For our twenty-third annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five writers to introduce this year’s group of debut authors, and in the process they not only offered a reading list of five books that mark the arrival of exciting authors whose work readers will be enjoying for a long, long time but also uncovered truths about the art of fiction and the different ways writers draw on the people, places, ideas, and things they encounter in their own lives to build new worlds and tell new stories.

Maisy Card talks with Tyriek White about his novel, We Are a Haunting. “One of the biggest things I wanted to do was just write a story about my community, about my neighborhood, and capture the anxiety of growing up but also the wonder of growing up in a place,” says White. Kim Fu interviews Ada Zhang, author of the story collection The Sorrows of Others: “These stories feature lonely characters, and it comforts me—makes me feel less lonely—to think of them together.” V. V. Ganeshananthan talks with Mihret Sibhat about her novel, The History of a Difficult Child: “In my novel, humor is the primary ingredient that raised the tragic raw materials of my childhood to a level of art,” says Sibhat. “By giving me a chance to approach grief from an oblique angle, humor helped me see old stories anew.” Naheed Phiroze Patel and Shasri Akella discuss Akella’s novel, The Sea Elephants: “I worked with a street theater troupe in India for three months, traveling with them, writing the stories they performed. I often relocated myths to the present day to accommodate current issues or retold them from the perspective of a minor character.” And Tiffany Tsao introduces Rebekah Bergman, author of the novel The Museum of Human History: “I do think writing this novel changed me,” Bergman says. “It certainly changed how I think of my identity as a writer.”

We Are a Haunting (Astra, April) by Tyriek White
The Sorrows of Others (A Public Space, May) by Ada Zhang
The History of a Difficult Child (Viking, June) by Mihret Sibhat
The Sea Elephants (Flatiron, July) by Shastri Akella
The Museum of Human History (Tin House, August) by Rebekah Bergman

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Tyriek White, whose debut novel, We Are a Haunting, was published by Astra House in April, introduced by Maisy Card, author of the novel These Ghosts Are Family, published by Simon and Schuster in 2020. (Credit: White: Zoraya Lua; Card: Tehsuan Glover)

Tyriek White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy. The novel alternates between the stories of Key, a doula who can see and communicate with the dead, and her son, Colly, who lives alone in the family’s apartment in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, raising himself after Key dies from cancer. Colly inherits his mother’s and grandmother’s connection to the spiritual world, which allows Key to remain a presence in his life, guiding him even after her death. Together they tell the story of their community and how they and their neighbors navigate decades of crumbling public housing infrastructure, violence, and poverty.

The writing, on both a sentence and a structural level, is magical. As I read I felt increasingly unanchored in time. I had flashbacks of the beautiful parts of growing up in New York City, but I was also flooded with visceral memories of what it was like to be part of a working-class family in the 1990s—our struggle to hold our place in a city that has grown increasingly hostile to the poor. But the ghosts in the novel do not let us despair. While they remind us that Colly’s neighborhood falls on a continuum of Black disenfranchisement in the Americas, the ghosts also illuminate the cultural and spiritual practices that enslaved Africans and their descendants have drawn from and created to retain a sense of community, no matter how many times we’ve been forced to begin anew.

Kiese Laymon describes your book as “so New York—yet so deeply Southern on lower frequencies.” I know you received your MFA from the University of Mississippi. Did you go down south as a child, or was this your first time living in the South? What effect did it have on your writing process?
My family is from North Carolina, so I’ve been down south. I’ve loved going down for the summers, but Mississippi was definitely a bit of a shock, for a combination of reasons. I discovered a vibrant radical community there but was also negotiating that with the political realities of the place. I think it unlocked how I wanted to talk about this world. I’ve been in New York for so long that changing my relationship with space or geography, moving all the way down south kind of upended how I wanted to write about this urban environment. I used a lot of natural language. I think the sensibilities are probably very Southern.

Considering that you were writing from a distance, what resources did you draw from to render New York City so vividly?
In literary terms the novel is very much in that lineage of Jazz by Toni Morrison or The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. I was taking those imaginings of New York and sort of inserting myself. One of the biggest things I wanted to do was just write a story about my community, about my neighborhood, and capture the anxiety of growing up but also the wonder of growing up in a place. Being from the outer boroughs, being on these outskirts, and seeing how that informs our understanding of empire and power, I wanted to write about people who love and care for each other and also how we push forward in communities like ours. I think that was my main goal but also that haunting sense of the past. The way we navigate our streets, the street names being from slave owners or politicians of eras past. How does that affect the weight of your footsteps, in a sense, walking through your neighborhood or your community?

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A lot of the landscapes that you described felt intimately familiar to you, but I was curious about the research you did for the book. The supernatural element connects the past with the present. There’s a moment when Key is talking to the ghost of a slave in an abandoned part of Brooklyn, and I assumed that you were describing a place that still exists. Were there spaces in the city that you weren’t familiar with that you explored for the novel?
For sure. There’s an old Brooklyn Eagle article that I drew heavily from. There’s this Dutch reformed-style church a block or two down from where I grew up. The article, from the late 1800s, describes how white folk were interred or buried in the back of the church, but also how they had this space or section where Black people were buried—in a little corner of this cemetery behind the church. And then, if not, they were buried across the road or something. I was compelled by that image of Black folk during that time. There were free men, like in the Weeksville community, but a lot of them were also enslaved, and so what were their burial practices or ceremonial practices at this point when they didn’t have a place to bury their own? I was so intrigued by the idea of sort of figuring out or finding that space. A lot of those scenes reverberate with that.

