Volume 2, No. 10: Voices I'll Never Forget + Orange & Cinnamon Skillet Brownie

Greetings, book and treat people!

First, a bit of housekeeping: I’m going to keep the Books & Bakes birthday giveaway open for one more week! Two winners will receive a copy of any book I’ve recommended here—your choice. To enter, share this newsletter—forward it to a friend, share it on social media, or use the handy share button below. Then, make sure to let me know you’ve shared it by leaving a comment, tagging me on social, or replying to this email.

A few readers shared last week’s newsletter, but I have no way of knowing who. If it was you, and you’d like to be entered in the giveaway, please let me know!

This week’s books are all first-person narratives, and they’re all told with voices I will never forget. Each one of these books feels exactly like itself. They’re the sort of books that are so honest and true, so vivid and familiar, so exactly right, that they don’t feel like fiction. They just feel like life—even though one is about an owl-child and one is about a vampire.

I only ever write about books I love here, but these three are all contenders for my Best of 2022 list. I’ll never forget the voices of these characters. Each one pulled me into their story and would not let me go. What a rare and perfect pleasure, to sink so deeply into someone else’s world.

The Books

Backlist: Chouette by Claire Oshetsky (Fiction, 2021)

If you’ve been around here for a little while, you know I’ve been struggling to read science fiction and fantasy recently, despite my love for the genres. So I am deeply grateful to books like this one: weird and magical and fantastical, but grounded in the real world. My brain can handle stories like this. My brain delights in stories like this.

Longtime readers also know how much I’ve come to love Weird Queer, and friends, this novel is an absolute wonder of a weird queer book. It’s about a woman, Tiny, who gets pregnant via owl, and gives birth to an owl-baby. Here’s how it opens:

I dream I’m making tender love with an owl. The next morning, I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace. Two weeks later I learn that I’m pregnant.

You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl?

I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman.

What an opening! I’m rarely hooked on a book from the first paragraph but this one got me. Even better: it didn’t let me go. Tiny’s voice is like this throughout the rest of the novel: sharp and strange, direct, lonely, fierce. The imagery is astounding—detailed, precise, evocative. Tiny’s narration is full of longing. It’s funny and desperate. There’s a hunger in it, and an edge. And it’s emotional, visceral—Tiny’s life as the mother of an owl-baby is not easy, and the writing is spiky, painful, hot. But there’s also this wonderful matter-of-factness about it. Tiny relates the events of her life, extraordinary as they seem, with a calm certainty. It’s a fantastical book, but it doesn’t feel fanatical.

When her daughter is born an owl-baby, Tiny is the only one who sees her for who she is and doesn’t see anything wrong with it. Her husband is obsessed with “fixing” and “curing” Chouette. Tiny’s entire life becomes about protecting Chouette from a world that doesn’t understand her, that only sees her as wrong and broken. Tiny’s love for her daughter is massive, all-consuming. It’s also exhausting. Chouette speaks her own language. She eats raw meat. She’s a hunter. Tiny learns her daughter slowly, turning their home into a habitat for creatures for Chouette to hunt, taking her out into the woods at night. They build their own world together, though it’s under constant threat from Tiny’s husband and his family. It’s a struggle. Tiny is not good. Her love is not simple. She makes tons of mistakes. She doubts herself. She’s reckless, selfish, loyal. Oshetsky captures all these contradictions so beautifully:

The days keep coming. You keep on living. Inside me is a damp and complex geography, a sweaty expanse of mixed feelings, uncertainties, and regret: and all of these feelings spread out from my body like the vast Serengeti, full of dark and danger. The edges blur. The truth is, I have no idea how to be your mother.

I love everything about this novel, and most especially that yes, it’s a metaphor—or not a metaphor, exactly, but it’s a book about disability and queerness, about parents and children who do not fit into mainstream molds, about the violence of cure, about how much work it takes to keep the ableist world from winning. It’s a nuanced, multi-layered story about motherhood—how hard, how joyful, how absurd, how dangerous it is. It’s about mother-daughter relationships and how volatile and contentious they can be. It’s about loving people whole.

It’s also a wonderful story about a woman and her owl-baby. Chouette has talons and a beak. She’s violent, wild, not-human. Tiny once found joy and refuge in wild places; she had an owl-lover but gave her up to live in the world of husbands and houses. Oshetsky doesn’t play any tricks on you. The story is what it is: magical and real at the same time.

