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The Essence of Nathan Biddle.

BY J. WILLIAM LEWIS

Greenleaf Book Group Press | June 2021

On the first anniversary of Nathan’s death, we went to the sea. We may have been looking for the ungraspable image that Melville said is visible in all rivers and oceans, but I didn’t see it. Maybe I wouldn’t have recognized it if it were floating like flotsam on the surface of the water. In any case, I didn’t see the image and I didn’t find the key to it all. We spent two weeks in a little cottage my mother rented, walking on the beach in solemn silence and sitting on the deck in the evenings while the sun sank into the ocean. We talked some about Nathan but not really that much. Neither of us mentioned his death. We had exhausted ourselves in hours of anguished fretting over a death that in any sane world was inconceivable. The ocean didn’t provide any answers but it did envelop us in an almost mystical caressing balm. The beach house stood a couple hundred yards back from the water, built on pilings among the sea oats and bordered on the beach side by a large wooden deck. At twilight, when the sun left nothing but an orange tint on the waves, the ocean flooded the deck with a pungent fragrance and gentle gusting breezes. Even in the half-light, you could see the whitecaps cascading along the line of the beach. The hush of the evening was punctuated only by the incessant, rhythmic pounding of the surf like a gigantic heart. The last night we were there, I was sitting on the deck looking absently toward the surf when I noticed a great blue heron standing alone about twenty yards from the deck. The bird stood on one leg at the edge of the area lit by the flood lamp on the beach side of the house. The wind off the ocean moved the lamppost gently to and fro, so that the ring of light on the ground moved back and forth and the solitary fowl was alternately bathed in light and sheathed in darkness. The bird never moved while I watched him. The light came and went but he just stood there looking wary and maybe perplexed. I still think about that strange, gaunt bird standing on one leg in the pulsing light. It seems unbearably sad to be totally alone and uncomprehending: The heron had no way of knowing and no one to explain why the light came and went or why the ocean throbbed and the wind moaned along the shore. I don’t worry all that much about Nathan’s

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death anymore, but the bizarre monopode randomly sneaks back into my mind and roosts there like a spirit from another world. Maybe because he first showed up in the summer, the hint of warm weather always invites him to return. He seems always to be lurking in the shadows but in the summer he is a constant intruder, yawking wildly if I try to elude him or chase him away. As far back as I can remember, I have expected summers to be wonderful. I don’t know why I delude myself with that notion but I don’t seem to have any control over it. It begins with a giddy sensation in the spring, and I can feel the anticipation rising inside me like a providential tide. But summer is never anything like the images I create in my mind. Last summer was particularly disappointing. My friend Eddie Lichtman’s father hired us to deliver furniture again, and I was tired almost every weeknight. Also, Anna was gone the last month and a half of the summer, working as a counselor at a camp. We had not been getting along very well when she left, and then right before school started everything collapsed. She wrote me a letter in early August saying that she just wanted to be friends. I was already getting more and more nervous and strung out worrying about the meaning of things, and I couldn’t make the “friends” thing work in my mind. It was probably an illusion to begin with, but everything had seemed to be pretty much on track. I had been clacking along, more or less trying to stay with everybody’s programs and schedules, and all of a sudden the trestle seemed to give way under me. My last day of work at the furniture store was on Wednesday of the week before the start of the fall semester. I was tired Wednesday night, so I decided to stay home and read instead of going out. But I really didn’t do much of anything. I fell asleep on the couch. I don’t even remember moving, but I was in my bed Thursday morning. The house was quiet and it was already nine-thirty when I woke up. My mother had left early because she had teachers’ meetings, so I just lay there for a while. I thought about staying in bed all day but, after about thirty minutes, I started getting restless and my thoughts began to roam.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Essence of Nathan Biddle is a timeless coming-of-age tale that, as novelist David Armstrong observed, "is like discovering The Catcher in the Rye all over again." Protagonist Kit Biddle is a rising prep school senior who finds himself tangled in a web of spiritual quandaries and intellectual absurdities. Kit's angst is compounded by a unique psychological burden he is forced to carry: his intelligent but unstable Uncle Nat has committed an unspeakable act on what, according to the Uncle's deranged account, were direct orders from God.

In Hindsight.

BY SHARON BONANNO

Advantage Media Group | Dec 2020

It was like being chased by something in the dark. I couldn’t see it, but I knew to be terrified. I was running so fast that I couldn’t get enough air. When the oxygen came, it pierced my lungs and clenched my chest, making it painful to take another breath. At first all that I could think about was moving. Fast. Keeping ahead of whatever it was that was chasing me. I wasn’t thinking about getting away. I wasn’t thinking ahead at all. I was just running and trying to breathe.

