Megan Doney, a literature and creative writing professor at Virginia’s New River Community College, is the winner of the 2024 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Nonfiction Prize. Some might think this is her time to celebrate, but the mere mention of celebrating might cause Doney disquiet. Here’s why: Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir is based on a 2013 school shooting that she survived while teaching at New River. Doney may have lived through the event, but the emotional scars remain, causing her to ponder, as she writes in Unarmed, if she will ever be “okay, fixed, healed.” 

Throughout Unarmed, Doney lays bare her soul, re-living the horrific day of terror that rained down on her college while also recounting other school shootings—far too many in fact: Sandy Hook, Columbine, Parkland, and Uvalde. She buttresses her recounting with startling statistics on gun violence, handily underscoring America’s irresponsible gun culture. 

Doney’s anger over the senseless shootings, including the one she lived through, and the lack of research on the post-shooting trauma that teachers live with, provided the impetus for Unarmed. She explains that surviving a shooting imbues the survivor with anxiety and depression—or survivor’s guilt. Here’s proof: During a three week span in March of 2019, two Parkland survivors took their own lives and the father of Sandy Hook victim also died by suicide. Doney suggests her own guilt partially stems from her directing her students to run out of her classroom, not to shelter in place, the recommended protocol: “I could have sent my students into a gauntlet of bullets from an unknown second assailant,” she writes. 

The author continues to transform her rage into research and volunteer work in an effort to “make sure that this will never happen to anyone ever again.” Her questions have taken her inside gun shows. During one such visit, she learned that, as recently as 2014 in Virginia, it was possible to purchase a gun, privately, without a background check. 

In 2018, Doney volunteered to organize a march for Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students during their nationwide tour to end gun violence. Doney accompanied them to the Virginia Tech Memorial, just 20 miles from her campus, that was built to honor the 32 students and teachers who were murdered at Virginia Tech in 2007. Doney reports that, unfathomably, the students, who had recently lost 17 classmates and teachers, received a flood of death threats from gun fanatics during this tour. 

Doney’s prose and facts are burnished and accurate. She writes distressing accounts of toddler-related gun deaths including the alarming data point that, in April 2016, “four toddlers killed other people with guns,” she writes before adding an aside: “In 2015, toddlers shot more people in the United States than did terrorists.” 

The disquieting issue of racial targeting and police shootings are also addressed in Unarmed. The author harkens back to the 2022 murder of Jayland Walker in Akron, Ohio. What began as a traffic stop ended with Walker being shot 46 times by police as he ran away from them. Doney reminds us that Walker, a Black man, was carrying a firearm legally (and that it was in the car, not on him, when he was shot and killed), and that every police officer walked free. She also reimagines the tragic murders of Michael Brown, Anthony Gray, and Breonna Taylor: “All of them Black. None of them injured another person. All were shot and killed by police.”

Before she taught at New River Community College, Doney was a Fulbright fellow in 2007 in South Africa, where she met her husband. It was also where she witnessed a government openly admit its transgression—specifically during years of apartheid‚ on public broadcast programs: “In South Africa … no one can say we didn’t know. A community should not wipe out a part of its past,” Doney writes in Unarmed. “[Here], we wrap words like liberty and freedom around the bodies of the dead and clean up the blood and make sure that you never have to look at them again.” Her message is clear: We need to do better. 

Throughout her book, Doney includes a lesson about Frankenstein. She and her students discuss Victor Frankenstein’s hubris in attempting to accomplish something extraordinary by creating the Creature. But when the Creature murders Victor’s brother and wife, Doney asks them: Who is liable? 

Her answer: “We are responsible for what we bring into this world.” Doney uses Mary Shelley’s masterpiece as a mirror for modern times: In 2012, Nancy Lanza legally bought her son Adam a cache of guns, including an AR-15 Bushmaster, in an effort to bond with him. On December 14, 2012, Adam shot and killed Nancy Lanza before murdering 26 people—including 20 children—at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Who bears the responsibility for that tragedy? Doney tries to find an answer in Unarmed.

Though she no longer calls D.C. home, writer Marissa Higgins knows her way around the District, where she lived in various Northwest neighborhoods from 2014 to 2020. The city even celebrated her work in 2020 with a grant for her nonfiction writing, which has appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, Salon, and Slate. Unfortunately, D.C. won’t get a starring role in Higgins’ fictional work until next year’s Sweetener, but her debut novel, A Good Happy Girl, published by Catapult in April, puts Higgins’ talents as a writer on full display. With its dynamically crafted plot, distinctive narrative arc, and unique characters, Higgins succeeds at accomplishing every author’s goal: projecting a clear image and propulsive story for her readers. 

The protagonist and unreliable narrator is Helen, a self-destructive young professional who goes through life in a cough syrup-induced haze staving off anxiety and malaise—detritus left over from her childhood. Although Helen’s emotional state is unsteady, three things are clear: She is a lesbian who enjoys hooking up with couples, her brother died mysteriously, and she can make money and garner attention through her side hustle: livestreaming her feet. 

Higgins quickly engages readers by giving us direct access to Helen’s frame of mind as she prepares for her first date with the married Catherine and Katrina: “I loaded up on decongestants to save my mind. I brushed my teeth, which, in bad spells, I only did a few nights a week.”

The foundation of A Good Happy Girl, set in Boston, is built around these dates. After the trio meet up at a cafe, where Katrina was “bundled in a white coat with fur at its collar,” they move to the couple’s home for another date. During each rendezvous the sexual exploration advances and the emotional attachment intensifies. Higgins conveys the throuple’s closeness and Helen’s insecure nature through a road trip to Katrina’s mother’s house in Maine. They also convene in Vermont, which provides the setting for an important development un the trio’s relationship and a defining moment for Helen.

