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Happy Stories, Mostly
Written by Michelle Hart, originally published in Electric Literature
May 24, 2023
Happy Stories, Mostly
Written by Michelle Hart, originally published in Electric Literature
May 24, 2023
What even is time? I had a couple conversations this past year, some of them surrounding the publication of my non-chronologically structured novel We Do What We Do in the Dark, during which the concept of “queer time” came up, this idea that LGBTQ people experience time differently, almost four-dimensionally like Vonnegut aliens. We constantly look back to see evidence of our nascent selves, when queerness was less an identity than it was a feeling, and we constantly look forward to imagine a world finally ready to welcome us with open arms.
It’s hard to see the past clearly—so many of our childhoods are marked by denial instead of discovery—and even harder to see the future, especially for those of us who came of age in the shadow of AIDS and now find ourselves still very much in the throes of a pandemic that has disproportionately affected the most marginalized. Add to that the banning of our books, the rolling back of our civil rights, the daily threat of hate-fueled violence.
Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu (June 6)
In their debut English-language collection of speculative and absurdist fiction, Pasaribu adeptly renders that quintessentially queer liminal space between joy and melancholy.
It’s hard to see the past clearly—so many of our childhoods are marked by denial instead of discovery—and even harder to see the future, especially for those of us who came of age in the shadow of AIDS and now find ourselves still very much in the throes of a pandemic that has disproportionately affected the most marginalized. Add to that the banning of our books, the rolling back of our civil rights, the daily threat of hate-fueled violence.
Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu (June 6)
In their debut English-language collection of speculative and absurdist fiction, Pasaribu adeptly renders that quintessentially queer liminal space between joy and melancholy.
Read the full article here.