Eventually my fear evolved into anxiety. I realized that there was no end in sight. Whatever was after me was not letting up, and I couldn’t maintain the pace. Every cell in my body was on the verge of collapse. I had to stop. I was afraid to stop. I wanted my limbs to give out. I wanted to collapse. All that I knew how to do was to keep running.

I remember that I didn’t sleep that night. Or at least it felt like I didn’t sleep. I fell onto my bed and closed my eyes in the winter-dark early morning, and as soon as I had found quiet, the lights screamed on. When I opened my eyes, Mom and Sharon were standing there in my bedroom.

That morning the accosting felt like it had come out of nowhere. It seemed a random attack. In hindsight, I can see the events that brought us all to that moment. I still don’t remember stealing money from my sister a week earlier, although I believe that I did it— cocaine is expensive. I took less than twenty dollars from her wallet while I was visiting and ran out the door while she was checking her laundry. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to be noticed—mostly because she was noticing other things.

Finally, just the night previous to Sharon and Mom appearing in my room, I’d called Mom at two thirty in the morning. She hadn’t answered. I’d left a message on her answering machine. I had been crying so fiercely that I could barely put words together. I’d told

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her nobody was there for me, nobody understood me, nobody cared about me. I’d told her that I was alone. I’d told her that I knew she loved me. I’d said that I wanted to die.

The truth that I understood later was that I was in a deep depression. I felt sad and alone. So alone. Day after day I had breakdowns. They were constant. I would cry. I would write letters to my sister and Mom. I would pray to God when I went to sleep—“Maybe I don’t have to wake up”— and I didn’t even know if I believed in God. I was too much of a wimp to take my own life. I would look in the Yellow Pages for places where I could get help. I did this every day— the crying, the praying, the searching. Other than finding and doing cocaine, it became my life. It’s hard to explain how truly terrible it was, how empty and worthless I believed I was. I was unbelievably sad. I went through the motions of life, but I wasn’t there. I was a shell, and the real me shrunk away inside, getting smaller and farther away from the surface so that I was barely there. For a while the drugs made things better, then they only distracted me. Eventually they did nothing but clog my nose. I couldn’t go on.

The feeling wasn’t new. I felt this way my whole life. All through my twenties, I had thought that there was something wrong with me, but I didn’t think it was the drugs. I knew that I felt bad about myself. I felt like nobody understood me, and I didn’t fit in anywhere. I always felt so alone. Cocaine stopped my head from telling me that I was crazy and bad. It was pretty good medicine until it stopped working. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

You Wonder How Someone Can Let Things Get So Extreme. In Hindsight, So Much Is Clear.

Lisa and Sharon are sisters who grew up together in what appeared to be a typical suburban family. After their parents divorced, they lived with their mother in the same house throughout their childhoods and visited their father every other weekend. From the outside, everything looked fine. But by their twenties, their lives diverted radically. While Sharon moved into a career, started a family, and embarked on her adult life, Lisa tumbled in a downward spiral of lying, addiction, depression, and shame.

Last Words on Earth.

BY JAVIER SERENA TR. FROM THE SPANISH BY KATIE WHITTEMORE

Open Letter | September 2021

In the period just prior to the advent of all the recognition and money and readership, Ricardo’s only toehold in reality apart from Pasquiano’s monthly letters, the only people who validated his status as a writer and confirmed that his authorial identity wasn’t simply a figment of his imagination, were Fernando Vallés and Rodolfo García Huertas. Both men were so different from Ricardo: Fernando was an established, prestigious novelist whose books had already been translated into several languages; thanks to his rapid ascent on the literary scene, early on he started to publish articles in La Vanguardia, in addition to counting on considerable family wealth. In contrast, Rodolfo García Huertas never harbored the same ambitions as either Ricardo or Vallés: he was content for writing to be little more than a pastime, a Sunday treat, an armchair traveler’s fancy. At the time, I feared that if those threads of friendship were broken, Ricardo would be lost forever in our tourist town, like a satellite escaping its controls and floating off into the infinite darkness of space, where there were no conjectures about the future and where his voice didn’t echo and every gesture was a juggling trick performed for an audience of none. Ricardo harbored that same terror, as well. One afternoon in July, García Huertas came to Lloret with his wife. We were having paella on a restaurant patio, cocooned from reality by the dazzling sunlight and our dark sunglasses and piles of towels and bathing suits and sand pails. Relaxed after two jugs of sangria, Ricardo’s old friend from Barcelona decided to make a confession. He wore a red-and-white flowered shirt and had smeared sunscreen all over his face without bothering to rub it in. “I only write in the office now,” he joked, adjusting his straw hat to protect his incipient bald spot from the sun. “Not even that: I just revise the work of professors who need extra income.” He admitted that he was shelving his literary ambitions, mostly because he judged, with chagrin, that his writing wasn’t very good, and I couldn’t help but wonder what remained of the oaths he and Ricardo had sworn when they met in the Raval, when they

