INTERVIEW: TIA WILLIAMS

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT Tia Williams

Pauline St. Denis

Tia Williams began her career as a beauty editor, working at such magazines as YM, Elle, Glamour, Lucky, Teen People, and Essence. Since 2004, she’s written novels for adults and young adults and co-written a memoir with Iman. Her latest novel, Seven Days in June (Grand Central Publishing, June 8), follows two intense teen lovers who meet many years later as successful adults, both authors. Kirkus called it “a hugely satisfying romance that is electrifying and alive.” Williams answered some questions by email.

What was the original inspiration—a character, a scene, an image—that started you writing the novel? The idea for Seven Days in June popped into my head one Saturday night while watching Romeo + Juliet— the one with Leo and Claire, obviously! I thought to myself, what if they hadn’t died at the end? What if those wild, lovesick teens went their separate ways and then ran into each other as grown-ups? Does true love have an expiration date? And how many functional-seeming, got-it-all-together adults are walking around with hidden pasts and tortured secrets? Eva and Shane were born out of these questions. And since writing about what you know is, in fact, a great idea, Eva and I have a lot in common. (Full disclosure: I’m the mom of a 12-year-old living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with lifelong, debilitating migraines and a mother who is Black Creole.) Shane is pure fiction, however. I loved dreaming up a man who carefully constructs his life so that he has no ties whatsoever— and watching it all unravel as love creeps in.

What was more challenging to write—the scenes with adult Shane and Eva or the ones featuring their teenage selves? Eva’s and Shane’s teenage stories were so tough to write. I really tried to imbue their stories with dignity and grace and absolutely zero trauma porn. In order to convincingly write about kids with no guidance or safety, who self-medicate in dangerous ways, you need to turn on all your empath sensors—which are hard to turn off! Teen Shane and teen Eva still show up in my dreams.

Who is the ideal reader for your book, and where would they be reading it? It’s funny, I thought I knew exactly who my reader was. But when this book launched, I was flooded with DMs from straight men who read their girlfriend’s or wife’s copy, loved it, and decided they were Shane. I was so delighted! As a Black woman, I write for Black women. Specifically, and intentionally, I write these stories as an escapist fantasy for us. But I’m thrilled with whomever else comes to the party.

What was it like having a book come out in 2021? How did you connect with readers in this socially distanced year? I was actually petrified to release a book during the pandemic, but it ended up being the best launch I’d ever had! In the before times, I’d get maybe 40 or 50

people at a book signing (if I was lucky). But that’s a tiny fraction of the amount of people you can reach through a virtual event. You can tour from your couch! I spoke to readers all over the globe, in real time, which exposed the book to people who may not have found it otherwise.

What work of fiction most dazzled you this year? I really enjoyed The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris, which features the experiences of two Black women working in the very White publishing industry—and all is not what it seems. It was such a clever read, and I loved that it straddled the line between thriller and social commentary.

Interview by Tom Beer.

A LOT LIKE ADIÓS

Daria, Alexis Avon/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $15.99 paper | Sept. 14, 2021 978-0-06-295996-6

Childhood best friends have a second chance at love. Oppressed by the weight of family expectations after his high school graduation, Gabriel Aguilar left the Bronx for Los Angeles and never looked back. Thirteen years later, he co-owns a successful gym; he used to love working one-on-one with clients, but he’s bored and unhappy now that his job is nothing but calendar alerts and endless meetings. Gabe’s partner has hired Michelle Amato, a marketing expert, to help them with the gym’s New York expansion, unaware that she was Gabe’s childhood best friend and nextdoor neighbor. Michelle is excited for the chance to rebrand Agility Gyms but also hopes to finally find out why Gabe abandoned their friendship. Daria excels at writing strong, interesting conflict for her characters. Michelle is determined to protect herself after too many heartbreaks: She was devastated when Gabe moved to LA and was personally and professionally burned in corporate America. Gabe learns that his inability to stand up for himself in business is related to his penchant for running away. Gabe and Michelle know they should be careful with their hearts, but they cannot resist their powerful attraction or shared history, which is detailed on the page through instant messages from their teenage years. Michelle and Gabe battle their inner demons and take a chance on each other, and the result will delight romance readers. Not only is it a satisfying and steamy romance, but the novel also explores how family and friends can be an essential part of a happy, fulfilling life.

A sexy, satisfying romance about people who finally grow into being right for each other.

