Jordy Rosenberg, Night Night Swan

In this episode Brett sits down with Jordy Rosenberg to discuss his latest novel, "Night Night Swan". The talk about writing satire and the value of it, Transphobia, Palestine and growing up with Zionist parents, writing female friendship, lesbian and trans sci fi, and how he ended up narrating the book. 

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https://www.jordy-rosenberg.com/

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https://www.instagram.com/jordyrosenberg/

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Transcript

Brett Benner 0:00

Hey everybody, it's Brett Benner and welcome or welcome back to another episode of Behind the Stack, where today I am sitting down with author Jordy Rosenberg for his new novel Night Night Fawn. A little bit about Jordy. He is the author of The Novel Confessions of the Fox, A New York Times editor, choice Selection shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's First novel Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, a Publishing Triangle Award, the UK Historicals Writers Association debut Crown Award. Long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and named one of the best books of the year by the New Yorker. Kikis Reviews and others, Jordy's work has been supported by McDowell, the Lanin Foundation, the Banff Center, and the Amin Getty Foundation. He is a professor in the Department of English and associated MFA faculty and the program for poets and writers at UMass Amherst. So I hope you enjoy this episode of Behind the Stack. Hey everybody. I am thrilled to be sitting down today with Jordy Rosenberg for his brand new book Night Night Fawn, love this cover and I'm so ready to get into it and to Barbara with you. So thank you for being here, Jordy. It's just a pleasure.

Jordy Rosenberg 1:24

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to talk to you,

Brett Benner 1:28

I have to say. And then I'm gonna ask you for the, the age old elevator pitch, but she is going down this character of Barbara as the most memorable that I've read so far this year, and maybe ever. Her combination of snide humor and vitriol is genius and hilarious, and at times jaw dropping.

Jordy Rosenberg 1:46

Yeah.

Brett Benner 1:47

So congratulations. Thanks. Do you have a. I know you do'cause I've heard it and it's very good and very concise. Mm-hmm. But can you give an elevator pitch for the book for our viewers

Jordy Rosenberg 1:57

and listeners? It's not, it's neither good nor concise, but I guess I would just say it's, well, Barbara Rosenberg is a transphobic mother who is dying and she is being cared for by an estranged. Transgender son who in an opium haze, Barbara believes, is turning into a person sized hawk. And this hawk is vengeful and is demanding in return for their care that Barbara offer an apology for her life. And so that's the sort of inciting premise that gets Barbara to write what is essentially. The, the, the book is essentially the fictionalized diary of Barbara Rosenberg that she's producing under Duress. Okay.

Brett Benner 2:45

So obviously there is this, uh, meta fiction

Jordy Rosenberg 2:49

mm-hmm.

Brett Benner 2:50

Quality here about the book and your own mom. Was there one particular thing that inspired you when you started to think about this and thought, I wanna write this?