The narrative turns darker through a series of phone calls and meetings with Helen’s imprisoned father, incarcerated for elder abuse of his mother: “He left his own mother alone for so long that her skin stuck to her reclining chair, her urine and feces forming a connective layer of rot,” Higgins writes. She creates a monstrous man who does not exhibit any love for his family—let alone his daughter. The only thing he desires is a character statement from Helen for the parole board. Her mother is an accomplice, but it is Helen’s father on whom Higgins focuses. 

Higgins continuously projects flawless images of her defective characters and her masterfully crafted sentences provide readers with a clear vision of A Good Happy Girl’s various settings. In describing a prison visit, Helen notes, “The visitor’s room was all cream walls and plastic folding tables and chairs. My father thumbed the circles under his eyes. His fatigue, like mine, grows purple. Mauve in the noon light.” Before a spontaneous visit with the wives, Higgins describes Helen’s mood: “Feeling disgusted with myself, ashamed of my dirtiness, I clipped my nails in the car. I was ovulating and my skin spurned grease.” 

Helen’s self-disgust is threaded throughout the novel: “I was getting the slam I really wanted, or close to it—confirmation I was meaningless, dismissible, impermanent. I was crying and I was feeling happy. Why don’t I matter?”

Higgins’ protagonist might remind some readers of Ottessa Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation who escapes life with a diet of sedatives and sleep. In Helen, Higgins has created a relatable character deeply traumatized by her parents. What sets both writer and character apart is the way in which Helen’s self-destructive nature and her desire for love and approval are depicted. It draws the reader in, making you wonder if Helen will find a way to stop hating herself.

With A Good Happy Girl, Higgins’ has established her extreme talent as a writer who understands the pain of a wounded soul.

In Universally Adored and Other $1 Dollar Stories, D.C. author (and actor) Elizabeth Bruce gives nearly three dozen reasons why a dollar bill can enrich a story. Her 33 microstories, like those of Haruki Murakami and Ottessa Moshfegh, are brief, feature a resolved plot, and occasionally a plot twist or a surprise. Sometimes the dollar is a symbol of love or hope. In other stories, the currency represents loss of innocence and misfortune. In all instances, Bruce’s dollar bills serve as the fulcrum of her tales, centering readers in stories featuring flawed, ordinary, and innocent characters. 

Bruce structures her book into five sections—Couples, Parents and Children, Brothers and Sisters, Known Associates, and Gathered Loved Ones. 

The second story, “Universally Adored,” is a story of love lost. Right away, we learn about the two ex-lovers, Fran, an artist, and Janine, who was not happy with Fran’s indolent lifestyle. Janine moved to Las Vegas because of Fran’s idleness. When Janine sends a postcard featuring Santa and a dollar bill on the cover, Fran draws a decorative facsimile of it, “sketching out the contours of the bill, penciling in the circles and rectangles and arcs before drawing George Washington himself.” She sends it to Janine to win her back with the note: “One perfect dollar … A masterpiece, universally adored (like you, my love).”   

“Ricky Steiner Was Supposed to Die in Prison” is a tender story about a wrongful murder conviction, and an unconditional love between a jailed father and his daughter. Bruce conveys the fact that a Sunday newspaper totals one dollar, but that paper just might contain information necessary for Steiner to get a second chance at life, so he can hug and dance with his daughter again. 

“Exact Change Only” is a story about two thieves—one of whom has just been paroled and is angry because his friend arranged a botched robbery. As they approach a toll road in Virginia, a split-second decision involving a dollar toll, which must be paid in exact change, just may send the culprit back to prison. 

In the intimate, one-page story “The Gutter,” a young girl’s silver dollar falls into the sewer. “Her life’s savings” may now be lost. She contemplates retrieving it. 

At first, “Mashed Potatoes” seems like an innocent story about a $1 bet between two girls flinging mashed potatoes: “First one [who] finishes slinging their mashed potatoes wins the war.” But Bruce masterfully creates an unexpected turnaround of events, conveying just how precious and short life can be. 

Bruce has a knack for writing about mundane events and people to whom we can instantly relate. Her simple sentences are laden with the imagery of both sentimental and painful life experiences. Her creation of the dollar bill as the hinge of the stories is impressive. To Bruce, it is more than a stock element, it becomes a plot device, accentuating the trajectory of the stories, traits of her characters, and the relationships they have with each other.    

Elizabeth Bruce’s Universally Adored and Other $1 Dollar Stories, published by Vine Leaves Press on January 30, is now available. elizabethbrucedc.com.

Temim Fruchter, who earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, College Park, is uber-talented, and she proves it in her debut novel, City of Laughter, an amalgam of sapphic love, family secrets, and Jewish folklore. The action begins when the protagonist, queer Jewish woman Shiva Margolin, develops an identity crisis at 31. To quell her quandary, she decides to go back to school for a master’s degree in Jewish folklore.  

Strained relationships, unfortunate circumstances, and 100-year-old family secrets propel the plot. In the beginning, we learn that Shiva’s father died of cancer, and that Shiva came out as queer toward the end of his life. Shiva’s father wanted to hear more about her lover, but her mother, Hannah, needed time to process the news, which is not a surprise because “things between [them] were not good,” Fruchter writes. In fact, “her relationship with her mother had largely come undone.” 

This tension is crafted perfectly throughout the book. It’s her father’s death, her tenuous relationship with her mother, and her devastating breakup with her first love that causes Shiva to slide into stasis. Her solution—to focus all her energy on studying Jewish folklore.