Your bio mentions that you’re a musician. Were you a musician or a writer first? Can you speak to how music informed your writing process?
I’d say I was a writer first, but I’ve been into music since I was eleven or twelve, when I was writing lyrics in middle school. I have a machine sampler, some keyboards, a separate place for my brain to tinker around other than the page. They tell you being a writer is an isolated practice, but I don’t believe it has to be. In contrast, music is just extremely collaborative. So I think about what principles, what practices I can sort of absorb and take back to the page.

The musical references in the book stood out to me. It felt like each character had their own soundtrack, and music was also used to signal the shift or passage of time.
Right. It’s used to organize time and where each character is. There’s a soundtrack for the book; there’s also a soundtrack that I used to write the book. And not just a whole playlist, but the beats that I wrote this book to. I think that’s a big part of the process. Other art is in the background, too, but mostly music.

An excerpt from We Are a Haunting

One day, I fell backward into a scar in the world, a fall sudden and lasting. A portal took me whole, sent me traveling across a pulse that could split me down the middle. I tumbled out the other side, a terrible moaning like a hive of meat bees. I had been pedaling down the block on an unkempt length of road on Flatlands, barreling ahead, ripping along twisted storefronts and storage lots. The smell of hot metal filled the air, lodged itself at the back of my tongue and burned as I tried to catch my breath. I had reached the Belt Parkway and the creek widened, blooming into the bay and into the Atlantic, the dark basin, murky with trash and wildlife, boats twinkling in the distance. The water emptied into a reservoir where it was drained and then treated. There were heating and waste stations, chimneys that gagged out heavy smoke and stray embers into the clouds over the land. A bridge reached over the harbor, kept Far Rockaway at bay, the lights from ferries and small boats parting thedarkness. In the distance, I saw the shape of Boulevard through the fog, apartments stacked atop one another, our city in the clouds, embassies of time, crashing dimensions and histories, the cursed, the lost, the all-seeing. No different from Ingersoll Houses, or Marcus Garvey, or Tilden; Chelsea, or Pink Houses, or Brevoort; Farragut, or Walt Whitman Houses, or Baisley Park. No different from Saint Nicholas, or Queensbridge, or Mott Haven.

You died without telling me what it was like to be in two places, without designation, without home, no matter how hard you try to make one for yourself.

When I reach out for you, tipping over, into a slippage of time. I feel my body grow open, my hand wrapped in another. This is Nana, blood rushing to her fingers, her hands the color of pink salt. We are in the doorjamb of a temporary house. I see a shoal of folk near the center of a settlement farther down, along the gray water. I follow the sound. A dirt path like a welt stretching toward the sea. I slip through the cattails and the buttonbushes, under the river birches and needles of the bald cypress. The smell stays with me, on my hands and in my hair. The smoke above the huts on the beach carried spiced meats and greens. Through the bramble, the band of sweet pepperbush, I see the shore open up, the ocean flat. Cloudy. The person standing in front of me didn’t look like anyone I knew but felt like you. A ways down the beach I heard a crowd; the smell of fresh meats and spices from an open market. High tide sounds like a stampede. My feet are sinking into the loam, the wet paste of sand and dirt. I am barefoot in the duckweed. You see me, the same expression in my dreams, a sad smile.

“Oh, baby, when did it hurt so bad?” you ask. Not why does it hurt, or where does it hurt, but when? I feel like all the times, the time before me, an ache that was precolonial, a Paleolithic expanse of sorrow. You are Cybele carved in Anatolian stone.

“You were just gone one morning,” I tell you. “And I know it sounds like I blame you but I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Are love and sacrifice not dark synonyms for one another?”

I turn away, take a few steps up the beach. When all felt lost, being seen through your grief, really seen, was all that mattered. What if, I always thought, if I never met you, never felt you gone because you weren’t there in the first place. In my mind, it was like being without something from birth— sight or a limb—and how it compared to having the thing, losing it, then living the rest of a life without it. Inevitably, the thing dries and crumbles like sand and one is forced to dream away the incessant drum of missing, make themselves anew. When you died, Pop told me I’d only think of life in two phases: life with you and life without you. Said when he lost his own mother, folk could only see him as an unfinished body, what was sundered, removed. Never how he created a new whole, had to reimagine what those parts left could amount to. After he’d finished his stories, I would try to drift to sleep without thinking about the old him, the sawed-through flesh and muscle, the hacking of bone, the dark blood that painted the emergency room. I tried to imagine anything else besides the yellows and browns his body leaked, the pus, the clotting of fluid, a cursive written on his skin and across smocks and sinking through sheets. If I never knew you, perhaps I’d still be who I was before you died. I would never do the hard work of looking beyond myself to see others suffering along with me, that the world and the human condition were threaded around the work of community, our care for one another. I feel my gut stir when I look back at you—remorse. I want you to know the new ways I could love, which I had learned for better or for worse.