Jordy Rosenberg 3:01

Right. Okay. So I'm gonna give, I what I hope is not a very long answer. But just cut me off. Originally the book was supposed to be a memoir told from my perspective, me, I had written a couple of kind of memoir pieces that were in the Los Angeles review of books maybe 12 years ago that were about this experience of taking care of, of my estranged mother while she was dying. People liked those, those essays, and I think I thought, give the people what they want. They like this. You know, I have done a lot of other writing experiments novel. A novel, a previous novel that was very experimental, very niche. It didn't meet with one, a wonderful readership, but it's, it's written in like 18th century British dialect. It's very, let's just say it's, it takes a particular reader. So I thought, well, people like this, I'll do this. But the first thing to say is that certain things that work as essays don't really work as books. Different genres. But the other thing is that in the course of trying to put that together, I did a reading, there's actually a reading for paperback release. For most of you, BOS and I gave a reading of one of those memoir pieces, and there's one moment in that memoir piece where I am speaking, kind of performing in my mother's voice. It's a joke. Well, it functions as a joke. It wasn't a joke when she said it, and there was just breakout laughter when, and I did this kind of, You know, caricatured speaking in her voice. The, the, the line was, it was when I had come out to her, you know, when I was like 18 and she, her world just was destroyed. This was a woman who, I mean, she existentially crumbled. She could not handle this. It was like she was living in a nightmare and. We argued about it for a couple years and then we became estranged. But in the course of trying to argue with her, at one point I thought I'd hit on like, this is the argument. This is the one she won't be able to refute. I got it. I'm just gonna tell her she's not gonna wanna hear it, but I'm gonna say it. But mom, I don't like sleeping with men. What's she gonna say to that? Right. She can't tell me to like something I don't like, and without skipping a beat, she just goes. Nobody likes sex with men. Nobody likes it. Just marry one and divorce him for the alimony. So, I mean, There was something about this, the way that that line, you know, read when I performed it and the way people responded to it, that just stuck with me. And as I was trying to wrestle this. These essays into memoir form I was kind of haunted by by this moment. And I think that there are with with novels, I'm very interested in the inciting moment when like things you're thinking about, you might be thinking about things politically, you might be thinking about things historically. You're just thinking about things and there's a moment when. The questions that you're asking all come together and become a novelistic question. They become, to my mind a situation that has to be addressed through fiction. And I think to me, that way in which I was kind of haunted by my mother's voice became novelistic. And the situation here was the melancholic incorporation of. A voice that you're completely opposed to the political positions, you're completely opposed to this woman is vitriolic trans phobe. She's a Zionist who's embraced herself as. She identifies as a colonizer. That's how she identifies. I personally, I reject that politics, but I was interested in the idea of the entanglement of two characters who are entirely at odds with each other, but they're entangled at the level of the unconscious, at the bodily, at the level of voice. And that to me was a situation. This one, character's being taken care of by another character and they hate each other. I wanted to explore that and then maybe we'll get into this later. Speaking in her voice is, is kind of about encountering these questions around complicity, which I see kind of running through the whole novel and what I was doing with that complicity, what we're doing when we're satirizing, what kind of a thing that is to do generically in terms of genre was something I was interested in, but that's, that's the kernel of what happened there.

Brett Benner 7:28

Now, originally you just came out to her as queer, correct?

Jordy Rosenberg 7:33

Uh oh yeah. Right. Yeah. We're talking about like the early nineties. Yeah.

Brett Benner 7:37

Yeah. And then how much further along was it before the whole trans identity began to come out for you? And then you voiced that as well?

Jordy Rosenberg 7:44

Yeah, I guess I don't really think of it. In terms of the relationship with my own mother, who is really a distinct person than the character Barbara. Yeah. Ultimate. Because when you're writing a novel, I mean, you have, you know, the, the, you need to three dimensionalize this character in ways that like far exceed and in some cases departed from, you know, really the actual person. But, but if you're asking about my actual mother, I mean. I don't really think of those questions separately because I think for, for my mother, the, the real issue was around gender. It really wasn't around loving women. As you can see, she, she recognized. Mo, most people would prefer women. The issue was around masculinity. So whether I was coming out to her as like a queer woman who was masculine, or whether I was engaging with her as someone who was trans and masculine, that it wasn't really. I don't really differentiate that so much. I think I see it more like as a continuum. It was just a continuum of increasingly untenable situations between, her and I around masculinity. So, I'm sorry. It's, it's, yeah. I can't really put like

Brett Benner 8:59

a No, no. I, I, I get that. It's an interesting thing because look, she says so many offensive things and not. Yeah. Not like, you know, Like she refers to her daughter as a, a, a golum of upside down gender.

Jordy Rosenberg 9:11

Yeah. Yeah.

