LIVING, TOGETHER: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection, exactly what it says on the label

LIVING, TOGETHER: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection
SAMANTHA PAIGE ROSEN (editor)
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: 21 writers and organizers on found family, hacking adulthood, and other lessons communal living can teach us about the future of housing in America

Featuring Kristen Arnett, Rhaina Cohen, Kim Stanley Robinson, and more

At age 29, when Samantha Paige Rosen made an unexpected move back home, she was surprised to find how much she loved living with her parents again. Inspired and curious, she began searching for others who had redefined home and community.

The essays and Q&As in Living, Together are about carving out spaces of communal connection and joy in our 3-bed, 2-bath starter home culture. Although they recount life at different stages and in different regions, these stories showcase the delights and tradeoffs of more dynamic shapes of “home.” AAcross sections on family, intentional community, and what lies beyond housing, readers will hear from voices like:

Kristen Arnett, whose found family kept her afloat, from weddings to hurricane season and everything in between

Kim Stanley Robinson, who describes the magic of communities that are led by everyone

Sarah Thankam Mathews, who founded a pandemic mutual aid group and discovered, like so many of us, how essential connection and care are in times of crisis

Rodney M. Bordeaux, who explores how strength and unity are inextricably tied to life on First Nations reservations

Communal living isn’t just for cults or millennials with a pipe dream. Amidst the climate crisis, a hostile housing market, and the loneliness epidemic, Living, Together opens a window into how people in the US are thriving through collective care. This book invites us to imagine what new opportunities for connection exist when we push through the walls society has built for us.

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My Review: I live alone. I have always loved living alone. Company suits me only when I can't hear, see, or smell them (smokers need to be treated for their addiction!) when I don't want to. (Which is almost always.) However, age and disability require I compromise by living in congregate care so the things I genuinely can no longer do but that need doing are still done.

Because I live in New York City, that is not an impossible dream, and I wake up each and every day happy and comfortable...and very aware of my extreme good fortune.

So there's my essay for this collection of them on the topic of living in and among others. It is a fascinating topic, living arrangements always are. The essays within the collection are going to appeal in varying degrees. Different writers approach the topic differently, and sometimes unexpectedly based on their larger bodies of work.

I'm convinced the topic of housing all of us is never going to be less than contentious. Capitalism's deep, invasive weed roots are going to wrap around everyone involved in its systems' minds. I hope reading this collection of essays will convince a few to stand outside the building their lives have been spent within to take a fresh, sunlit view of the needs, the wants, and the realities of fair, just, reasonable access to housing.

*snort* Not bloody likely in a world where healthcare is rationed by money, but a boy can dream.

WATERSPOUT, one of Troy Ford's Pink Sheep Novels

WATERSPOUT (The Pink Sheep Novels Book 2)
TROY FORD
Sweet Flag Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Pillion meets The Goldfinch in this dark literary novel about art, ambition, and the volatile people who become our muses.

Jimmy Traywick is running out of options. Job, apartment, boyfriend, and gallery in San Francisco—gone. Retreating to a quiet town across the Bay, he’s hoping for a fresh start when a charismatic insider offers a shot at the New York art world.

Desperate to seize the opportunity, he begins painting the new lovers and friends who have pulled him into their orbit, transforming passion and chaos into a raw new body of work.

But when secrets surface and relationships fracture, he discovers too late that inspiration can come at a devastating price.

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My Review: Ambition's a cruel taskmaster. It forces people into actions they'd otherwise overthink their way out of, like trading sex for fame. It's a terrible price to pay for a a commodity that loses value when you lose interest. Money...assets...jewels...their value is more durable.

It doesn't stop people from making that bargain. For millennia people have traded sex for tangible items and intangible things like gods and power and fame/notoriety. Jimmy Traywick did that. It worked...until it didn't.

That's the thing about Faustian bargains: Wanting something badly enough to ignore your own misgivings about it is its own reward. Funny word to use, isn't it. Not funny-ha-ha but funny-hmmm. It's a bad reward, but a real one, to set and pursue a goal to the single-minded exclusion of doubt and fear. Jimmy, like other ambitious people, desires at a more intense level than most of us. He's not stupid, wait yes he is, he's not dumb because he sees Paul Allenson in 3D, shadows are there, they point to things that aren't open, aboveboard...and he takes the proffered bargain anyway.

It's a choice. A choice he made. Now we meet Jimmy in the aftermath. He still owns his choice, its mark is on him for good and ever. The story you're reading is the story of making that choice, choosing that fate knowing it will be costly but not what exactly the cost will be.

