{"id":231653,"date":"2024-01-26T04:50:36","date_gmt":"2024-01-26T09:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=231653"},"modified":"2024-01-26T12:09:48","modified_gmt":"2024-01-26T17:09:48","slug":"the-annotated-nightstand-what-brandi-wells-is-reading-now-and-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-annotated-nightstand-what-brandi-wells-is-reading-now-and-next\/","title":{"rendered":"The Annotated Nightstand: What Brandi Wells is Reading Now and Next"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brandi Wells\u2019 unnamed protagonist sweeps, mops, wipes down, and disinfects an office while its daytime workers sleep. \u201cI know them all,\u201d The Cleaner<\/a> tells us. \u201cI\u2019ve seen the grossest things about them, their half-eaten and molding snacks, their vaguely sexual doodles.\u201d Wells gives us the depressing realities of The Cleaner\u2019s invisible labor, beginning with shit smears on toilet seats to abandoned sandwiches in desk drawers. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly<\/em> states<\/a>, \u201cRarely has cubicle culture been depicted in such griminess or with such glee.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because of the nature of her work and her schedule, The Cleaner is only apparent if she fails to clean something well\u2014and, as fastidious as she is, she never fails. At one point she describes how she takes her time between window scrubbings so the new clarity will be a \u201cshock.\u201d \u201cOnce everyone notices how clean it is, they\u2019ll realize I exist,\u201d she tells us. \u201cThey\u2019ll be so embarrassed they hadn\u2019t thought of me before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout her shift, The Cleaner digs through employees\u2019 desks to figure out who they are (Mr. Buff uses protein powder, Yarn Guy is a knitter), and to determine who deserves help\u2014or punishment. At one point, The Cleaner throws away a self-help book in the desk of The Intern. By its description, the book sounds awful (\u201ca man on the cover, pointing accusingly at the reader\u201d). So, at first, one might think, \u201cGood! Expel whatever misogynist crap that might lie between those covers!\u201d That is, until The Cleaner explains her reasoning: if she leaves the book, more people will start to read and heed self-help texts, take dubious supplements, go full woo-woo, and \u201cThat kind of atmosphere isn\u2019t conducive to productivity.\u201d She doesn\u2019t exploit her proximity to these people through their stuff\u2014and emails and search histories\u2014for fun or to stick a thumb in the eye of capitalist hacks.<\/p>\n

Instead, The Cleaner\u2019s efforts are to keep the place humming like a well-oiled machine. Her mind, access, and inconspicuousness are her sharpest tools. \u201cIt\u2019s not a crime to care about other people,\u201d The Cleaner tells her one coworker, a security guard named L. L., slapdash in her approach to her job, isn\u2019t convinced. \u201c\u2018It very nearly is,\u2019 she says. \u2018The way you do it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

What might feel like a monotonous story about a monotonous job\u2014a person comes and cleans, has one coworker, briefly talks to the delivery person\u2014Wells manages to give us a page-turner plot with biting, grander implications. Here we have a person who has arguably gone whole hog on the enterprise of her career and its capitalistic value. When one\u2019s job is their sole purpose\u2014arguably one of America\u2019s loudest directives\u2014the potential threats toward life\u2019s meaning are rampant.<\/p>\n

When The Cleaner realizes the CEO of the company is engaging in nefarious acts that risk the health of the company, the stakes are undeniably higher for her than anyone else. While she does much to control her environment, fantasizing about the narratives she shapes through her exploits, the reality is that The Cleaner remains invisible to those she feels she knows best. The dark commentary Wells builds regarding capitalism and work is undeniable.<\/p>\n

Wells tells us of their to-read pile, \u201cBecause of migraines, I do so much of my reading via audiobooks. I considered sending you a photo of those\u2014most of them are new releases. But I still can\u2019t help myself in a bookstore, love to carefully pick through their catalogue, and also peruse their staff picks. I love seeing what booksellers recommend.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Lisa Tuttle, A Nest of Nightmares<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong>This is the first short story collection by the fantasy and horror writer Lisa Tuttle. Tuttle famously refused the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1982 because another author had disseminated his story to Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America members and Tuttle found the \u201ccampaigning\u201d distasteful.<\/p>\n

In an interview in the defunct Fantastic Metropolis<\/em><\/a>, Tuttle was asked of about her genre of choice. She explains, \u201cI’m attracted to the intellectual aspect of SF\u2014I like fiction which deals straight-forwardly with ideas, fiction which is intellectually stimulating and questioning. I like the idea of SF as \u2018thought-experiment\u2019\u2014although mostly in a social and personal sense. I like trying to figure out what it would FEEL like to be immortal, for example, or to live in a society with dramatically different values and ideals than our own.\u201d<\/p>\n