After Shiva is accepted into New York University’s program, her adviser, Mel Rosen, explains that she must narrow her scope of study, so she lands on the mysterious Russian Jewish writer S. An–sky, author of The Dybbuk, a play Shiva discovered through her father. She is obsessed with the mysterious author and his 100-year-old story: “She’d wanted to follow An-sky wherever he led her, and here he was, leading her directly and emphatically to Warsaw.” 

She receives a grant to travel to Poland. Leaving her life in Brooklyn behind, she updates her location on her dating app profile and begins texting with a woman called G, whom Shiva hopes to meet in Warsaw. 

Preoccupied with G and An-sky, Shiva travels to Warsaw. There she meets El and attends a gay porn party. She emails updates to Rosen while continuing to try and meet the elusive G. With El, Shiva departs for Ropshitz where she hopes to get a better understanding of her great-grandmother Mira. Though Shiva’s mother and grandmother rarely discuss Mira, we learn about the matriarch before Shiva arrives in Poland through haunting 100-year-old epistles Mira wrote to an “L,” which describe a horrific attribute she possessed. 

In one dispatch, dated Dec. 6, 1920, Mira wrote: “My name is Mira Wollman, I live on the Jewish street in Ropshitz, Poland … I am afflicted, and also in danger.” 

In March 1921, Mira warned L that her laugh “is no regular laugh. It is a piercing thing, a screaming witch’s cackle straight from [her] gut.” 

In May 1921, she wrote that her laugh “had teeth and fur, a sound that bit and caught at the air.” 

Mira, with her witch’s cackle, is one of the many fascinating women in City of Laughter. Another enigmatic character Fruchter creates is Shiva’s grandmother, Syl, who believed she could communicate with birds. It’s Syl who dubbed Ropshitz the City of Laughter—paying “homage to the proud line of badchanim, or Jewish wedding jesters, who’d come from that place.”

As she explores her family history, Shiva also develops a deeper understanding of An-sky. She uncovers 100-year-old reviews of The Dybbuk and we learn—through Shiva’s research—that dybbuks “were often restless male spirits that entered the bodies of women … with unfinished business,” ready to disturb a community. The reviews say “Warsaw … was possessed.” She, and us with her, also learn that An-sky’s sexuality was never known.

The author uses Mira’s letters, emails from Shiva to her professor, and text messages between her and G to create a multivocal chorus of voices—past and present—to engage the reader and it works.

Fruchter’s ingenuity is on full display when she writes about a Jewish myth, the ritual of which Shiva’s mother performed 39 years ago on her 16th birthday. Teenage Hannah believed that if she slept with her window open, hid a piece of challah bread under her pillow, heated a piece of challah with a candle’s flame, and with her candle looked into her mirror at midnight, she would see her future husband. When she performed the ritual, Hannah saw not a man but a green-eyed lady staring back at her. Subsequently, both mother and daughter encounter mysterious green-eyed women, similar to that original image in Hannah’s mirror, throughout the story. 

Throughout City of Laughter, Fruchter entices her readers by creating formidable and interrelated forces. With her intergenerational debut novel, uniquely blending queerness, Jewish spirituality, and generational silence, Fruchter manages to captivate us on every page.

City of Laughter, the debut novel from former D.C. resident and University of Maryland, College Park, grad Temim Fruchter, will be published on Jan. 16 by Grove Press.

Fruchter will discuss her novel at 7 p.m. on Jan. 24 at Loyalty Books’ Petworth location. temimfruchter.com.

I knew Jackie Robinson was the first Black athlete to play in the Major Leagues in the modern era, and I knew Althea Gibson broke the color barrier in professional tennis, but I was not familiar with Wilmeth Sidat–Singh, the first Black star athlete at Syracuse University—and I am a Syracuse grad. This changed thanks to Scott Pitoniak and Rick Burton’s Invisible No More, a historical novel about the two-sport superstar. 

The book, released on Dec. 5 during the 80th year anniversary of Sidat-Singh’s death, begins in 2000 in Upstate New York where Black sports reporter Breanna Shelton covers a medal ceremony for Charles Williams, one of the Tuskegee Airmen (a fighter pilot squadron of Black pilots active during World War II). Charles, who flew alongside Wilmeth, persuades Breanna to write about the Syracuse athlete. After convincing her editor to greenlight a series on him, Breanna visits Charles’ home to obtain source material, which includes letters to Wilmeth from boxer Joe Louis, and musicians Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. At this moment, Shelton realizes the importance of introducing Wilmeth to readers. 

Through Breanna, a fictionalized character used as a narrative device to tell Sidat-Singh’s story, we learn that Wilmeth grew up in Jim Crow D.C. His father died when he was 7, and his mother, Pauline, was a secretary at Howard University where she met her second husband, Samuel Sidat–Singh, a Howard med student of Indian descent.

Samuel moved the family to Harlem, and Wilmeth began to hone his basketball skills at the neighborhood YMCA, where members—including Calloway’s son Mercer—were in awe of his talents that “went beyond his God-given physical abilities.” Wilmeth made the Daily News all-city team, making him one of the first Black athletes to earn all-city honors in a daily  newspaper. This accolade earned him a scholarship to Syracuse University. 

Bigotry runs through the book as a theme, especially when Wilmeth, known as the “Manhattan Hindu” because of his light skin and last name, arrives on Syracuse’s campus in 1935, where he’s forbidden to live. He’s chased by security guards, profiled by professors, and shunned by administrators. But football coach Roy Simmons Sr. sees something special in him. During an intramural football game, Wilmeth throws a 50-yard pass, inspiring Simmons to convince the talented athlete to play football for the Orange.