It's always fascinating and not a little enlightening to read stories about people who are more intense about their lives, their goals, the desires than we-the-reader are. We're looking in on a train wreck, watching the rescue operation be hit by flash floods, the director with the radio coordinating everything get hit by lightning, the ambulances fall into sinkholes on the way to the scene...and we-the-reader sit comfortably in our chair in the air conditioning thrilling to it all.

Ain't reading grand?

Author Ford is an unkind man with a depraved soul. Goddesses please bless him for showing it to us. Jimmy goes through the wringer and comes out flattened but never flat and featureless.The same is less true of those around him, or this would be five stars with a yodel of rapture. It's a tough balancing act, taking time away from our PoV guy to limn some depth for the supporting players. It's a thing all too often left undone. I don't think it was left undone here, Author Ford's not careless or unskilled. It was part and parcel of the choice to tell the story with its focus resolutely on Jimmy. It was a lot to put onto one character, and that one character was rather less nuanced than I'd've needed for him to be to sit back in my chair with the book open on my lap with a slightly dazed expression on my puss.

It's a really involving tale, once I opened it I didn't close it willingly; it never once bored me or made me wish to heck he'd get bloody on with it; but it explored depths I didn't find that deep, so it's not my idea of perfect.

It very much is perfectly entertaining and, not for nothing, really begging to have a movie draped over it. Get you one and see if I'm wrong.

THE AND THAT WAS, beautifully illustrated novella-length prose poem

THE AND THAT WAS
MIA TIJAM (illus. Rustom Pujado)
Rosarium Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The and That Was is an archipelago of words: lush and mountainous in parts, civilized veneer in others, almost all of it seemingly born from instances when the forces within could no longer be restrained. The thing about archipelagos is to not view them as chains of islands, but as the space that envelops them.

That is what this collection contains.

The land. The culture. The rustic and the urban, religious and heretical. The fractures. The spaces. The cities without dragons...

The Fairy Tale Reality of the Philippines...

Where the end began and begins again...The wishes that point to what we should have wished. These stories contain–and release. And so do you.

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My Review: "Stories" and "collection" are slightly misleading descriptors. There are under 150pp in this book; there are very cool illustrations on full pages, elucidating angles of seeing on the, the, uhm vignettes or prose poems they're surrounded by; the sum of these parts is less "collection" than stream-of-consciousness novella.

I don't know anything meaningful about the Filipino culture I was within though apart from as I read. I'm very clear that I'm in a world that's dreamlike, delineated in flashes, and in swirls of awareness.. It's bounded and bordered and depicted by the artwork that, malheureusement, I'm not able to show you (put up downloadable samples, Rosarium! you can watermark them!) for added edge-giving. Illustrator Rustom has either read these stories with great care and deep personal connection resulted or he is the male half of Author Tijam's bicameral mind. The prose is deft and rich:

The child gingerly stood up and warily folowed her out of the bodega, into the afternoon light, and through the dirty-kitchen—a hut beside the main house where the old women chopped ebverrything on a long wooden table and cooked in a kiln banked by dried wood.The old nursemaid led her to the deep-well pump beside it. The child wited silently as Nana Kuring lifted the tin basin that was shaped like a soft drink bottle crown and filled with laundry to hoist it on top of her head while bending to pick up the palo-palo used as the laundry paddle. The old woman began walking towards the gate that led to the road and after a dozen stepsm stopped when she realized that the child wasn't following her. The child was looking up at the windows of the old house, at those shuttered shell windowpanes, and then looked at her. Nana Kuring swung the palo-palo in a forward motion to the child, and the little girl hurried after the old woman.

An entire cultural milieu, images sounds and all, is in this brief not-unique passage.

I found the reading experience satisfying on several levels: curiosity about a culture I do not know, immersion in an unfamiliar sensory world, stimulation of visual language fresh to me. I'm sure it's hard to look stuff up, to see the places you don't have a ready-made image in your head to match, at first anyway. It' really worth making the effort and I recommend this work to you as a rewarding place to start your efforts.

SAVVY SUMMERS AND THE PO'BOY PERILS, second dangerously fattening entry in a delightful, atmospheric series

SAVVY SUMMERS AND THE PO'BOY PERILS (Savvy Summers #2)
SANDRA JACKSON-OPOKU
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The next delectable mystery featuring quick-witted, unforgettable Savvy Summers, owner of a soul food café in Chicago.

