Verge

Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Bustle and Lit Hub

A fiercely empathetic group portrait of the marginalized and outcast in moments of crisis, from one of the most galvanizing voices in American fiction.

Lidia Yuknavitch is a writer of rare insight into the jagged boundaries between pain and survival. Her characters are scarred by the unchecked hungers of others and themselves, yet determined to find salvation within lives that can feel beyond their control. In novels such as The Small Backs of Children and The Book of Joan, she has captivated readers with stories of visceral power. Now, in Verge, she offers a shard-sharp mosaic portrait of human resilience on the margins.
 
The landscape of Verge is peopled with characters who are innocent and imperfect, wise and endangered: an eight-year-old black-market medical courier, a restless lover haunted by memories of his mother, a teenage girl gazing out her attic window at a nearby prison, all of them wounded but grasping toward transcendence. Clear-eyed yet inspiring, Verge challenges us with moments of uncomfortable truth, even as it urges us to place our faith not in the flimsy guardrails of society but in the memories held—and told—by our own individual bodies.Praise for Verge:

“The powers of her prose [are] on full, incandescent display. . . . The damaged beauty of these misfits keeps the reader leaning in. ” —Nicholas Mancusi, TIME

“Children harvest organs, janitors build magical worlds, and mourning lovers drive to destinations unknown in this searing, precise collection of short stories.” —Vogue

“Spellbinding.” —O: The Oprah Magazine

“Bracing [and] profound.” —Entertainment Weekly

“At several points while reading Verge, I found myself curled into a ball, my fingers gripping the pages so tightly they almost tore the paper. It was as if the words had crawled off the page and under my skin.”  —Cornelia Channing, The Paris Review

“Full of suspense . . . Young or old, male or female, the characters in Verge will shock and impress themselves onto the reader.” —LitHub

“Yuknavitch’s writing is as sharp as ever and her empathetic takes on the grief, trauma, and beauty of marginalized souls are as precise as they are gripping. This is a book that lingers.” —Refinery29
 
“This book is a gem. . . . A brilliant collection of twenty stories that contain as much compassion as suffering . . . In Yuknavitch’s hands, words are both swords and feathers. . . . She writes with a sensibility that is both blunt and empathic, as if to open the reader’s heart and make it bleed.” —Ms. Magazine

“Diverse and impactful, unlike some collections, where only a few stories shine . . . Verge boldly asks some pressing yet unspoken questions, such as: How is it that Americans can say anything with a straight face? Does it hurt more to keep the secrets or tell them? It also forces us to acknowledge—and even embrace—the unsettling answers.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Yuknavitch is one of the most celebrated contemporary writers. [Now she] returns with a collection of short stories that embody her unique blend of the unsettling and the delightful.” —Electric Literature

“Dynamite. . . . I don’t know of any other writer who can render the brutality of life with such honesty and dazzle. . . . That Lidia Yuknavitch can create such beauty out of the tragedy of contemporary life is testament to her skill as an artist. Verge is volatile and vital, and it hits where it hurts, in the most oddly pleasurable way.” —Lambda Literary

“Lidia Yuknavitch displays the same gift for exploring the borderland between art, sex, and trauma that readers have come to expect . . . . [turning] her powers toward life on the margins.” —The Millions

“Yuknavitch writes with rare empathy about the repercussions of grief, loss and dislocation.” —Jane Ciabattari, BBC Culture

“Disturbing and delightful all at once.” —BookRiot

“With the publication of Verge, Yuknavitch’s writing flies into hyperspace. . . . [Verge is] an act of courage and urgency. The book is historically specific, yet ultimately timeless.” —The Brooklyn Rail

“The stories in Verge swim with ravishing sentences, and swimming is an apt metaphor because Yuknavitch’s long and multifaceted history with swimming shows up all over her writing. It’s there in water imagery, it’s there in characters who endure, it’s there in the literal text that seems like it’s moving and breathing.” —Cascadia

“Characters who are often pushed to the fringes of literary fiction are given voice through Yuknavitch’s raw prose, resulting in a collection that feels equal parts urgent and soothing.” —The Adroit Journal

“Brilliant. . . . Consistently incisive, with sharp sentences and a barreling pace. . . . This riveting collection invites readers to see women whose points of view are typically ignored.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Insistently visceral . . . These howls from the throats of women, queer characters, the impoverished, and the addicted remind us of the beauty and pain of our shared humanity. Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.” —Kirkus Reviews