“Here,” you say, easing me into the current. A cool wind from the ocean had pelted sand into my hair. It stung my eyes, made me shiver down to my toes. There was a hole in the night sky, where it all goes in the end, some giant we’ve mistaken for sun or light. I have this strange feeling of culmination, what could be made of all those histories, an infinite process—hilltop city of seven waters. “I’ll tell you everything.”

Excerpted from We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White. Published by Astra House. Copyright © Tyriek White 2023. All rights reserved.     

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Ada Zhang, whose debut story collection, The Sorrows of Others, was published by A Public Space Books in May, introduced by Kim Fu, author of four books, most recently the story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, published by Tin House in 2022. (Credit: Zhang: Chloe Chang)

As I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs—sometimes the first few sentences—I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me. It’s tempting to chalk this up to shared cultural experience, to say that I saw myself in one story’s self-destructive Chinese American teenager on a hot May night in Texas, or my parents in another story’s newly immigrated couple grimly reinventing themselves over green bean casserole, or my grandparents in the shadows and silences created by the Cultural Revolution in these stories. But this would be facile and untrue. I felt this way because Zhang is a master of character and interiority, what it is to be a person: every gesture and perception colored by a lifetime of memory, the privacy and singularity of the mind, the irreducible multitudes contained within. This is a debut with the subtlety, confidence, and range of a seasoned writer. When these characters speak past each other, when they confound and misunderstand each other, when the story they tell isn’t the story that’s heard, when they look in the same direction and each see something completely different, I felt so acutely that impassable gulf between bodies, that unknowability, even as I marveled at literature’s capacity—and, more specifically, Zhang’s gift as a writer—to transcend it.

The opening story, “The Subject,” about a young artist who interviews and paints her elderly roommate, deals directly with questions of representation—whose images and stories are considered worthy of artistic attention and who gets to tell those stories. Did those questions inform the writing of The Sorrows of Others more broadly? What was the significance of having this story as the first one the reader encounters?
I suppose questions around representation did inform the writing of the book in that I tried very hard to write against representation, to be aware of its shortcomings and avoid its pitfalls. Representation, as it is understood in our modern discourse, places an unfair burden on artists from marginalized communities to write universally, which is the exact opposite of what I believe about making art: that it should come from specificity, and that only in capturing something specific—a detail about the world—can the work be appreciated by anyone.

I knew how easy it would be for my book to be labeled a book about the immigrant experience or about the Asian American experience. These have become marketing terms, almost, in the publishing industry, and it bothered me that my stories might be subject to this limited reading. Since I could not—cannot!—avoid representation, I decided to write a story about it. In drafting “The Subject” I was able to give my questions on this topic to the main character, to let the story do the asking. I wanted this particular story to come first to encourage readers toward a more sophisticated reading of the stories that follow and of the collection as a whole. My characters all happen to be Chinese or Chinese American—but is that really what the book is about? I can’t control how people will receive the book or how it will inform their ideas. But “The Subject” as the opener was my attempt at not letting readers, or myself, off the hook.

What are some of the other through-lines and thematic connections across the stories you hope a reader will draw? Were any overarching themes or sustained interests clear to you while writing the individual stories, or did that come later in the process of assembling the collection?
I have always been interested in the limitations of language as a medium for human connection. I enjoy writing dialogue for that reason. So much is revealed to me about the characters in what they say or don’t say to one another, what they hide intentionally or are unable to express for whatever reason. There is often some distance—whether generational or cultural or the simple fact of life pulling people apart—that my characters must speak across to reach one another. It’s this reaching that fascinates me, the risks we will take to know and be known by another person.

Each story in the collection was pursued on its own terms; only later, when I was assembling the collection, did I realize I was kind of writing about the same thing over and over. These stories feature lonely characters, and it comforts me—makes me feel less lonely—to think of them together. When I get mired in my own life, it helps to remember that somewhere, someone is asking the same questions I am and that everyone has a story.

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I often found the final line or lines of these stories especially elegant, both the prose itself and the emotional resonance with the story as a whole. There’s a moment in “Silence” when a character thinks, “Every story relied on one preceding it, which made a story told in isolation a lie and one told in its entirety basically impossible,” which I think speaks to one of the biggest challenges of the form. How do you know where to end a story? Do you have an ending in mind and write toward it, or does it become inevitable along the way? Do you consider multiple possibilities?
I don’t have an ending in mind when I set out. I have to trust that the sentences are taking me where the story wants to go, though just as often they lead me astray. For half the stories in the collection, the endings were found during revision, sometimes multiple drafts. The other half kept their original endings, and the revision was about making sure everything prior prepares the reader for that final moment. In drafting I might make contact with an idea or an obsession, but revision is really when the story becomes clear. If it were up to me, I would choose revising over drafting any day! It’s just too bad you really need to see all the pieces before you can start moving them around. A short story ending, I think, should feel big enough to contain the parts of the story that come before but small enough to pass as just another detail.