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traded stolen books and created poetry anthologies and co-authored stories. When neither one of them could imagine a future that wasn’t flush with words. Ricardo already knew that his friend had started working at a press that published textbooks, didactic books designed to organize basic knowledge for schoolchildren, books that were not books as they had conceived of them, despite the paper and ink. García Huertas’s admission didn’t come as a surprise, but when Ricardo heard it, he gave a bitter smile that neither his sunglasses nor Patricio’s presence on his lap could conceal. Ricardo had on an even more colorful shirt than García Huertas, with daubs of green and blue and yellow, anarchic brushstrokes that seemed to mimic a cockatoo’s plumage and a childhood on the Caribbean coast instead of Lima. He took a long drag on his cigarette and seemed to chew the smoke before he exhaled. “You’re doing the right thing,” he said, finishing his espresso and getting to his feet. “Maybe it’s what we all should do: resign ourselves to correcting other people’s work and appreciating it as readers. From a distance.” Sad and solemn as the victim of a sacrifice, a martyr who accepted his fate in the firepit in exchange for the redemption of the very mob that condemned him to death, Ricardo walked toward the sea, in the direction of the little pedal boats. We watched as he and Patricio climbed aboard. From our table on the terrace, we could recognize Ricardo from the back, and the small shape of Patricio on the bench beside him. Ricardo made a beeline from the shore straight out to sea, hell-bent on motoring as fast as his legs could take them, away from the beachfront restaurant and the swath of swimmers at the water’s edge, away from García Huertas’s admission and the fact that he was down one more companion on his voyage. They were out on the water for close to an hour. We kept watch, unsure if it was another of his halfmad jokes and we should just wait, or if it would be prudent to alert the Coast Guard in case he disappeared over the horizon forever. .

ABOUT THE BOOK

In exile from his home country of Peru, Ricardo Funes embodies the ultimate starving artist. Fired from almost every job he’s held—usually for paying more attention to literature than work—he sets himself up in a rundown shack where he works on writing stories to enter in regional contests across Spain, and foisting his judgements about literature on anyone who will listen as one of the last remaining members of the negacionismo poetry movement. Completely dedicated to an unwavering belief in his own art, Funes struggles in anonymity until he achieves unbridled success with The Aztec and becomes a legend . . . at least for a moment. Diagnosed with lung cancer a few years later, Funes will only be able to enjoy his newfound attention for a short time.

Among the Hedges.

BY SARA MESA TR. FROM THE SPANISH BY MEGAN MCDOWELL

Open Letter | May 2021

It all started on a morning like any other. The alarm clock went off at the same time as always, and Soon lazed under the covers for a while, then dragged herself out of bed, washed her face, put on her track suit. When she went downstairs her parents were drinking coffee and talking in whispers; they went quiet when she entered the kitchen. She mixed a Cola Cao, nibbled on some madeleines. Same as always, says Soon, nothing to make her think that day would be different from any other. She didn’t plan anything, had no way of knowing she was approaching the decisive moment, the moment when everything would change: she left the house and headed down the street, hurrying because she was a little late . . . and then she turned around. She turned around and sped up even more, but in the opposite direction. Not yet knowing what to do. Not knowing where she was headed. Not even knowing why or from what she was running. Her heart was pounding hard, but she felt strangely relieved, even happy. She sat down on a bench, took out some notebooks, pretended she was reading over them. After a while she got up, walked to another neighborhood. and sat on another bench, spent another good while there, dissimulating. No one noticed her. Maybe she gave the impression she was older, maybe an underdeveloped sixteen— it happens: some girls develop late, they’re slight and childish alongside their peers, girls among women. She spent the whole morning like that, wandering, until it was time to go home. She calculated the time exactly; her father opened the door for her, and his expression was the same as the day before, the week before: a routine, disinterested expression. They had lunch together. Her mother came home afterward, asked if she had much homework, if she wanted to go to the store later. Affectionate as always, both of them, not realizing a thing. She’d thought that her face would betray her, but no. Life went on the same whether she went to school or not. She knew then that she never wanted to go back. But there was still the matter of her excuse. If she kept skipping, on the third day at the latest they would call her. house to