“In Verge, characters find their meaning and faith in their own bodies, grounded in physicality and anatomy, pain and desire. These stories are daring, provoking, and incendiary.” —Booklist (starred review)

“A vertiginous and revelatory book whose characters—sometimes in desperate situations, and sometimes, finally, in a place of safety—have much to say about the world that we live in now. Lidia Yuknavitch is astonishing.”
—Kelly Link 

“Verge is a wonderful, challenging book. I know these people. I know their dilemmas, and where I don’t recognize them, I believe them. The passion Lidia Yuknavitch brings to the page is astounding. I am caught up, shaken up, and now and then simply delighted. ‘Listen to this,’ I call out to friends, and then, minutes later: ‘No, wait, listen to this!’”
—Dorothy Allison       

“I can’t remember the last time I was as captivated by a collection as I am by Verge. The grace implicit in these stories is rare, and the way the book brings us to the verge of the unthinkable, and then leaves us to ponder our complicity, is astonishing.”
—Jamie Quatro

“Verge is a bouquet of dynamite: explosive, deadly, and spectacularly beautiful. These stories captivated me like modern fairy tales, and like those dark lessons they showed me how resilience is forged through survival, beauty through brokenness, joy by fire. The women who occupy them are my favorite kinds of heroines: as flawed as they are furious, as bold as they are tender. I won’t soon forget them.”
—Melissa Febos

“Verge is dangerous. Lidia Yuknavitch, through multiple narratives, explores human endurance with brilliance and lightning power. She thunders life to each page. I am forever a fan.”
—Terese Marie Mailhot

“Lidia Yuknavitch is a life-giving sea creature, an anemone, opening and closing, showing us our beauty and dis-ease. These twenty breath-catching stories come from the margins, that place we all live now. Her work is a necessity, all the ways she forgives us, and urges us on.”
—Pam HoustonLidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, and Dora: A Headcase, and of the memoir The Chronology of Water. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards and has been a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

The Pull

 

In the water the swimmer feels weightless. The blue of the pool fills her ears and holds her body and shuts out the world. Swimming is her favorite state of being. On land, the swimmer can barely breathe.

She was not yet two, the story goes, when she first gravitated toward water. One afternoon, during a family trip to the Mediterranean Sea, she wandered off the edge of a dock before anyone could notice, dropping like a rock into the ocean. Her sister, five years older, dove in after her, pulling her back to the surface. When she emerged, she was smiling, not drowning. She remembers none of this; it’s a vivid story her family tells.

But then her entire childhood is like one long story she doesn’t want to hear. The kind of story that makes your chest grow tight as you listen.

She’d rather swim than anything else. She’d rather swim every day than remember a single moment of her childhood. She doesn’t even remember the shapes of the buildings in her neighborhood. Home is a blown-up brick in her throat.

There is one family photo left hanging in the hallway outside her bedroom, taken at a long-forgotten family reunion. Between the unsmiling relatives are spaces where others should be standing: An uncle. A cousin. A brother or an aunt. As if the whole family were disappearing one body at a time.

She doesn’t love anything more than water, except maybe her sister’s face. Sometimes, at night, she smooths the crease between her sister’s brows when she has bad dreams, as she has often since the tanks came. And her sister gently traces the cavities in her ear to help her go to sleep when her eyes stay open too late because she’s afraid of mortar shells. Her sister is like a lifeline to her. Two girls, twinning themselves alive.

She never has nightmares. What she has, instead, are water visions. As if the water is speaking to her.

Move your arms as if you are free from gravity. Open your mouth if you like, but do not breathe as you breathe on land; rather remember that breathable blue by closing your eyes. Then open your eyes. You can breathe underwater now. We all can. We all did. Before time. Now let your body sink rather than float. When you reach the bottom of the ocean, let your feet find the sand, let your weight come, stand up. From here, you can walk wherever you like. Starfish and turtles are here with you now. An electric eel swims by you, arched like an S, spotted yellow and blue. Look at your hands. Can you imagine fins? Spread your fingers wide. There was a time before fingers, arms, legs. Before the landlife. There is no alone in the ocean. There is only the lifedeath of water. Thriving.

There’s another story her family tells, about how swim coaches spotted her in a hotel pool, churning away all by herself. That’s how she got onto a swim team. Before the ground gave and the sky began to rain metal. Anywhere there was water, she found it. A kidney-shaped hotel pool next to the supermarket, the ocean on vacations, a bombed-out apartment complex with a half-full pool, leaves and dirt and dust and who knows, maybe blood, too, but she didn’t care. She’d swim anywhere. Swimming made the world go away.