DAMNATION SPRING

Davidson, Ash Scribner (464 pp.) $28.00 | Aug. 3, 2021 978-1-982144-40-1

Big business, protesters, and working-class loggers clash in this environmentally savvy debut. Davidson’s novel takes place in Northern California forest territory between 1977 and 1978, as Rich Gundersen, a fourth-generation logger, is poised to make a big profit: He’s just purchased a stretch of land full of old-growth redwoods whose sale could provide security for his family, which is smaller than he’d like; he and his wife, Colleen, have one son, Graham (nicknamed Chub), but as the story opens she’s just had another in a string of miscarriages. Other crises soon emerge. Anti-logging protesters are trying to halt work and are

suspected of having left a child’s skull in the forest to prompt an investigation. Colleen, a midwife, witnesses an increase in stillbirths, many with serious deformations. Daniel, a researcher and Colleen’s ex-boyfriend, suspects chemicals sprayed by the timber company are responsible, but any delay to investigate threatens Rich’s plans to cut down and sell the redwoods. Davidson researched this milieu deeply but with an eye toward making every discovery feel natural and unforced. By shifting perspectives among Rich, Colleen, and Chub, she reveals not just the conflicts among loggers, protesters, and companies, but the growing stress within the family. The family of Colleen’s sister, Enid, whose husband is working an illicit tree-poaching scam, adds another layer of tension. (And Colleen can’t help but resent that Enid’s brood is ever growing: “Enid uncrosses her legs for two minutes and a baby pops out.”) As thoughtfully as Davidson establishes these dilemmas, she’s equally skilled at writing an outdoorsy adventure novel in which logging threatens the lives of workers with snapped cables and everybody else via landslides. Thematically, it’s a strong work of climate fiction, but it’s rooted in age-old man-versus-nature storytelling.

An impressively well-turned story about how environmental damage creeps into our bodies, psyches, and economies.

MACHINEHOOD

Divya, S.B. Saga/Simon & Schuster (416 pp.) $27.00 | March 2, 2021 978-1-9821-4806-5

Welga Ramirez thought she was done in the security field. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Welga is a shield—a bodyguard working for wealthy funders who develop pills to enhance human performance so people can compete with bots and AIs. It’s all theater. Fight with style and watch the tips roll in from the public watching via swarms of microcam drones. Welga is three months from the end of her contract when an attack on one of her clients actually turns deadly. Something called “the Machinehood” takes credit and gives humankind a week to stop producing pills, or else. Now Welga, along with the rest of the world, must race to answer the question: Is the Machinehood really the world’s first truly sentient AI? And if not, who’s threatening the entire world’s way of life—and why? Meanwhile, Welga’s having muscle spasms when she comes down from pills, which aren’t supposed to have side effects. Can her biogeneticist sister-inlaw, Nithya, figure out what’s going on before the spasms get worse? Divya has created a richly imagined and eerily familiar world filled with insecure workers cobbling together freelance gigs and families dependent on rapidly designed and homemanufactured vaccines to protect against new bugs. It’s a world without privacy, where every activity is performed for a crowd in hopes of getting tips—and a world confronting urgent questions about humans’ place in a society increasingly run by AIs. Simply taking a tour of this world is well worth the reader’s time, but Welga’s and Nithya’s quests also rocket the plot along toward an unexpected yet satisfying conclusion.

Intriguing worldbuilding plus a fast-paced plot equals catnip for SF fans.

ECHO TREE The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas

Dumas, Henry Ed. by Eugene B. Redmond Coffee House (416 pp.) $19.95 paper | May 4, 2021 978-1-56689-607-8

The work of a late, lamented, and influential icon of the 1960s Black Arts Movement is brought back into print to connect with a post-millennial Black Lives Matter generations of readers—and writers.

Dumas was two months shy of his 34th birthday when, in May 1968, he was shot and killed by a New York Transit Authority policeman in what was judged a case of mistaken identity. By that time, the Arkansas-born writer had already become something of a cult legend for his poetry and fiction, steeped in folkloric imagery, magical realism, and a haunting, deeply evocative lyricism that was near music. His short stories were posthumously collected in two volumes edited by his friend and de facto literary executor Redmond, and this book contains all those stories as well as some previously uncollected ones. Whether you’re already familiar with Dumas or are just encountering him for the first time, such pieces as the title story, “A Boll of Roses,” and the much-anthologized classic “Ark of Bones” administer a shock of recognition of how, at such a relatively early point in his career, Dumas achieved near mastery of narrative form, whether the gothic horror of “Rope of Wind,” the allegorical cunning of “The University of Man,” or the unsettling bare-bones naturalism of “The Crossing.” Most of the stories deal with the raw-nerve perils and spiritual crises that come from growing up in the rural South while others, such as “Harlem,” engage the hair-trigger tension of Black urban life in midcentury America. And there are times, as in “Devil Bird,” when Dumas’ phantasmagorical and metaphysical tendencies merge into wild and wicked farce. For all these stories’ spellbinding attributes, some of them seem to trail off as if waiting for yet another draft to amplify or add on to their details. The newer stories seem like variations, even repetitions of previous themes. And yet, the last story, “The Metagenesis of Sunra,” a tour de force of creation mythology and cosmic improvisation, submits yet another jolt of discovery, suggesting how Dumas, who always seemed ahead of his own, albeit brief, time, was capable of advancing African American storytelling art even further than one previously suspected.

Every couple of decades or so, we need to be reminded of what made writers like Toni Morrison call Henry Dumas a genius.

