INTERVIEW: ADRIANA HERRERA

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT Adriana Herrera

HQN

“In a word, marvelous,” said Kirkus of Adriana Herrera’s A Caribbean Heiress in Paris (HQN, May 31), a historical romance novel featuring a female rum tycoon—the heiress of the title—who meets a Scottish earl in the whisky business while attending the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. Herrera, a New York–based trauma therapist who works with survivors of domestic and sexual violence, is the author of 15 books and a co-founder of the Queer Romance PoC Collective, which advocates for greater diversity in the genre. She answered our questions— about romance and rum—by email.

What do you enjoy about writing a historical romance? How does the process differ from writing a contemporary romance? Other than romance, nonfiction books about history are probably what I read the most. The research is something I particularly enjoy. I also like the challenge of discovering pieces of history that are not usually brought to life. The Caribbean was a vibrant melting pot in the 19th century. There were thousands of people from the West Indies living, studying, doing business in Europe, and I love being able to carve a space out in romance to tell those stories.

The biggest differences from contemporary are the research and the use of language. It can get pretty interesting when I am coming out of a historical and trying to draft a contemporary!

The plot of Caribbean Heiress is built around the rum trade. How much did you have to learn about rum making, and did your research involve sampling rums? Do you have a favorite? I grew up in the Dominican Republic, where rum is basically a religion! It is also one of our oldest industries, so I had a good sense of the long history of the trade in the Caribbean and the DR specifically. It was fascinating to learn about the role of women in the sale and distilling of rum. One of the most interesting things I learned—with the help of the archives of the Institute of Dominican Studies—was that most of the liquor retailers on the island in the 19th century were women. As I wrote it, this book very much became about highlighting that part of history that we never hear about.

I did sample some rums in the process…for research! And I will give two favorites: Brugal Leyenda, which is from a very old Dominican distillery that has a woman master blender, the great-great-great granddaughter of the founder. My second favorite is Ron Zacapa Edicion Negra, from Guatemala, which also has a woman master blender.

Were you able to do live events for the book this year? Any memorable moments you’d like to share? I was able to do in-person events, which was wonderful. One of the most memorable moments happened at Comic Con this year. A reader—a Latina— got up during the Q&A and started to cry when she talked about what it was like for her to read a histor-

ical romance with a protagonist that she could see herself in. That meant so much to me, because that is exactly the reason why I started to write.

What books published in 2022 were among your favorites? I read quite a few great ones this year, but two that have really stood out for me are You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi and After Hours on Milagros Street by Angelina Lopez. Both of those books have the kinds of heroines I love to read—strong and a little messy but very certain of who they are. Both books are also incredibly sexy and romantic.

Interview by Tom Beer.

change is Bix, an NYU classmate of Sasha in Goon Squad but here a vastly rich social media magnate who, in 2016, makes the next leap in the “Self-Surveillance Era” by creating, first, Own Your Unconscious, which allows people to externalize their consciousness on a cube, and then Collective Consciousness, which offers the option of “uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online ‘collective,’ ” thereby gaining access to “the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone, living or dead, who had done the same.” Egan explores the impact of this unnervingly plausible innovation with her habitual panache, ranging from her characters’ pre-internet youths to the 2030s. While there are “eluders” like Bix’s son Gregory, who refuse to share their private thoughts with strangers, many are seduced by the convenience and power of this collective tool. The most stylistically audacious chapter shows us the scarily logical next step; it reproduces the instructions of a “weevil” implanted in the brain of Lulu, daughter of morally compromised Goon Squad publicist Dolly, now a spy married to “a visionary in the realm of national security.” As she did in in Goon Squad’s PowerPoint chapter, Egan doles out information in small bites that accumulate to demonstrate the novel’s time-honored strengths: richly complicated characters and compelling narratives. The final chapter rolls back to 1991 to movingly affirm the limits of floods of undigested information and the ability of fiction, only fiction, to “roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.”

A thrilling, endlessly stimulating work that demands to be read and reread.

IF I SURVIVE YOU

Escoffery, Jonathan MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (272 pp.) $27.00 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-374-60598-8

A collection of linked stories focused on one family’s tempest-tossed journeys in Jamaica and Florida. Escoffery’s sharp and inventive debut largely focuses on Trelawny, the bookish son of Jamaican parents whose place in the world is complex both physically (he’s homeless for a time) and ethnically. In Jamaica, his light-skinned, mixed-race parents feel superior to those with darker skin; growing up in Miami, he’s mistaken as Dominican; in college in the Midwest, he becomes “unquestionably Black.” In the finely tuned opening story, “In Flux,” Trelawny’s efforts to nail down an identity frustrates both himself and others; he’s at the center of a question he has a hard time answering and few others want to face. That uncertainty follows him throughout the book as he squabbles with his father and older brother for their esteem. He’s also forced to take peculiar and/or degrading jobs to make ends meet: He answers Craigslist ads for a woman who wants a black eye and a couple who want a stereotypically Black man to watch them having sex. Not that the rest of his family has it much better—his older brother, Delano, is a struggling musician working on the side in a shady landscape business, and the