Wilmeth worries about how the community will receive him as the only Black person on the roster, but Simmons has an idea: Let Wilmeth continue to “pass” as Indian, which he does while leading the team to key wins over rivals Cornell and Penn State. Along the way, he earns praise from legendary sports writer Grantland Rice. On the basketball court, the coaches marvel at Wilmeth’s “no-look pass” and the way he plays like “a magician forever in search of new tricks.” 

But things change on Oct. 23, 1937, when the Washington Tribune outs Wilmeth in its story: “NEGRO TO PLAY U OF MARYLAND; THEY CALL HIM A HINDU.” Wilmeth gets benched because Maryland “[doesn’t] play against Negroes.” Although devastated, he finished his career at Syracuse as a bona fide two-sport star, earning a diploma in 1939.

The book’s authors follow him postgraduation as he moves back to D.C. to play semiprofessional basketball. But when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, he says “playing professional basketball seemed pretty insignificant.” Wilmeth signs up to be a Tuskegee Airman.

The authors stay attuned to Wilmeth’s pain, and we plummet with him into the nightmare of the Selfridge Air Field in Michigan where he “could smell the racism in the air” and where “Wilmeth hated thinking white maintenance men or ground crew would even consider purposely damaging a plane such that it might kill the pilot.” Prophetically, on May 9, 1943, at the age of 25, Wilmeth Sidat-Singh’s plane failed, forcing him to parachute into Lake Huron where he drowned.

Through the authors, we recognize Wilmeth’s nationwide impact—Louis arranged for an Arlington Cemetery burial where celebrities such as Calloway and Ellington paid their respects. We also learn that Syracuse retired Wilmeth’s basketball jersey in 2005. Prompted by the college’s chief diversity officer Kumea Shorter–Gooden, the University of Maryland made a public apology at the 2013 Maryland-Syracuse football game. Shorter-Gooden tells Breanna: “What happened to Wilmeth Sidat-Singh is an example of the worst of America’s racial history.” 

The authors create a scenario where Breanna’s articles about Wilmeth go on to win many awards, catapulting her to a position at the Washington Post where she becomes one of the first Black women columnists at a major newspaper. In the book, she, too, struggles with racial discrimination throughout her career, an acknowledgement that inequality still exists today. I am hopeful that the authors’ in-depth research and imaginative prose in Invisible No More will create the earned respect for Wilmeth Sidat-Singh and establish his place among the pantheon of great Black athletes.

Invisible No More, by Scott Pitoniak and Rick Burton, was released on Dec. 5 by Subplot Books.

In my opinion, every season is reading season, but there’s something about fall that makes you want to nestle down with a good book and a good drink. And with the new season comes an abundance of new books all vying for your attention. Below, City Paper’s book critics have dug into some upcoming and recent releases with local ties that span genres and styles to give you a head start on your fall reading list. It’s also another reminder that great things come from D.C. —Sarah Marloff

Her Own Happiness by Eden Appiah-Kubi

Release date: Sept. 5, via Montlake Romance

Genre: Romance

From Amazon Publishing’s Montlake romance imprint comes Her Own Happiness, a cheerful sophomore effort from the D.C.-born Maryland native Eden Appiah–Kubi, loosely inspired by Jane Austen’s Emma. (Appiah-Kubi’s first novel, 2021’s The Bennet Women, also bears the imprint of another, even better known, Austen classic.) In Her Own Happiness, best friends Maya, a plus-size, pansexual artist, and Ant, an asexual lover of plants and nature, exemplify the beauty and strength of platonic Black love … at least, at first. But can their blossoming, romantic feelings survive the machinations of celebrity “girlboss for good” Emme Vivant, who sets Maya in her mentorship sights?

Emma is perhaps more of a launching pad for Her Own Happiness than a direct blueprint. If Austen is an arch, at times cynical, witness to societal foibles, Appiah-Kubi is perhaps the sweeter sister, critical of class inequality but earnest and broadly optimistic when it comes to human behavior. All the same, Austen fans will seize on the references; in (fictional) coverage, Vivant is described by Washingtonian as “handsome (WTF?), clever, and rich,” while Maya muses, “Truth was, there’s no perfect place for a Black queer woman, especially one without a small fortune.” 

At heart, Her Own Happiness is a cozy, good-natured tale of love and friendship, following characters who do not define themselves by their hip body piercings or artsy tattoos but, rather, through kindness toward others. Appiah-Kubi combines escapist descriptions of fashion and travel with an honest look at how so many of our lives have been shaped by COVID-related isolation and uncertainty. Residents of the DMV will delight in regionally specific callouts, including Rock Creek Park, Takoma Park, and Washington City Paper (hey, that’s us!). —Annie Berke

Unreliable Narrator by Aparna Nancherla

Release date:  Sept. 19, via Viking Press

Genre: Memoir 

Who am I to hold forth on comedian Aparna Nancherla’s new essay collection Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome? This debut book is an insightful, savvy read. It recognizes up front that “impostor syndrome—like probiotic yogurt—does primarily get marketed toward women and minorities.” Clearly, Nancherla’s wholesome and society-critiquing voice deserves the pop cultural space to be understood as panoramically human. “I’ll never find all the answers. But there’s meaning in trying, and meaning can be everything,” she writes.

Now based in Los Angeles, the D.C.-born, McLean-raised Nancherla was perceived by her physician parents and older sister as a shy, passionate kid who didn’t quit, who first told jokes in public at an open-mic night in Tysons. She turned 30 before her first big break as a writer-performer on the 2012–2013 TV show Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell. With her ever-bigger jobs and personality-specific opportunities that followed, she explains, “Every day was Take Your Doubter to Work Day!” 

