women writers

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #6 Sonya Chung

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I’ve been sharing some thoughts about my favorite novelists. You may already be familiar with many of them, but I hope you’ll find some new favorites of your own in this list.

 Only one, but it’s a beauty

Sonya Chung has written only one novel so far, and it’s a beauty. Long for this World is about a war photographer who is injured in Iraq and goes home to recover in New York.

“Home” is an ambiguous concept for her, since she has spent the past decade traveling to all the world’s worst places, preserving images and losing people. When she learns that her father has abruptly left her mother and gone to visit his brother in Korea – the first time he has returned to his home country in decades – the daughter goes to find him, bringing her cameras, her childlike Korean, her weariness and her curiosity about this mysterious notion of family.

According to whom?

Chung was 37 when Long for this World was published – a late bloomer, according to some standards of the literary world. This, of course, ignores her many published and lauded stories and essays. And it’s a nonsensical standard to begin with (says the writer who also published her first novel at 37).

In response, Chung went on to found Bloom, a literary website that features writers whose first books were published when they were 40 or older. The site’s tagline is “’Late’ according to whom?”

You can find Sonya Chung’s writing all over the Web. What you won’t find – yet – is her second novel. Wait for it. Watch for it. It’ll be worth it.

Sonya Chung

Sonya Chung

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #5 Susan Choi

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Only a few weeks to go before my novel Her Own Vietnam is published, and still many fabulous women novelists to discuss. Moving in alphabetical order, today it’s Susan Choi.

We think we know this story – but we don’t

Susan Choi explores events, situations or characters that we think we know and upends them, making them both less familiar and more illuminating of life in America. Her characters are sometimes unlikeable but always compelling, and Choi’s psychological insights penetrate even the most complicated characters.

I became a Susan Choi fan after reading American Woman, published in 2003. The novel uses some elements of the well-known Patty Hearst saga – a young heiress is kidnapped by left-wing radicals and comes to join them – and melds them into a story we’ve never read before.

Choi’s focus is not on the Patty Hearst figure, but on the woman no one notices, a revolutionary of Japanese-American descent who agrees to hide the heiress and ultimately grows to love her, all the while knowing that it is she herself – not white, not rich, not recognized as fully American – who is the most at risk. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

The power of otherness

A Person of Interest (2008) is based loosely on an amalgam of two real-life stories: the Unabomber saga, and the scientist whose life was destroyed unfairly when he was announced as a person of interest in the anthrax case. In the novel, a mathematician named Lee is nearing retirement at a Midwestern university. He is envious of his young, popular neighbor in the faculty offices – until the man opens a package that contains a bomb. Lee ultimately becomes a person of interest in the case. The novel is part mystery, part procedural, but mostly a detailed, thoughtful exploration of life as a perpetual outsider.

In My Education (2013), a graduate student is powerfully drawn to her glamorous professor. It’s a timeworn literary trope, but with a writer of Choi’s skill and originality, nothing is quite what you expect. To start with, the student ends up falling in love not with her professor, but with his wife.

The dynamics of race, gender, ethnicity, class and culture – the very definition of “otherness” – play central roles in her work. With the sure hand of an expert storyteller, Susan Choi takes on the unpopular, the unsayable, and the deeply intriguing.

Susan Choi

Susan Choi

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #4 Jillian Cantor

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As the publication date for my novel draws closer, I’m thinking and writing about 30 Novelists You Should Know. And they’re all women.

What if?

What if Margot Frank, Anne Frank’s older sister, had survived the concentration camps? What if she tried to shed her past by moving to Philadelphia and creating a new identity for herself as a non-Jewish woman named Margie Franklin?

This is the premise of Jillian Cantor’s compelling and haunting novel, Margot. The book takes place in 1959, just as the movie version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” sweeps across America.

A fresh look at a well-known story

A vast number of people throughout the world have read The Diary of a Young Girl. (For a fascinating examination of the book’s reach and impact, read Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife by Francine Prose.)

I read Anne Frank’s diary as a teenager and have reread it as an adult. Like most Jews of my generation, I’ve also read a large amount of Holocaust literature.

Margot is something different. It centers on the sister we never knew, the one we readers saw only through our peripheral vision because we couldn’t take our eyes off Anne. And it provides a shocking glimpse of the casual and pervasive anti-Semitism in post-war Philadelphia, just years after the horrors of the Holocaust had become fully known.

An appalling inspiration

Cantor’s inspiration to write Margot emerged from an appalling event. She was only yards away when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot and six people were murdered, including a girl only a little older than Cantor’s own children. You can read about it here.