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ask about her. That’s how it always is: teachers chase the students down to make them go to class, even though at heart they’d rather the kids miss school, because it meant less work and calmer classrooms for them. Take Héctor, a repeating student who skipped school all the time, and who, when he did go, only caused trouble. Héctor didn’t have the slightest interest in learning any of what was taught in those classrooms; he wanted to be a construction worker, but he had to wait until he was of legal age to leave school. He spent his time in class climbing on top of desks, throwing spitballs, and smacking his classmates on the back of the head, just out of boredom. Once, he went weeks without showing up, until an inspector came around and inquired about him and about the school’s measures against his absenteeism. Absenteeism, kids, is punished, he told the other students there, the ones who never skipped, and his tone was very serious, menacing. Her case isn’t comparable to Héctor’s because she is not under suspicion. From the outset she has a credibility that he would never have, since she has always been an obedient, disciplined, and even submissive girl, not at all rowdy—she would be terribly embarrassed, for example, to climb up onto a desk. But, even so, she had to give some explanation for her absence. First she thought about calling in with a made-up excuse, then she considered faking a letter. She looked online and found some forms to request a school transfer. There were several kinds: she chose the SUT model (Sudden Urgent Transfer). If you thought about it, it really wasn’t so strange: a sudden change in her parents’ jobs or any other unforeseen event could force them to move, those things happen all the time, especially at the start of the year, right? She filled out the form, chose a random school in a nearby city as her transfer, included a fake phone number, and faxed it to her school from the copy shop near her house. So far, the trick was working. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Soon, who is almost fourteen years old, has been skipping school and spending her days hidden among the hedges in a local park, listening to music and reading women’s magazines. One day, a fifty-yearold man stumbles upon her hiding place, and the two strike up a friendship. He tells her about birds and Nina Simone, buys her soda and chips, and spends almost every day talking with her.

As these secrets rise to the surface, the clock is ticking, the weather is growing cold, and the school is untangling Soon’s set of lies, setting up a moment where something has to give.

Winter in Sokcho.

BY ELISA SHUA DUSAPIN TR. FROM THE FRENCH BY ANEESA ABBAS HIGGINS

Open Letter | April 2021

The wind was sweeping the clouds over the surface of the road. Late afternoon light. Skeletal remains of villages on either side of the road. Cardboard boxes, plastic waste, blue metal sheets. No urban sprawl. Gangwon Province had been left to rot since the war. I told Kerrand to drive faster or we’d be late for the tour. I translated the road signs for him. I’d handed him the keys as we got in the car. I hated driving, I’d never intended to drive him there. It suited him fine.

At the checkpoint, a soldier younger than me made us fill in forms. A loudspeaker was delivering instructions on a loop. No photography. No filming. No leaving the marked pathway. No loud voices. No laughing. I handed the papers back to the soldier. He saluted and the fence opened onto no man’s land. Gray and beige as far as the eye could see. Reeds. Marshes. Here and there, a tree. It was two kilometers to the observation point. We had an armed convoy as our escort at first. Then it turned off and we were alone. The road started to snake between snow-filled ditches. Suddenly, Kerrand put his foot on the brake and I was thrown against the windshield. “I thought she was going to cross,” he mumbled, his hands clutching the steering wheel. By the side of the road, a woman. Hunched beneath a pink jacket. Kerrand signaled to her to cross. She stood there, not moving, her hands crossed behind her back. He started up again carefully. I could see her in the side mirror, following us with her eyes. She watched us until we disappeared from view round a bend. My throat was feeling dry from the heater. In the car park at the observation point, the wind whipped our coats against our legs. A smell of cold oil wafted toward us from a tteok stall. Kerrand buried his hands in his pockets, his sketchbook protruding from the right pocket. We climbed the hill as far as the look¬out point. A line of binoculars. For five hundred won, you could gaze at North Korea. I slid a coin in the slot. It was so cold our

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eyelids stuck to the metal frames. To the right, the ocean. To the left, a wall of mountains. Ahead of us, fog. Not much of a view, but what could you expect in this weather? We went back down to the car park. The old lady we’d seen earlier was there, talkin to the woman selling tteok at the stall. As soon as she saw me she was all over me, talking at me and stroking my cheek with her rough hand. I pushed her away. She whimpered. I clutched at Kerrand, he calmly put his arm around my shoulders. “What did she say?” “We’re God’s children. She thinks I’m pretty.” The woman at the stall pointed to a dumpling floating in the pot. Oil was seeping from its pores, expelling little bubbles of air. I shook my head. The other woman was still whining. Kerrand drew me toward the car. Inside, I wedged my legs against the heater, rubbed my hands between my thighs. I wasn’t warming up. We headed toward the museum. It was late in the afternoon, I hadn’t eaten since the evening before. A Choco Pie had burst out of its purple wrapper at the bottom of my bag and I began picking at it, one crumb at a time. “When was the last time you were here?” asked Kerrand. “This is my firt time.” “You’ve never been here before? Out of a feeling of solidatiry, I mean?” “Shedding a few tears behind a pair of binoculars? You call that solidarity?” “That’s not what I meant.” “Tourists are the only ones who come here.” Kerrand didn’t respond. At the museum entrance, inside a sterile box, a woman’s face leaned in, mouth close to the microphone. Five thousand won. “For two?” I asked. A pair of bulging eyes looked languidly up at me. Yes, for two people, she said in English. I choked back the humiliation of not being addressed in my own language in front of Kerrand. A rubber-gloved hand pointed us in the right direction. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an "authentic" Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls, and cross into North Korea. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows—the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.

