod Edson's THE BOULEVARD

Not since Robert A. Heinlen*'s Job: A Comedy of Justice gave us the jovial, folksy Devil in the person of Jerry Farnsworth has Old Nick himself aroused my positive emotions as he does in The Boulevard, Canadian novelist Jerrod Edson's not-really Allegherian literary train ride through the Underworld. Though in this case, Jerry Farnsworth is kind of split into two people, the Devil and Ernest Hemingway.

And yes, the third figure on the book cover is Vincent Van Gogh. All aboard!

The premise, or at least the inciting incident, of The Boulevard is pretty simple. A nearly-ignored email, checked almost too late, informs the staff of Hell that, for the first time ever, God Himself is planning on coming down for a visit to see what they've made of the gloomy void he condemned Lucifer and all of his rebels to, eons ago. He's heard such magnificent things...

Only the Rebels have actually just settled it like any of us would in playing a simulation game, starting with mud huts for shelter in the stygian gloom and crafting their way up to something like civilization (occasionally stealing a few resources from the world of humans now and then. Like light. But not enough of it), though they've had to make do with some poor substitutes like painted metal representations of the flowers that won't grow Down Below and were, in a charming early anecdote that would have done the Heinlein of Job proud, the original source of their trouble. They've made a decent go of it, these Infernals have, even unto bringing into being one real miracle of beauty and light that is the great joy of every demon and condemned soul, The Boulevard.

But if God sees that Hell is not, in fact, a lake of fire filled with torment and agony and eternal ugliness, sees that his employees are maybe enjoying their work and afterlives, well, just imagine Elon showing up at a Tesla factory one day and seeing that George Clinton was supplying the house band and all the assembly line workers were enjoying themselves while building cars that not only didn't lock passengers inside at the first sign of an engine fire but also don't treat pedestrians as targets! That's no way to run a torture chamber factory! There'd be Hell to pay. 

OK, I'll stop with the puns and the Heinlein comparisons. Just, Job was baby's first blasphemy book.**

The aforementioned train ride is one that Satan is making across Hell, to meet with his estranged friend and tenant, Van Gogh, without whose work the Boulevard would still just be a dark and depressing street in Hell's Capital City, and break the bad news that his greatest work, his shining triumph, his immortal glory, his 60-block-long celebration of art, has got to go in order to save them all from the literal wrath of God.. Um.

Hemingway just happens to have been on the same train, traveling with a Jean Rhys whose brief appearance is one of The Boulevard's few lowlights. She's drunk, she's disgraceful, she has no reason to be there except as unpleasant comic relief, and for someone Hemingway can bitch about misogynistically. Boo. Anyway, the Devil, Ernie thinks, will be better company, especially since he's in a confessing mood. He seems to carry a lot of guilt over his relationship with Van Gogh. Uh oh.

Much of the meat of the book, thus, consists of Satan narrating the life of Van Gogh as observed by a secret manipulator, now disguised as a magpie and captured in a famous early painting, now scrubbing the floors of his famous room at Arles, now appearing as a chance met companion for an easel-side chat in a wheat field, but always subtly guiding the artist towards the desired end, or ends. This exposition dump -- for that is what it is as far as the frame narrative of the journey is concerned -- could have been just a dull, short retelling of famous scenes from Van Gogh's well-documented life, but the Devil's perspective on them gives them immediacy and freshness, helped along by frequent pauses for Hemingway's usually sardonic commentary. If you're looking for a charming, brief and bittersweet biographical sketch of one of the greatest painters ever to do it, you could do a lot worse than pick up a copy of The Boulevard; it's worth the cover price for this alone, with its entertaining and occasionally profound frame narrative an added bonus that will make you pause and think more than a few times.

Alas, I came away from this a little bit disappointed, because it feels unbalanced. There are a few jumps back to the titular Boulevard where Satan's minions are busy getting ready to undo all of the hard work that has gone into making the Capital City and all of Hell's other cities into the thriving metropolises that they are, but we get only the briefest of glimpses of these. The fact that they're enacted by the likes of Al Capone especially makes these bits feel inadequate for their brevity and their one-note treatment of what is going on; it's all logistics and very little emotion, and Capone and the other doers of Satan's bidding really beg to be fleshed out as characters in the ways that the riders on the train are -- especially Ms. Victoria, the book's other female character, frequently admired for her va-va-voomery but never allowed to become a person even though we learn she's been right there with Satan and the Boys since they were all angels and he went by Lucifer. I wanted this side of the story to have something closer to equal weight with the Satan and Ernie show.