much-fought-for family home in Miami is sinking through its foundation. (Delano’s thoughts capture the mood of futility: “You try to make a situation better, only to make it worse. Better to do nothing.”) But if Escoffery’s characters are ambivalent, his writing is clever, commanding, and flexible—he’s comfortable in first and second person, standard English and Jamaican patois, Miami ethnic enclaves and white-bread high rises. And he writes thoughtfully about how the exterior forces that have knocked Trelawny’s family sideways—Hurricane Andrew, poverty, racism—intersect with and stoke interior fears and bouts of self-loathing.

A fine debut that looks at the complexities of cultural identity with humor, savvy, and a rich sense of place.

DR. NO

Everett, Percival Graywolf (232 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 1, 2022 978-1-64445-208-0

A deadpan spoof of international thrillers, complete with a megalomaniacal supervillain, a killer robot, a damsel in distress, and math problems. One never knows what to expect from Everett, whose prolific fictional output over the last four decades includes Westerns (God’s Country, 1994), crime novels (Assumption, 2011), variations on Greek mythology (Frenzy, 1997), and inquiries into African American identity (I Am Not Sidney Poitier, 2009). This time, Everett brings his mordant wit, philosophic inclinations, and narrative mischief to the suspense genre, going so far as to appropriate the title of an Ian Fleming thriller. Its nonplussed hero/narrator is a mathematics professor at Brown University who calls himself Wala Kitu. It turns out he’s the grown-up version of Ralph Townsend, the genius child in Everett’s novel Glyph (1999), who retains everything while determined to say nothing. Indeed, “nothing” is the recurring theme (or joke) of Everett’s latest, beginning with its title and continuing with the meaning of both Wala (nothing in Tagalog) and Kitu (nothing in Swahili). “Nothing” also appears to be the major objective of one John Milton Bradley Sill, a “slightly racially ambiguous” self-made billionaire who declares to Wala his ambition to be a Bond villain, “the sort of perpetrator of evil deeds that might cause the prime minister to dispatch a double-naught spy.” John Sill offers Wala a hefty sum ($3 million) to help him rob Fort Knox just as the eponymous baddie of Fleming’s Goldfinger tried to do. Wala’s not sure whether Sill’s joking or not. But the money’s big enough to compel him to tag along as Sill goes through the motions of being a supervillain, stopping along the way in places like Miami, Corsica, Washington, D.C., and, eventually, Kentucky. Wala’s accompanied throughout by his faithful one-legged bulldog, Trigo, and a math department colleague named Eigen, who at times seems to be literally under Sill’s spell but is almost as vexed by the nefarious goings-on as Wala. Being stalked throughout by Gloria, a comely, deadly Black android with an on-again, off-again Afro, doesn’t ease their anxieties. Everett is adroit at ramping up the tension while sustaining his narrator’s droll patter and injecting well-timed ontological discourses on...well…nothing. It may not sound like anything much, so to speak. But then, neither did all those episodes of Seinfeld that insisted they were about nothing. And this, too, is just as funny, if in a far different, more metaphysical manner.

A good place to begin finding out why Everett has such a devoted cult.

STORIES FROM THE TENANTS DOWNSTAIRS

Fofana, Sidik Scribner (192 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 16, 2022 978-1-982145-81-1

Eight interconnected stories set in a low-income Harlem high rise give faces, voices, and meaning to lives otherwise neglected or marginalized. The Banneker Terrace housing complex doesn’t actually exist at present-day 129th Street and Frederick Douglass Avenue in Harlem. But the stories assembled in this captivating debut collection feel vividly and desperately authentic in chronicling diverse African American residents of Banneker poised at crossroads in their overburdened, economically constrained lives. In “The Okiedoke,” a 25-year-old man named Swan is excited about the release of his friend Boons from prison; maybe too excited given that an illegal scheme they’re hatching could endanger the fragile but peaceful life he’s established with Mimi, the mother of his child, who’s been struggling to balance waitressing at Roscoe’s restaurant with doing hair on the side. Helping her learn the hairdressing trade is Dary, the “gay dude” in apartment 12H, who, in “Camaraderie,” goes over-the-top in his obsession with a pop diva by getting too close to her for her comfort. “Ms. Dallas” may well be the collection’s most caustically observant and poignantly tender story; the title character, Verona Dallas, besides being Swan’s mother, works as a paraprofessional at the neighborhood’s middle school while working nights “at the airport doin’ security.” Her testimony focuses mostly on the exasperating dynamics of her day job and the compounding misperceptions between the White Harvard-educated English teacher to whom she’s been assigned and the unruly class he’s vainly trying to interest in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. (The keen perceptions and complex characterizations in this story may be attributed to the fact that its author works as a teacher in New York City’s public schools.) All these stories are told in the first-person voices of their protagonists and thus rely on urban Black dialect that may put off some readers at first, with the frequent colloquial use of the N-word and other idiomatic expressions. But those willing to use their ears more than their eyes to read along will find a rich, ribald, and engagingly funny vein of verbal music, as up-to-the-minute as hip-hop, but as rooted in human verities as Elizabethan dialogue. The publisher compares this book to Gloria Naylor’s The Women