Swim practice makes the swimmer feel alive. Her muscles moving her through water, the rhythm of breathing and not breathing, her heart pumping. The only people she feels close to are other swimmers. They don’t need a language to understand one another. Underwater all bodies look related, making the same shapes, creating the same rhythms, moving through waves different from one another and not.

Sometimes she wishes she could swim all day and night instead of going home.

But there comes a day after which everything about the swimming pool, and what went on inside her there, is transformed. School is being canceled more and more often, for weeks at a time, but still she and her friends text one another and talk about regular things. Kids tend not to notice change; they just want to be with their friends, to be normal. But there are warnings. There have always been warnings, but on this day her mother forbids her to leave the house for school or swim practice.

That afternoon, while her shoulders ache from not swimming, a screeching comes in the sky and then a deafening quiet, and then a bomb obliterates most of the roof and one wall of the swimming pool. Two swimmers who were friends of hers are killed, their bodies limp at the surface of the water, then sinking. They never swim another lap toward their own futures.

After death comes into her life and takes the water, all she thinks about is making for the ocean.

In her watervision the ocean underneath things hums through the bones and detritus of ships and sea creatures and the bodies of men and women and children and animals and coral reefs blooming and dying and plastic and oil and volcanic plumes . . . everything fluid, everything part of everything else. Whole civilizations next to new colonies of fish, new species, deeper and deeper meanings. Photosynthesis and its absence and yet life and more life. Underwater the death of things giving way to the life of things. No walls or roads or fences or states or bombs, only thermohaline circulation, the submarine streams, the impact of Earth’s Coriolis-making motion. Tides pulled and pushed by the sun and the moon. The sea speaking to you. Her swells and retreats. Her creation and destruction and re-creation in endless waves.

When she and her sister leave their country, they already know the perils of the journey. Her parents know. Everyone everywhere knows. The story of how to leave came alive before they were born. Nightly conversations between family and lovers and friends and strangers, telling one another about the cleave of leaving. Her foreground is cluttered now, with her dead friends and the bombed-out training pool, all of it between her and her freedom to swim. She has the same desires as all kids: She wants to swim. Have friends. Go to school. Not to starve. Not to die. She grinds her teeth.

So when she and her sister leave, the leaving already has a story. They will join a wave of other leavers. The journey will move by land to Turkey, then through the Aegean to Greece, and from Greece twenty-two days to Germany. It won’t matter where people are from, what origin their bodies have. It will only matter that they travel together, like a new organism formed in the leaving of a place, a mash of languages and fears and desires. Like a new species emerging from water to shore.

In the Aegean, at dusk, when their raft like so many others around the world begins to falter, they are all so thirsty that salt and skin flakes are forming on their faces and around their eyes and mouths. The others on board are teens as old as she and her sister and much younger; two are infants; some are older. Among everyone there is a fierce sort of kindness, a violent compassion that might keep them all alive if they keep it afloat. When the raft begins to capsize, for a moment it looks to her like a tilted family photograph, as if the world has gone off-kilter and the people are spilling out of frame into the sea. She studies their faces, family of strangers, then looks back at the water.

The hardest part: Everyone in the raft can see the shore in the distance, but she can see on their faces that none of them is swimmer enough to make it.

In her watervision, the swimmer feels the pull.

There is a pull for some people when they are in big water. A pull no one talks about. The pull comes to people whose lives are too weighted. People whose lives break the story and travel to realms everyone else fears. The pull is cool and warm at the same time; it releases a body back to history; it is something like amniotic fluid, only stronger. Most people who feel the pull let themselves go down a little, sink underwater some. They let their arms and legs go limp, and they close their eyes and hold their breath with a superhuman calm. The kind of calm that comes to those people who believe as children that they can breathe underwater. Those who feel the pull then experience one of two things. Some thrash toward exhaustion, then move toward a kind of motionless surrender, as the water enters what used to be their breathing, as it did before we were born. The pull lives in all of us differently.

Then there are the others, who open their eyes underwater and a rush of agency comes into them, much bigger than breath, and they bicep and kick their way back to the surface and pull air back into their lungs in a great gulp. They fight for life.

She removes her shoes in the raft. Her sister removes her shoes as well. She removes her pants. Her sister follows. She slides from the raft into the water. Her sister slides into the water after her. Two swimmers who learned to swim before they learned to walk.

