Tag Archives: new books

Be Careful What You Write About

This week, we celebrate the publication of Half! Author Sharon Harrigan shares how life can imitate art.

One of the joys of publishing a novel—unlike my first book, a memoir—is that I can tell anyone who sees herself in one of my characters: It’s not you! I made the whole thing up. What a relief to hide under the cover of fiction. But the truth is, like many novelists, I drew inspiration from my life to write Half. The intimacy between the identical twin sisters is based on the close bond I had with my brother, a year and a half older than me. And the girls’ larger-than-life, part hero/part monster father has a passing resemblance to my own.

Orange book cover with twin faces partially shown.

Here’s the surprising thing: recently my life seems to draw inspiration from my book, not the other way around. I can’t tell whether this turn of events is delightfully magical or just plain creepy. Maybe both.

In my novel, two siblings are so close they speak in one voice, until they can’t. They discover a secret that breaks their collective voice in half.

At the end of 2019, the advance readers’ copies had just gone out. My brother was visiting for Christmas, and we were walking my dog to the playground when he said, “I have something to tell you.” His voice hushed, even though no one but my cockapoo was anywhere near enough to overhear us. My brother is a professor, used to giving lectures and speeches, and usually words flow easily from him. But on that night, they came slowly. One. At. A. Time. He told me about a terrible event he hadn’t shared with anyone. I could hear, in his hesitation, how much it hurt.

I felt his pain. People use that phrase all the time, but they don’t usually mean a physical sensation. I do. Stress gives some people headaches; in others, it causes tight shoulders or a churning stomach. For me, stress stabs me in the throat. I developed a flu that resulted in a damaged nerve, paralyzing one of my two vocal cords. I posted the diagnosis on Facebook. “So funny,” my friends said. “You wrote a book about a voice breaking in half and then it happened to you!”

“I know,” I responded. “Be careful what you write about.”

Half ends in 2030, when climate change has resulted in a world that didn’t seem possible in the Before Times. It snows endlessly for months, the sky a white out.

In real life 2020, we muse wistfully about the pre-pandemic universe, a place we know will never exist in quite the same way again. It might as well be blizzarding for months, because we act as if we’re snowed in, barely ever leaving our houses.

In my fictional near future, “a fault line from Portland to Seattle caused the biggest earthquake in recent history. Sea levels rose and coastal houses, once worth millions, couldn’t be sold for scraps.” Will something like this happen in ten years? No one knows what the future will hold.

At least I don’t know. But my book—in its own magical or creepy or artfully mysterious way—just might.

author in black shirt with green background

Sharon Harrigan teaches at WriterHouse, a nonprofit literary center in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is the author of Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir. Her work has appeared in the New York Times (Modern Love), NarrativeVirginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

New Books & New Paperbacks, June 2018

We are pleased to announce the following books, which are being published this month.

June 7, 2018
Now in Paperback
The Paternity Test: A Novel
Michael Lowenthal

“Credit Lowenthal with taking what could have been a safe, sweet story and turning it into something knotted and barbed. . . . [He] is aiming for something truer to life.”Washington Post

“What matters here is love. Sure, it’s a complicated, messy, and somewhat dysfunctional love, but it reads and feels like the real thing.”Lambda Literary Review

“Readers—both gay and straight—will come away from Lowenthal’s novel with a deeper understanding not only of the ethical issues surrounding surrogacy, but also of the ever-evolving gay community.”Publishers Weekly

June 7, 2018
Now in Paperback
Sex Talks to Girls: A Memoir
Maureen Seaton

Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies

“Stories of marriages, divorces, alcoholism, motherhood, and coming out that are like little newsflashes, little bursts of light, little puffs of smoke.”Chicago Free Press

“Compellingly narrates her passage through a host of roles—pious adolescent, Stepford wife, recovering alcoholic, sexual adventurer, and bi mom—on the way to discovering her identity as sober lesbian poet.”Pleiades

“Stands beside important memoirs by lesbian poets including Eileen Myles’ Cool for You and S/He by Minnie Bruce Pratt.”Lambda Literary Review

“I was swept away with the feisty zeitgeist. . . . Reading Sex Talks to Girls jolted me to a fuller state of awareness.”The Rumpus

June 12, 2018
Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light
Laila Amine

Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture

“Effectively demonstrates how racialized stereotyping and ethnocultural marginalization of citizens of North African descent have long betrayed the French idyll of equality and integration. Perceptive and groundbreaking.”—Adlai Murdoch, author of Creolizing the Metropole

“A powerful, highly relevant, and innovative study of the cultural and political role of France’s largest ethnic and religious minority.”—Jarrod Hayes, author of Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb

June 19, 2018
Tito and His Comrades
Jože Pirjevec, Foreword by Emily Greble

“An enlightening, enthralling biography of Yugoslavia’s leader Tito.”Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“Skillfully navigating the complex terrain of history and memory that Tito evokes, this biography is both respectful to his complicated legacy and sensitive to the emotionally charged questions of history that have fueled discord in the region. . . . Pirjevec does not take sides, nor does he ask his readers to do so.”—Emily Greble, from the foreword

“Tito’s life is an extraordinary story, a series of theatrical coups and ruptures on a stage with many of the great figures of the last century. [Pirjevec] shows all the paradoxes and ambiguities of this fervent revolutionary who nonetheless enjoyed luxury, entertaining Hollywood stars or the Queen of England with equal splendor.”Le Monde

June 26, 2018
In Search of the True Russia: The Provinces in Contemporary Nationalist Discourse
Lyudmila Parts

Russia’s provinces have long held a prominent place in the nation’s cultural imagination. Lyudmila Parts looks at the contested place of the provinces in twenty-first-century Russian literature and popular culture, addressing notions of nationalism, authenticity, Orientalism, Occidentalism, and postimperial identity.

“A fascinating study of how the internal Other of the provinces has been replacing the external Other of the West in post-Soviet cultural discourse. Useful for anyone interested in contemporary Russian culture.”—Anne Lounsbery, New York University

June 26, 2018
An Anti-Bolshevik Alternative: The White Movement and the Civil War in the Russian North

Liudmila Novikova, Translated by Seth Bernstein 

“”Novikova’s treatment of the Russian Civil War is both original and compelling. It will be an agenda-setting book in the literature on the period. Wonderfully written and well argued, it should appeal to those with interests in Russian history and twentieth-century history more broadly.”—Peter I. Holquist, author of Making War, Forging Revolution

“The White movement in North Russia had a character of its own, reflecting the particulars and peculiarities of the region, as this excellent new study reveals.”Revolutionary Russia

June 26, 2018
Dead in the Water: Global Lessons from the World Bank’s Model Hydropower Project in Laos
Edited by Bruce Shoemaker and William Robichaud; foreword by Yos Santasombat; afterword by Philip Hirsch

New Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies

“Extremely insightful and succinct, this volume shows how badly the Nam Theun 2 dam project has failed across the areas of indigenous rights and development, sustaining fisheries and river life, livelihoods of the displaced, protecting wildlife, and forestry and the commons. An important book.”—Michael Goldman, author of Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization

“Offers a new understanding of Laos in a difficult period of nation building and development [and] a vital lesson to policy planners, scholars, and INGOs encountering the illusory success of a globalizing economy.”—Yos Santasombat, from the foreword