“A superb debut short story collection explores the uncanny and grotesque.”

out there

of Brewster Place and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. One could also invoke James Joyce’s Dubliners in the stories’ collective and multilayered evocation of place, time, and people.

A potentially significant voice in African American fiction asserts itself with wit and compassion.

OUT THERE

Folk, Kate Random House (256 pp.) $27.00 | March 29, 2022 978-0-593-23146-3

A superb debut short story collection explores the uncanny and grotesque. A man develops a symbiotic attachment to a house he must keep “moist” at all costs. A young woman pines after a fellow patient on the ward for people suffering from a rare disease known as Total Nocturnal Bone Loss, which causes a person’s bones to melt overnight. Frustrated by her partner’s neglect in their new suburban home, a woman becomes obsessed with the possibility that someone is living in their storm shelter. In this collection, first-time author Folk conjures up thrilling new ways to write about the strange and often disgusting experience of having a body: One character, while having sex, “focused on her joints, imagining bones turning in the sockets of other bones, rattling at the ends of strings.” Not all of Folk’s stories live up to the standard of her best—the shorter installments tend to be weaker—but her best are truly exceptional. The apex of her innovation are the “blots” that appear in the first and last stories in the collection: artificially constructed men who seduce women via dating app before stealing their identities and wreaking havoc on their digital lives. Though the blots are initially easy to identify—“They were the best-looking men in any room, and had no sense of humor”—they become increasingly difficult to differentiate from normal human men as their technology improves. In “Out There,” a woman agonizes over whether her new boyfriend is a blot or just a jerk; in “Big Sur,” the collection’s high point, Folk delves into the mind of one of the early blots, whose wildly inhuman social skills render him lovable.

A bold, exhilarating display of talent.

LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Fu, Kim Tin House (220 pp.) $16.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2022 978-1-951142-99-5

Stories blending emotional realism with surreal imagery.

It’s worth mentioning this from the outset: The title of Fu’s latest book is not a metaphor. In the pages of this collection, readers will discover a sea monster more aptly described as “an amalgamation of brainless multicellular organisms”; a sinister doll that once belonged to a family beset by tragedy; and a being with a hood that pours out sleep-inducing sand. This book will likely resonate with readers of Karen Russell and Ben Loory; like them, Fu is equally at home chronicling bizarre events and pondering her characters’ inner lives. “June Bugs,” for instance, follows the travails of Martha, a woman who moves to a new place abounding with an uncanny number of bugs. Fu explores the circumstances of how Martha came to live there, including the way an earlier relationship curdled into something toxic and abusive; by the denouement, the story has arrived at a phantasmagorical place, but Martha’s challenges in life and work are what endure. Some of the stories venture fully into the speculative realm, such as “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” which is told entirely through dialogue between a customer and operator of a futuristic service that creates realistic simulations of the user’s fantasies, exploring questions of memory and reality, and “Twenty Hours,” in which a couple pays for a service that allows them to murder one another repeatedly. Violence, trauma, and intimacy come to the foreground in many of these stories, including “#ClimbingNation,” about a memorial service for a man who died while climbing. Even here, in a more realistic mode, Fu addresses questions of technology and community with grace and subtlety.

A powerful collection that demonstrates Fu’s range and skill.

PORTRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN LADY

Gainza, María Trans. by Thomas Bunstead Catapult (192 pp.) $24.00 | March 22, 2022 978-1-64622-032-8

An art critic chases the identity of a legendary forger through the testimonies of the aging counterculture denizens who knew her.

In 1960s Buenos Aires, a group of “tatty bohemians” take up residence in a decaying mansion they’ve dubbed the Hotel Melancholical. Among the poets, painters, photographers, translators, and philosophers that make up the heady menagerie is a hypnotically charismatic, flinty-eyed woman named Renée who is an accomplished art forger, specializing in the works of (reallife) Austrian Argentine portraitist Mariette Lydis. The hotel’s residents all have a role in the scheme—from forging the labels on the backs of paintings to publicizing the pieces to Buenos Aires galleries—and they all split the resulting profits, but they need somebody on the inside to provide the final touch: a certificate of authenticity from the art valuations department of the Ciudad Bank. This is managed by Enriqueta, Renée’s friend and fellow student at Argentinean Fine Arts Academy, who uses her position to pass along Renée’s forgeries for years until