Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk. I’ve had this essay collection on the shelf for awhile, and I wish I’d read it sooner. The essay opens with an examination of what the author calls ecosystems fiction, or narratives that grapple with the interdependency of humanity with the environment–often in ways that challenge conventional narrative structures, which traditionally depend on a singular point of view. She explores weird plant fiction, nonhuman narrators, and immersive interactive storytelling like larping. It was a pleasure to read and gave me a lot of ideas to mull for my own project.
The Alternatives by Caolinn Hughes. I met this writer many years ago when I worked at a rare book library and she was reading from her poetry collection. This novel is semantically dense in the way that prose by poets tends to be; I read it slowly, but enjoyed it very much. It follows the lives of four sisters, all of whom have PhDs in very different fields, suited to their very different personalities: the oldest is a geologist, the brusque second sister is a wealthy and well-known political scientist, the artistic third sister is a celebrity chef who lives on a houseboat, and the dreamy youngest sister is a philosophy adjunct in the States and dealing with chronic illness with no health insurance. It is also an environmental novel: climate change is pressing in on their daily lives, from the chef’s planning for food shortages to the rising sea threatening the overachieving sister’s property on the Irish coast. The four sisters also, whether intentionally or simply in the practice of their own choices, explore different pathways one can take to resist or live outside of the structures that make climate change feel inevitable: capitalism, landownership, government, even the expectations of a family unit. So, while the story is very much anchored to these four big personalities and the details of their lives, it’s very much a novel of ideas.
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is a collection of tense, uneasy stories about characters who are discovering something about themselves in a situation where it is not safe to do so, like a boarding school or a collapsing society in the aftermath of a pandemic. Or you could say that it is about toxic friendships: each character is attracted to and repulsed by a person whose very existence threatens their sense of self. This collection is more experimental than Detransition, Baby, which I enjoyed as a sharp social novel; the fine character work and impossible social conundrums are still here, but these are genre exercises that take a little time to find your footing in. For example, the title story (more of a novella) is historical fiction rife with the vernacular of a 19th century logging camp, and it took me some time to get the hang of its dialect, but soon I was completely absorbed by the increasingly dangerous position of its main character.
Stag Dance made a good pairing with Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, when my library hold for the latter came in. (It’s only been a month since I read the first hundred pages at a friend’s house–very fast in library time!) What the two story collections share is a willingness to peel up the scaly armor of their protagonists and look unflinchingly at what’s underneath. Shame is a vital principle in both collections: characters coil around some burning sense of shame, shrink their lives so that the shame takes up all available space, attempt to hide or sublimate their shame with more palatable self-righteousness and rage, and ultimately find themselves in desperate circumstances due to their inability to center anything else. Rejection is a bleak read, but darkly and wickedly funny–and that’s not a phrase I use very often, as it’s often applied in marketing copy for books that aren’t as smart as they think they are. Rejection IS that smart, and it’s funny even when it’s wounding.
It was a good month for turning books back into the library: I also finished The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, which I appreciated much more deeply than I expected to. I learned so much about the geologic history of the earth and the development of its scientific study, and I felt that book more than earned its finale, even though I resist the way she characterizes our whole species as the invader that decimates other species. (I’m not saying she doesn’t have a point! But I do think this characterization erases cultures that have established more harmonious relationships with other species, and implies that the impulse to be a good steward is rarer than my experience leads me to believe.) I also finished Love After the End, which remained a vital antidote to a bleak season of news, and I loved reading classic sci fi tropes (AI, a generation ship, alien first contact) from the perspective of indigenous writers.
And then, just when it was the busiest time at the end of the month, I picked up The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, and inhaled it in one day. I had other things to be doing! But it was such a delicious mix of time travel, wry British spy drama, and romance that I simply couldn’t put it down.
Elsewhere
A beautiful essay about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and its connections to how clothing is made today.
AI in the news:
New initiative to follow: AI + Planetary Justice Alliance
‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers (Aftermath, April 7, 2025)
Revealed: Big tech’s new datacentres will take water from the world’s driest areas (Guardian, April 9. 2025)
MIT study finds that AI doesn’t, in fact, have values (TechCrunch, April 9, 2025)
This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value” (Vanity Fair, April 15, 2025)
I Found an Entire Book That Was Written About … Me. It Only Got Weirder From There. (Slate, April 22, 2025)
Henry Blodget Invents, Hires, Sexually Harasses, Blogs About Nonexistent AI Subordinate (Defector, April 22, 2025)
And, as last month, it’s worth paying special attention to how AI is being used to the detriment of safety and public service.
This is what AI-generated trade policy looks like (Blood in the Machine, April 4, 2025)
Inside DOGE’s AI Push at the Department of Veterans Affairs (Wired, April 4, 2025)
Minutiae
In April, despite the hopeful signs of the season, my spirits were flagging. I joined some marches: I walked with ten thousand others down Market Street on a national day of action, and clustered with a smaller group at City Hall to protest cuts to SEPTA. I felt more numb than galvanized, which says more about my emotional landscape than it does about the marches themselves. And there are many ways to resist, to get the word out, to promote visibility, but I’m just feeling tired and sad.
I did enjoy the outdoors. I went on a walk with plant nerds and mushroom nerds to find fungi in a West Philly park. I planted trees in my neighborhood and shrubs in a rain garden at a nearby school. One day, I walked across center city in the rain from a rally to an art museum, where there was a gorgeous exhibit on landscape architecture in Italy that reminded me of my long-ago study abroad there. Afterward, I chatted (in the rain) for an hour with a passing friend, went for a late lunch (in the rain) with another friend, and then took myself to Friday night ballet class (in the rain). The perennials in my container garden are finally starting to emerge from their winter sleep.
I celebrated Easter for the first time in decades, channeling cultural more than religious traditions with my partner’s parents (who kicked off Easter breakfast with an ice cold shot of vodka). I spent some time with a friend who is recovering from surgery, and arranged a big group hang so we could all pile around her bed and eat brunch together. I went to New Jersey to see my BFF in Casa Valentina, which turned out to be a funny and thoughtful portrait of midcentury men who go to a resort in the Catskills to dress as women. (I use that language because it’s more or less how they describe it, although they each have different reasons for doing so and different relationships to gender.) It’s a lovely play, and dovetailed nicely with some of the themes explored in Stag Dance and Woodworking. In my down time I’ve been rewatching a lot of Jane Austen adaptations and adaptations of the adaptations (like Fire Island), but the crowning moment in this comfortfest was seeing Pride and Prejudice (2005) in theaters with friends.
At the beginning of the month, a little orange guy moved in with me. He was the foster cat of a friend, but he didn’t get along with her other cat, so I took him temporarily while she figured out how to rehome him. He is a very amiable roommate; he mostly keeps to his own schedule, but now and then he commandeers my lap or walks on my keyboard during Zoom calls. My heart is not open for a forever companion, but I do enjoy his company.
Sara Davis 