Brett Benner 9:11

And then even moving on to, she talks about her at one point she has a job and her boss who's gay. Mm-hmm. How he Oh yeah. And his part were partner, were desperate to seem normal. There were examples of how gay people are just lonely. So the, you know, it moved on kind of, she was. Really kind of attacking the whole, diaspora of queerness, right? Mm-hmm. And so, I'm so curious in writing this, but also, you know, you talk about the humor of it. Was, was, was this a kind of way, there's a little bit of a reclamation to me. I mean, let me explain this. Like, I remember when, when, way back when I first graduated from college and was working at a record store in New York City and I worked with this. Guy who identified as queer and he, you know, has combat boots on and, you know, he would talk very freely to me about his leather cock ring. But I just remember the harshness at the time of that thing, queer. And I thought, well, and just that difference. And yet to me, as I've gotten older, a reclamation of that word mm-hmm. That was thought of as a, mm-hmm. A negative. Right? Yeah. That suddenly becomes a positive. And there's something about this as I'm reading it, with the humor that's infused and what you've done is, I'm wondering if for you, there is a, an element of a freeness to it, of being like, I see you, I see this, and I'm going to kind of

Jordy Rosenberg 10:30

mm-hmm.

Brett Benner 10:30

Punch the air out of it. Does that make sense?

Jordy Rosenberg 10:33

Right. Yeah. There's so many ways I can, respond to that, but yeah, I mean, at the, at the, and I appreciate that question. At the most basic level, we're talking about a satire that is, ridiculing or punching back against these ideologies by inhabiting, exaggerating, but also giving this kind of unconcealed version of just how violent and cruel sadistic they are. You know, those, those worldviews. So, you know, that's one thing to say. If, if I can give like a slightly longer answer

Brett Benner 11:10

sure.

Jordy Rosenberg 11:10

I did, I mean, I, I absolutely decided, or was compelled by the idea of leaning into that voice. And I tried to think through throughout what I was doing, why I was doing that. And it's really like a lot of it comes to you retrospectively and a lot of it comes to you through talking to people who read the book. So I'm looking forward to talking to more people and you know, I'm sure people will have a range of reactions to it, and I'd like to know about that. But one thing that I think I thought myself to be doing. Around this satire was that, you know, look, if you think about transphobia in particular, like. The far right, not even just around transphobia, but around a lot of the sadistic politics of the far right. There is a labinal aspect to it. There is an aspect of pleasure. We're not just talking about people who stumble into a politics and they don't know what they're doing. Some people maybe, but there's also a degree and a level of appeal that is around. A kind of unleashed enjoyment. The idea that you can say, I mean, we saw this right after Trump was elected, where there was just a celebration of, now we can say whatever we want, just this really sadistic thing. I think that the part of writing a satire like the one that I've written was this idea of stealing back some of that energy around a labinal enjoyment. For the left, stealing it back for the left in the form of satire. And there's of course, like, there's like a really long history of like, say anti-fascist satire, you know, going back, you know, think about like George Orwell where he talks about it was part of the actual machinery of despotism and that that's, and then he, that's part of what is kind of the impetus for his satirizing of say in his case, you know, the police he's talking about having been part of, of the police. So, I think that was part of it. When you think about satire too, I mean if you think about humor, part of it, and my partner was kind of helpful in terms of thinking this through. She was was saying to me throughout, you know, that there was some value in creating a. Humor for for the left that you would imagine. I mean, I don't know. Hopefully it'll be more broadly popular, but you have to think about who you're writing for while you're writing, and this idea of creating just a space to relax people for a minute. A place of like a kind of anxiety relief through laughter. But I also think there's something about satire specifically that's about tapping into anger and reader's anger because. I think, and going back to that thing about, you know, speaking through my mother's voice, there's a melancholic possession of me by it, but there's also like, you know, it's aggressive to parody someone that way on my part, and it's about anger, you know, and so it's, I more helpful for me to do so in the form of a novel because the real person who's my mother. I had a more complicated relationship with. In fact, there were moments of certain kinds of reconciliation around queerness between her and I before she died. But the character for me of Barbara is standing in for a whole host of political ideologies that I, and I think a lot of people feel very angry about. It's easier for me to be angry at a character than am my own mother. There's a complicated process there. So that's a couple things. I hope I've, I've touched on what I think. Um. Some of the value of satire is.

