by Bryan Hurt
To John Oakes: publisher extraordinaire, generous, enthusiastic, and patient even as our cell phone calls were dropped as I was driving up into the mountains.
To Andy Hunter, Jennifer Abel Kovitz, Julie Buntin, and everyone else at Catapult.
To Aimee Bender, T. C. Boyle, Etgar Keret, and Jim Shepard for your early support of this project.
To Sean Bernard, Steven Hayward, Mark Irwin, Dana Johnson, Katherine Karlin, Alexis Landau, and Bonnie Nadzam for your friendship.
To all of my contributors: it’s been an honor, deeply moving, and deeply satisfying to work with so many of my heroes.
To my parents, Jeanne and John Hurt, and to my sister, Emily Hurt, for your unconditional love and support.
Most of all to Marielle and Ezra: for everything.
Credits
“The Taxidermist,” by David Abrams. Printed by permission of the author.
“Viewer, Violator,” by Aimee Bender. Printed by permission of the author.
“Adela, primarily known as The Black Voyage, later reprinted as The Red Casket of the Heart, by Anon.,” copyright © 2012 by Chanelle Benz. First appeared as “Our Commutual Mea Culpa” in The Cupboard, vol. 12. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“California,” by Sean Bernard. First appeared in Poets & Writers. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Relive Box” by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Copyright © 2014 by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Originally published in The New Yorker, March 17, 2014. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
“Lifehack at Bar Kaminuk,” by Mark Chiusano. Printed by permission of the author.
“Nighttime of the City” by Robert Coover. Copyright © 2014 by Robert Coover. Originally appeared in Vice, March 28, 2014. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
“The Entire Predicament,” from The Entire Predicament: Stories by Lucy Corin. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Thirteen Ways of Being Looked at by a Blackbird SR-71,” by Paul Di Filippo. Printed by permission of the author.
“Scroogled,” by Cory Doctorow. First appeared in Radar Online. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Strava,” by Steven Hayward. Printed by permission of the author.
“Moonless,” by Bryan Hurt. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Gift,” by Mark Irwin. Printed by permission of the author.
“Testimony of Malik, Israeli Agent, Prisoner #287690,” by Randa Jarrar. Printed by permission of the author.
“Buildings Talk,” by Dana Johnson. Printed by permission of the author.
“Ladykiller,” by Miracle Jones. Printed by permission of the author.
“Sleeping Where Jean Seberg Slept,” by Katherine Karlin. Printed by permission of the author.
“Second Chance,” copyright © Etgar Keret. Published by arrangement with the Institute of the Translation of Hebrew Literature.
“Drone,” by Miles Klee. First appeared in 3:AM Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“What He Was Like,” by Alexis Landau. First appeared in Amor Fati. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Dinosaurs Went Extinct around the Time of the First Flower,” by Kelly Luce. Printed by permission of the author.
“Transcription of an Eye,” by Carmen Maria Machado. Printed by permission of the author.
“Our New Neighborhood,” by Lincoln Michel. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Witness and the Passenger Train” by Bonnie Nadzam. Copyright © 2014 by Bonnie Nadzam. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
“The Transparency Project,” by Alissa Nutting. Printed by permission of the author.
“We Are the Olfanauts,” by Deji Bryce Olukotun. Printed by permission of the author.
“Making Book,” by Dale Peck. First appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Ether,” by Zhang Ran. First published in Chinese in Science Fiction World; translated by Ken Liu and Carmen Yiling Yan. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Safety Tips for Living Alone,” by Jim Shepard. First appeared in The Canary Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Prof,” by Chika Unigwe. Printed by permission of the author.
“Terro(tour)istas,” by Juan Pablo Villalobos. First published in Portuguese in Estadão; translated by Annie McDermott. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Coyote,” by Charles Yu. Printed by permission of the author.
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1 Appears in the French translation as “Alela.”
2 The earliest edition attests to a far more implicit positivism, arguably a glass-half-full tone, emphasized in the substitution of “yes?” for “no?”
3 Here, punishment. There is yet another edition, likely from the turn of the century, which, as such, establishes that upon meeting the children, Adela applies a poultice to their wounds, thereby tinging her kindness with practices of the occult.
4 A Gothic novel by Byron’s jilted lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, that Byron himself reviled as a “Fuck and Publish” in which the innocent, Calantha (the avatar for Lamb), is seduced by the evil antihero, Glenarvon (a thinly veiled portrayal of Byron). Both Calantha and Lamb were subsequently ruined.
5 See Mamney, “In works such as Shakespeare’s Othello, the female character is a canvas onto which the male character ejaculates his fears of emasculation and desire for dominance.”
6 The reference to Beau Brummell (1778–1840), the innovator of the modern man’s suit and inspiration of the Dandy movement, many scholars believe, infers that Quilby will not suffer Brummell’s profligate fate of dying penniless and mad.
7 Nineteenth-century audiences suspected that Adela suffered from syphilis. This disease was thought to result in hardened lesions on the trunk, which serves to give a double resonance to “thornback.”
8 This negation of their mother’s sexuality is an example of the male policing the children engage in to mediate any potentially disruptive female power.
9 An oblique reference to Percy as a dissolute alcoholic.
10 Yet another veiled barb as to Adela’s sexual depravity, for since the success of Emperor Augustus’s propaganda machine, Cleopatra has long been portrayed as oversexed.
11 This trope was frequently used to denote a “wild child,” however in the context of the Byronic hero discourse, the children are referring to the acute chronic melancholy of Percy’s ruttish dissipation.
12 Adela is revealing that, by bringing his agenda of disharmony upon her, Percy is threatening to dismantle her authenticity with his financial cacophony.
13 Such vernacular as “merry”-ness suggests that Adela’s “merry” sexual misconduct has been enjoyed since birth.
14 Note the children’s conception of Adela’s bastardy approaches deformity.
15 Adela, lighting the way for Wuthering Heights, is known to have thoroughly inspired Charlotte Brontë to pay homage in the creation of Heathcliff, the construction of Moor as man, allowing Brontë to position the subaltern as the vessel of violent agency.
16 This fluidity in their conception of race typically predates the nineteenth century and is most often found in the eighteenth century where skin color was a less fixed secondary identity marker. For a charming and oft incisive exploration of this, see Roxann Wheeler’s The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture.
17 A Creole female, which Adela has now claimed as her identity, was commonly depicted in the discourse of white colonial domination as lascivious and unstable due to the West Indian heat.
18 This carries the connotation of Percy’s animalistic virility astride Adela’s noble savagery. See Dowd, whose Barbarous Beasts, White Toys, and Hybrid Paternities: Considerations on Race and Sexuality in the Caribbean examines these tensions.
19 This accusation hearkens to the seemingly fixed, misogynist association between West Indian women and black magic which was stereotypical during the period in which Adela was composed.
20 In the first German translations, it is curious to note that “she” rather than “he” dies.
