2 minute read
February 2021
U Up? Catie Disabato
Praise for The Ghost Network:
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‘A smart and thorny debut novel... Truly contemporary.’ New York Times Book Review ‘Ambitious, digressive and occasionally overstuffed, The Ghost Network is a rewarding read – in other words, it’s a rabbit hole well worth falling down.’ Chicago Tribune
A young woman investigates her best friend’s disappearance while navigating co-dependent friendships, toxic exes, and witchy rituals in this ultra-modern novel.
Eve has a carefully curated online life, works occasionally, and texts constantly with her best friend, Ezra. Basically, she is an archetypal L.A. millennial. She has also been carrying on a yearlong conversation with her deceased friend Miggy over text. But when Ezra goes missing on the anniversary weekend of Miggy’s death, Eve feels
like her world is shattering. Over a frantic weekend Eve investigates Ezra’s disappearance, scouring social media for clues, while drowning her anger and anxiety in drinks, drugs, and spiritual cleansing. Eve starts to spiral as her friends try to convince her that she’s overreacting, and ghosts—both real and metaphorical—continue to haunt her. When she uncovers clues to a life Ezra kept hidden, Eve starts to question how much she really knows about her best friend... and herself.
In U Up? Catie Disabato holds a mirror to the ways the phantom selves we create online permeate our emotional lives and hide our worst traits from everyone, including ourselves.
Catie Disabato’s first novel, The Ghost Network, was published by Melville House in 2015. She has written essays and criticism for outlets including the LAist, Buzzfeed, and LA Weekly. She lives in Los Angeles.
Midnight’s Borders A People’s History of Modern India Suchitra Vijayan
The first true people’s history of modern India, told through a five-year, 9,000 mile journey across its many contested borders.
Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world’s largest democracy and second most populous country. Yet most of us don’t understand it, or the violent history still playing out there. In fact, India as we know it didn’t exist until the map of the subcontinent was redrawn in the middle of the 20th century—the powerful repercussions of which are still being felt across South Asia.
To tell the story of political borders in the subcontinent, Suchitra Vijayan spent five years travelling India’s 9,000-mile land border. Now, in this stunning work of narrative reportage, she shares what she learned on that groundbreaking journey. With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan shows us the forgotten people and places in the borderlands and brings us face-to-face with the legacy of colonialism and the stain of extreme violence and corruption. The result is the granular portrait of modern India we’ve been missing.
Contains 24 photographs taken by the author.
Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in India, received her higher education in law at the University of Leeds in England, and now lives in New York. She is a Barrister at Law, writer, political essayist, and lecturer. She worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which serves Iraqi refugees.
