The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

by Sheila Heti

  “I want to come home,” he says. “I want us to be O.K. That’s it. I’m simple and I want to come home and be with my family.”

  “But I am extremely not simple,” I tell him. My body’s coursing with secret genes and hormones and proteins. My body made eyeballs and I have no idea how. There’s nothing simple about eyeballs. My body made food to feed those eyeballs. How? And how can I not know or understand the things that happen inside my own body? There’s nothing simple here. I’m ruled by elixirs and compounds I don’t even know. Maybe I love Sam because my hormones say I need a man to kill the coyotes at night, to bring my babies meat. But I don’t want that kind of love. I want a love that exists outside my body also. I don’t want to be a chemistry project.

  “In what ways are you not simple?” he asks.

  I think of the women I collected upstairs, how they’re inside me. I’m thinking of molds. I’m thinking of the sea and plankton. I’m thinking of my dad when he was a boy, when he was a tree bud. “It’s complicated,” I say, but words aren’t going to be the best way here. Don’t talk. How can I tell him something that’s just coming into existence?

  “I get that now,” he says. “But you’re going to have to try to explain it.”

  We see each other through the glass. He lifts his hand to my face. We witness each other. That’s something, to be seen by another human. Sam’s seen me since we were young. That’s something, too. Love over time. Love that’s movable, invisible, love like a liquid or a gas, love that finds a way in.

  “Unlock the door.”

  “I don’t want to love you because I’m scared.”

  “So you imagine crazy things about me? You imagine me doing things I’ve never done to get rid of me? Kick me out so you won’t have to worry about me leaving?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Right.” And I’m glad he gets that.

  Sam cocks his head the way a coyote might, a coyote who’s been temporarily confused by a question of biology versus morality.

  What’s the difference between living and imagining? What’s the difference between love and security?

  “Unlock the door,” he says again.

  This family is the biggest experiment I’ve ever been part of, an experiment called: How do you let someone in?

  “Unlock the door,” he says again. “Please.”

  I turn the knob. I open the door. That’s the best definition of love I can imagine.

  Sam comes inside. But when I go to shut the door behind him he tells me no. “Leave the door open.” As if there were no doors, no walls, no houses.

  “Open?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about skunks?” I really mean burglars, gangs, evil.

  “Let them in if they want.”

  If they even exist. If I didn’t make them up. “Really?” I ask.

  “Really,” he says, and pulls the door open wide, as open as it can be.

  Contributors’ Notes

  Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in 2016 and was nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in fall 2017 by Two Dollar Radio.

  Annie Baker’s other plays include The Flick (Pulitzer Prize for drama), John, Circle Mirror Transformation, and an adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Steinberg Playwriting Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She is a resident playwright at the Signature Theatre and cochair and master-artist-in-residence of the MFA Playwriting Program at Hunter College. All of her plays are available from TCG Books.

  Jesse Ball (1978–) is an absurdist whose works appear in many languages the world over.

  John Batki is a kilimologist, writer, translator, and visual artist. He was born in Hungary and has lived in the United States since age fourteen.

  Peter Bush is a translator of works from Catalan, French, Spanish, and Portuguese into English and has received numerous awards. He has translated Quim Monzó’s novel The Enormity of the Tragedy and two short story collections, Guadalajara and A Thousand Morons. He lives in England.

  Lilli Carré is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in experimental animation, sculpture, comics, and drawing. She is codirector of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, which is held annually in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.

  Chris (Simpsons artist) is an anonymous artist and storyteller who is known for his surreal artwork and stream-of-consciousness writing. He is a regular contributor for both national and international publications, and has gained a cult-like following on social media, with many touting him as the voice of his generation.

  Seo-Young Chu also goes by “Jennie.” She teaches at Queens College, CUNY. Her publications include Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (Harvard University Press, 2011), “CHIMERICAL MOSAIC: SELF TEST KIT IN D# MINOR,” “Hwabyung Fragments,” “Postmemory Han,” “I, Stereotype: Detained in the Uncanny Valley,” “Welcome to The Vegas Pyongyang,” and “After ‘A Refuge for Jae-in Doe’: A Social Media Chronology.” Much of her writings can be found on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

  Daniel Clowes was born in Chicago in 1961. In 1989, he published the first issue of his seminal comic book, Eightball. His graphic novels include Ghost World, David Boring, Caricature, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ice Haven, Mr. Wonderful, and Wilson. His latest book is Patience. A major retrospective of his work, The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, debuted at the OMCA in Oakland, before traveling to the MCA in Chicago, and the Wexner in Columbus. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Erika and son Charles.