Savvy has her work cut out when an old friend hires her to cater a company luncheon at a nearby office building on Chicago's South Side. Stepping out of her traditional soul food comfort zone, Savvy whips together a menu of Creole classics, with her own spin, of course—mini po’boys with assorted fillings, sunburst salad, and bread pudding using Great Aunt Essie’s famous buttermilk biscuits.

But when someone is found dead in the company’s conference room, Savvy’s culinary creations are suddenly in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. While the focus should be on their delicious flavors and inventive techniques, Savvy’s beloved café instead becomes the center of a murder investigation once again.

Caught within a messy web of gossip, miscommunication, and fraught coworker relationships, Savvy will have to settle the confusion to clear her name. Somebody’s hiding something, and with the help of her trusty assistant manager, Penny Lopés, Savvy sets out uncover exactly who is to blame. With familiar faces turning up the heat on her investigation and her café still in hot water, will Savvy be able to save her reputation before it’s too late?

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My Review: I gained fifteen pounds off the bread-pudding description alone. I would *kill* for some right now! I'd kill for some buttermilk biscuits, honestly, but these, and the perfect bread pudding...*drool*

As I said of Author Jackson-Opoku's work before, this series is going to fatten me right up into blimp-sized, belching satiety. Savvy's knack for landing in hot water is still credible to me, seasoned old reader that I am, because it doesn't come from some out-of-character contrivance but from accepting a job her business needs.

It seems clear that the series is going to do a lot of wandering around. It's not my first preference for the way a murder mystery unfolds, but it very much is my preference for a character-driven polyphonic novel of a community that feels real in its tight-knit gossipy love. Even though ugliness is inherent in murder mysteries, death is always a blow to a group, the deep interconnections are strong enough to heal the wound. With time, and as an aftermath to justice being served.

Savvy herself is a fun character to follow around as she talks to people, caring about them, listening to them. Penny is a scene-stealin' sass-dealin' delight as always. It's a hallmark of Author Jackson-Opoku's chops that I felt welcomed back into a charmed circle of lovely friends most of the time during this read. It takes skill to make that a reader's experience of a series story.

Savvy and Fanon (love that name, so resonant for someone born when and where he most likely was) have the kind of chemistry I myownself prefer: hot, but at a simmer that can turn into a boil quickly if there's just a *little* nudge of the thermostat. It's believable these two connected as hard as they did; it's believable they couldn't make it work full-time, but also are so finely attuned to each other that they have an unbreakable connection.

I really enjoyed being invited back into the community, welcomed with a so-enticing spread of delights, and told all the tea while everyone tried to be the one to spill it hardest. Not the greatest shakes on the mystery front...another deeply unlikeable crudbucket dead that not one soul should mourn the loss of...but as a novel, and a way to spend time rewardingly, it's up there for 2026.

THE MULAI, consider the comps given by the publisher as gospel

THE MULAI
MUNIR HACHEMI (tr. Julia Sanches)
Coach House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Interstellar via Invisible Cities: spec-fic translated from Spanish imagines a utopian way of life on another planet.

Years after the climate wars on Earth, the Mulai have settled into their new home on an unnamed planet. Supplies stopped arriving from Earth many years ago, and the Mulai have found a way to live. But now the people of Earth want to know what happened to the settlers, so they send The Archaeologist.

He finds that they have become a different people: uncannily similar to us but with something radically Other about them. Their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, reproduce, bury their dead, and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable. The Archaeologist feels like his trip is one extended misunderstanding.

With fragments from The Archaeologist’s notes and the stories of Flukeh and Faida, who map both their world and their language, The Mulai offers a glimpse of a world adjacent to ours – one that just may be a model for how to better our own.

From one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists and author of the celebrated Living Things, and translated by the award-winning Julia Sanches, comes a bold new Borgesian reimagining of what ‘civilization’ might look like.

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My Review: “Only when we encounter the other can we truly see ourselves.”

This is the crux of this story's argument. It is spoken by The Archaeologist, Dr. Cordovero, in an unironic way as he executes the duties of a scholar to interpret the Mulai, a culture not his own. So, a colonizer's PoV...a man whose cultural matrix he's so embedded within that he can't see how it forms...distorts...his picture of Reality. This being a story about how a human culture simply...vanished...without making a ripple in water left behind, it made perfect sense this should be the case. The Archaeologist’s notes are his rigid way of trying to fix an understanding of the Mulai's lifeways into a clear explanation of power structures, kinship patterns, and language architecture.

None of these concepts apply.