Brett Benner 14:40

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. It, you know, I was coming through the end of this and I know it probably wasn't your intention to create a story that would kind of, uh, be saturated in current events in the way. Mm-hmm. But it also made me kind of look at it all and say, you know, this whole adage of like, the more things change, the more things stay the same, and looking at it and thinking, God. How much we haven't learned and how much we haven't progressed. As much as we would like to think we have, and that was just kind of a strange thing as, as I. Came to the end of it. Just this repetitive nature of history and like what we're watching going on right now, certainly in this country and, and the kind of explosion of everything that's happened with Palestine that's continued for years and years, but has suddenly reached Yeah, this kind of fever pitch. Right. Going back to Barbara though for one second, the gender thing is such an interesting construct with her generally because it's not even that her ideas of, of gender in terms of, of masculinity and what a man should be are also so. Interesting to me and, and there's this quote where she talks about the differences of being between having boys in her neighborhood when she grew up mm-hmm. Versus what she actually want, what she actually wanted for herself. And she had mm-hmm. You know, she says, I've had many of these boys, she said, I had all these boys already. I've given them countless grs against the rough parkside stone of the wall, holding my violent gum between sticky fingers until I could chew it again on the way home for marriage. I wanted a boy with a coarse. Beard. Mm-hmm. But soft dear Eyes, who giggled after a single Carlsburg beer whose thick hands touch me tentatively. Apologetically. And now look. And it's mm-hmm. And I loved that. And it also just made me laugh. But, you know, it's, she's such a, um, this kind of mix of wanting this idealized version of something. And yet also she's this highly sexualized. Creature and, and her relationship with her husband and the way her relationship changes with her husband, or what she knows to accept. It's kind of going back to what you were saying in the beginning, going back to what she's going to accept from this relationship and what she's gonna kind of get out of it or hope to get out of it. And you know, surely the disappointments that come before that.

Jordy Rosenberg 16:56

Mm-hmm hmm. Yeah.

Brett Benner 16:57

Something you said earlier that I liked, and it wasn't, it was in another interview where you talked about making politics. Palatable effectively. Oh, mm-hmm. And the way you're doing that through this story. Because like you had talked about, a lot of people do feel like, I don't know, politics, I don't understand politics. And, and, and you've said politics is really, its, its people and you could understand it. Um, and I know that you are very verbal about Palestine and, freeing Palestine and the colonization. Can you talk a little bit about, there's an incident that happens in this book with, at the time, the daughter, can you talk about what for you was kind of the moment or the moments or the thing that kind of made you aware of like, Hey, this is something's going on here and it's, it's a bigger thing.