A writer to watch

Jillian Cantor has written another novel for adults and three for teen readers. I learned about Margot through book reviews, and had not been familiar with Cantor before that. I’ll definitely be watching for future work from her.

If you read Margot, read it for the story – and to see how a writer’s words can transform a tale so familiar into something new and evocative.

Jillian Cantor

Jillian Cantor

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #3 Octavia Butler

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You would think that writing novels might sate your appetite for reading them, but I’ve found the opposite to be true. There seem to be countless numbers of novelists out there, writing dazzling books.

As the November 1 publication date approaches for my own novel, Her Own Vietnam, I’m writing about 30 of my favorite women novelists. I dare you to read their books and not become a fan.

The majesty and mystery of Octavia Butler

First, that name. Octavia Butler. There’s majesty and mystery to it. Someone knew something when that child was born. And that makes sense, because Octavia Butler’s books are full of people who have special ways of knowing.

You could call her a science fiction writer, although I don’t actually think of her that way. I think her books ask the universal question of all fiction: “What if?”

However, she certainly swept the top literary awards for science and fantasy fiction, winning both the Nebula and Hugo awards – twice.

Octavia Butler wrote 12 novels that comprised three different series, and two additional stand-alone novels. Many of these books unfold in worlds different from our own, with characters that are not strictly human.

Creating new worlds and reshaping familiar ones

Her most famous novel, Kindred, takes place in a completely familiar world. It has one small wrinkle, though: the main character, a young African American woman, keeps being flung back in time to a plantation in rural Maryland. There she is both enslaved and entrusted with a mission to save the future, including her own.

I am not a big fan of science fiction or fantasy, but I am a fan of Octavia Butler. Her books create other universes that serve as mirrors to examine what is most human in us. How do we understand and respond to race, gender, otherness? What makes a family? What is the purpose of power? How thin is the line between what we know and what we fear?

Fearless

Octavia Butler herself seemed fearless. As an African American woman and a lesbian, she broke new ground and demanded respect in the predominantly white, male field of science fiction. She was the first writer in that genre to win a MacArthur Fellowship, which we all secretly think of as a genius grant.

She was an imposing woman, 6 feet tall, yet shy and introverted, according to her own description. I had the privilege of hearing her speak several months before her death in 2006, and she was witty and humble as she addressed an adoring, standing-room-only audience.

Octavia Butler died at 58. Who knows where else she might have taken us with her words?

Octavia Butler (Photo by Leslie Howle)

Octavia Butler
(Photo by Leslie Howle)

 

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #2 Kim Barnes

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These days I’m writing about Thirty Women Novelists You Should Know. In alphabetical order, today is #2: Kim Barnes.

Turns out I didn’t discover her

Like many writers I believe I’ve discovered, Kim Barnes had a distinguished writing career long before I stumbled upon her work. For instance, her first memoir was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. I’ve read only one of her three novels, but loved it enough to know I want to read more of her books – and to introduce other readers to her if I can.

In the Kingdom of Men is about a young couple from Pawnee, Oklahoma who move to Saudi Arabia in the 1960s so the husband can work for an American oil company. The wife, who grew up in poverty under a strict Pentecostal religion, suddenly has an Indian houseboy and a Bedouin driver, and nothing to do but chafe under the familiar restrictions the Saudis place on women. The novel does a wonderful job of creating characters and exploring the many political, racial and gender issues at play in the burgeoning oil partnership between the U.S. and the Saudis.

We all live in a dangerous neighborhood

I was first drawn to the book by its title, since I believe we are all living in the kingdom of men and it’s a dangerous neighborhood. The novel captured me with its vibrant depiction of the American oil companies’ frantic efforts to domesticate the Saudi landscape and people, as well as the book’s examination of the dangers – and temptations – of empire.

The main character, Gin, is complicated and compelling, always probing to find the limits of her freedom. As a reader you fear for her, cheer for her, and wish she could live in a less confining era. The novel brilliantly illuminates conflicts of culture – not only the tensions between the Saudis and the Americans who live in guarded compounds on their land, but the tensions between democracy and the rampaging capitalism of the oil companies. And I particularly loved how friendship served in the novel as both a means of redemption and insurrection.

I’m stealing this

On Barnes’ website, the discussion guide for In the Kingdom of Men concludes with this odd and thought-provoking question, which I am absolutely going to steal for my own discussion guide for Her Own Vietnam: “If you could save one life in this story, whose life would it be?”

Kim Barnes

Kim Barnes