What draws you to the short story form in general?
The short story is mysterious. That’s what excites me about it. It’s a form that’s allergic to formula, that invites experimentation and rewards risk for those who really go for it. I like the honesty it demands from me, and the rigor. That’s the craft answer, but I fell in love with short stories first as a reader. They’re still my favorite things to read. I read slow naturally but have found that the form encourages a more drawn-out attention in which you aren’t racing to find out what happens next but waiting, rather, for what’s inevitable. That particular kind of suspense I enjoy, and I hope my readers will enjoy it, too, in my collection.

Who are some of the short story writers you love to read? Were any of them particularly influential to this collection?
The list of short story writers I love is long and continues to grow. I feel like we’re in a golden age of short story collections right now. More and more people are reading them, refuting the idea long held by publishers that short stories don’t sell. I love seeing how different writers interpret the form. Recent favorites include A House Is a Body by Shruti Swamy, How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs, and A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley. The short story writer most influential to this collection has to be Yiyun Li. I started reading her work in college and have revisited A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl numerous times since. I read one of her short stories, “A Sheltered Woman,” out loud to my father once many years ago. When I first became interested in writing, my father advised me not to write about Chinese people. He didn’t think my work would find an audience. He was visibly startled after I finished reading, as I was, too, the first time I was introduced to Li. He couldn’t believe that lives like ours could be the subject of art. I think that’s when my dad realized he was my audience and maybe that was reason enough for me to keep writing. After I had published a couple of stories in literary journals, people started telling me that my work reminded them of William Trevor. So I started reading William Trevor, learning embarrassingly late that he is in fact Yiyun Li’s favorite writer. It’s exciting to uncover one’s literary DNA and to feel like you’re never writing alone, because you’re always writing into a tradition and carrying that tradition forward. Other writers in my DNA include Alice Munro, Eudora Welty, Edward P. Jones, and James Alan McPherson.

An excerpt from The Sorrows of Others

“One Day”

On a random weekday in November, when I was a child and not yet weary of his kindness, my father drove forty minutes from his workplace to have lunch with me in the school cafeteria.

Handprint turkeys lined the halls of the school’s first floor, from the entrance up to the library, then splitting in two directions down the various homerooms of K through third. Each little turkey was cut from a paper plate. Each colored brown in the palm, the turkey’s chest, with a flash of red below the beak, the part we called the turkey’s gobble. In the center we’d written our names. Eric, James, Annabelle…

“Helen,” my father read out loud when he found mine.

He touched the fingers, which I’d decorated in orange and brown feathers and nothing else. The other turkeys were more exciting. Feathers in pink and blue and purple, plus glitter and sequins, pom-poms with bits of tinsel—but mine was the most realistic, I thought. During the craft, it had bothered me that no one else seemed to care about this. “Use your imagination, Helen!” Ms. Evans had said, but my imagination, I wanted to tell her, had rules. Even in kindergarten, it seemed plain to me that certain things were not possible.

“It’s super,” my father said, looking down at me. He smiled and touched the back of my head. “Are you hungry?”

In the cafeteria I scanned the mayhem, all those bodies in one fluorescent gray room, until I caught Ms. Evans, her stubby fingers spread wide and waving at me as though her explosion of hair or outfit wouldn’t have given her away. I didn’t have friends. Ms. Evans was always making efforts to include me, fold me in with the other kids, but I took my cues from adults, the other teachers, and I maintained a separation between me and her. The cafeteria smelled as it always did, of something fried and something sour. My classmates with packed lunches were already seated with their sandwiches, their baggies of grapes and baby carrots. Everyone else was in line, where I would have been, too, sliding a tray of pizza with a side of mashed potatoes, if on that day my father had not come and surprised me.

At the far end of the table, where no one was sitting yet except for us, he removed two clear containers from his lunchbox, both pocked with moisture on the inside. He looked around, then raised his hand in the air as though he were one of us, a student. He winked at me, sitting across from him, and I tried to wink back. Ms. Evans was down one table, monitoring a different homeroom. She saw my father and made like she was running. Her pants swished. Her enormous arms rolled from side to side.

“Yes, Mr. Chen?” she said, out of breath.

“Is there a microwave somewhere so I can heat up our food?”

“Sure, if you come with me I can take you to the teacher’s lounge right down the—”

Just as she finished the last word, Ms. Evans threw her head back and sneezed, sending one of her silver hoop earrings slicing through the air to the ground near our feet. The noise was so loud, the convulsion of her body so huge and terrifying, that I ducked and covered my face. My father tapped my knee three times before I moved my elbows away, before Ms. Evans could notice.

“Bless you,” he said, and reached under the table.

When he resurfaced a moment later, Ms. Evans was blinking rapidly with wide, open eyes, like she’d just appeared someplace new. She sniffed, and instead of taking the earring my father had retrieved, she cocked her head sideways to remove the other hoop from her other ear.

“These things never stay in,” she said. She spoke as though forced into admission. “They’re cheap.”

“They look nice on you,” said my father. After a pause he added, “Cheers,” lifting the earring to my kindergarten teacher, the hoop held solidly, daintily, between his thumb and index finger, in the signature for Okay!

Ms. Evans gasped. She let the breath go in a soft, choppy laugh, exposing something fragile, and I got the sense that for Ms. Evans, life had turned one way, the wrong way, a long time ago and now could not find its way back.