George Eliot, Romola<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong>The historical novel by Eliot is set in Renaissance Florence, just after Christopher Columbus has left Spain. There is a blind scholar, his titular daughter, an estranged brother who is a Dominican friar, a shipwreck, enslavement of adopted fathers\u2014the works. Eliot apparently spent a year and a half researching for the book. She often went to Florence in order to capture the story. While she received \u00a37,000, the book apparently didn\u2019t sell well. This despite the fact that Eliot herself said of writing Romola<\/em> that she did \u201cswear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood, such as it is, and with the most ardent care for veracity of which my nature is capable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kristen Ringman, I Stole You: Stories from the Fae<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong>In its review of I Stole You<\/em>, Publishers Weekly<\/em> states<\/a>, \u201cRingman (Makara<\/em>) has woven her recollections of personal experiences with \u2018fae creatures\u2019 into these 14 lyrical, disturbing first-person tales, all told to victims by vampiric shape-shifting beings drawn from various mythological traditions. Ringman, who is Deaf, postulates telepathic fae-to-human connections as well as signed communication with emotional overtones that no auditory vibrations can match\u2026 Ringman successfully brings readers a few steps out of everyday reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong>Otsuka\u2019s novel introduces us to a group of people who know one another through their routine of swimming. The NPR<\/em> review of The Swimmers<\/em><\/a> explains, \u201cWhen the pool is shut down for safety reasons, the collective daily rhythm of the swimmers’ lives abruptly stops. One swimmer is particularly affected by this rupture in the pattern of the everyday: her name is Alice, \u2018a retired lab technician now in the early stages of dementia.\u2019 We’re told that, \u2018even though [Alice] may not remember the combination to her locker or where she put her towel, the moment she slips into the water she knows what to do.\u2019 Untethered from the practice of those repetitive daily laps, Alice\u2019s mind floats free. The Swimmers<\/em>\u00a0is a slim brilliant novel about the value and beauty of mundane routines that shape our days and identities; or, maybe it\u2019s a novel about the cracks that, inevitably, will one day appear to undermine our own bodies and minds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maru Ayase (trans. Haydn Trowell), The Forest Brims Over<\/em><\/a>
\n<\/strong>The first of Ayase\u2019s works to be translated into English, The Forest Brims Over<\/em> fights the usual gender tropes in myth and storytelling when Nowatari Rui turns herself into a forest to avoid her husband using her as inspiration for his novels. As the jacket copy states, \u201cWith her privacy and identity continually stripped away, [Rui] has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband\u2019s art. When a decade\u2019s worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a hospital, her husband keeps her in an aquaterrarium, set to compose a new novel based on this unsettling experience. But Rui breaks away from her husband by growing into a forest\u2014and in time, she takes over the entire city.\u201d<\/p>\n

Noor Hindi, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong>Hindi\u2019s poem \u201cFuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,\u201d<\/a> made rounds when it was first published in Poetry <\/em>in late 2020 and is understandably being posted on social media again and again since Israel\u2019s brutal assault on Gaza. \u201cI want to be like those poets who care about the moon,\u201d she writes. \u201cPalestinians don\u2019t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.\u201d The intensity of this poem seems to be the general tone of the forceful collection. Viet Thanh Nguyen says of Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.<\/em>, \u201cNoor Hindi wields her poetry with passion and righteous anger in this powerful, striking collection that touches the heart and the head, the body and the mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong>Becky Spratford in her starred review of Khaw\u2019s book in Library Journal<\/em><\/a>, states, \u201cWhat if the Little Mermaid laid eggs and her hatched children\u2019s hunger laid waste to her prince\u2019s land? Khaw\u2019s (Breakable Things<\/em>) latest novella tackles this question with a brutally visceral but seductive opening sequence.\u201d Spratford\u2019s verdict? \u201cWith this brilliantly constructed tale that consciously takes on a well-known story and violently breaks it open to reveal a heartfelt core, Khaw cements their status as a must-read author. For fans of sinister, thought-provoking, horrific retellings of Western classics by authors of marginalized identity like Helen Oyeyemi and Ahmed Saadawi.\u201d<\/p>\n