Jordy Rosenberg 17:48

I mean, yeah, I, I appreciate this question and I will answer it, but I also wanna preface it by saying that my own experience with this, which was like a longer journey because, you know, my parents were very ardent Zionists. They had moved us to Israel several times in the mid eighties where my father worked for the health ministry. And so I had a, a lot of. Experience with, that environment, at that time. And, and I went through a process that, and, and I'll touch on it briefly, but what I wanna say is that, you know, history moved so much faster even than, than things I said like a couple months ago, which is incredible. I don't think that people need. I think this is clear. I don't think people need to go to Palestine to know what's going on anymore. I don't think, and this is what I meant about politics is not that complicated. I mean, but I think we're seeing it people. You know, despite what has been said to us around, you know, it's too complicated what's going on there, and it's impossible to have an opinion, so we just have to go with the status quo. It's not that complicated. People can see what's happening and the movement for Palestine solidarity has become a mass movement. It's far exceeded. Any, anything that I've seen in my lifetime in terms of Palestine solidarity, and we all have seen this. So that's just to say my journey aside, I don't think anyone needs a journey at this point to see what's happening. And that's all down to the fact that Palestinians themselves have been recording their own genocide and communicating it to the world to see. So that's, that's why, but me personally, as I said, you know, I did have, a lot of experience living in the state of Israel, in, in the mid eighties. And then also, our parents, that I do actually have a sister, but I, I didn't include her in the, in the fictionalized version, which I feel really good about. Not fictionalizing someone I love, but our parents sent us to. A program in the late eighties during the first Intifada, which no one ever talked about in our family, to work on an army base, an Israeli military base doing, I guess, you know what you might call logistics or like supply maintenance, and we were miners. I didn't really have a choice in the matter. When I got there, I, I refused to do any of the work that I, in my 17-year-old brain thought would be contributing to what I understood at that time as like violence. All I understood was they tore a, you, you land at this base, your 17-year-old American, it's, it's bizarre, you know, put you in a uniform and then they tore you around the space and they just say, here's an entire. Warehouse of ammunition. We're gonna teach you how to clean these guns and maintain them for soldiers. Here's a field as far as the eye can see of tanks, and we're gonna teach you how to clean them, wash them down so they're ready to go. And I, I do have like an academic, or like a more contextualizing understanding of what's going on with this effort, where they're bringing in volunteers from, say, mostly North America to do this work. I saw this and I thought, huh. That's a lot of, that's a lot of ammunition. I don't feel good about this. And I didn't have a way of con contextualizing. We didn't have the internet and within American Jewish families, like my own, we didn't talk about what was happening, why, what's the history, what's going on? All I knew was this is a lot of, this is a lot of weaponry. And I don't feel good about it. And I thought, well, I'm not gonna do anything that contributes to like, and I knew, all I knew was, I know Palestinians don't have this much. Weaponry. That's all I really knew. And I thought, I don't wanna be involved in this. But there weren't any repercussions for me.'cause I was a, I had been volunteered to go, I wasn't like being conscripted, so I wasn't like court-martialed for my refusal. But I think that was the seed for me of a longer process that was like, alright, you're uncomfortable with this. What are you gonna do about it? You can refuse individually to wash a tank. Okay, three weeks later, you're off the space. What are you gonna, what else are you gonna do? And then that's the question of politics was a, which is a collective question, which now how will you get invested in a collective movement that's beyond just an individual refusal? Uh, where are you? How will you take this feeling of discomfort that you really don't have language for yet, and figure out what it is? Figure out, you know, how to participate with other people in a movement, that seeks to address this thing that you're uncomfortable about. But as far as the book, you know, okay, so if I was gonna write this book as a memoir, I would be describing the process of getting distance from that history. I, for a number of reasons, just didn't feel that that was, I guess for me, an interesting enough creative project. I started work on this book in like 2018, so, you know, quite a, quite a while ago. At the time, what I think I felt had more value was. Representing in an unvarnished way, what I knew from the inside to be some of the say. Going back to this question of binal politics, the violent lib, the violent libidinal appeal of a colonial politics to ordinary American Jews, and how that becomes normalized within those families, I thought. That, that was a way for me to understand the project. But by the time the book has come out, you know, I am like, well, this thing that I thought there was value to in 2018, everybody knows now, you know that no, no one needs me to tell people what's going on and how violent it is, but, so I can't really, I don't really know what the, what, what its meaning will be in the world now, if that makes sense.

Brett Benner 24:07

Yeah, it does. I've had this conversation with a lot of different authors. That too. This is just that interesting thing about the, just the, the transition from the moment of, of, of, of the intent or what you are creating.

Jordy Rosenberg 24:16

Yeah.

Brett Benner 24:17

And you are the larger collective and the way that it is received and the way that people perceive it and what they extrapolate from it, and what particular things are the things that they walk away from. And like I said, for me, so much of this was. Jesus Christ. We really are stuck. We're really, we're really stuck or worse in a lot of ways and. So much of this. On a somewhat lighter note, I want to talk for a second about sugar.

Jordy Rosenberg 24:50

Mm-hmm.