“Cheers,” she said.

They clinked hoops, making a dull, disappointing sound.

We ate noisily and with our heads down, chopsticks flicking, the way we ate at home. By then the lines had cleared and the tables were full. The boys sitting next to us stared, and I thought nothing of it. My world was still too small for me to feel ashamed.

“What you did earlier, Helen,” my father began once we were finished. “It wasn’t nice.” He stacked the empty containers on top of each other and pushed them aside. “You could have hurt your teacher’s feelings.”

I said, “I know.”

My father began peeling an orange and carved the fruit out in seconds, in one tremendous sweep of his thumb. He broke it in half and gave one to me.

I wonder if he suspected then that I was beginning to detect weakness and to feel repulsed by it. “Helen is such a sweet girl,” my father was always telling everyone. Over the years it became clear to me that he’d interpreted my reclusiveness for loneliness, my brooding for sophistication, when actually I was, as a child, already sick of the world and hardening myself to it, so it could never do to me what it had done to Ms. Evans. What it had done to my father, who raised me on his own. I thought he was too good for the feckless types on whom his charms were most effective, until eventually I viewed him as one of them, someone who did not know how to make life easier.

I left home when I was eighteen and remained distant until he got sick. When I returned, I watched a man turn into a gnarled, hollowed body, as though someone had taken a spoon to his skin and scooped out the flesh, and I knew, before being told, that something so small and destroyed could not survive. I’ve learned to be softer now, but there remains a frayed thread of that part of me from before. At times I feel it writhing—in my intolerance for slowness, my impatience—even though now I’m someone’s partner and a mother to two children. I was twenty-five when he died.

“Don’t go,” I said to him when lunch was over. We were standing near the school’s entrance. All around us, kindergarteners were filing out of the cafeteria. First graders were making their way in, a scene repeating itself.

“Baba has to go back to work. I’ll see you in a few hours at home.”

“But I don’t want to be here,” I said. The idea of resuming an ordinary day filled me with dread. “I want you to be with me.”

My father knelt down. He aligned my hand to his in a still high-five and said, “Look! My turkey’s so much bigger than yours.”

When I said nothing, he draped my arms over his shoulders. “You’ll make friends, I promise you,” he said. “It gets better.”

He kissed me firmly on the forehead, and I watched him leave. There was a spring in his step, the gait of someone strong and healthy. Ms. Evans came and stood with me by the glass doors, and to my surprise she did not turn me away. It wouldn’t occur to me until I was an adult that, probably, no one had ever raised a toast to Ms. Evans before, that my father was likely the first, perhaps the only. Before that I couldn’t appreciate the perfect strangeness of their encounter. Together we watched him get into his car and drive. I stared out even after he was gone, until I felt ready, then Ms. Evans walked me back to class.

Excerpted with permission from The Sorrows of Others by Ada Zhang. Copyright Ada Zhang, 2023. Published by A Public Space Books in May 2023.  

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Mihret Sibhat, whose debut novel, The History of a Difficult Child, was published by Viking in June, introduced by V. V. Ganeshananthan, author of two novels, most recently Brotherless Night, published by Random House in January. (Credit: Sibhat: Dena Denny; Ganeshananthan: Sophia Mayrhofer)

Mihret Sibhat’s debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though He were mad at somebody. The resulting flood carries detritus to the Small River, which passes things along to the Medium River, which hands the lot off to the Big River, and before we know it we, too, are swept away, caught in the force of that water, in the force of those sentences, which take us right to Selam Asmelash, the irresistible and unforgettable heart of the story—a not-quite-a-child narrator busy making her way into the world.

“I am the little terrorist who managed to fuck with an entire town’s head before I was even born, and this is my story,” Selam says. This line has stayed in my head. As Selam narrates the story of her once-prosperous family navigating socialist political upheaval in the 1980s, she can’t help but be blunt, outlining with savage wit and undeniable tenderness the thousand hypocrisies of the political and personal jockeying around her. The smallest child in her sizable family, Selam somehow manages—relentlessly, like that flood—to pose big questions about politics, power, and faith. Mihret Sibhat has written a novel that seamlessly and audaciously teaches us to play by its rules and to read along at its merciless, fluid velocity. It’s a book that will make you feel like you must keep up with it and that there’s nothing you’d rather do.

One of the most astonishing things about your book is the voice. The narrator is a child, and even though Selam has little control over her world, she has command of the story. How did you think about approaching her perspective, and what were the most exciting and challenging parts of navigating this point of view?
When an adult narrates a story, we don’t really think about how much credit for their wisdom belongs to their child self. The wisdom essential to survival—“do not touch fire” and “be careful when walking down stairs”—is learned through sacrifices made by the child. And yet even when the child is part of the story, we see her only through the somewhat filtered retrospective gaze of the adult. Letting Selam tell her own story was a way of addressing this fundamental unfairness. And when she needed support to tell her story successfully, it seemed just to put everyone—God, her grown selves, the surveillance state, the institution of gossip—at her service. But she’s still a child; she can’t carry everything, so occasionally she wisely passes the microphone to others. The most exciting aspect of spending time with Selam was seeing my freedom expanded, going places that I am not allowed into as an adult. I could get away with expressing harsh takes on parents, being vulnerable without the fear of looking ridiculous, and being freely earnest about things and not feeling the need to always be witty or subtle. Moreover, because the novel is semiautobiographical, seeing Selam grieve the tragedies of her life allowed me to look at mine anew; it gave me permission to cry over things that happened decades ago. The biggest challenge in writing Selam came in the need to know when to say, “This part of the story isn’t something my voice can carry; I need to let someone else do the job.” That problem was solved when I decided to incorporate other points of view.