Seen from The Archaeologist’s PoV, a Mulai library f/ex is not anything like a library. A bit like Samuel Beckett's splices from late in his life, these places are collecting points for unbound unconnected sheets that do not necessarily tell any kind of cohesive story...just as random pages torn willy-nilly then taped together did not form a deliberate Beckett story, though it was what Beckett intended. The Archaeologist is sure, with typical colonizer arrogance, that these distant cousins of Earth's humans have let him in, have answered his questions as he intended them to not as they intended to. Life lived in translation is always tough. Life lived in denial, blindness, in a fog of culture-bits one does not know is obscuring clear vision...harder still.

That this story about a life lived in (mis)translation is itself a translation is either a step too twee or a layer of hot fudge atop the whipped cream of sociological SF from an earlier literary era wrapping up a rich, dense custard of story. It's a novel that requires you-the-reader to think past the obvious, to dig your spoon under the rich topping of the SFnal setting, through the soothing sweetness of the story's meaning, into the heavy, velvety lushness of Author Hachemi's ideas about how culture, language, and art emulsify into this marvel of delightful idea-sharing.

What actually happens on the page is far less important to this reading experience than what happens inside you as you read it. Did you just read the glossy surface...did you just give the story your attention without turning it over and over as you read, after you finished...or is this a "too hard, turn on the TV" kind of experience? They're all in here.

It's a lot, but it's rewarding no matter where you end up.

UNSAYABLE: A Life in Writing, speaks the unsayable into being

UNSAYABLE: A Life in Writing
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Hours and Day

Go ahead. Try using language to slit the skin of mortality to see what’s on the other side.

At the age of three, Michael Cunningham began obsessively collecting the names of oak, Chevrolet, finch, tulip, Tupperware… Each word rendered the world ever so slightly more understandable, more describable, kicking off a lifelong love affair with language—one that would, eventually, maybe inevitably, lead him to become a writer.

In Unsayable, Cunningham’s memories spill forth, and with them, reflections on the craft of writing. He is fifteen, in a swimming pool at night, gazing at the first boy he ever fell in love with, who is lost in contemplative silence. He is a new college graduate, setting off for nowhere in a Dodge Dart, hoping to pull meaning (and a novel) from the expanse of America. He is on Cape Cod, regaling an elderly couple with invented tales of sexual escapades. He is in an art gallery, unwittingly having the first in a lifetime of conversations with the man he would marry. A thread ties each beautifully-wrought moment to the what is unspoken, what won’t yield to language, what is embellished beyond recognition, what is still left to say.

Luminous, perceptive, and powerful, Unsayable is an ode to literature, a meditation on craft, and an intimate account of a life spent trying to put into words that which resists depiction. This, it turns out, is the lifeblood of the fiction the impossibility of capturing the human experience, and the relentless desire to try.

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My Review: Do you like life?

Really unanswerable, that question. Does it mean your life or just Life, that vast agglomerating thing that doesn't even have a rigorous definition? See...pointless to ask, unable to be pinned down well enough to create an answer.

But asking the question made you think, made you name things to focus thoughts, organize feelings, contemplate so many things no one ordinarily just...turns over deliberately. And all of it was done in words, because you read words, and put your words into combinations they probably havent been in for a long time. Or ever.

This is what Michael Cunningham has done in Unsayable: he has turned over in his mind all the life he's had, looking for words to put around the very odd thing he's organized his life around, being a writer. He loves writing, he loves words, he loves stories, and each anecdote in this memoir reinforces the reader's sense of these facts as rooted in his life. It's a tacit admission of his likely audience, the aspiring writers of the Anglophone world. It's also a generous gift from a seventy-plus year old teacher of the arts of storytelling, because it will survive him as well as his professional career. There are moments of craft advice in the moments of life story, there are even more clues as to how a reader can view the stories they consume so as to get the most pleasure out of the reading. It's just never made sense to me that more readers who don't plan to write fail to see the benefit of reading writing advice. How better to comprehend a story's creator as a person practicing a craft?

It's as deft an exercise of prose-writing as you'd expect. It's a read filled with stories for you to know Michael Cunningham by. It's a powerful tool to create a narrative, whether for your own life, a story you want to write, or empower yourself to create change.

Goodness knows the world needs people of vision to create better, more humane stories to follow in the world itself. Best to learn how from a master practicioner of the storytelling art.

THE WINTER FOLK, a new way to magic up Appalachia

THE WINTER FOLK
JEN JULIAN
Run For It (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman returns to the mysterious lodge in the woods where she once worked, and to the inscrutable creature that bound her there, in this haunting Appalachian gothic horror from singular voice Jen Julian. Perfect for fans of Alix E. Harrow and T. Kingfisher.

