We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo
by Rebecca Scherm
From the Archives: NoViolet Bulawayo’s stunning debut novel asks difficult questions amid the contrasting landscapes of a Zimbabwe shantytown and bone-chilling Michigan.
Rebecca Scherm is the author of two novels: A House Between Earth and the Moon (2022) and Unbecoming (2015).
From the Archives: NoViolet Bulawayo’s stunning debut novel asks difficult questions amid the contrasting landscapes of a Zimbabwe shantytown and bone-chilling Michigan.
From the Archives: “Quatro’s stories are often fabulist, if fabulism is magical realism plus a reckoning.” Rebecca Scherm on Jamie Quatro’s debut collection, I Want to Show You More.
Learning from your teachers’ teachers: Elizabeth McCracken, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Rebecca Scherm discuss the writing chain of influence.
“You know how questions can be hydras—you think you’ve solved one, and then two more sprout. I’m sure the desert will continue to baffle me in the future, but I’m excited to say my next book has more stamps in its passport.”
A.M. Homes discusses the work of writing timeless human behavior in rapidly changing moment.
“Raised on Southern manners, I thrill at the way Gilchrist foxtrots through tea-sipping customs while exposing all manner of prejudice through her narrator, ten-year-old Rhoda, who absorbs the language of the adults around her and then spits it back at them indiscriminately”: Rebecca Scherm explores the power of child narrators through Ellen Gilchrist’s story “Revenge.”
“Dick” is a snorter, a mean cackler, a muffled hooter. It’s a story to read on the subway home from a maddening staff meeting, or on your front steps after a surreal and unpleasant interaction with a neighbor, or to prepare for a holiday with extended family. Ann Ponders (har har) moves her husband and son from L.A. to Colorado, hoping to leave everything unnerving behind: her snorting, smoking daughter Lizzie, “clever and duplicitous” in “the whole smooth suit of skin she wore without thinking”; her Alzheimer’s-addled mother, now in a nursing home; her young son’s best friend, Dick, who […]
Over the course of these stories, a conviction emerges: faith and lust are not unalike.
Learning from your teachers’ teachers: Elizabeth McCracken, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Rebecca Scherm discuss the writing chain of influence.
Anna and Rebecca have more suggestions for books to give (Part 2 of 2).