But that show is glorious, and the imbalance isn't enough of a problem to stop me recommending that you pay The Boulevard a visit at your earliest opportunity. After all, unlike Hemingway and Van Gogh and Al Capone, you don't have to die to check it out. You just have to get your hands on a good book.

It's just a bit of a shame that it's not a truly great one.

*I know.

**My disappointment that none of RAH's other books were remotely like this still makes me sigh. 

Ursula Whitcher's NORTH CONTINENT RIBBON

Sometimes there's a better way to show me the society, the world an author is imagining than via a single piece of narrative fiction. If you've created a truly richly developed culture that really differs from ours, it can be more effective, by which I mean both more efficiently communicative and more interesting for me as a reader, to show me facets, via vignettes or mini-biographies or, most gracefully, short stories about different characters occupying different roles in that society. And the stories need not necessarily overlap or interact, nor do they have to depict earth-shattering crises or huge personality conflicts or major civilizational turning points, either. An older example of this is Lucius Sheperd's story cycle surrounding the vast corpse of The Dragon Griaule; but I've found an even better one here.

Ursula Whitcher's phenomenal story suite, North Continent Ribbon, where, as the cover explains to us, "every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret," depicts one of those imagined worlds that would feel like a fantasy setting if the tales within were read out of order; several of them involve no science fictional wizardry or even much-beyond-medieval era technology. Were it not for its opening matter, which declares that it comes from a larger work named Cross-Planetary Investment: A Practical Vraselian's Galactic Opportunity Handbook and informs us that the planet on which most of these stories take place is an important source for "faster-than-light vehicular components sourced from a high-orbit E-type singularity," the society on the North Continent of Nakharat would be all but indistinguishable from one of the weaving planets in Andreas Eschbach's The Carpet Makers, for instance.

But amidst its tales of ribbon-crossed lovers and sundered families and somewhat shady business dealings, we get hints that there's a lot more going on than just trade and agriculture and the many different ways love can come and go in human lives. There's the question, for instance, of how those aforementioned vehicular components, once assembled into faster-than-light vehicles that navigate through what this culture refers to as the deep*, are sourced. And what they even are. Which, it might seem as one pages through this slim little volume, are questions that might not get answered? At least not explicitly?

At least, not if you're not well versed in the kinds of science fiction and fantasy that I love best, where what's going on between the characters is not the whole of what's going on in the book, might even be a distraction from that, actually. See also Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison and Frank Herbert and Alastair Reynolds.**

But even if you're not willing to plumb the weird and somewhat distressing secrets of this world, Whitcher still has plenty of rewards for your attention in store; these stories feature deftly drawn characters facing dilemmas that are delicately fantastic yet still mundane enough to be believable, from clandestine business machinations by rival corporations vying for profit, to local political scandals, to estrangement between children and parents, to inappropriate workplace love affairs, to secret labor union conspiracies, to the threat of imminent invasion by military forces that might just be coming to restore peace and safety, but might also come to impose new tyrannies over old -- all amidst some stunningly good line-for-line science fiction writing, like this in an earlier story, "The Fifteenth Saint":

The new text began with a litany: an electron's internal spin, the electron dancing around a nucleus, the shiver of atoms within a rock, all the way up to the slow rotation of the galaxy's arms and the slide of entire galaxies. Twisted behind and within and around all of these things was the deep, that other space where starships cut between stars. At every shift in scale, the book said, we experience a loss. But at every shift in scale there is the deep, thus at every shift in scale we find eternity; at every shift in scale there is the beloved, who has always been the beloved.

The text under discussion in the above, by the way, is a sort of samizdat that is buried in a book that has found its way into the hands of one of a district's hard-working political officials, who is starting to suspect that some of his co-equals in power and responsibility not only aren't holding up their ends -- he has just had to spend a whole day solving what should be a trivial problem for somebody else's constituent, only to be stymied repeatedly by layers of bureaucracy that he didn't even know had been imposed because things have been so compartmentalized -- but might actually be corrupt! But the culture of Nakharat is far too subtle for a samizdat to just come out and say things like that; far better to do so indirectly, poetically and above all memorably.