Brett Benner 24:51

Who was, who was very close with, I, I, with Barbara. I kind of pictured them as kind of like the Jewish Ferrante girls when they were younger. Can you just talk a little bit about her, who she is and who she is to, to Barbara?

Jordy Rosenberg 25:03

Yeah. I can, I mean, I don't know if I'll be able to keep things on a lighter front, but I'm gonna start, I'll start there and then I'll end with politics as every answer apparently is gonna do.

Brett Benner 25:15

No, and that's all good.

Jordy Rosenberg 25:16

Well, certainly when I went into writing this book, I did not think I. I'm gonna write a book that's, a lot of it is about female friendship in a million years. I was, I never thought that that's what I was writing. But, but this is the thing about, you know, you create a character and then it, you know, she has her own life and, and, um, she kind of has her own obsessions and. Sugar is Barbara's childhood friend who goes on to have like a much more successful career than Barbara does in the movie industry, which is what Barbara had wanted to do before she ends up being the receptionist for like a mid-range plastic surgeon who's essentially like the boob job guy for the Brighton Beach raps. Mitre Mistresses. Okay. So Barbara, I mean, she thinks of sugar as her like ego ideal, I think, and she's. Like the, who's living the life that, that she would like to have. And she has a lot of, they have a lot of tension in their relationship and I was, ended up kind of like wanting to explore that. And so I do mo most of the book. I think, you know, emotionally in a way, even more than the relationship to the trans son. I think it's about the relationship of Barbara to sugar or. In her mind, a relationship to the life she never had or that she would wanted to have. I don't think that that level of engagement with the question of Barbara's interiority and of female friendship and her desires is in contradiction with my own hatred of anti-trans, quote unquote feminism. And I'll just say, why. I think that I am very like, influenced by, and I'm kind of very in favor of, argument that, that the author Sophie Lewis makes in a recent book called Enemy Feminisms, where she's talking about how is it possible that these anti-trans reactionary feminisms came into place? How can you have something that's called feminism and anti-trans at the same time? And she really kind of. Is describing sort of this way in which a kind of female or resentment around, you know, certain kinds of gender depressions, certain kinds of class oppressions. In the case of Barbara, her sort of working class background is sort of limiting in her, her understanding the opportunities that she has to pursue the life that she wants. She kind of ends up in having to fulfill certain gendered expectations of child rearing, which don't work out well for her. She's very, very, very frustrated and Louis is kind of talking about the way in which that kind of female frustration can get channeled. In the direction of anti-trans animus, and she describes it as a restrictive pessimism about what it means to be female that you kind of, that you get certain people who are kind of clinging onto become invested in this very narrow view. A very anti utopian unimaginative view of what you have to do to be female and what you have to suffer and what other people should be suffering and you know, so I think that I was kind of exploring at the level of character and of, in a sense like. A psychoanalytic question about a character who she does have hopes and dreams. She's a character who wants certain things for herself, and that wanting gets channeled into a certain what I would des you know, Lewis describes as a restrictive pessimism, um, that ends up being quite sad. In her relationships. Yeah. But in the course of that, I had to illustrate and bring to life what is Barbara's relationship to, you know, to feminism, to other women, to her friendships. And there's just a lot of scenes of her relationship with sugar. Some of them are even, I won't give any spoilers, but they're quite racy. They're, you know, they talk about sex. They themselves have like a, just a very intense connection that turns from like, you know, just intense and caring to like, hatred and, you know, they have a friend break up and, you know, so, so, all of these things, it's a novel need to be explored at the level of, you know, narrative. You know.

Brett Benner 29:35

Okay. So the movie Exodus is, is talked about a lot in the book and it becomes instrumental and, and Barbara and her family and friends and everyone's very enamored of the film. And I, this is the one thing I wish I had time to watch it before I sat down with you. Oh, terrible. So, but I watched the trailer last night. Mm-hmm. And God, it's terrible.

Jordy Rosenberg 29:53

Yeah. It's, it's totally nuts.

