A comic novel about grief that becomes a story of survival in the California desert, by the highly-acclaimed author of So Sad Today, Milk Fed, and The Pisces.
DEATH VALLEY: A Novel
by Melissa Broder
Scribner, Fall 2023
(via The Gernert Company)
In DEATH VALLEY, an unnamed woman arrives in the California desert seeking respite. Holding herself at bay and temporarily deserting her own life seems preferable to being filled by the anticipatory grief chasing her — both for a father attempting to recover from a near-fatal accident and a husband whose chronic illness is worsening. What the desert provides, however, is not inner peace but a path: a receptionist-recommended nearby hike. On this desert trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there. It is wounded. Its gaping injury beckons like a familiar door. So, she enters it. What this woman finds inside this mystical succulent is enough to make her believe her load can lighten. When she returns to the trail, however, the cactus is gone and in seeking it, she suddenly is more lost than ever before. Whether she can survive, and be reunited with all she found to live for while inside her cactus is up to what she is able to seek within herself. With no phone battery left to tell her where she is, whether her father is still alive, or whether her husband will be waiting if she returns, what’s written on her heart alone is her only map out.
Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Milk Fed and The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today, and five poetry collections, including Superdoom: Selected Poems (Summer 2021) and Last Sext. Broder has written for The New York Times, Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia, and New York Magazine‘s The Cut.
Heniek and Andrzeij live in a small town in Poland. One is a mechanic, the other a carpenter, and both are about to retire. They have never had the urge to see the world, but one day they leave their home town of Gajerudki and head west down the A2, the « Motorway to Freedom ». They’re trying to track down Beatka, who has left Heniek after 36 years of marriage to start a new life in the Netherlands. They’ve taken the Mercedes they were meant to fix for a customer, and when they don’t have enough money to fill it with proper fuel, they use cooking oil instead. After an accident involving a herd of deer, the two friends continue their journey on foot. Along the way, they find out things they never knew about each other, including some dark secrets – and when they encounter a European bison, they face a reckoning with their past.
DESTINY GRIMOIRES VOLUMES I-IV (published 2018 – 2021):
THE DESTINY COMIC COLLECTION VOL. ONE (July 2019):
For the past four years before Covid hit, Eliot Stein has been traveling all around the planet profiling remarkable people who are producing or preserving a distinct cultural wonder that exists nowhere else for a column he created for BBC Travel called Custom Made. In Italy, Eliot learned the secrets of the world’s rarest pasta from one of only three women alive who knows how to make it. In Taiwan, he shadowed the island’s last film poster painter, a man who’s now partially blind but still hangs his giant brushstroke canvases on the theater marquee. In Sardinia, Eliot meets a 24th generation diver who is the only person left on Earth who still knows how to harvest and embroider an incredibly rare fiber known as sea silk, into elaborate patterns that glisten like gold.