Reading Like a Writer

Ocean Vuong's On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a novel about a Vietnamese-American boy, his childhood, and his first boyfriend. It’s written as a letter to the boy’s mother, a woman who is both traumatized and abusive. Vuong is not only a novelist but a poet . . .

Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police is set on an island in which disappearances occur. Things like hats, roses, fruit, and calendars are made to vanish—not only from the physical world but also from memory. And those who mysteriously manage to remember are detained and killed by the Memory Police.

Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House is a devastating memoir about an abusive lesbian relationship. The structure is strange and lovely. Machado doesn't pick a genre for her story but uses a different one each chapter.

The main characters in Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts have been stuck on a spaceship for generations and brutally oppressed by those on higher decks with lighter skin.

"Blue Light in the Sky" is the title story of the collection by Can Xue (translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping). It's a creepy story about two sisters, their adversarial relationship, and what happens when one is mysteriously injured.

The hardest thing is figuring out how to begin a story. It's your one chance at a truly pure and vulnerable reader. The reader knows nothing, and must trust everything—or not—and you can work with that in the best ways.

Manuel Gonzales's The Regional Office is Under Attack is about forces of darkness, those out to stop those forces, and others out to stop the forces stopping the forces. It has assassins, oracles, and robot arms. And it's riveting.

When fiction refuses to look at non-centered characters, it teaches us to do the same in our lives, normalizing the erasure of real human beings.

The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon is about a college student (Phoebe) who becomes enmeshed in a violent religious cult, while her boyfriend (Will, the narrator) grapples with his own discarded faith in God.

Yukiko Motoya's collection "The Lonesome Bodybuilder" (translated by Asa Yoneda) is wonderfully strange and darkly profound.

Porochista Khakpour's Sons and Other Flammable Objects is about family strife. A mother, father, and son flee Iran during the revolution to settle in Los Angeles, but when the son grows up, they are torn apart by alienation, pride, and miscommunication—among other things.

The story is magical, but also strange and complex. There is a particular world created inside the story, one in which all babies are made from the materials that surround us—yarn, clay, porcelain—and debts can be repaid in happiness and empathy.