Staff Picks: Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg

Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black
by JP Poole

Frida Kahlo’s likeness appears on tote bags, t-shirts, mugs, refrigerator magnets, coffee table coasters and more; she has her own action figure. One of the most recognizable artists in the world, Kahlo symbolizes feminist strength, cultural pride, and the sharp essence of pain. In her poignant and deeply felt book Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg, Emily Rapp Black interrogates the way in which Kahlo is reduced to a female artist whose muse is bodily and emotional suffering. Pain is not a muse, Rapp Black argues. “I do not believe that suffering was Frida’s main characteristic, because suffering does not create art, people do.” She adds that, yes, “[Frida] painted in bed. Create or die. That’s very different from ‘being inspired.’”

When Kahlo was six years old, polio disfigured her right foot. As a teenager, her spinal column, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, foot, and left shoulder were all broken or fractured in a streetcar accident. During her lifetime, she would undergo thirty-two operations. Due to gangrene, her leg was amputated. Rapp Black was four years old when her leg was amputated and she was fitted with a wooden leg. She writes, “Frida died on July 13, 1954; I was born twenty years later, almost to the day, on July 12, 1974. And yet our legs could have been made by the same man.” When she’s a twenty-one-year-old college student, Rapp Black discovers a translation of Kahlo’s journals and a deep cross-temporal friendship is born.

As a grown woman, Rapp Black visits Casa Azul, the home that Frida shared with Diego Rivera. She walks through the museum pregnant, “mostly belly,” remembering the questions she received, such as “Must you have a baby?” Perhaps these questioners did not know that Rapp Black had already had a baby, a little boy, who died at age three from Tay-Sachs disease. Throughout the book, the cruelty of able-bodied people is so palpable it stings. She writes, “The pregnant disabled body is one that mystifies onlookers….” Alongside other museum visitors, she views the narrow bed where Frida slept, made love, painted, convalesced, and died.

Rapp Black’s fierce protection of Frida is what makes this gorgeous book hum. In psychically protecting Frida from the ignorance of people who don’t understand disability, she is also, by extension, protecting herself, and the memory of her dead son. At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, she overhears the conversation of two women, as they look at the various legs, casts, and corsets Frida wore. “Oh, these awful … devices. But it inspired her to paint,” one woman says. “Yes, it made her an artist. All that pain,” says the other. Rapp Black wants to shout at the women for reducing Frida’s existence to a narrative of pain. “Disability makes people uncomfortable” she writes; we neglect to see that “we will all someday live with a disability of some kind.” An artist cannot be captured by gift shop flair—not socks, or aprons, or stickers—and Rapp Black does a beautiful job of reminding us that Frida Kahlo’s “life was wholly vivid, saturated with all the things that make a life a life: knowledge of suffering; love; sex; friendship; home; travel; laughter; anger; joy; the creation of art.”

Malvern’s 2020 Anthology Bestsellers

Below, the 2020 bestsellers from our eclectic selection of anthologies. These are arranged in no particular order—but if you’re curious, the I Scream Social Anthology Volume 2 and Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction were the joint bestsellers in this category.

Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking

On Dogs: An Anthology

Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction

The Red Thread: Twenty Years of NYRB Classics

The Haunted Looking Glass: Ghost Stories Chosen by Edward Gorey

Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam

Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color

Six Vietnamese Poets

American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time

Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction

I Scream Social Anthology Volume 2

Dallas Noir

When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through

Cat Poems

 

Malvern’s 2020 Graphic Novel Bestsellers

Below, the 2020 bestsellers from our most excellent selection of graphic novels. These are arranged in no particular order—but the number one bestseller was Kafka, illustrated by the legendary Robert Crumb and with thoughtful text by David Zane Mairowitz.

Wuvable Oaf by Ed Luce

Twists of Fate by Paco Roca

Reading Quirks by Javier García del Moral and Andrés de la Casa Huertas

I, Parrot: A Graphic Novel by Deb Olin Unferth and Elizabeth Haidle

The Milk of Dreams by Leonora Carrington

Jack and the Ghost by Chan Poling and Lucy Michell

The Man Without Talent by Yoshiharu Tsuge

Letter to Survivors by Gébé

Jack Jackson’s American History: Los Tejanos and Lost Cause by Jack Jackson

Kafka by R. Crumb and David Zane Mairowitz

 

Malvern’s 2020 Other Bestsellers

Our “Other” collection includes eclectic essays, plays, creative non-fiction, memoirs and more. Below, the twelve bestselling titles from this section in 2020. These are arranged in no particular order—but Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles by local author Taisia Kitaiskaia topped the list!

Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles by Taisia Kitaiskaia

Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times: From Ask Baba Yaga by Taisia Kitaiskaia

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations

 

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

How Shostakovich Changed My Mind by Stephen Johnson

Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures by Max Weber

 

Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz

 

Of Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog

The Crying Book by Heather Christle

Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers by Taisia Kitaiskaia and Katy Horan

 

Malvern’s 2020 Poetry Bestsellers

Presenting our thirteen bestselling poetry titles of 2020! These are arranged in no particular order—but if you’re curious, The Tradition and Time were our joint bestsellers of the year.

Of Death. Minimal Odes by Hilda Hilst

Scorpionic Sun by Mohammed Khair-Eddine

Envelope Poems by Emily Dickinson

A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib

Advantages of Being Evergreen by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Salt and Ashes by Adrienne Drobnies

Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 by Lucille Clifton

I Live in the Country & Other Dirty Poems by Arielle Greenberg

A Treatise on Stars by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Homie: Poems by Danez Smith

A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr

Time by Etel Adnan

The Tradition by Jericho Brown

 

Staff Picks: Don’t Try This at Home

Don’t Try This at Home by Angela Readman
by JP Poole

The first sign that Don’t Try This as Home isn’t your typical short story collection is the whirl of jackalopes on the cover. The second is the book’s opening sentence: “I cut my boyfriend in half; it was what we both wanted.” For as often as women are maimed on the page, I was certainly intrigued. Have the tables been turned? The fact that the speaker states that it was a mutual decision is what kept me reading since I don’t care for gore or gratuitous violence in my books—I keep it PG-13.

Angela Readman has a particular type of humor that I can’t quite put my finger on but that I know hinges on her ability to charm. Recently, I heard a writing instructor say that “charm” is the hardest thing to teach MFA students. Talent can be cultivated but charm? Either you have it or you don’t. In the title story “Don’t Try This at Home” the speaker and her boyfriend decided this body-severing should take place because the couple could “double their time together.” The boyfriend states “he could be twice as productive.” They’re about to get married and, well, planning for a wedding is intense. When the narrator cuts her boyfriend in half by chopping him in two with a shovel, he becomes doubled, two boyfriends for the price of one. Suddenly, there’s a lot less housework, and more quality time. She observes her two boyfriends, two Daniels, with awe:

They took Daniel’s ‘brother’ on at the engineering firm where he already worked. The night before he started he laid his clothes on the chair like a kid before a new term at school. When he’d been working for a while, I asked him, ‘Do you have lunch with yourself?’ I mean, at work?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘I’m my superior, it’s not done.’

To maximize the couple’s earnings, she cuts him in half again, but each Daniel created is a little bit off. Some have secret lives. One she learns is cheating on her. The humor of Readman’s story is linked with something painfully true; it’s hard to get ahead these days. Being one person isn’t really enough. Women are more often the ones divided to fit into a pie chart of selves: girlfriend/wife; child-rearer/caregiver; worker/professional; home maker/manager; emotional support giver; and on and on. The story also hints at how much easier it is for men to have “secret lives,” to keep parts of themselves hidden from their partners.

Most of the stories in the collection put women at their center of the story. Readman’s characters are fascinating because they exist on the fringe. In “There’s A Woman Works Down The Chip Shop,” a woman who works deep frying fish all day turns into Elvis after being flirted with by a young lass, who loves a little extra free food (and also, we learn, happens to be married). It’s a sweet and sad story about a woman who, for a short time, gets her sexual mojo back by channeling the king.

In another story, “Birds Without Wings,” a girl typically housed in fat camp each summer travels to Mexico with her mother. All she wants is the romantic version of travel, which to her means Paris. The story opens:

Last summer, it was me and Eva against everything evil in the world: swimsuits, kale, something that buzzed in our room. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about Diana Pinter, some girl at school who went to Paris with her mother. I lay on a bunk scratching mosquito bites and pictured them outside the Eiffel Tower, eating salad in the rain.

Readman is able to capture nuances of character so beautifully; it breaks one’s heart a little. Life so often isn’t what we want. We are covetous creatures but Readman proves the imagination is perhaps a way we offer ourselves a bit of love.

I never would have discovered this book if I wasn’t tasked with restocking books at the store. Don’t Try This at Home was published in 2015, and I certainly don’t remember much in the way of buzz. There’s a lag, I’ve noticed, between books published in the U.S. and the U.K.; it seems one-sided, in that it’s harder for British writers to get recognized in the U.S. than it is the other way around. Small presses like And Other Stories certainly help to foster a more balanced exchange.

With a glut of books in the marketplace it’s hard for the vast majority of writers to get any notice at all, especially for a small collection of short stories. This is why I love Readman’s last sentence on her acknowledgements page: “[This book] is dedicated to anyone who has felt like giving up, but did not.”

Amidst Britishisms such as chip shop, crisps, costume, and jumper, I think readers will discover, in Readman, a shining gem of a writer, who tells stories with a massive heart.*

* Chip shop or chippy (fish and chip shop); crisps (potato chips); costume (bathing suit); jumper (pullover/sweater).