  Kari Dickson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. She has a B.A. in Scandinavian studies and an M.A. in translation. Before becoming a translator, she worked in theater in London and Oslo. Previously a teaching fellow in the Scandanavian Studies section at the University of Edinburgh, she is now an occasional tutor in Norwegian and translation.

  Tongo Eisen-Martin is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry book someone’s dead already. He is also a movement worker and educator whose work in Rikers Island was featured in the New York Times. He has been a faculty member at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and his curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, “We Charge Genocide Again!” has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is from San Francisco. His latest book of poems, titled Heaven Is All Goodbye, was published in the City Light’s Pocket Poets Series and won the 2018 California Book Award.

  Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently A Collapse of Horses and The Warren. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes, an NEA Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His new story collection, Song for the Unravelling of the World, will be published in 2019. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts.

  Kathy Fish teaches for the Mile High MFA at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. She has published four collections of short fiction: a chapbook in the Rose Metal Press collective, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women (2008); Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011); Together We Can Bury It (The Lit Pub, 2012); and Rift, coauthored with Robert Vaughan (Unknown Press, 2015). Three of her stories have been chosen for the annual Best Small Fictions (Braddock Avenue Books) anthology.

  Laura Francis is the coauthor of A Life Discarded and writer of all the words. Born in Oxford in 1939, Francis spent most of her working life as a live-in housekeeper for an elderly professor of IT in Cambridge. She is (or would be, if she would stop throwing her books out) Britain’s most prolific diarist. She has written up to 4,000 words a day since the age of twelve.

  Roxane Gay is the author of th
e New York Times bestsellers Bad Feminist and Hunger, which has been nominated for the National Books Critics’ Circle Award and received the NBCC Members’ Choice Award; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, she has also written for Time, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, and Salon, among others. She is the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She lives in Los Angeles.

  Lucy Huber is a freelance writer in Boston. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She writes satire, personal essays, sketch comedy, and many impromptu songs about her cats.

  Bonnie Huie is a literary translator of Chinese and Japanese, whose books include Notes of a Crocodile (NYRB Classics, 2018) and Hummingbirds Fly Backwards (AmazonCrossing, 2016). Her work has appeared in PEN America, the Brooklyn Rail, Kyoto Journal, The Margins by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the visual arts journal Afterimage. She was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.

  Samantha Hunt’s novel about Nikola Tesla, The Invention of Everything Else, was a finalist for the Orange Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. Her first novel, The Seas, earned her selection as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35. Her novel Mr. Splitfoot was an IndieNext Pick. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, McSweeney’s, Tin House, A Public Space, and many other publications. Her short story collection, The Dark Dark, published in 2017, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. She lives in upstate New York.

  László Krasznahorkai, described by James Wood in The New Yorker as an “obsessive visionary,” was born in Gyula, Hungary. The World Goes On is his seventh book published by New Directions.

  David Leavitt’s works of fiction have been finalists for the PEN/ Faulkner Prize, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, and short-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Award. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and Vogue, among other publications. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he is a professor of English at the University of Florida and edits the literary magazine Subtropics.

  Andrew Leland hosts The Organist (kcrw.com/theorganist), an arts and culture podcast from KCRW and McSweeney’s.

  Carmen Maria Machado’s essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. Her debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and won the Bard Fiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the writer-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

  Christina MacSweeney was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclan Translation Prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth. She has translated two other books by the same author, and her translations of Daniel Saldana Paris’s novel Among Strange Victims and Eduardo Rabasa’s A Zero-Sum Game both appeared in 2016. She has also published translations, articles, and interviews on a wide variety of platforms, including Words Without Borders, Music and Literature, Literary Hub, and BOMB Magazine, and in three anthologies: México2o; Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories After Cervantes and Shakespeare; and Crude Words: Contemporary Writingfrom Venezuela.