Empty Houses.

BY BRENDA NAVARRO

Daunt Books | February 2021

DANIEL DISAPPEARED three months, two days and eight hours after his birthday. He was three. He was my son. The last time I saw him he was between the seesaw and the slide in the park where I took him each afternoon. I don’t remember anything else. Or maybe I do: I was upset because Vladimir had texted to say he was leaving me because he didn’t want to cheapen everything. Cheapen it, like when you sell something valuable for two pesos. That was me the afternoon I lost my son: the woman who, every few weeks, said goodbye to an elusive lover who would offer her sex like some kind of bargain giveaway to make up for his leaving.

That was me, the conned shopper. The con of a mother. The one who didn’t see. I didn’t see much. What did I see? I comb the warp of visual images for the thread that might help me grasp, even for a second, when exactly it happened. In which moment, which instant, amid which little yelp from a three-year-old body did he disappear? What happened? I didn’t see much. And although I walked among the other park-goers calling his name, I could no longer hear. Did any cars go by? Were there any other people there? Who? I didn’t see my threeyear-old son again.

Nagore finished school at two, but I didn’t collect her. I never asked her how she got home that afternoon. In fact, we never discussed whether any of us actually went home that day or if we all disappeared with the fourteen kilos of my son, never to return. To this day, there isn’t a mental image that can give me the answer.

Then, the wait; me in the Attorney General’s Office, slumped on a grubby chair where Fran later came and found me. We waited together, we’re still waiting on that chair, even if, physically speaking, we’re somewhere else.

More than once I wished they’d both died. I would look in the bathroom mirror and imagine I was seeing myself crying over

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them. But I wouldn’t cry, I’d hold back the tears and put my calm, collected face back on in case I hadn’t got the act quite right the first time. And so, turning back to the mirror I’d ask: Dead? What do you mean they’re dead? Who’s dead? Both of them?

Were they together? Are they actually dead or am I just imagining this to help me cry? And who are you, the one telling me they’re dead? Which of the two? And the only reply I’d get was me, standing in front of the mirror repeating: Who’s dead? Please, tell me someone has actually died, anything to fill this void! Then, faced with an echoing silence, I would answer myself: Both of them, Daniel and Vladimir. I lost them both at the same time, and both of them are still alive, somewhere in the world, without me.

It’s the last thing anyone ever imagines: waking up one day shouldering the weight of a missing person. What is a missing person? It’s a ghost that haunts you, like some kind of schizophrenic delusion.

I never wanted to be one of those women people look at in the street with pity, but I did regularly return to the park, almost every day to be exact. Nagore often followed me there. I’d sit on the same bench and retrace my movements: phone in my hand, hair in my face, mosquitoes buzzing around me. Daniel with his one, two, three steps and dopey smile. Two, three, four steps. I looked down.Two, three, four, five steps. Right there. I look up in his direction. I spot him and go back to my phone. Two, three, five, seven … no steps. He falls. He gets up. Vladimir in my guts. Two, three, five, seven, eight, nine steps. And me behind each one of them, every single day: two, three, four … And only when Nagore would glare at me, mortified because I’d be standing between the see-saw and the slide, right in the way of all the children, only then would it click: I had become one of those women people look at in the street with pity, and with fear. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Daniel disappeared three months, two days and eight hours after his birthday. He was three. He was my son.

Empty Houses unfolds in the aftermath of a child’s disappearance. His mother is distraught. As her life begins to unravel, she is haunted by his absence but also by her own ambivalence: did she even want him in the first place?

In a working-class neighbourhood on the other side of Mexico City another woman protects her stolen child. After longing desperately to be a mother, her life is violently altered by its reality. Alternating between these two contrasting voices, Empty Houses confronts the desires, regrets and social pressures of motherhood faced by both the mother who lost her child and the new one who risked everything to take him.