Frontlist: Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman (Fiction)

I started this on audio last night and finished it this morning. I would have listened to the whole thing in one sitting if I had started it just a little earlier in the day. It’s a quiet and beautiful novel, a queer and trans lover letter to fandoms and sci-fi, a gorgeous ode to ghosts and to the stories that live in our bodies. Sometimes a book just hits you in the heart and this one hit me. It’s so soft and so tender, heartbreaking and joyful.

Sol is a trans man who works as an archivist in San Francisco. He’s also a vampire—lots of people are. He’s been living in his basement office for five years, not really dealing with the realities of his condition. Then he meets Elsie, the widow of a somewhat-famous television writer and the creator of a sci-fi show that Sol was once obsessed with. Elsie brings her wife’s papers to the archive, and she and Sol are immediately drawn to each other. Their meeting shakes him awake.

This a trans love story that acknowledge queer and trans suffering without being about that suffering. This is something I’ve come to cherish in queer novels, and it’s one of the ways I know that a story is being told from the inside. There’s a vast difference between writing with honesty (and sometimes humor) about painful experiences, and glorifying or magnifying that pain. I don’t know how to explain the difference. It’s something I feel in my bones when I’m reading. I felt it immediately reading this book: a sense of safety, an unspoken and unshakable belief in the complexity of queer and trans lives.

The bulk of this novel consists of Sol and Elsie having conversations and having sex. It sounds banal, perhaps; it’s brilliant. It is so ordinary and so real. They talk about gender. They talk about their bodies. They talk about Sol’s vampirism, and Elsie’s wife, and sci-fi and fandoms and making art. They talk about fanfic, desire, transition, feminism. They talk about their past relationships. They talk about queer culture. They talk about Sol’s work. All of their conversation sound like conversations that I might have, that people I love might have. The sex scenes are the same—beautifully written, deeply queer.

Very little happens in this book. It’s a story about two people falling in love. There’s some outside conflict, and they both have their own emotional stuff going on, but there’s little conflict between them. Sol and Elsie come together and change each other. In reaching for each other, they find themselves—new pieces of themselves, old pieces of themselves. It reminded me a lot of Yerba Buena, another quiet queer love story that is breathtakingly real. I’m in awe of Fellman’s ability to make such a seemingly simple story feel so vibrant and immediate.

This isn’t a long book, and I didn’t want any more from it—it wasn’t missing anything. But I could have read it forever, just for the pleasure of Sol’s snarky voice and distinctly queer sense of humor. I could have listened to his narration for pages and pages and pages—his pain and bitterness, his slow opening, his love of music, his opinions about fandom and archives, his thoughts about transness, his coping mechanisms, his curiosity, his stubbornness, his care. He is so specific. I’m certain that if I saw him walking down the street (in the middle of the night, obviously), I’d recognize him.

The vampire mythology here is fascinating. There’s also a ton about archives—what archives are for, who they’re for, how they’re created, the similarities between archives and bodies. And there’s a lot about ghosts and death and memory, and how all of these things intersect. About what’s alive and what isn’t, and the differences between holding something and knowing it, recording something and living it. Fellman makes connections between ghosts and queerness, between transness and the way memories and ideas are held in archival collections. Through Sol, he ponders all the ways that life changes us, and the ways that we refuse to change. He asks a million questions about being a person in the world, having a gender, loving someone else. All of these things simmer beneath the surface as Sol and Elise go about their lives, as they fall in love. Every moment of this book feels as raw and precious as life itself: ordinary and extraordinary at once.

Upcoming: The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela (Fiction, Astra House, March 22)

This is one of those “Ah! I loved it so much! How do I review it! Just go read it already!” books. It’s my favorite, favorite kind of book: a contemporary queer novel about ordinary life. It’s not dramatic. It’s not grand. It’s a beautiful tapestry of ordinary moments, a collection of emotional messes. It’s about the small stuff, which is really the big stuff: conversations and casual friendships and dinners, car rides and sex, doing errands, sitting in hospital waiting rooms. It’s also, of course, about the big stuff: complicated family dynamics, first love, grief, marriage, aging, illness, capitalism, race.