I know humor has been a priority for you since early on. Can you talk a little bit about that? Were there parts that weren’t funny and became funnier, or the other way around? I especially love the conversations and conflicts among the family, as well as the town’s gossiping and your sharply chosen metaphors.
Like Selam’s voice, humor was my essential instrument for reaching what Elena Ferrante calls “literary truth.” Without it I don’t think I would have succeeded in turning the tragedies of my childhood into a novel. I see the difference between factual events and a work of art as the difference between a shelter and a home. The former can be any structure with a roof; the latter evokes a feeling because you have made aesthetic decisions in making it. In my novel, humor is the primary ingredient that raised the tragic raw materials of my childhood to a level of art. Whether it is good art or not is a different story. By giving me a chance to approach grief from an oblique angle, humor helped me see old stories anew. It gave me an incentive—entertainment at least—to write about stories that I thought were just painful and held no value for readers. It functions both as a literary device and a therapeutic device that gave me the courage to face my grief. Once the humorous tone of the book was set in the early chapters—with the speculations surrounding the child’s conception and birth—Selam and I felt empowered to make fun of anything and anyone, including her mother’s disease. That freedom allowed us to not be threatened when we came across something that felt purely tragic: We simply embraced the sadness. I did not pressure myself to make everything funny; humor and tragedy worked in symbiosis, coexisting or sometimes yielding the page to each other.

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The grief and humor you’re describing appear frequently in moments connected to faith, especially as Degitu, Selam’s mother, becomes ill. How did you think about humor and irreverence in relation to some characters’ reverence for God?
In the culture I grew up in, grief and God share some traits, like unassailability and fearsomeness. Children were forbidden from holding their heads with both hands, for example, because it is something adults do during mourning, as they wail for the dead, and to do so in peacetime is to summon a bad omen. Naturally, for rebellious types like Selam and me, such forbidden matters are fertile grounds for staging our uprisings—not out of need for rudeness per se, but for survival. So in those moments when grief and faith appear together opposite Selam, threatening to suffocate her, she cannot walk into that space empty-handed; she must bring her irreverence, her humor.

Which writers on your bookshelves do you think are particularly good at depicting belief?
My books are currently in boxes in a friend’s basement, unfortunately, so I can’t look at them and refresh my memory. But a chapter in We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo, and Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander come to mind, and I remember thinking how hilarious and relatable the latter is even though it is a memoir of an Orthodox Jew. My family’s Evangelical Christianity was a site of immense trauma for me, so the only way I can stand to read literature dealing with any religion for now is if it’s funny.

I know this book was originally conceived as part of a longer story, and I’d love to hear more about what’s to come for Selam.
This book was intended to be the first of a trilogy. I was going to follow it up with the stories of the teenager and the woman. However, for a reason unknown to me, the teenager is refusing to talk. Perhaps I’ll spend some time trying to understand what she wants, looking for an entry point into her story. Or I’ll leave her alone and move on to something else.

An excerpt from The History of a Difficult Child

On a rainy morning in August, a month ahead of the tenth anniversary celebrations of the revolution, a group of women gather at a house in the center of town to drink coffee, eat bread, and marvel at a thing that’s been growing inside the troubled belly of Eteyé Degitu Galata, the former feudal landlady who lives in the green house next door but is clearly too good to join her neighbors for coffee.

“It can’t be a child, can it?” they whisper amongst each other.

“No, it can’t be. She has that disease that’s been making her bleed for over a year now.”

“You don’t get pregnant while bleeding.”

“No, you don’t,” they say. “No, you don’t.”

There has been confusion in town over the question of how to deal with Degitu’s situation. Ever since the news of her abnormal bleeding got out—there was an incident involving a soiled habesha qemis at a wedding—women of the neighborhood have been sympathetic, her sickness having sucked the vigor out of their revulsion for that aristocratic louse. The revolution has spent the last decade teaching people how to hate the former landed gentry: sometimes, farmers marching through town would pause in front of Degitu’s house, chanting “Death to bloodsuckers!” and forcing her and her husband to lock up their doors in fear. The revolution has offered no instructions on how to behave when former bloodsuckers start bleeding themselves. Women of the town don’t know what to do, and it isn’t just a matter of figuring out one’s moral stance; there is also confusion over whether expressing sympathy for people like Degitu amounted to a counterrevolutionary act.