Deemed a “unicorn” in show business, Nancherla has built a versatile career as a second-generation Indian American woman who leans into onstage jokes about treating her anxiety and depression. “I think it’s hard, in comedy, or in any field maybe, to not have people put you in a box,” she said in a 2017 interview with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. “But I don’t think of myself as ‘the Mental Health Comic.’” 

Her wide-ranging book also delves into her creative process, being online, and finding love that feels like home, as well as filler bits of uneven quality. Some major pieces stay on thematic task by dissecting her experiences through an informed lens of destigmatizing all mental illnesses. While documenting her eponymous topic was “an extremely agitating and disorienting process,” Nancherla stays brave because she can. “Being completely, painfully honest is the only worthwhile place I know to begin,” she writes. “Life can so often be a grotesque maze of smoke and mirrors.” 

Everybody hurts, even as the era shapes any humor in our public responses to that private fact. Way back in 2012, Nancherla tweeted, “Any pizza can be a personal one if you cry while you eat it.” Seemingly reasonable self-doubt in a world this duct-taped may indeed be an unreliable narrator. But that voice inside, the one that wants to dream and do, is reliable. It’s all we’ve got.  —Diana Michele Yap

Scenic Overlook by Anne Ray

Release date: Oct. 1, via Awst Press

Genre: Fiction, Novel-in-stories

Recalling a childhood memory of her father digging in the front yard, the protagonist of Anne Ray’s evocative Scenic Overlook explains, “I think of that day now and half of it has the flatness of looking into a television, a projection. The other half has the roundness, sharpness, of looking through a telescope.” This novel-in-stories from independent, Austin-based Awst Press follows Katie, a college dropout with a bone-deep loneliness and a penchant for wandering, as she grows up, moves away, and makes various homes for herself in the American West. Scenic Overlook, as the title suggests, is more about what Katie sees than who she is, and her desire to become more than an absence, a void, in her own life, carries across the book’s 13 chapters. 

Of these installments, “Answering Machine” stands out as a topical treatment of abortion that delves deeply into the intricacies of women’s friendships. Of her relationship with her friend Yahlie, with whom she lives and shares not just expenses but emotional intimacy, Katie says, “These days we’re more like two pioneer women who’d met face to face on the Oregon Trail and became traveling companions after losing their wagon trains in a snowstorm.” 

Characters like Yahlie and Katie’s brother, Danny, are delicately rendered; together with the snapshot quality of the collection and the reflective quality of the narration, Scenic Overlook reads more like a memoir than a novel. An Elliott City native currently working as a digital archivist of radical and historical press materials, Ray has produced a skillful debut that will appeal to readers and viewers of Into the Wild and Nomadland. —Annie Berke

Company by Shannon Sanders

Release date: Oct. 3, via Graywolf Press

Genre: Short stories

D.C.-area writer Shannon Sanders won the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers with her story “The Good, Good Men.” It’s a stunner of a piece, an exploration of the growing distance between two brothers as they prepare to run off yet another opportunistic boyfriend from their mother’s life. The story was originally published in Puerto del Sol’s Black Voices Series in 2019, and it’s the opener for her new short story collection, Company, that comes out from Graywolf Press on Oct. 3.

“The Good, Good Men” is the perfect introduction to Sanders’ writing. Her voice and style are reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout and Deesha Philyaw, with her beautiful, layered plotlines and character-based world building. This is not a loud collection, but instead a deeply moving one. The stories are linked, the feel almost novel-like, with every character offered the chance to step into the spotlight. Each story becomes a hero’s tale—even characters we were sure, earlier on, were the villains. Sanders’ craft is precise, her writing absolutely gorgeous, but it’s this care and love for the flawed humans she’s created that captures our hearts as we read. Her work is quietly propulsive, the collection a fast, often funny read despite its thorny subject matter. Families are complicated, loving, and sometimes even terrible, Sanders shows us, but also funny as hell.

We’re right there with her the entire time. It’s not hyperbole to say that I laughed, cried, and was completely devastated by the end of this collection. I’d fallen so in love with this world, and with Sanders’ writing, that it was very hard to put Company down. (Sanders will read from Company at 7 p.m. on Oct. 12 at Politics and Prose.) —Hannah Grieco

Bad Questions by Len Kruger

Release date: Oct. 3, via Washington Writers’ Publishing House

Genre: Fiction

Novels that are very funny and truly sad are rare, but Washington metro area writer Len Kruger’s Bad Questions is one. Set in Silver Spring and Rockville, Maryland, in the late 1960s, it traces the mistakes, confusion, and above all questions of seventh grader Billy Blumberg, whose father, his Hebrew school principal, has just committed suicide. It’s impossible to read this book and not get frustrated with Billy—the way you get frustrated with any stubborn adolescent, especially one who won’t stop asking questions that turn into, and turn their answers into, pretzels. “I could think of plenty of questions,” Billy tells the reader. “I was the Albert Einstein of questions. They came to me when I blinked my eyes, when I heard houses settling and telephones ringing, when I shoveled macaroni and cheese into my mouth.”

But then, given the strangely unexpected plot, it is really very fitting that this kid would make so many unlikely inquiries. To avoid a spoiler, all I’ll say is that the plot involves a junior high teacher, who tells her class, “At some point in your lives your minds will snap. All of you. Do you understand? Snap. Crackle. Pop … You—each and every one of you—will enter the Kingdom of Madness. It may be for the briefest of seconds. It may be for a week. It may be for a year … But it will happen … And there’s not a thing you can do about it.”