Andrés is a gay Latinx man in his forties, a professor of public health, who returns to his suburban hometown for his 20-year high school reunion. His dad is sick, and he’s going through a rough patch with his husband, so he figures: why not? The visit, which turns into the longest amount of time he’s spent at home as an adult, forces him to confront not only his current life, but his past as well. He reconnects with his first boyfriend and his best friend from high school and reflects on how those relationships have shaped him. For the first time in a long time, he’s able to look at the place he grew up with something like clarity.

It’s such a specific story about growing up a queer brown kid in a mostly white suburb, about being the child of immigrants, about the grief of losing a sibling, and about revisiting old wounds in middle age. Andrés has such a distinct voice. He has a tendency to spiral. He’s incredibly observant and self-aware, which makes it painful, at times, to meander with him through his thoughts. He’s sometimes self-righteous. He hides behind humor, and it’s a humor that bites. Everything about the way he narrates his story feels so true, both specific to his particular desires and fears and experiences and identity, and also familiar, like he’s someone I might run into tomorrow at the grocery store.

Varela writes with so much detail and integrity, and so Andrés comes alive in every simple interaction, every banal moment: his annoyance with his hometown and the people who still live there, his love and exasperation with his family, his long-winded opinions about late-stage capitalism, what he turns into a joke and what he doesn’t. It’s a joy to read, and hard to look away.

But Varela also plays with POV in a way that makes the book feel expansive and symphonic. Though it’s mostly told in first person, there are alternating chapters in third person that capture the many intersecting lives and stories that make up the town. Varela dips into the POVs of Andrés’s parents, his brother, his first love, and various others. The additional POVs give the novel a sense of wholeness. It’s a book about what we hide from each other, about what happens underneath, about the stories we walk by on the street without noticing. Varela gives all those stories space, turning them into rich and meandering side journeys. The book is as much about the town as it is about Andrés, and yet, because it is also so focused on Andrés’s emotional life, it’s incredibly intimate. It’s a brilliant structure.

I’m often wary of books about high school reunions, or characters who lives have been defined by high school relationships, partly because my high school experience does not loom large in my life. I had intense relationships, sure, and formative experiences. But I don’t think about any of that anymore. It’s not present for me. And none of it present for Andrés, either, until he spends a while at home. Then it all comes tumbling back into the right now, and that’s what changes him, that’s the messy heart of the book. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel that so perfectly captures this truth: that people and events and places and moments from our past can matter immensely, even if we never think about them.

Near the end of the book, Andrés reflects: “Going home makes it impossible to forget the past, but it also ushers the past into the present, reconstructing it, making it easier to face.” Reading this took my breath away. Not everyone is haunted by their past, but we are all defined by our pasts. Our pasts are what make us. Our past selves are how we got to now. And sometimes the only way to figure out who we are—and who we want to be—is to return to where we came from. That’s the journey of this book: moving, funny, awkward, painful, warm, and so very queer.

It’s out next week and you can preorder it here.

The Bake

I know I just shared a brownie recipe a few weeks ago. But do I care? I do not. I love chocolate with orange, and I love chocolate with cinnamon. I’ve always thought chocolate, orange, and cinnamon would be a brilliant flavor combo. So I added orange zest and cinnamon to a brownie recipe, and discovered I was right: it is absolutely delicious. It’s spicy and citrusy and intense. The orange and cinnamon are both subtle, but they linger. It’s lovely.

Skillet Brownie with Orange & Cinnamon

Adapted from Jeanne McDowell via NYT Cooking

This brownie is rich and decadent, made even more so by the ganache. I didn’t mess much with the original recipe beyond adding orange and cinnamon, so if you’re not into those flavors and leave them out, you’ll have a more traditional but still delicious brownie.

Ingredients

For the brownie:

• 220 grams (1 cup) brown sugar

• 100 grams (1/2 cup) white sugar

• zest of two oranges

• 170 grams (1 1/3 cup) all-purpose flour

• 1/2 tsp baking powder

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 1 tsp cinnamon

• 170 grams (6 ounces) bittersweet chocolate, chopped

• 55 grams (4 Tbs) unsalted butter

• 1/2 cup olive oil (the original recipe calls for natural oil; I loved it with olive oil)

• 3 eggs

• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla

For the ganache:

• 170 grams (6 ounces) bittersweet chocolate, chopped

• 3/4 cup cream

• juice from 1-2 oranges

Heat the oven to 350. Butter a 10” cast iron or other oven safe skillet.