Degitu and her family are not entirely isolated from the community—she has been to the same funerals, weddings, and baptisms as the Women. She’s also a member of the town’s Mahber, an association of Christian women, where she is known for her dedication to service, inserting her imperialist face at every event, arriving at functions ahead of everyone else, taking on cooking duties never even assigned to her. That is sometimes more annoying than her past as a landlady who made her tenant farmers cough up the last cup of grain she was owed. It is more annoying than the fact that, despite losing her large tracts of land, her coffee farms, her businesses and two homes, she lives in a house with an elevated concrete foundation, multiple rooms, and cement floors. At least that house isn’t what it used to be: the exterior is the kind of green you would get if trees could shit and had diarrhea. It hasn’t been green in the truest sense since Degitu spent what must have been the last of her monies on a sewing machine. (Or maybe that is what she wants people to think: those former feudal lords might sometimes wear pilling sweaters with missing buttons, but they could be hiding a stash of gold bought at a discount from people who have fallen on hard times.)

The point is: despite not joining her neighbors for coffee, Degitu is very much part of the community. The problem is: everyone knows the list of counterrevolutionary acts is a living list, so although it has been mostly safe to interact with Degitu so far, things might change tomorrow. Even seemingly upstanding citizens who have always been poor might turn out to be members of some counterrevolutionary movement. So much happens in secret, which is strange because in a town as big as a bull’s forehead you think you would know everyone. You only get a full picture of your neighbors when they get arrested or, in the case of those who haven’t been seen since the Red Terror, completely disappeared. You have to always be alert and ready to abandon people, for anything that’s good today might turn out to be counterrevolutionary tomorrow.

From The History of a Difficult Child [6] used with the permission of the publisher, Viking. Copyright © 2023 by Mihret Sibhat.  

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Shastri Akella, whose debut novel, The Sea Elephants, will be published by Flatiron Books in July, introduced by Naheed Phiroze Patel, author of the novel Mirror Made of Rain, published by Unnamed Press in 2022. (Credit: Akella: Subhadra Madhavan)

Shastri Akella’s poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father’s violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother’s unfathomable grief. It is a story about queer desire, the comfortable lies families tell themselves to survive, and art’s power to say the unsayable, to help us win back ourselves from the shame and self-disgust that society often deploys to control us.

In India queer existence is still relegated to the margins; it is precarious, ephemeral, endangered. It was only in 2018 that the Indian Supreme Court struck down a British colonial-era law that criminalized homosexuality. As of this writing, Indian law does not recognize same-sex marriage or civil unions. While there is a rich, storied tradition of queerness in South Asian art, culture, and mythology, queer literature is still a relatively sparse canon. This makes Akella’s novel, and his voice, all the more important—an infusion to a collective oeuvre that deserves much more far-reaching attention than it has received so far, both on the Indian subcontinent and abroad.

I was struck by an exchange between the narrator, Shagun, and his father at the start of the novel, in which his father asks Shagun about his favorite god. Can you talk a bit about the role Hindu mythology plays in the novel as well as in the framing of traditional ideas of masculinity?
Hindu mythology, in both oral and written forms, abounds with queer and trans characters. However, a fleet of political invasions on the subcontinent triggered the age-old fear of “the great replacement.” These original texts were supplanted with rigidly structured heteronormative versions: stories where straight upper-caste couples are at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the ruling and the agrarian, landowning caste. A celebration of the “masculine” cis man led to a reframing of Hanuman only as a fierce, masculine god—the version that Shagun’s father wants him to imbibe. The Sea Elephants presents myths in original and censored versions but without being didactic.

In your novel Shagun joins a traveling theater group in his search for meaning. Is there an overlap between the queerness narrative and the street theater narrative? What kind of research went into writing that?
I worked with a street theater troupe in India for three months, traveling with them, writing the stories they performed. I often relocated myths to the present day to accommodate current issues or retold them from the perspective of a minor character. The myth of the sea elephant was one of the first stories my grandmother told me. Once upon a time, the gods and the demons churned the ocean to mine its treasures. All kinds of wealth rose to the surface, including the first sea elephant. Pearl white, with six tusks. Beguiled by his beauty, the gods claimed him and took him to heaven. As a child of six I was shocked. How could they just take him away? What happened to his kids and friends? Years later, when the theater troupe said they wanted to perform that story, I found a way to answer those questions: by extending the story, by showing the gods apologizing to the sea elephants for stealing their ancestor and offering them reparations.

Shagun’s boyfriend is Jewish. I am sure many readers would be surprised to read about the rich history of Jewish communities in southern India. How did you learn about it?
When I discovered the history of Jewish migrations to India, I followed my hunch and got a research grant that funded my trip to Cochin, in the state of Kerala. The Jewish families I met were welcoming, sharing meals and stories with me. The persecution suffered by their ancestors, forcing them to flee to India circa 970 BCE, the community they formed nevertheless, resonated with the ways in which I was thinking of what it means for my narrator, Shagun, and individuals like him to have an authentic existence. A lot of what I learned made its way into the book, including Judeo-Malayalam, a language created by early Jewish settlers, a mixture of Hebrew and Malayalam. It made sense for Marc, the love interest, to come from this incredible community.