This is the story of Moth, who earned her name working for the Winter Folk.

Every year, the Winter Folk gather at a secret lodge in the Appalachians, a place known as Deerhaven, refuge for the time-worn and weary. As a child, Moth heard warnings from her mother: They are heartless, wild creatures—and they got no concern of us. At twenty-one, Moth is a college dropout, indebted, impoverished, and desperate for better things. She falls instantly for Deerhaven’s beautiful antlered host, the mild-mannered Mr. Oslin. When he offers her a housekeeper’s contract—one wish granted for a winter of service—she signs without question.

But Deerhaven is a dangerous place. Staff must follow strict rules or else face dire consequences, and the guests can be unpredictable and savage. And yet, Moth endures, enticed by a rumor that Mr. Oslin is looking for a protégé. A singular worker who would stay with him forever and be transformed.

Decades later, Moth returns to Appalachia with her husband and teenage daughter. She can't shake the feeling that she needs to return to Deerhaven, which banished her twenty years ago. As she hunts for a way in, her haunting memories and harrowing experiences come roaring back—her friends and rivals, her growing obsession with Mr. Oslin, and her mysterious exile.

A door exists in the dark of the woods. After so long away, what has Deerhaven become?

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My Review: In fiction, one must always have a fine balace between questions answered, questions unanswered, and unanswerable problems. Without something in the story that feels...unfinished, there's no place for the reader to put their own experiences onto the read. If there are unanswered questions, things the author sets up as needing reolution that aren't resolved, they'd best be finely calculated to invite a sequel. My ur-text for doing this balancing act well is Lord of the Rings. Yes, *I* said something noce about a story I really disliked reading. It left the Problem of Evil unresolved, as indeed is reality's unresolved Big Question; but the plot-driving questions? All resolved to varying degrees of finality. It is genius storytelling. (I still hate it, but credit where it's due.)

On the other end is A Song of Ice and Fire. I don't feel the need to elaborate. Trillions of pixels arranged in uncountable patterns are out there reflecting fans' emotional responses to an incomplete story. Fans are still spouting off about the various issues, the creator is not doing much to calm them down, so on the noise goes.

Here's a story, with a fundamentally unresolvable conflict underpinning it, resolvable conflicts skinned over it, and some left-unfinished business that invites a sequel or two, that doesn't quite scale heights of genius but does plant the author's story-flag atop a hill.

The setting is Appalachia, which is US-cultural shorthand for "the Shire," that pre- or de-industrial landscape of natural beauty, peopled by rustics, rife with quaint folk who *indulgent smile* accept magic is real. I find that more than mildly insulting acceped as a storytelling given, but it's there, it works, and it's not factually incorrect just because it's insulting. It is not used condescendingly in Author Jen Julian's hands, so I'm not bristling at her, but at the stereotyping that allows this perception to go unchallenged.

Author Julian's story of Moth's life lived in two mutually exclusive worlds, magical and mundane, is one she could not have told as well absent this stereotype. Moth will always be Moth despite being born Vera. Think a moment about the root of the name "Vera," and her destiny is unlocked. (Go read, I'm going to assume you got the point and move on.) Moth is, and isn't, Vera. Like all those who are transformed by contact with magic, the life Moth leads after her time in Deerhaven is much like the lives lead by post-Garden Adam and Eve. She knows now what it costs to See Beyond (caps very intentional for context) when Vision is...removed, denied, forbidden...after being granted. How she will always, always have Heimweh for a state of being that can only exist in a place that is inaccessible now you've left it.

Don't put too much weight on Vera's last name being "Stoker." It can best be seen as a marker of her otherness and not as an invitation to horror and bloody violence. Moth, being returned to "Vera" and mundanity, can't stop being aware of her lack, loss, denied state. It's achieved by very unshowy means, in word choices for Moth and later for Vera that convey different emotional registers. It's not something that will hit you in the face but a dawning awareness, a thing that stays just outside your field of vision until you see it then you don't unsee it as it organizes the read anew.

Vera and Moth belong to different worlds. They have some memories in common; they know a few of the same people and carry some of the same baggage from bruising, painful shifts in their life; but in the end Vera can only be Vera or Moth in those lives, in those mutually exclusive worlds.

Do you need a better explanation for the experience of growth as a person?

It's a read I can see taking on a life bigger than its basis if and when the zeitgeist aligns with it. I hope for Author Julian's sake that happens now, propelling her into prominence she has the talent to support. I seriously hope she has or acquires the skills to survive it.