Brett Benner 29:57

It's terrible. Yeah. Not to mention that there's this, a young actresses blonde who'cause in an introducing, I don't even remember who she was, who the line readings were, so, God, it was bad. Anyway.

Jordy Rosenberg 30:09

Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely schlock Exodus was. Really important. A scholar, Amy Kaplan, wrote a really great book called Our American Israel, that that actually has a long chapter on Exodus, but in the course of it, she finds an old quote from Israel's minister of Tourism who says something like. This film was so influential as a piece of propaganda for the state of Israel and the the Minister, as quoted in Kaplan says, we could have thrown away all the promotional literature we printed in the last two years and just circulated Exodus. So this is a movie that is representing the founding of the state of Israel from a very Zionist perspective. And this movie was really, really affecting. For young diasporic Jews in that period. And so I'm representing, you know, and Barbara, I mean my actual mother had a really, a real relationship to this movie and named me a, you know, at birth after a character from the movie that's kind of gets adopted in the book. I mean, that's how attached to this movie she was, and my father too. I mean, you've got a population of teenagers. In like the 1960s who are, you know what I mean? They're not thinking about politics or the state or state craft. They're like James Dean and Bobby Socks and whatever it is. Right. How do you get these people interested in the founding of a state? The media's really important in that process. And Exodus is, is central to that. Yeah.

Brett Benner 31:46

Yeah. No. Then the last thing I really wanted to ask you there is, the sun in the book has a, a certain pension for lesbian sci-fi. Is there anything you could recommend?

Jordy Rosenberg 31:55

Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, you know, I'm just gonna rep, recommend what that, um. I think, uh, what that character would recommend, the character's quite obsessed with gay science fiction, although there is, there is kind of a lesbian sci-fi sort of sub sub. Text in the book. Um, the character's really obsessed with the author Samuel Delaney, the extremely important science fiction author and theorist Samuel Delaney. And I mean, I think, I don't think that anyone really needs me to recommend this author because he's extremely well known, but his Navion series. It's, it's actually a little more fantasy than science fiction, I think is an absolutely incredible undertaking that is trying actually to narrate the transition from feudalism to capitalism. But it does so through narrative and it's really incredible. Um, ah, lesbian sci-fi in the early nineties would probably have recommended there's a book that kind of fell. I was very, sort of little known, but I was really obsessed with, or sorry, the character would've been really obsessed with at the time called the Fortunate Fall. Uh, was that what it was called by Raphael Carter? Um, they, they were, I think they've changed their name. Um, it was a wild. It was kind of like about the internet before the internet like had really begun to exist and somebody has like a relation, it was like lesbians, maybe one of them is. Virtual, like doesn't exist in

Brett Benner 33:33

embodied form. I here it's their name is now Cameron Reed.

Jordy Rosenberg 33:35

Yeah.

Brett Benner 33:36

And it says, A reporter with the virtual reality broadcasting equipment implanted in her brain. Yes. Uncovers a massacre, coverup, and a radically strange near future Russia.

Jordy Rosenberg 33:46

I haven't read it since then, so I don't know if it holds up, but I, boy did. I love it. And I do believe that she has some kind of maybe sexual. Relationship that's only virtual with a whale in that. And I think I really enjoyed that. Yeah, that's a really, that's interesting. Niche recommendation, but, but I just say contemporary, trans science fiction, there's so many places to go for this and, uh. I would, I mean, I can't even begin to list. One of the recent books that I absolutely loved was M North is M Norths in Universes. I did blurb this book, but it was absolutely magical to me. But there's also a collection. It was meanwhile elsewhere. A collection from 2017 is a collection of sci-fi and fantasy from trans authors. There's just so much trans science fiction, honestly now that like, it's such a wonderful, wonderful proliferation. Alright,

Brett Benner 34:47

well next I, oh Jordy, I have to say the book is fantastic. Please everyone go out and get a buy independent. If you can buy independent and, wait, I have to ask you, is there an audio version of this?