The swimmer eyes the distance, her head a buoy on the surface of the sea. What would look much too far to a regular person-what looks terrifying, like a choice to drown, to the others on the boat-seems absolutely possible to her. She turns to look at her sister. She can see in her sister’s eyes that they can both make it. Treading water, her arms making figure eights and her legs pumping easily, she has no doubt in her body. They can swim to life. She reaches over and smooths her sister’s brow.

Then the sisters find the raft ropes and tie them to each other’s ankles.

With a phenomenal confidence, they swim for it, towing the others behind them. The beautiful bodies of the swimmer and her sister, and the great watery pull underneath, and the pull of the eyes and hearts of the people hoping against hope in the raft, and the pull of the great wrong world raging around them toward-

This story has no ending.

We put children into the ocean.

 

The Organ Runner

 

For six months, when she was eight years old, Anastasia Radavic’s entire left hand was grafted to her ankle, just above her foot.

She’d been run over by a combine harvester in a wheat field, completely severing her hand from her arm. Though she’d worked in the fields with her family since she was five and was thus considered skilled as a laborer, a three-second glance away as the combine harvester passed her row of youths, their hands low to the ground, was time enough for the tragedy to occur. The hand was too badly damaged to reattach immediately, so the doctors attached it to her ankle to let it heal, a risky procedure for even the world’s best doctors. In her part of the world, the doctors were often newcomers, eager to hone their skill at the latest procedures in an area with plentiful patients and little regulation. Six months later, doctors reattached her hand to her wrist. It took several operations before the feeling returned, the pink color gradually improving with her blood flow, and eventually she regained some use in the hand. But she never forgot how it looked growing from her ankle. Two parts of her body seamed together in a way they should never have been. She remembered resting in a hospital bed, staring down at the handfoot, wondering if they told each other secrets.

At night the other children in the state hospital whimpered a little like animals, crying themselves to sleep, some of them more or less abandoned. This went on for months and months as Anastasia healed. She thought of her hand, lodged at her foot, and it made her think of chimps, the way they run with the backs of their hands to the ground and their feet grabbing at things for traction. Her dreams filled with primates; she imagined herself running with her hands.

Anastasia knew from school that the Soviets had used rhesus monkeys in their Bion satellite program in the 1980s and ’90s. She had even memorized their names: Abrek, Bion, Verny and Gordy, Dryoma and Yerosha, Zhakonya and Zabiyaka, Krosh and Ivasha, Lapik and Multik. Of them all, only Multik had died, slipping away while under anesthesia during a biopsy.

Anastasia spent nearly two years recovering at the state hospital, and she told any nurse who would listen about her fascination with the monkeys. One of them snuck her a book by a Western primatologist, Jane Goodall-My Life with the Chimpanzees, it was called-along with a small stuffed monkey. She slipped the book under her thin, stained mattress to keep it safe.

After her hand had healed as much as it was going to, she was released from the hospital, hiding the book beneath her waistband in the small of her back as she prepared to leave. The stuffed monkey-she’d named it Goodall-she carried openly; it was a child thing, and no one noticed or cared. She was sent back to a distant aunt who agreed to take her when her family didn’t show up. (What use is a one-handed girl on a farm? her father had been heard to say. We have nothing but work here.) She lived in a house with seventeen other children.

The distant aunt (Was she? Anastasia wondered), as it happened, made her living from her body. Most of the children were hers. (Were they? the girl wondered.) The aunt took great pride in the fact that she’d lost none of her children, to death or anything else. The children ranged in age from an infant, suckling at the woman’s breast, to a fourteen-year-old boy. But the aunt was aging, and that tilted the economy toward new endeavors.

Anastasia never returned to school. Instead, she quickly began learning the lessons of the house. As early as five years old, the aunt started instructing the children on a matter that was very important to their survival, or so they were told. The human body, they learned, has eight organs that can be donated to another body: the lungs, liver, heart, kidneys, pancreas, and small intestine. Tissue can also be donated, including skin, bone, tendons, cartilage, corneas, heart valves, and blood vessels. Some organs, including the liver, could be donated in sections. Sperm, breast milk, egg cells, hair. Everything of a body had worth.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.5700 × 5.1100 × 8.0000 in
Imprint	Riverhead Books
ISBN-13	09780525534884
ISBN-10	0525534881
Author	Lidia Yuknavitch
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC029000, FIC044000
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