This somewhat crazed teacher delivers this oration at the novel’s beginning, then pops up later, weirder than ever, and alters the course of Billy’s interior life. He also gets into trouble, but that’s to be expected of a solitary, introverted, somewhat wacky teenager, whose very depressed father has just killed himself. Suicide looms over the book and, naturally, Billy’s entire life. Indeed, the novel begins with Billy lighting his father’s yahrzeit, the candle in memory of the dead, and ends with it. In between, the story is filled with narrator Billy Blumberg asking, as always, lots of questions. —Eve Ottenberg

Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession by  Laurence Leamer

Release date: Oct. 10, via G.P. Putnam’s Sons

Genre: Biography 

In Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession, Washington, D.C.-based author Laurence Leamer (Capote’s Women) peels away the glamour of Hollywood to detail the director’s troubling relationships with eight high-profile blonds who starred in his movies. These actors include Ingrid Bergman (Notorious), Grace Kelly (Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief), Janet Leigh (Psycho), Kim Novak (Vertigo), Eva Marie Saint (North by Northwest), Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie), Madeleine Carroll (The 39 Steps), and June Howard-Tripp (The Lodger).

Readers unfamiliar with Alfred Hitchcock’s methods will learn about his obsession with these women and, explicitly, how he controlled every aspect of their lives including what they wore and how they styled their hair. On set, Hitchcock made his stars uncomfortable. During the filming of Vertigo, he placed a plucked chicken inside Novak’s dressing room, and he bombarded Hedren with dirty jokes throughout a lunch date. But he really crossed the line when he made “a sexual proposition so unspeakably crude that for the rest of her life [Tippi] could not even repeat his words,” Leamer notes in the book.

Leamer also guides readers through the actors’ personal lives starting with Bergman’s divorce from Petter Lindström and her marriage to Italian director Roberto Rossellini. He then delves into Novak’s battle with bipolar disorder and Kelly’s marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco. 

Hitchcock was a master craftsman, but his seedy behavior, which would not be tolerated today, diminishes his accomplishments. Hitchcock’s actions, which Leamer so astutely documents, would make a cogent horror film—no editing required.  —Wayne Catan

Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away, edited by Hannah Grieco

Release date:  Nov. 14, via Alan Squire Publishing

Genre: Short stories

There’s something deeply human about the urge to run away. We all, at one point or another, have longed for escape—be it from the mundane, the stress, or the fear that exists in our daily lives. Those feelings are captured succinctly, and sometimes beautifully, in the new release of short stories from Alan Squire Publishing. Edited by City Paper contributor Hannah Grieco, Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away is a compact collection, totaling just over 200 pages, which means most of the aforementioned 40 stories are on the extreme end of short. Though the quick reads make it difficult for the reader to submerge themselves in, they offer brief moments of that craved escapism: We can run away in these pages and come back however quickly we like.

The collection features 40 writers (for the 40 stories), including local fiction author Amber Sparks, whose 2020 short story collection And I Do Not Forgive You was named a best of the year by NPR and the Washington Post; Aubrey Hirsch, whose byline frequently appears in my email via Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and Lyz Lenz’s Men Yell At Me newsletter. Hirsch’s story in Already Gone is a haunting and sexually gruesome reimagining of the biblical tale of Lot’s wife; like the bruises mentioned in the pages, the story lingers. However, it’s Deesha Philyaw’s “Mother’s Day” that stands out most for me. Author of the debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (being adapted for television with Tessa Thompson executive producing), Philyaw’s short is a beautiful story of a mother choosing herself over her adult children. It pulls you into the bright colors of Miami and offers thoughts on family and commitment that are worthy of reflection. If you long for a quick kind of escapism, this collection is for you. —Sarah Marloff

In the introduction of A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers, the anthology’s editor, Joyce Carol Oates, writes that women mythical figures such as “Scylla and Charybdis, Lamia, Chimera, Sphinx [are] nightmare creatures representing, to the affronted male gaze, the perversion of ‘femininity’: … the female who in her physical being repulses sexual desire.” These monsters have rejected their function in a patriarchal society as submissive and subordinate, creating distress for men accustomed to patriarchal rule. The 15 writers in A Darker Shade of Noir—including Elizabeth Hand, Margaret Atwood, and Aimee Bender—traverse categories (existential, grotesque, supernatural) to immerse us in the bodies and minds of women who reject cultural expectations. The characters also wrestle with their identities and fight for equality in a male-dominated society. 

In “The Seventh Bride, or Female Curiosity,” Hand, a Catholic University graduate, writes a grisly version of the Bluebeard folktale. Hand’s telling is set in 19th-century London at the Royal Camden Theatre. Frotteur Georgie Pye plays Bluebeard in a stage production, and Livey is a late replacement as his seventh bride, a dangerous role because five actresses who previously worked with Georgie departed the theater in compromised conditions due to Georgie’s aggressive, unprofessional behavior. “Doris had left because she was with [Georgie’s] child,” Hand writes.

She creates a macabre scene where the director buys three (real) skeletons “from a resurrection man,” to represent half of Bluebeard’s six wives. One had a “marbled brown and black” leg bone; another had a glass eye, and the third was draped in a wedding dress. But it was “The sixth and last bride [that] terrified Livey more than the others combined. It resembled a real woman who had recently been alive.” Hand masterfully tackles all elements of a horror story with an eerie setting and using the subsequent friction between Georgie and Livey to drive the conflict. 

