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Contemporary Fiction Views: The art doesn't excuse this artist [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-14
TRIGGER WARNING for rape and other SA abuse victims
Monday's online publication by Vulture of chapter and verse that recount Neil Gaiman's history of rape and other forms of sexual abuse is as lurid and disgusting and heart-rending as any warning from others who have read it have reported.
The author of beloved works like Sandman, Coraline, The Ocean at the End of the Lane and more is as awful as you can imagine. There is rape, physical trauma, psychological abuse and children involved.
So here we are again, at the subject of how awful does a creator of art have to be to make that creator's works something to shun. Our colleague debtorsprison led a thoughtful discussion of this last week with a new biography of Woody Allen. While people have made differing conclusions about the moviemaker, there is no doubt about Gaiman.
But oh how he fooled some people.
Years ago, I was a volunteer staff member on CompuServe's LitForum, eventually becoming one of the managers as it bounced to an independent site when corporate dumped all the forums. When I first joined it 30 years ago, there were incredible authors there, such as C.J. Cherryh, Raymond Feist and Val McDermid. This was when forum member Diana Gabaldon was starting to publish big novels, starting with Outlander.
And there was this guy named Neil who had written some graphic novels, and we all swooned over him.
Thinking back, I cannot remember a time when he said anything in public that sent up warning signals. And as a former Hotline volunteer and board member, and an abuse survivor, I hope I would have noticed it. He was so valued that the owner of the forum paid his CompuServe membership for years, before he hit it big. And Alex was no pushover.
So I feel I let the universe down there.
Time and again, some readers maintain that the art and the artist should be kept separated. That the creative products and the person are not the same, and the former should not be put aside because of the latter.
But in this era, when an adjudicated rapist is going to be sworn in next week as the president, and on a day when a sexual predator is being lauded by GOP senators in a hearing to become the secretary of defense, enough is enough. Sandman does not excuse raping a babysitter in a tub after she has repeatedly said no. Coraline does not make up for raping a young woman when his child was in the same room. Good Omens does not take away from demanding women, who have not consented to sex, to calling him master. And intimations that cruelty by his Scientology parents explains it all away does not make a single cruel act he performed excusable.
None of it is all right, despite what the culture is currently saying. While one of the tasks of literature is to explore what is worthwhile and what is contemptible within humanity, that does not condone excusing cruelty and depravity committed by a person.
Not a single Gaiman work, nor the collected works, is more important than someone else's right to not be sexually, physically and psychologically attacked.
And there are far more works out literature to be discovered, to be discussed, to be celebrated.
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Among this week's new releases are the following, with links to The Literate Lizard and blurbs from the publishers. Whether any of these, or new nonfiction releases, or old favorites find their way to your reading space, may you find something to read that brings you rewards.
Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories by Yukio Mishima
A new selection of Yukio Mishima (author of Spring Snow and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea) short stories from the 1960s — his final decade — Voices of the Fallen Heroes offers a unique glimpse into the mind of one of Japan’s greatest writers. Available in English for the first time.
Going Home by Tom Lamont
Going Home is a sparkling, funny, big-hearted story of family and what happens when three men — all of whom are completely ill-suited for fatherhood — take charge of a toddler following an unexpected loss.
Miss Abracadabra by Tom Ross
Lorraine "Rain" Franklin-whose family made their way north as part of the Great Migration and have settled in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York--is lost. She stumbles through a series of questionable romantic encounters and assumed identities, and eventually into an unplanned pregnancy, struggling both to define herself in and against a fallen world and to achieve autonomy from her mother's repressive anxieties. Rain's misadventures are a parable of what it means to confront, however imperfectly, the contradictions of a Black community defining itself in midcentury America.
Isaac's Song by Daniel Black
Isaac is at a crossroads in his young life. Growing up in Missouri, the son of a caustic, hard-driving father, he was conditioned to suppress his artistic pursuits and physical desires, notions that didn't align with a traditional view of masculinity. But now, in late '80s Chicago, Isaac has finally carved out a life of his own. He is sensitive and tenderhearted and has built up the courage to seek out a community. Yet just as he begins to embrace who he is, two social catalysts--the AIDS crisis and Rodney King's attack--collectively extinguish his hard-earned joy.
At a therapist's encouragement, Isaac begins to write down his story.