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Could you talk a bit about your novel’s arc from its initial drafts to when it landed on your editor’s desk? What changed while editing for publication?
I thought I was asexual until I came to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst to do an MFA. In a fiction workshop my professor Sabina Murray said my novel seemed to want to be a gay love story. After a supportive conversation with her, I began therapy, came out, and my narrator came out with me. Eight years separated the version I submitted in Sabina’s class and the one that landed on the desk of my editor, Caroline Bleeke. Collaborative editing helped each draft approach its final version. Fellow writer Andrew David MacDonald’s feedback helped the novel find the apt starting point. My agent Chris Clemans’s suggestions helped me emphasize the story’s key priorities and give minor characters fully realized arcs. From Caroline’s potent feedback, the novel’s final structure emerged, the one that felt the most organic to telling the story I intended. This novel was raised by a village.

What would you say are your major literary influences?
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which I read every year for my birthday, taught me how to write characters who inherit bleak worlds and still find room for wonder. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which includes comic-book stories alongside the main narrative, taught me how to incorporate myths alongside my novel’s main story. Douglas Stuart’s fiction [Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo] taught me how to construct well-rounded queer characters who are products of the family and class they’re born into.

An excerpt from The Sea Elephants

ARRIVAL

My father left the country the year my sisters were born. He returned six months after I watched them drown in the Bay of Bengal.

My sisters’ funeral dinner was scheduled to coincide with the day of his arrival. Some relatives came over that morning to participate in the ritual. When I got back home from school, I found them sitting cross-legged in the foyer: fifteen women, the henna on each left palm drying to a russet circle of mangoes and leaves. The air tingled with excitement. And I understood. My father was here.

At dusk, we all filed into our backyard. I was still in my school uniform. We formed a circle around a priest. He read aloud a Ganesha hymn, and we chanted after him. We sat down cross-legged. In front of each of us was a banana leaf that held a heap of lemon rice surrounded by small pools of lentils, aloo-gobi, mango chutney, and yogurt. We started eating in the light of paper lanterns that ran from Ma’s window past the well to the outhouse, their amber bellies glimmering against the slowly darkening sky. The lighthouse on the banks of the Bay of Bengal swept its illuminated arm across the evening at nine-second intervals.

I avoided looking at my parents. The priest stood in our midst and watched us eat. He rubbed his potbelly and grinned at anyone who made eye contact with him. I didn’t want to be grinned at, I certainly didn’t want to grin back, so I looked away from him as well.

Suddenly, Ma called out my name. “Shagun? Where are you?”

The conversations around us were suspended.

“Shagun?” she called again.

The woman to my left hollered, “Your son’s here.”

Ma dropped her head a little, leveled her eyes with mine, and asked, “Why won’t you respond when I call you, son?”

I cupped a palm around my ear and leaned toward her.

“This is your father,” Ma announced.

That was how, at the age of sixteen, I met the man who made me. His face was owlish, his hair salt-and-pepper. He had the build of a banyan; he dwarfed Ma who sat next to him.

Some guests started to clap their hands to their thighs. All their bangles jingled.

Ma swept an arm my way and said to my father, “Your son. A Mathur obviously.”

Laughter spilled from everyone’s mouths. And some food.

The conversations around us resumed. Ma kept shaking her head to brush aside the two locks of hair that kept falling onto her forehead. He blushed when he tucked them behind her ear, and my neck went hot.

After dinner, an aunt took me up the stairs and to my father. He was sitting on my mother’s bed. I clasped my hands and stood before him with my head bowed.

“Ay-hay, look at him,” she said, “feeling nervous to meet Daddy. That’s so cute.”

She laughed and clapped the back of my head. She closed the door as she left.

“You’re not to call me that,” my father said.

My throat ached. I wanted to gulp down a bottle of water.

“No Daddy-Papa business. You’ll call me Pita-jee,” he said. “Now come here.”

He held my head in cupped palms. He thumbed my eyebrows, ran a knuckle down my cheek, turned me around, placed his palm on my back, turned me again. He studied me slowly, head to toe, until his little lashes met.

“Are you asleep?” I asked. “Should I go?”

He laughed with his eyes closed and his shoulders shook. He picked me up, his sixteen-year-old, and put me on his lap. Four of his shirt buttons were open. He smelled of something pleasant and foreign. He pressed his cracked lips to my forehead, then opened his eyes. They were hazel like mine. The edges of his mouth curved downward.

Downstairs, Ma and our visitors sang bhajans as they cleaned the backyard and the kitchen, their voices punctuated by the dull clang of metal pans, by the mop’s wet slurp on the floor.

It was a mild October day so my uniform didn’t reek of dried perspiration; that felt like a small consolation. I leaned into my father and wrapped tentative hands around his shoulders. A hug would bring our reunion to its end, I thought, and he’d let me slip off his lap and go back to my room.

Instead, he pressed me to himself. He smothered my face against the wiry hair on his chest. His stubble scraped my forehead. He scrubbed my arms ferociously. His throat, as he cleared it, rumbled against my forehead. His embrace felt less like an act of affection, more like a punishment. Punishment for what I’d done.

I panicked and pressed my forearms to his chest and tried to place some distance between my body and his. When his tight grip frustrated my attempts, I raised my head and bit his ear.

Excerpted from The Sea Elephants by Shastri Akella. Copyright © 2023 by Shastri Akella. Used by permission of Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.