Bender’s “Frank Jones” is a prime example of body horror. She sets her characters—four run-of-the-mill employees—in a basement computer lab where they toil away in a mundane existence. One of those laborers is Taylor Jones, a loner, who, in college, began ripping off skin tags from her hip and storing them in a cup until it was full. Inspired by an artist who fashioned a bird from his fingernails and glue, Taylor sews her skin tags into a “person-like shape with tag arms, and tag legs, tag head, about the size of [her] thumb.” She names her friend Frank Jones, as a tribute to Frankenstein. Forever the recluse, Taylor brings Frank Jones to work and places him on her coworkers’ desks, giving them nightmares. One coworker, however, is so inspired that he creates his own “hair creature.” Bender’s unforgettable and surreal tale meshes the supernatural with the quotidian to emphasize equality in the workplace and show just how boring our nine to five jobs can be. 

In “The Chair of Tranquility (From The Diary of Mrs. Thomas Peele, Trenton, New Jersey, 1853),” Oates lends her storytelling skills to the collection. She writes, in diaristic prose, a terrifying tale about a woman (Mrs. Peele) whose husband checked her into an asylum because she was disfiguring her face. Her “beauty [however] was not [hers] to destroy… [it was] the possession of her husband,” Oates describes. In the asylum, “at all times, warm-wetted sheets” bound her just like the male-dominated society in which she lived. According to her journal, Mrs. Peele was secured to The Chair of Tranquility for an entire day and forced to obey chauvinistic edicts such as “I will not read for a period of 6 to 8 weeks. I will not write for a period of 6 to 8 weeks …  I will not speak for a period of 6 to 8 weeks.” Mrs. Peele was also force-fed in the hope that she would bear an heir. According to historical records, real-life doctor Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) administered this type of “rest cure” for women who defied their female role in society, Oates write in the introduction. Her ability to fictionalize Mitchell’s madness is exceptional.

It is fitting that 15 of our most respected women authors write the stories collected in A Darker Shade of Noir because the body horror category, a subgenre of horror and fantasy, “speaks most powerfully to women and girls,” Oates writes in the introduction. Cloaked in these stories are themes of powerlessness and loss of identity like in Atwood’s “Metempsychosis, or The Journey of the Soul,” in which the protagonist shares her body with a snail, prompting the woman to audit her self-worth. A Dark Shade of Noir will appeal to a variety of readers, especially fans of gothic horror and supernatural authors like Brian Evenson and Shirley Jackson. 

Akashic Books’ A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, comes out Sept. 5. akashicbooks.com. Hardcover, $29.95. 

Thomas Mallon, the D.C.-based author of 2012’s Watergate and 2019’s Landfall, understands the nuances of historical fiction. He knows the key to this genre is to realistically recreate historical events and personages. He achieved this in his previous works and accomplishes this in his latest novel, Up With the Sun, in which Mallon fictionalizes the botched robbery and murder of Dick Kallman, a former Broadway and TV star. 

The novel opens on Feb. 23, 1980, the day after Kallman’s death, with the description of the murder scene: “God almighty! I saw this ultrasharp black-and-white image of Dick, in one of those Louis XV chairs … one side of his head pristine and the other side exploded.”

Steven Szladek, Kallman’s live-in lover, is situated, dead, next to Kallman, in their apartment on New York City’s Upper East Side, where they ran a fledgling antiques business. From here, Mallon’s prose thrums with nostalgia and anticipation.

The narration alternates between pianist Matt Liannetto’s first-person telling and a third-person omniscient voice. Liannetto, who met Kallman on Broadway, was at Kallman’s apartment the night of the murder, so he is a reliable narrator. Patiently, the pianist offers vital information about the police investigation, explains why Kallman was not a trustworthy friend, and introduces readers to some acquaintances. In several tender moments, Mallon writes about Liannetto’s relationship with police clerk Devin Arroyo. In the odd chapters, beginning with the very first chapter, Mallon turns back the clock to focus on Kallman’s career and social life starting in 1951. By pivoting between past and present with every other chapter, Mallon creates an echo chamber, helping us enjoy the bygone years of Hollywood and centering us directly in the middle of a murder mystery. 

Kallman was a Lucille Ball protege who appeared in several Broadway shows, including 1951’s Seventeen, which starred Kenneth Nelson, and 1965’s Half a Sixpence. On TV, he played Hank Dearborn on the sitcom Hank. The author moves the plot with many examples of Kallman’s imbroglios with friends and by weaving in Kallman’s obsession with Nelson, the handsome Seventeen actor, as well as Kallman’s reactions to Nelson’s constant rejections. On one occasion, Kallman tries to dish an unfavorable story about Nelson to a Hollywood Reporter columnist, but the journalist rebuffed the novice move. On another occasion, we read about Kallman smashing Dyan Cannon’s fingers during a performance because she was outshining him. “[By 1971] Dick had pretty much stopped wondering, since he pretty much had the answer … nobody who knew him, liked him,” the third-person omniscient voice tells readers. Nelson confirms Kallman’s belief through an epistle to our narrator, Liannetto: “I’m sorry I can’t write more about Dick. I disliked him for all the obvious reasons that most people did.” 

Mallon’s perceptive knowledge of New York and Hollywood takes us inside Broadway venues such as the Broadhurst Theatre and the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon Theatre), and across the country to the Beverly Hilton ballroom for a Golden Globes ceremony, and dinner at West Hollywood restaurant Dan Tana’s where Kallman picked up a busboy. Mallon also writes about Rounds, a popular gay bar Arroyo frequents to obtain tips about Kallman and his lover’s murder. 

