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Erica Ezeifedi, Associate Editor, is a transplant from Nashville, TN that has settled in the North East. In addition to being a writer, she has worked as a victim advocate and in public libraries, where she has focused on creating safe spaces for queer teens, mentorship, and providing test prep instruction free to students. Outside of work, much of her free time is spent looking for her next great read and planning her next snack.
Find her on Twitter at @Erica_Eze_.
View All posts by Erica Ezeifedi
More nonfiction out this week that should be on your radar includes The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits by Bianca Tylek and Worth Rises; To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, the collection of essays from Pulitzer Prize-winning Viet Thanh Nguyen; and the humorous (but sobering) What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife by Robert Garland. And, if you want your humor with a dose of high society, there’s The Jane Austen Insult Guide for Well-Bred Women: Serving Tea with a Side of Scorn by Emily Reed.
Now as far as the featured books go, there’s a fantastical and queer (queer-er?) Great Gatsby retelling, queens of Appalachia, a book-saving cat in Japan, and a young woman with a…unique attraction.
Don’t Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo
I’ve been a Vo devotee since I read The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the first novella in her Singing Hills Cycle series. With Don’t Sleep with the Dead, in addition to some pretty sound advice, Vo is giving us a companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful, her 2021 retelling of The Great Gatsby. This time, instead of following the queer Asian tennis player Jordan Baker, we’re focused on paper soldier and novelist Nick Carraway. Nick has become adept at watching the spectacle that is New York high society in the late ’30s, but what he doesn’t realize is that as he watches, something also watches him. His pretending to be straight—and even human—hasn’t gone unnoticed. What’s more, the events—and the people who may or may not have died—of that summer in 1922 aren’t quite done with him.
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Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Here’s what I said about it before: Through Nikki, who has returned to North Carolina at the request of her estranged grandmother,