  Alexander Masters was born in New York, and took his degree in physics and mathematics. In 2016 he published A Life Discarded, a biography of the anonymous author of 148 diaries that a friend had discovered in a dumpster on a building site. Over five years, Masters pieced together the life of the diarist (whom he originally believed to be a man and dead) and discovered she was alive and living half a mile away.

  Katherine Augusta Mayfield is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s fiction MFA program, and is the recipient of writing and art residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Rufus Stone, and Gullkistan. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in No Tokens, the Virginia Quarterly Review, BOMB Magazine, and others. She lives in Queens, New York.

  Qiu Miaojin—one of Taiwan’s most innovative literary modernists, and the country’s most renowned lesbian writer—was born in 1969. Her first published story, “Prisoner,” received the Central Daily News Short Story Prize, and her novella Lonely Crowds won the United Literature Association Award. In 1995, at the age of twenty-six, she committed suicide. The posthumous publications of her novels Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile made her into one of the most revered countercultural icons in Chinese letters. After her death in 1995, she was given the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature. In 2017, she became the subject of a feature-length documentary by Evans Chan titled Death in Montmartre.

  Quim Monzó was born in Barcelona in 1952. He has composed scripts for radio, television, and cinema, and adapted texts for the stage. He has published three novels, nine collections of short stories, and nine collections of essays, and has been translated into twenty-two languages. He is a winner of the Premio Nacional de Literatura, the Ciudad de Barcelona prize, and the Prudenci Bertrana award, among others.

  Anders Nilsen is the artist and author of nine books of comics, including Big Questions, The End, Poetry Is Useless, and the forthcoming Tongues. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Medium, Kramers Ergot, and elsewhere, and been translated into numerous languages. Nilsen has garnered three Ignatz Awards and the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize. In addition, he is a regular participant in and occasional organizer of the experimental collaborative comics residency Pierre Feuille Ciseaux. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

  Diego Enrique Osorno was born in 1980 in Monterrey, Mexico. A reporter and writer, he has witnessed some of the twenty-first century’s major conflicts in Mexico and Latin America. He has been called one of the region’s most important journalists by the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for New Journalism and has received Italy’s prestigious Stampa Romana. In 2014 he was awarded Mexico’s National Journalism Prize, which he dedicated to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. He is the author most recently of Slim, a biography of the richest man in the world, which Verso will publish in English. Like many other Mexican journalists, he has been threatened because of his work.

  Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her story collection Knots was published by FSG in 2017, and Wait, Blink was adapted into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts in 2015. 0yehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.

  Ben Passmore makes mad comics in his dusty room, including DAY-GLOAYHOLE, Goodbye, and the Ignatz Award-winning comic Your Black Friend. He’s a regular contributor at The Nib and Vice. He likes to write about politics, monsters, race, sad punks, and narcissism. He is one of the founding organizers of NOCAZ (New Orleans Alternative Comics and Zine Fest). His latest comics collection, Your Black Friend and Other Strangers, was published in May 2018.

  Catherine Pond’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Narrative, Rattle, and many more. She is a Ph.D. candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California as well as the assistant director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. In 2018 she won third place in Narrative’s Winter Story Contest. She lives in Los Angeles.

  Kristen Roupenian’s story collection, You Know You Want This, will be published by Scout Press in 2019 and in more than twenty other countries. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Harvard, and an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, where she is currently a Zell Fellow.

  Benjamin Schaefer is a writer and editor from upstate New York. He studied literature and creative writing at Bard College and at the MFA program at the University of Arizona. His fiction has appeared in Guernica and Electric Literature, and he is the r
ecipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

  C. S. Soong is the coproducer and host of Against the Grain, a radio program and web project that highlights progressive and radical thinking and activism. He holds a B.A. in history from Brown University and a J.D. from Cornell Law School. He has also done graduate work in philosophy at San Francisco State University.

  Souvankham Thammavongsa’s stories have appeared in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, NOON, and other places. She is the author of three poetry books.

  Alex Tizon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was former Seattle bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times and longtime staff writer for the Seattle Times. He was a professor of journalism at the University of Oregon.

  Stacey Tran is a writer from Portland, Oregon. She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, family, and identity. Her writing can be found in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and diaCRITICS. She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018).

  Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures, which have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. She is the recipient of many awards, notably the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997 and the United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. In 2012, Walker became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives and works in New York City and is the Tepper Chair in the Visual Arts at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts.