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| photo: Huascar Medina | |
Izzy Wasserstein is a queer and trans woman, educator, and the author of two poetry collections and the short story collection All the Hometowns You Can't Stay Away From. Her novella These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, just published by Tachyon, is a noir techno-thriller of fractured identity and corporate intrigue. Wasserstein shares a home with the author Nora E. Derrington and their animal companions.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
In the near future, a trans woman returns to her old commune to investigate her ex's death, but she's haunted by faces from her past.
On your nightstand now:
An ever-expanding list of books in various stages of completion. Currently that includes I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia, and Stephen Graham Jones's Don't Fear the Reaper.
Favorite book when you were a child:
C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair, which was my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia books, and may have been the reason I'm still obsessed with fantasy adventuring and role-playing games.
Your top five authors:
If you ask me this on a different day, you might get different answers! But at least for today, my list includes Octavia Butler, who taught me so much about world-building and the ways that power differentials shape every community and interaction; Ursula K. Le Guin, who did more than any other author to open me up to new ways of thinking, and even when I disagree with her, she's always worth arguing with; N.K. Jemisin, whose Broken Earth trilogy begins with an audacious promise, and then finds an even more audacious way to keep it; China Miéville, who writes weird, politically complex books that haunt me; and Jorge Luis Borges, who once turned a grievance with another poet into the classic story "The Aleph"--may we all put our petty complaints to such great use!
Book you've faked reading:
James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer, a book I spent weeks trying and failing to complete for an undergraduate class. In the end I ignored most of the middle of the book and flipped through the end. It did, however, lead me to Mark Twain's famous "James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," so at least it had one positive effect.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Hard to Be a God, which is simultaneously a warning about the dangers of fascism and a critique of the Soviet government. It's strange, unsettling, and masterful, and hasn't found as wide an audience (at least in English) as it deserves.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I don't know that I've ever bought a book for its cover, since I am constantly buying more books than I have time to read, but I can say that I think I'd have bought the excellent Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs for its cover if I hadn't already had it on my to-read list.
Book you hid from your parents:
I don't know that I ever actually hid a book from my parents--I was a very rule-oriented kid--but I am very glad that they never paid attention to the content of the Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman that I was reading.
Book that changed your life:
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. That's a book that has so much to say about gender, war, religion, and winter itself. It also has one of the best last pages in history. It re-wired my brain, and I'll always be grateful for it.
Favorite line from a book:
Asking me to pick a favorite line is like asking me to pick which of my animal companions is my favorite; spoiled for choice, I'll share a line I adore from The Left Hand of Darkness:
"I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy."
Five books you'll never part with:
Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which teaches me something new every time I read it; R.B. Lemberg's The Four Profound Weaves, which is gorgeous, meditative, and essential; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the first science fiction novel and still essential reading; Eavan Boland's heartbreaking, life-affirming poetry collection Outside History; and bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress, a book every teacher should (re)read.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. It's a dark academia book, a portal fantasy, and so much more. It's also one of those books where describing it can't do it justice. I'd love to experience it again for the first time.
Book you are desperate to read:
I can't ever get enough books about marginalized people who get to be as complex and messy as white men are allowed to be. If that book also has chosen families and a "there's only one bed" moment, so much better!