“An atmospheric novel about an independent young woman in a South Korean beach town.”

winter in sokcho

WINTER IN SOKCHO

Dusapin, Elisa Shua Trans. by Aneesa Abbas Higgins Open Letter (160 pp.) $14.95 paper | April 27, 2021 978-1-948830-41-6

An atmospheric novel about an independent young woman in a South Korean beach town. Dusapin’s debut novel depicts a young biracial Korean woman living and working in a small guesthouse in Sokcho, South Korea, a beach town 60 km from the North Korean border. When a mysterious middle-aged Frenchman named Yan Kerrand arrives, offseason, in the midst of the winter slump, the woman is intrigued. She has never met her father, a Frenchman who left her mother after a brief affair, but has studied French language and literature in school and dreams of traveling to the country someday. The novel unfolds in brief vignettelike chapters that reveal the unnamed woman’s daily life. After work, she visits her mother, who works in the fish market and is renowned for her delicious octopus soondae. Despite pressure to marry, the young woman is ambivalent about her long-distance relationship with her boyfriend, Jun-oh, an aspiring model in Seoul. Dusapin’s novel avoids clichés in the woman’s developing relationship with the lonely foreigner, who turns out to be an internationally renowned graphic novelist looking for inspiration for a new book. The woman observes the man and never looks at him as a savior or stereotypical lover. Instead, Dusapin depicts a fiercely intelligent, independent woman who longs to be seen clearly for who she is and the choices she has made, including leaving Seoul to help her aging mother. Higgins’ exquisite translation from the French original is a pleasure to read. The descriptions of daily life in the titular town are beautiful, elliptical, and fascinating, from the fish markets near the beach to soju-drenched dinners in local bistros to a surreal glimpse of a museum on the DMZ. Dusapin, who like her protagonist is of French and Korean heritage, has won several awards for her novel in Switzerland, where she lives, including the Prix Robert-Walser and the Prix Régine Desforges.

A triumph.

THE DANGERS OF SMOKING IN BED Stories

Enríquez, Mariana Trans. by Megan McDowell Hogarth/Crown (208 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 12, 2021 978-0-593-13407-8

Twelve gruesome, trenchant, and darkly winking stories set in modern-day Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Belgium.

One of the great advantages of genre fiction is its ability to use metaphor and distortion to explore realities that may otherwise feel too large or terrible to confront head-on. Enríquez, a journalist who grew up in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s Dirty War—a trauma that echoes across these stories—is a pioneer of Argentinian horror and Spanish-language weird fiction, warping familiar settings (city parks, an office building, a stretch of neighborhood street) by wefting in the uncanny, supernatural, or monstrously human. Drawing on real places and events and spinning them out in fantastical ways, she disinters the darkness thrumming under the smooth, bureaucratized surface of urban life, exposing powerlessness, inequity, abuse, and erasure. Colonial Catholicism, pop culture, grotesquerie, and local legends intertwine in images of rotting flesh, altars that conceal their true nature, and ritual magic while themes of loss, fate, mental illness, state violence, fear and disdain for the other, and familial obligation—both the abnegation and upholding thereof—run throughout. In “Angelita Unearthed,” a young woman lives with an unexpected burden of inherited grief. “Rambla Triste” introduces us to a woman visiting old friends in Barcelona who is soon confronted by a potent and inescapable reminder of the neighborhood’s tragic, buried—and questionably authentic—past. In one firecracker, “Our Lady of the Quarry,” a volatile mix of teenage vanity, jealousy, and rage leads to a summoning of dark powers and disproportionate revenge. And in the creepy and desolating “Kids Who Come Back,” the lost, sold, and rejected children of Buenos Aires begin to return, sparking dubious joy out of even more dubious grief and exposing an entire populace steeped in guilt but determined to reject its culpability. As entertaining as it is affecting and channeled into English with almost clairvoyant percipience by translator McDowell, this is one not to be slept on for enthusiasts of weird fiction and literary horror and of writers like Samanta Schweblin, Amber Sparks, Ayse Papatya Bucak, and Carmen Maria Machado. An atmospheric assemblage of cunning and cutting Argentine gothic tales.

Insidiously absorbing, like quicksand.

THE SENTENCE

Erdrich, Louise Harper/HarperCollins (416 pp.) $24.49 | Nov. 9, 2021 978-0-06-267112-7

The most recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction—for The Night Watchman (2020)—turns her eye to various kinds of hauntings, all of which feel quite real to the affected characters. Erdrich is the owner of Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis and, in this often funny novel, the favorite bookstore of Flora, one of narrator Tookie’s “most annoying customers.” Flora wants to be thought of as Indigenous, a “very persistent wannabe” in the assessment of Tookie, who’s Ojibwe. Flora appears at the store one day with a photo of her great-grandmother, claiming the woman was ashamed of being Indian: “The picture of the woman looked Indianesque, or she might have just been in a