The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2020, pt. 14: Anya Johanna DeNiro

 

 

The Pleasures of Reading in 2020
by Anya Johanna DeNiro

This has obviously been a hard year from a variety of perspectives, and reading has been a constant companion—for comfort, for clarity, for a way to put my own anger and sadness into the shape of someone else’s story. Luckily, there were many books and stories this year that shone, particularly with marginalized voices. May 2021 shine just as brightly. 

 

My favorite novel I’ve read this year has been, without a doubt, Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. From others who have read this novel, it should be no surprise. A rich, resplendent take on high fantasy with fantastic worldbuilding with plenty of intriguing queer characters, with plenty of heartfelt declarations and acts of courage. It is precisely the type of “big” fantasy we need right now—discarding all the b.s., retrograde tropes that don’t work and refining the ones that do. 

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson is also a particular favorite. This novel posits a version of the multiverse in which travel to parallel worlds is commoditized and exploitative. Besides being a fierce portrayal of a world jumper who is trying to survive in an unforgiving set of worlds, it’s also a moving exploration of privilege and imposter syndrome. And with a bisexual protagonist to boot. 

 

Failed State by Christopher Brown is the third of an astoundingly plausible trilogy of novels chronicling the United States’ move towards a kind of decentralized fascism. But Failed State is also definitely the most hopeful of the three; not just showing this nation’s dissolution, but what might actually take its place with an emphasis on shared struggle and ecology. 

With poetry, my biggest pleasure this year has been Wicked Enchantment, the beautifully produced selected poems by Wanda Coleman, released by her longtime publisher Black Sparrow. It’s these poems that I’ve been turning to most this year—there is truly no one else that quite has her voice, and her interplay between the formal and informal in her sonnets is a live wire. 

And for nonfiction, although it’s certainly not a new book, might I recommend Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922, by Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. I purchased this the weekend the movement toward “stay at home” really began in mid-March, and it was an apt read for the surreality and low-baud terror of that time. Tsvetaeva was a complicated figure in Russian letters with a brutal, tragic end to her life, but here her journals have a swift, brutal and yes novelistic impact as she describes the tumult of the Russian Civil War in wonderfully written sketches that nevertheless pull no punches. 

 

  Anya Johanna DeNiro was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. She received a BA in English from the College of Wooster and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. She's also a 1998 graduate of the Clarion Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared widely, in venues such as Asimov's, Strange Horizons, One Story, Interfictions,Catapult, and Shimmer. She's the author of two collection of short stories, both published by Small Beer Press, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead (2006) and Tyrannia (2013); and a novel, Total Oblivion, More or Less (2009) (as Alan DeNiro). She's also been shortlisted for the O.Henry Award, and a finalist for the Crawford Award and Theodore Sturgeon Award. Aqueduct Press released City of a Thousand Feelings earlier this year.

Anya Johanna DeNiro's City of a Thousand Feelings

I'm pleased to announce the release of City of a Thousand Feelings by Anya Johanna DeNiro, the seventy-second volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series, in both print and e-book editions. The book can be purchased now at www.aqueductpress.com.


The City of a Thousand Feelings doesn't let certain people inside its walls. It's a place where emotions can become visible, but it flees the approach of a makeshift army who want to enter. Two of the trans women in this army forge a deep, complicated, and at times contentious friendship spanning thirty years. They must come to terms with not only the City's literal and figurative gatekeeping, but also other, even more sinister forces that use necromancy against them. As the narrator and her friend's lives are sundered apart, they must come to terms with what it means to not have a home, and what it means to be queer and aching for such a home. A sword and sorcery tale with emotional resonance, City of a Thousand Feelings brims with both the visceral and the allegorical, allowing the two trans women at the center of the story to claim their own space.

Advance Praise

“Anya DeNiro’s City of a Thousand Feelings is a huge fantasy epic with a deeply intimate relationship story at its heart. I love these heroic trans characters and their struggle to find, or build, a better world. This story left me with a renewed faith in our collective ability to make it through the wilderness and the assaults of undead angels, and to create better families as we do so.
 —Charlie Jane Anders, author of All the Birds in the Sky

 

Reviews

Surreal and lyrical, if opaque, this profound fantasy from DeNiro (Tyrannia) explores the struggle for acceptance. An unnamed trans woman narrator meets the fellow trans woman to whom the book is addressed, whose name changes over the course of the novel from Melody to Mystery to Mercy, when they both join a ragtag army of exiled women intent on storming the city that excluded them. The army falls and 15 years of loneliness pass before the two women reunite. Together they decide to sneak back into the city to steal the city’s blueprints and use them to build a new, inclusive home of their own. While the setting is successfully atmospheric, readers learn little about the characters. DeNiro’s imagistic style leads to moments of beauty in lines such as “My heart is a flock of swallows blown out of a barn by a gale,” but can also make it difficult to parse whether fantastical elements are meant to be read metaphorically. While some readers will struggle for a foothold in this strange, cerebral story, others will be gratified by the poetic writing and powerful themes of belonging.
  —Publishers Weekly, November 2019

DeNiro packs an entire epic fantasy into this very short book from Aqueduct Press, and it is a testament to what a skilled writer can do with a hybrid form.
  —Buzzfeed, Wendy J. Fox,  January 2020

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2019, pt. 17: Anya Johanna DeNiro

2019 Pleasures
by Anya Johanna DeNiro

2019 was a wonderful year of reading (and watching). Here are some of my favorites. I tried to hew here closely to the last year or so, which is no easy feat for me!