But also, and this is what makes Nakharat feel truly fantastic to a 21st century reader in most of the English-speaking world, the situation that official just had to deal with is really more of an exception than the rule, because Nakharat has a fundamentally different conception of how a civilized society runs. Among other things, the military forces on this world do not exist primarily to fight wars or extend or exercise the domination of a particular polity. No. As two characters in a later story, "Ten Percent for Luck," discuss as one explains to another why she's chosen the career path she has:

"But why the military?" Because it sounded like Inkar hadn't just taken a Contract with Otter Company. Her parents might have had actual shares. People with that sort of income didn't join up, not usually, not even with a paid commission.

"Because I wanted to build something."...

"Don't Companies build things?"

"For themselves. So they can take tolls. The army, we protect everyone. It doesn't matter who you are."

And I haven't even gotten into the lovely grace-notes present throughout these stories, like the whole ribbon thing. Almost everyone on the planet wears their hair in braids decorated with colorful ribbons that show their various personal and professional affiliations. Look at a person's hair and you can see where they went to school, to what professional societies they belong, if they are married and/or have children, if they're a high official in a Company or a public servant or a member of the military or a sex worker -- but only if you are on close enough terms with them to see them without their turban. Every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret. And yes, there are some people who have no braids, no ribbons at all, and who flaunt this with loose, flowing hair not wrapped up in a turban. Those are very special people indeed, and yes, we meet one, kind of. But that person is maybe not as unencumbered as his hair suggests, hmm?

All in just 154 pages. My goodness!

Lots of people have had a good chuckle at the fact that North Continent Ribbon was short-listed for the 2025 Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction, and that the author is also named Ursula, as though the fix is in. But her own prose above and Your Humble Blogger are here to assure you that Whitcher deserved the honor, actually. And she's just revving up; this is her first book. And whether she chooses to continue writing, publishing and collecting Nakharat stories, or tries her hand at something else entirely, I'm here for it. Though I reckon I'll have to be patient, as she is a working mathematician, too.

I'm gonna choose to believe that she's taking her poet's ribbon at least as seriously as her math one, though. Because I definitely want to see more of her stuff. I'll put one in my hair, too, if need be. I've been growing it out again. And hey, it's grey now, so whatever color she chooses, it won't clash! Lemme know, Ms. Whitcher!

*Which I think is basically what most science fiction calls hyperspace or wormhole space or folded space. Use your favorite hand-waving term for how we cross the stupefying vastness of space without wasting human lifetimes in generation ships here. "The deep" seems just fine. I like, too, that it's treated as nothing special, so that it doesn't even get capitalized.

**What? You didn't know that the secret of the Revelation Space universe's Conjoiner Drives is explicitly revealed within that series? Tell me you haven't read Reynolds' short stories without telling me you haven't read his short stories. My goodness!

Ann LeBlanc's THE TRANSITIVE PROPERTIES OF CHEESE

Whomst among us hasn't been here: you're the very best cheesemaker (curd nerd in the parlance) outside of Earth's gravity well, famous for your unique, creamy and full-flavored products on every space station, asteroid and shuttle plying the solar system (and possibly beyond? You really don't pay much attention to matters of trade; you've built yourself a body perfect for stirring, curd cutting, measuring and tasting, and hacked your brain decades ago so you can tune out absolutely everything else in the universe and just concentrate on making that beautiful RedOrion), you've got an entire asteroid hollowed out, moved into a stable orbit, kept at the perfect temperature, humidity and gravity and inoculated long ago with the perfect population of beneficial microorganisms to assist in the fermentation and aging of your famous handiwork... and then suddenly one day you happen to hear a snippet on the news about how a big shot businessman has announced that an asteroid he owns and manages for his silent and reclusive genius of a business associate is going to be let go and allowed to crash into the Sun. It will burn up with all its contents in about two weeks. Wow, sucks to be that sucker. But hey wait, which asteroid was that again?

Such is the plight of Millions Wayland, cheesemaker of, in, among and to the stars, or at least the bodies orbiting this one, whose life's work is currently careening sunward on a collision course for financial reasons beyond her comprehension, in Ann LeBlanc's stunning little novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese. And of course there's no time to handle this the way most artisans of her caliber would; she's going to have to cross a rather large volume of outer space to even begin to lodge a complaint, and meanwhile there's these batches of cheese she just got going here in her workshop (not in the hollow asteroid-cum-cheese cave, not aboard the space station where that irresponsible jerk of a managing partner is, either, but another third place where crewed spaceships don't even go, just automatic cargo shuttles that periodically bring in supplies and bring out fresh wheels of space cheese to transport them to be aged in the cheese cave with the suddenly curtailed life span).