Frankie by Graham Norton (yes, that Graham Norton)
Always on the periphery, looking on, young Frankie Howe was never quite sure enough of herself to take center stage—after all, life had already judged her harshly. Now old, Frankie finds it easier to forget the life that came before.
Then Damian, a young Irish caretaker, arrives at her London flat, there to keep an eye on her as she recovers from a fall. A memory is sparked, and the past crackles into life as Damian listens to the story Frankie has kept stored away all these years.
My Darling Boy by John Dufresne
John Dufresne tells the story of Olney, whose beloved son, Cully, collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida. Aided by his terminally ill girlfriend and the colorful inhabitants of a local motel—including a doomsday prepper, an ex-nun, a pair of blind twins with an acute sense of smell, and a devoutly Catholic shelter worker—Olney sets out to save his son.
Elephant Herd by Guixing Zhang
Its main narrative begins in the 1970s and proceeds to explore the repercussions of Sarawak's midcentury Communist insurgency. Focusing on the boy, his extended family, and his Indigenous classmate and travel companion, Zhang examines the complex relations among ethnic Chinese, local Malays, and Indigenous peoples.
Confessions by Catherine Airey
New York City, late September 2001. The walls of the city are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady’s father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. When a letter arrives from an aunt she didn’t know existed in Ireland with the offer of a new life, the name jogs a memory: an old videocassette game Cora used to play as a child where two sisters must save the students of a mysterious boarding school.
This Love by Lotte Jeffs
When Mae and Ari meet outside a crowded gay bar during their final year of university, their connection is instant, sparking a lifetime friendship. Stubborn and no stranger to breaking hearts, Mae needs Ari's bright light to guide her out of her self-centered ways. Reeling from a scandal in New York, vibrant, charming Ari sees Mae as an anchor keeping him grounded.
Though they are young, ambitious, and queer, both Mae and Ari secretly daydream about settling down somewhere with a garden, children, and dogs, building a life that feels like home. They make a pact: somehow, some day, they will have a child together.
Good Girl by Aria Aber
In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.
We Lived on the Horizon by Erika Swyler
The city of Bulwark is aptly named: a walled city built to protect and preserve the people who managed to survive a series of great cataclysms, Bulwark was founded on a system where sacrifice is rewarded by the AI that runs the city. Over generations, an elite class has evolved from the descendants of those who gave up the most to found mankind’s last stronghold, called the Sainted.
Saint Enita Malovis, long accustomed to luxury, feels the end of her life and decades of work as a bio-prosthetist approaching. The lone practitioner of her art, Enita is determined to preserve her legacy and decides to create a physical being, called Nix, filled with her knowledge and experience. In the midst of her project, a fellow Sainted is brutally murdered and the city AI inexplicably erases the event from its data. Soon, Enita and Nix are drawn into the growing war that could change everything between Bulwark’s hidden underclass and the programs that impose and maintain order.
More or Less Maddy by Lisa Genova
A breathless, riveting novel about a young woman diagnosed with bipolar disorder who rejects the stability and approval found in a traditionally “normal” life for a career in stand-up comedy.
A Calamity of Noble Houses by Amira Ghenim
Tunisia, 1930s. Against the backdrop of a country in turmoil, in search of its identity, the lives and destinies of the members of two important upper-class families of Tunis intertwine: the Ennaifer family, with a rigidly conservative and patriarchal mentality, and the Rassaa, open-minded and progressive.
Andromeda by Therese Bohman
A young woman starts as an intern at this venerated institution, and over many years gains more and more responsibility for its authors and books. All under the supervision of Gunnar, publishing director of the most prestigious imprint behind the finest literature, Andromeda.
Over time their work relationship transforms into something neither of them can truly define. Perhaps built on mutual trust? Or is it something else?
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister’s lavish Caribbean wedding, she’s unceremoniously fired from her university job and, to add insult to injury, her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. With her career and dreams crushed in one fell swoop, she decides to write something just for herself. What comes out is nothing like the quiet, literary novels that have so far peppered her unremarkable career. It’s a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. She calls it Rusted Robots.
When Zelu finds the courage to share her strange novel, she does not realize she is about to embark on a life-altering journey—one that will catapult her into literary stardom, but also perhaps obliterate everything her book was meant to be. From Chicago to Lagos to the far reaches of space, Zelu’s novel will change the future not only for humanity, but for the robots who come next.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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