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong>Cha was an artist and author whose book, Dictee<\/em>, while receiving only tepid responses upon its publication in 1982, resurfaced in the 1990s and had continues to have an enormous impact on writers, readers everywhere. In her book Minor Feelings<\/em>, Cathy Park Hong writes extensively about Dictee<\/em>. She states, \u201cAlthough it\u2019s classified as an autobiography, Dictee <\/em>is more a bricolage of memoir, poetry, essay, diagrams, and photography.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2022, the New York Times<\/em> published an obituary for Cha<\/a> as part of its \u201cOverlooked No More\u201d series. In it, Dan Salzstein writes of Dictee<\/em>, \u201cThrough chapters named after the Greek muses, the book jumps from one protagonist to another: Cha herself; Joan of Arc; the early 20th-century Korean freedom fighter\u00a0Yu Gwan-sun<\/a>, who, at 17, was tortured and killed; and, perhaps most poignantly, Cha\u2019s mother, who hovers over the book like a protective spirit. Through her, Cha explores a traumatic era of Korea\u2019s history, including a decades-long Japanese occupation, a war that divided the country, a series of dictators and an ensuing diaspora, of which the Cha family was a part.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong>Born in 1960, Jeanette Winterson was adopted by a couple in England. By her own description, her parents were working class, with a father who was a factory worker and her mother a home maker. \u201cThere were only six books in the house, including the Bible and Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments<\/em>,\u201d Winterson\u2019s site states. \u201cStrangely, one of the other books was Malory’s Morte d’Arthur<\/em>, and it was this that started her life quest of reading and writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Winterson\u2019s parents were raising her to be a Pentecostal missionary, and, by the age of six, she was writing sermons and preaching. Ten years later, Winterson came out as gay and left home. She worked at a \u201clunatic asylum\u201d to make ends meet, before going to Oxford and studying English Literature. By 23, she had written Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit<\/em>, a semi-autobiographical novel about her young life.<\/p>\n

Cleo Qian, LET\u2019S GO LET\u2019S GO LET\u2019S GO<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong>Qian\u2019s debut short story collection has received a heap of praise, including being longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence. In an interview with A. Cerisse Cohen in BOMB<\/em><\/a>, Qian explains, \u201cI wrote these stories from 2016 to 2022. In my own life, I was experimenting and testing out new identities all the time. I thought a lot about subject matter. There are many people who find literary fiction insular and narrow. I think part of the writer\u2019s duty, in addition to being good at your craft, is to live and think broadly. Otherwise, who are you writing for?… My stories are often about characters who feel disembodied, which I also feel. I didn\u2019t realize that until I started doing yoga and the other physical activities I mentioned. We\u2019re glued to our phones. I write and read a lot, which is also all in my head. I have friends who are cerebral and intellectual and so fun to talk to, but we\u2019re not very connected to our bodies. That\u2019s unnatural. We should all be more in touch with our bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong>Gregory E. Rutledge, in his review of Hopkinson\u2019s book<\/a>, writes, \u201c<\/strong>The Salt Roads<\/em> features three mortal protagonists\u2014Mer the Ashanti-born, Santa Dominque-enslaved healer, Jeanne Duval, the mulatta lover of Charles Baudelaire, and Thais, a sex slave of ancient Alexandria, Egypt\u2014who are bound by the bitterness of life and the salutary potential of the meandering, salty flows of the earth, which a fourth immortal protagonists represents.<\/p>\n

Just as former Black fantasy author Charles R. Saunders recognized in Butler a true raconteur in 1984 (Bell 91), the label easily applies to Hopkinson, who manages some powerful storytelling here. What author wouldn\u2019t when she expertly excavates the ancient Roman empire located in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Holy Land of Jerusalem, walks readers through Napoleon\u2019s empire in France and the West Indian French colonies, and includes a fist fight, of sorts, between two West African deities of fire and water?\u201d<\/p>\n

James Tiptree, Jr., Her Smoke Rose Up Forever<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong>For the uninitiated, James Tiptree, Jr. was in fact Alice Bradley Sheldon, a woman who invented the name based on a marmalade brand after years of unsuccessful attempts at publishing with versions of her own name. \u201cA male name seemed like good camouflage,\u201d she said. \u201cI had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.\u201d This is because Sheldon had a wild life\u2014she eloped, had to drop out of unmarried-women-only Sarah Lawrence College, took classes at Berkeley and made art, divorced, joined US Air Force and was promoted to major, met second husband in Paris, joined the CIA, finished college, got a doctorate. Whew! Her pseudonym successfully kept her anonymous for about a decade.<\/p>\n

John Self writes in The Guardian<\/em><\/a>, \u201cTiptree\u2019s status as one of [science fiction\u2019s] leading practitioners is justified, as is the critical cliche that each story contains enough to fill a novel. That\u2019s not unqualified praise: Tiptree\u2019s techniques of defamiliarization through jargon\u2026 and dropping us in medias res<\/em>\u00a0means the reader has to remake the world with every new story. But in the darkness of space no one can see you scratch your head and given that most of the stories require two readings to be properly absorbed and appreciated\u2014and they merit that attention.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brandi Wells\u2019 unnamed protagonist sweeps, mops, wipes down, and disinfects an office while its daytime workers sleep. \u201cI know them all,\u201d The Cleaner tells us. \u201cI\u2019ve seen the grossest things about them, their half-eaten and molding snacks, their vaguely sexual doodles.\u201d Wells gives us the depressing realities of The Cleaner\u2019s invisible labor, beginning with shit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9656,"featured_media":231655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[92831,92829,63230,80451,92835,39995,49563,5536,92838,92834,38885,2475,21904,92833,89338,90964,89094,21028,38272,92836,92832,77997,92830,89095,87163,92837,76007,4798],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/brandi-wells-stack.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-Ygl","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231653"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9656"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}