Portions of the book introduce us to the three suspects and take us inside the police precinct and courtroom where the accused are tried for the murder and robbery. Before the trial though, the detective creates a vocal lineup for Liannetto. Composed of three policemen and a suspect standing behind a wall separating them from Liannetto, the detective prompts each person to speak in hopes that Liannetto can identify the killer’s voice. It is an important police tactic since the pianist did not see the killer’s face the night of the murders. But we’re warned: It is “something a little unusual,” and may not work in court. During the trial, however, the defendants are obsessed with an expensive pin Liannetto wears. This pin, which Kallman originally bought for Nelson, “was all [the killers] were after” the night of Feb. 22, 1980.

Because Mallon’s narrative moves shoulder to shoulder, it provides us with a glance into two different eras—mid-1900s show business and the 1980s grittiness of New York City. Mallon deftly creates an unlikable character in Kallman, brings in luminaries like Ball and Johnny Carson to further entrench us in the inner workings of show business, and creates an incident that just may help us understand why Kallman could not foster healthy relationships. For some, 1980s New York is almost synonymous with an epidemic. By the end of the book, we’re introduced—through Liannetto’s own declining health—to the scourge that would soon ravage bodies and spread through the queer communities of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco at a rapid pace. At the time, 1981, the disease was known as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, despite the reality that anyone can contract HIV) and it “felt more like a hallucination than a diagnosis.” Though there are a lot of sad incidents in the book, Mallon juxtaposes several uplifting moments to create a compelling page-turner. 

Up With the Sun by Thomas Mallon comes out via Knopf Publishing on Feb. 7. Hardcover, 352 pages.

When southern journalist and raconteur Julia Reed (New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Garden & Gun) lost her battle with cancer in 2020 at the age of 59, scores of people mourned her death. Not only because she was an engaging and witty writer, but because Reed was a selfless friend. Her essays in Dispatches from the Gilded Age: A Few More Thoughts on Interesting People, Far-Flung Places and the Joys of Southern Comforts give readers a sense of Reed’s selfless devotion to her cohorts. But it also showcases her strengths as a writer, including her ability to mesh her southern roots with superb reportage skills, while her knack for fashioning fluid sentences make her subjects come alive.

It all started in 1980 during Reed’s sophomore year at Georgetown University. She received a phone call from her editor at Newsweek, where she was working part time, informing her that Jean Harris, the headmistress of the Madeira School, located just outside D.C., had shot her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, aka the “Scarsdale Diet” doctor, in his home in Purchase, New York. Reed immediately bolted to the school (her alma mater) to cover the story, and at 19, the Mississippi native secured her first byline. That story and many more are compiled in Dispatches from the Gilded Age. 

In a lengthy story for Vogue, “Witness at the Execution,” Reed shadows 54-year-old nun Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, made famous by the film starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon. Reed writes honestly about Prejean, a “hilarious powerhouse of a woman with a heavy Louisiana accent and no habit who laughs all the time unless she is talking serious business.” Reed takes us inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary to experience the despair that death row prisoner Robert Wayne Sawyer felt the night of his execution. We learn about his crime (murder), his final meal (“two bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, french fries, a strawberry milkshake, and chocolate pie), and we are with Reed when the lights flicker outside Angola. Prejean was impressed with Reed because she visited the murder victims’ families, was not afraid to discuss the politics of capital punishment, and showed interest in every aspect of the death penalty abolitionist’s compelling book.

In another piece for Vogue, Reed introduces the Bush twins Jenna and Barbara to the world in a piece titled “Sister Act.” Reed first encounters the twins at a hotel on Central Park South where they try on designer clothes for a photo shoot. Barbara goes for a Zac Posen dress while Jenna opts for a pair of Joe’s Jeans. The article showcases Reed’s natural talent to put her subjects at ease—whether it is a nun fighting for a man’s life or the First Daughters making their media debut. We learn that Barbara, then at Yale, is quieter than Jenna, who graduated from the University of Texas. We learn that the sisters use adjectives like “awesome” and “hilarious,” and that they love Mexican food. At the time, Jenna had a dream of starting her own charter school while Barbara was inspired to help children in Africa afflicted with AIDS. And Reed ensures that readers understand the main point of her feature: “[The] First Daughters will serve to humanize and soften the image of a controversial wartime president.” 

We continue to experience Reed’s talents in features about Madeleine Albright, her trip to Africa, and “Cooking Through Covid” (Garden & Gun), in which we learn that she enjoys cooking for her friends most—not just simple dishes, but spatchcock chicken and homemade corned beef. In another piece for Garden & Gun, she displays here keen ear for country music with a first-person account of Willie Nelson’s 86th birthday tribute concert. Reed and her mother were treated to Nelson’s sons belting out “A Song for You,” Jamey Johnson singing “Georgia on My Mind,” and Nelson and Kris Kristofferson performing “Me and Bobby McGee.” “Kris’s voice was maybe not what I would term its tip-top best,” she writes.

For her collection of essays, published posthumously, Reed’s friend Roy Blount Jr. wrote the forward. Along with his insights, Blount also includes his wife Joan’s remembrance of Reed.

“[When Julia arrived at our New England home] she came in the door carrying bags and bags of presents and sat herself down as if she’d been here thirty times—so comfortable being in a new place, she made you feel comfortable,” Blount writes. “Not in some take-charge way, but in a subtle way, an elegant way.”

Her ability to put people at ease is one of Reed’s greatest legacies. That she could make her subjects feel “so comfortable,” allowed readers to share in the joys of her articles and in the joys of her life. 

Now available: Dispatches from the Gilded Age: A Few More Thoughts on Interesting People, Far-Flung Places and the Joys of Southern Comforts by Julia Reed, published by St. Martin’s Press in August 2022.