Rule of Capture by Christopher Brown. This novel combines the jugular-cutting dystopian worldbuilding of Brown’s previous novel, Tropic of Kansas, wth the tropes and structures of a legal thriller. What makes this work—and so unsettling—is how readily extrapolated this world building is with our current moment. It’s fascinating to surmise how a lawyer would work in a legal broken system with court censors and denaturalization procedures, but also? It rarely lets us forget how we also are in a broken system; ours is perhaps more teetering than fully broken, but for the most vulnerable members of society, it is definitely too fine of a distinction. And yet there is hope there as well, with the emphasis on self-sustaining communities unwittingly given space to live outside the margins of this fascist American state, providing green shoots in the bleak narrative.

City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. A remarkable novel about an extraplanetary colony and the unraveling of its colonial past, City in the Middle of the Night provides a swirling, complex array of characters in far reaching cities in a deeply inhospitable landscape. With a major upheaval right at the get-go, the pace rarely lets up, but it would be far less satisfying without its unwavering commitment to explore the characters’ desires and anguish. Finally, the depiction of the alien life on this planet—and the potentially complicated symbiosis with human interlopers—reminded me of the best of the Octavia Butler.

Armored Saint by Myke Cole. Heloise is one of the most fascinating characters that I’ve come across lately. It’s essentially a mecha story that takes a long, long while to get off the ground (luckily, the book is the first in a series)—but what an amazing ascent! This is truly a “demon haunted world”: deeply repressive and theocratic, and what Cole shows so adroitly is that Heloise is a product of this world, even as she strains to battle against its constraints. Yet she is only barely beginning to figure out an escape plan to truly liberate herself and those she cares about. Even these tentative first steps cost her dearly.

Alien Virus Love Disaster by Abbey Mei Otis. In this case, the title tells it all. This collection is like a riptide of stories with desperate characters, told in an extremely assured voice. In a way the different genre tropes are employed to create these soap bubbles which the characters inhabit. And occasionally everything pops aka goes to hell. Every story is searingly told and creates its narrative like an absolute necessity.

Winter by Ali Smith. Part of Ali Smith’s ongoing seasonal quartet of novels, this brisk tale is a post-Brexit little masterpiece. Told in Smith’s usual lilting but biting style, it’s an appropriate novel for an uncertain age—but also provides a large dose of hope and humor, as well as a fascinating look back at the anti-nuclear protests in Great Britain in the 80s.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi. Unbelievably haunting, this novel takes the “modern Prometheus” into the war torn streets of Baghdad, with a mix of different perspectives weaving together. American military contractors certainly perform their own dark necromancy here—but at its heart the story is one of a mother’s love for her son, in the middle of strife and diaspora.

Television and Film

The Boys. I was thoroughly prepared to thoroughly dislike this, but I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, the gore is at times gratuitous, but we live in an excessive age, and the superhero as villain trope has rarely been explored so potently.

Midsommar. Endlessly inventive with its visuals, Midsommar depicts summer solstice as a horrorscape in the far north of Sweden. But it would not work nearly as well as it does if not for the powerful meditation it became on grief. How do we grieve? And what happens when catharsis becomes its own form of horror? Also I will be fascinated to watch the extended version and to sink into this world a little more.

Fleabag. Speaking of grief, while Midsommar plays as a tragedy, Fleabag is the other side of the coin with an at-times melancholic comedy. The titular Fleabag is constantly giving asides to the camera, which could be cloying if the writing and actors weren’t so brilliant, but when the penny drops as to why she is doing this, it colors all of the past action and shows the throughline (about her best friend) which had always been there.

  Anya Johanna DeNiro was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. She received a BA in English from the College of Wooster and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. She's also a 1998 graduate of the Clarion Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared widely, in venues such as Asimov's, Strange Horizons, One Story, Interfictions,Catapult, and Shimmer. She's the author of two collection of short stories, both published by Small Beer Press, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead (2006) and Tyrannia (2013); and a novel, Total Oblivion, More or Less (2009) (as Alan DeNiro). She's also been shortlisted for the O.Henry Award, and a finalist for the Crawford Award and Theodore Sturgeon Award. Aqueduct Press will be releasing City of a Thousand Feelings in February.