So, Wayland does what any of us would do: she makes a perfect cognitive duplicate of herself, memories, personality, connectome and all, and shoots it in a tight-beam to the space station in near-Earth orbit where the restaurateur, who didn't even bother to warn her about her cheese cave's imminent demise before she heard it on the news, lives and works and maintains contact with the financial, military, civic and religious authorities of Earth. She -- or rather, this newborn version of herself -- is going to give that chucklehead a piece of her/their mind, even if she has to confront, head-on, the scene of the greatest trauma of her past, and of his -- and of all the other versions of themselves that are out here in space.

Versions? 

Yep. This is a trans-human soap opera, kids, and all of the characters except a few heavily armed thugs recently come up from Earth are cyberpunk interations of one of the first people ever to decide to upload himself to the Net and start making custom bodies for himself -- work bodies with extra arms, business bodies that look good in suits and are focused on the bottom line, party bodies for various recreational pursuits (mostly food and sex) and oh, by the way, before most of the copies of this character came into being, the original made a male-to-female transition, which is why I've mostly used female pronouns in this post but switched to male ones for this paragraph. There is trans-humanism and then there is trans-humanism. Which I should maybe call trans-trans-humanism? Except that would be silly? I mean, some of the bodies containing versions of the Millions character are more like giant robot millipedes than anything else, and are capable of directly metabolizing starlight and thrive in conditions of hard vacuum, because at some point in Millions' life they decided the best way to explore beyond the solar system would be just to become the spaceship!

Which is to say that, title aside, this book is only superficially about cheese, though in addressing the question of whether or not future batches that Wayland Millions may make in the future, without her cheese cave, could be regarded in any way as the same cheeses she was making with it, The Transitive Properties of Cheese takes on lots of bigger questions about how far the society in which she lives -- and the one she left behind when she left Earth -- are going to be willing to stretch the idea of "humanity," and how much that is even going to matter.

All in just over 100 pages. Because LeBlanc is a goddamn storyteller, who makes every sentence count for "world building," character development, plot advancement and the conveyance of exquisite sensory detail. In an age of 800-page doorstops, half of which seem to be devoted to that first (and least interesting) element of a piece of fiction, LeBlanc's talent for the tight and pithy novella is cause for considerable celebration. And The Transitive Properties of Cheese deserves to sell many, many, many more copies than any of those doorstops. What are you even doing? Go! And while you're at it, have a look around the publisher's site. They have a lot of good stuff there.

Helen Oyeyemi's GINGERBREAD (Narr by the author)

Once I thought I had a hard and fast rule that no novel narrated for its audio edition by its author could be as good as one narrated by a professional narrator.* But that was before I heard the soft, sweet, not quite-childlike but nearly child-pitched tones of Afro-Surrealist (and possibly Post-Exotic) queen Helen Oyeyemi. I've immensely enjoyed settling down each night to let her tell me the weird and wonderful bedtime story** that is Gingerbread.

Caveat auditor/caveat lector, though: you're likely to wake up the next morning with a fierce craving for the titular treat. Myself, I prefer sliced from nice loaf, with a good glop or two of lemon curd, over the biscuit/cookie variey, but you do you. 

Anyway, this magical, disturbing and bizarre little novel, what?

We first encounter our triple protagonists***, Margot Lee, her daughter Harriet and her granddaughter Perdita, in plain old 21st century Yorkshire. The younger two share a flat on the top floor of a seven-storey house far too old and ill-regarded to have an elevator. Margot lives elsewhere; we don't find out for a while where,  but it's just as banal a setting as the flat. So far, so dull. 

How we meet them, though, is through Harriet's famous-or-infamous gingerbread, her primary means of communication with her fellow humans. If she is courting you,  or worried that you're angry with her, or suspects you and she are in any way at odds, she will present you with a tin of what a "gingerbread addict" once described to her as tasting like Revenge:

It’s noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they’d get away with it,’ the gingerbread addict said. ‘That heart, ground to ash and shot through with dars of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze, and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon.

"You are phenomenal. You have ruined my life forever, " the addict had continued."Thank you."

Now, I make a pretty great loaf of gingerbread (and am pretty good at fruit curds, too) but nobody has compared it to a feeling that satisfying. So, first of all, goals. And second of all...