In a small bowl, combine both sugars and the orange zest. Rub with your fingers until the sugar is moist and fragrant. In another small bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon.

Bring a small pot of water to a simmer. Put the chocolate, butter, and oil in a heatproof bowl and set it on top of the pot. Stir frequently until the chocolate is melted. Remove from the heat and whisk in the sugar mixture.

Add the eggs to the chocolate mixture one at a time, whisking after each addition. Add the vanilla, and then the flour mixture, stirring until combined. Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 30-35 minutes. The top should be firm, but a tester inserted in the middle will yield a few crumbs. (I baked mine for 30 minutes; it was slightly underbaked but delicious.) Let cool completely in the pan.

To make the ganache: Put the chocolate in a heatproof bowl. Heat the cream until warm but not boiling; small bubbles should form around the edges of the pan. Pour the cream over the chocolate and whisk until smooth and shiny. Add the orange juice a little bit at a time. I used the juice from 1 1/2 oranges, but you can use as much or as little as you want, though if you use more than a few tablespoons it will thin out the ganache.

Let the ganache cool for 15-20 minutes, and then pour it over the brownie and smooth the top with an offset spatula. Allow the ganache to set before serving.

The Bowl and the Beat

The Bowl: Polenta with Sausage, Roasted Carrots, & Feta

Polenta is one of my favorite vehicles for making piles. It’s super quick and goes with just about anything. I’m especially fond of the sausage-polenta pairing; there’s something satisfying about the creamy polenta and the fatty sausage. But this dish is good with other combos, too.

For the polenta: combine three cups of water and one cup of polenta and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and continue to cook, stirring often, until it thickens, about 25 minutes. Once it’s done cooking, I like to stir in a chunk of butter, a bit of cheese, and some salt and pepper.

For the veg and sausage pile: Slice and sauté an onion. Cut 2-3 carrots into small half moons and add those to the pan. Cook on medium low heat until the carrots begin to soften. Slice a few of your favorite sausages and add those, along with any herbs or spices you want. I used a very flavorful lamb sausage and just added salt and pepper. Once the sausage is cooked through, add a big handful of chopped kale and stir it a few times until it wilts. Pile the veggies and sausage on top of the polenta, and top with feta (or any other cheese).

The Beat: The Reckless Kind by Carly Heath, read by Laura Knight Keating and Michael Crouch

This is an interesting YA novel set in Norway in 1904. It’s about a trio of queer teens who come together to form their own family after one of them is badly injured. The setting—small-town Norway—is so vivid, as are the three main characters. I love the way they interact with each other, how loving and tender they are with each other, how fiercely loyal. I’m also really into the emphasis on friendship. There’s a romantic relationship and several platonic ones, and the friendships are just as central as the romance. I’m a big fan of Michael Crouch, and I’m enjoying his narration, as always.

The Bookshelf

The Visual

These are all the books I’ve started in the past month! I’ve been enjoying reading books in fits and starts recently. I’m halfway through some of these, and only a few pages into others. But all of them are holding my interest, and it’s nice to have so many different kinds of books to choose from—there’s something for every mood.

Around the Internet

For Audiofile, I rounded up three audiobooks that tell complex Southern stories.

Bonus Recs Featuring Unforgettable Voices

It’s been years since I read it, but I will never forget the gruff and endearing voice of Bjartur—sheep farmer, weather-talker, and grumpy, endearing introvert—from Independent People by Halldór Laxness. And while I’ll likely never review it here because it’s so popular (rightfully so), Madeline Miller’s Circe is one of my favorite novels of all time, and it’s partly because of Circe’s singular voice. I’ve read it four times, and I expect to read it many more.

The Boost

• The 2022 Lambda Award finalists have been announced and I have never seen such incredible lists. Is it because I’m reading more queer books now than ever before? Because we are living in the Golden Age of Queer Lit? All I can say is that the finalists in basically every category are fire.

• Kristen Arnett on growing up closeted in Florida.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I’m still on the island, so it’s going to be the ocean for a while.

And that’s it unit next week! Catch you then.