Jordy Rosenberg 35:01

Do you secretly know that I did the audio book?

Brett Benner 35:05

I thought you might have after that thing of your mother? In the beginning I did, because I was gonna say, because Joan Rivers wasn't available to read it.

Jordy Rosenberg 35:11

Oh.

Brett Benner 35:11

So

Jordy Rosenberg 35:12

I did do the audio. It was quite an experience. I didn't know quite what I was signing up for. Yeah.

Brett Benner 35:17

Oh my God. I

Jordy Rosenberg 35:18

want

Brett Benner 35:19

to hear you read this book

Jordy Rosenberg 35:21

now. You can, you can. Um, it was, I just, yeah. I Well, you're in this business. I didn't, I knew that I could do Barbara's voice. And I often have made the joke that like, you know, you can, it's very easy to sound like a Yenta once you're on testosterone because you get that. Like, I've spent my life smoking and blaming people voice, but I did not realize how much voice like acting was involved and I should have. So we, there was a director who like helped me through it, but who knows how well I did. It was really hard. It was really hard.

Brett Benner 35:57

I see this future. Perhaps this becomes a stage play. Oh, you're gonna make your debut.

Jordy Rosenberg 36:02

Oh no. Go God. Yeah. That never, never would I do that, but yeah,

Brett Benner 36:07

it, it could be Cole Cola's next, um, vanity Project. How's

Jordy Rosenberg 36:11

that? Oh my God. Well, that, or, um, you know Morgan Basche VAs?

Brett Benner 36:16

No.

Jordy Rosenberg 36:17

Oh, no. Who, who is that? Well, actually the director who directed Cola's o Mary. Directed another stage play by Morgan Basque that came out last year and was quite a success, uh, called, can I be Frank And

Brett Benner 36:32

Oh yeah. Okay. Yes, I know that. Yes.

Jordy Rosenberg 36:33

Morgan. Morgan is fucking hilarious. I saw Morgan do a bit like 15 years ago on the Lower East Side in a community garden. They did a bit where they were speaking in the voice of Judith Light. From from, and it was, oh my God. I just, I was, I went crazy. They're actually going to do what part? They're one of the people who's doing my book launch with me.'cause I just, I think they're so hilarious. And I was fawning over them afterwards to such an extent that my girlfriend, she was my girlfriend at the time, now she's my spouse. She would hate for me to say that. But anyway, I just did and she was like. Have some dignity. Jordy stop. Like, but I just, I, she, I remember she was like, stop it. Have some dignity. But I, I couldn't because Morgan is hilarious. If Morgan, I really wish that Morgan could have done this audiobook, like in the vo, in the voice of Judith Light, but.

Brett Benner 37:32

That is so good.

Jordy Rosenberg 37:33

Alas, it's me,

Brett Benner 37:34

but you know, maybe Judith will do it. So there's that too. In the end, she could do the play. I mean, she's a wonderful actress.

Jordy Rosenberg 37:40

Yes.

Brett Benner 37:40

She's much more, she's so much more than he's the boss.

Jordy Rosenberg 37:43

I know. I know. She contains worlds.

Brett Benner 37:46

She really does.

Jordy Rosenberg 37:47

Okay,

Brett Benner 37:47

well Jordy, this was wonderful. Thank you so much. Good luck with all of this and we'll speak soon.

Jordy Rosenberg 37:52

Alright, thanks so much.

Brett Benner 37:54

Thank you again, Jordy. Now, if you've liked today's episode or other episodes of Behind the Stack, please consider liking and subscribing so that you never miss an episode. Also, what would be really helpful for me. The podcast is if you can give it a five star rating and if you have the time, what would be just incredible is to write a review. These things really help with the algorithm to get the podcast in front of other people who might enjoy it as well. Also, tell your friends, I will be back next week. In the meantime, you can always find me at Brett's book Stack. On Instagram, on YouTube, and now on substack as well. Have a great week, everybody, and as always, thanks for listening.