It's this really just a book about baked goods? And if so, wouldn't that be a bit, I dunno, cozy for a book covered here at Kate of Mind?

Oh, ye of little faith!

For the Lee family, at least two generations of them as we know to start, are not native to Yorkshire. Or to England. They might be said to be natives to Europe, but only if your idea of Europe can stretch to accommodate possibly imaginary, or at least notional countries that at one point were officially recognized by just four other nations in the world, but now maintain any kind of relations at all only with the Czech Republic. Such is Druhástrana, a land where one may be sentenced to public execution for unspecified crimes but where few actually die this way, because a stay is granted if one of the spectators at the event of imminent death agrees to take full legal and moral responsibility for the criminal in future by marrying them. For instance. 

This is how the Lee family got its start, when Margot impulsively volunteered to wed a very handsome crook -- despite the fact that she had observed him to be weirdly in cahoots with another female spectator. Before we know it, the not very happy pair, Margot, the daughter of a fabulously rich family of dubious scruples, and her formerly condemned bridegroom, are reduced to eking out a living on some rather poor farmland and living in a rather poor house, but welcoming a beautiful daughter, Harriet. And then, before we know it -- but that would be telling. You see, there are many mysteries behind Harriet's talent for gingerbread and her recipe, and of how Perdita came to exist at all. And these are the mysteries we are here to explore alongside Perdita as she embarks on a mission of discovery via... baking up a batch of her mother's famous gingerbread with an extra, unknown but possibly psychoactive ingredient, eating it all up and... slipping into a coma? Surrounded by the apparently sentient but laconic combinations of dolls and houseplants that have grown up alongside her while guarding the corners of her four-poster bed?

Well, yes. What part of "Afro-surrealist" would possibly lead you to expect a standard and cozy book about baking? That would be boring. And Oyeyemi, while she sounds gentle and soothing and only slightly amused as she narrates her tale, is not here to bore anybody, least of all herself.

Also, that whiff of fairy tales that a title like Gingerbread gives off for most of us? That's no accident, and one in particular is evoked by the name of Harriet's sly and not entirely well- meaning best friend, whose faintly flour-dusted fingerprints turn out to be all over the middle Lee generation's life, and thus those of her mother and daughter as well. 

Along the way through this story of mother's and daughters and gingerbread, Oyeyemi has left odd little ambushes of insight that wait to attack us like packs of wolves, or wolf pups at least. An "authenticity theme park" full of ersatz gingerbread girls here, a professor with wise bons mot about the writing of Emile Zola there, a lesson or two about what we will and will not accept in exchange for doing what we do better than anyone else around another corner... and, strangest and most confrontational of all, the idea of a near-utopia in which every kind of equality between people prevails except for economic equality. People may get bored with lives in which sexes, races, religions, sexualities, degrees or attractiveness or physical ability or intelligence are all on a level playing field, the land of Druhástrana seems to have concluded, as long as the chance of "unexpected abundance" (often in the form of some kind of lottery winnings) is present. Would that be so? Oyeyemi doesn't give us the answer to that; we must decide for ourselves. 

All this and at least one seriously adorably funny sex scene!

I have but one complaint about Gingerbread, and that's about the ending, which throws in several intriguing but unexplored new plot elements and characters at us by way of teasing a still-to-come reunion between Harriet and her old Druhástranian friend and on the whole feel like they've come from some other book entirely. It's a book I'd very much like to read someday, but I don't feel like it was a great way to end this one. 

Nonetheless, I've added the rest of Oyeyemi's output to date to my endless TBR, and will look forward to new work from her with anticipation and pleasure, like a freshly baked loaf of something dark and complex and delicious straight out of the oven. 

*Though one must always make allowances for the likes of Podiobooks and any similar efforts by aspiring authors who are trying everything they can to get attention for their beloved book babies, especially nowadays. Too many authors who have truly enriched my life got their starts that way, and some, like Scott Sigler, have never abandoned this practice. 

**If you're OK with tripping balls in your dreams that night. 

***Played in my imagination by 1980s-era Joan Plowright as Margot Lee, Juliette Stephenson as Harriet Lee, and Joely Richardson as Perdita Lee, because I spent many years with only a handful of movies on VHS to my name and my very favorite, watched until it wore out, was Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers, a film I still haven't tired of, by the way! And yes, the text makes clear early on that the Lee women have "pearl gray hair and bark-brown skin" but I couldn't help it. Once the idea leaked into my head, it couldn't be budged.