The loss of 10,000 local homes, followed by mountains of ash, soot, mud and invisible lurking toxins, what the Associated Press describes as “blunt force” in the White House, and the high price of eggs got 2025 off to a less-than-lovely start.
But March brings international Women’s Month, and reading what women write is one way to celebrate the twinned X chromosomes typically possessed by female humans. BTW, drug giant Pfizer states that … “the X chromosome is five times larger than the Y chromosome, and has 10 times the number of genes…meaning it carries more traits.”
ICYMI: the Y chromosome is carried by males, who also typically possess one X as well. The Y chromosome carries 45 genes, while the X possesses between 900 and 1400 genes.
As we contemplate the recent Super Bowl defeat of Travis Kelce, consider this statement: “The human Y chromosome has lost its ability to recombine with its once homologous partner, the X chromosome” (and please don’t tell Taylor, she’ll worry). Geneticists currently bicker about the destiny of the Y, some speculating that it may disappear altogether (in the next million years or so), while generally agreeing that “…the Y chromosome has already heavily degenerated.”
Here’s possible proof of the same: women write more fiction than men do. And although Americans read fewer and fewer books each year, which explains a lot, women continue to read 19 percent more fiction than dudes do.
If you’re a man troubled by any of this, grab yerself a shovel and start digging out for your less robust neighbors in Altadena. Then hie ye over to Vroman’s and snap up the seven new works of fiction written by women, all of whom will convene in Pasadena at month’s end. And if you’re rockin’ twin Xs, please do the same, because you know you can.
The seven authors mentioned will be present at the 17th annual Pasadena Festival of Women Authors, hosted by The Pasadena Literary Alliance. The festival will feature a keynote address by The New York Times bestselling author Rachel Khong, along with six other acclaimed writers: Marie-Helen Bertino, Rita Bullwinkel, Essie Chambers, Yangsze Choo, Eve J. Chung, and Xochitl Gonzalez.
The organizers say this: “The Festival has a eight-person Author Selection Committee (ASC) which reads numerous books and issues invitations over a six-month period. Eligible books are recently released works of literary fiction written by women. These novels must be both critically acclaimed and touted by readers. Selected novels typically address a variety of serious issues and universal themes and are notable for an engaging voice, their literary style, or a nuanced use of language. In addition, the ASC strives to invite authors from diverse backgrounds who are entertaining speakers.”
Earlier this month, we caught up with two of the participating writers and in both cases felt ourselves transported from the page into the author’s reality, carried by the power of the literary voice alone. Both are tales of others, outsiders, outliers, but literally from worlds that are a universe apart.
Marie-Helene Bertino’s new novel, Beautyland (published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), has been called “Best Book of the Year (So Far)” by The New York Times, and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other prestigious accolades awarded to this author, a 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow who teaches creative writing and undergraduate fiction at Yale and NYU, include the O. Henry Prize, and the coveted Pushcart Prize.
We chatted with Philly-born, Brooklyn-based Bertino by phone, and our conversation is flavored and textured by the same combination of boroughs grit and otherworldly beauty – and humor—that animates her novel’s 322 pages.
“In school, we’re taught that stories always begin one of two basic ways. Either someone starts off on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. I deconstruct this form, to be a bit more flexible,” she says.
The prototype, however, does set the stage for her story of Adina Giorno, an alien girl sent to earth as an infant to gather intel about whether or not our planet is habitable.
“Beautyland is not sci fi. It’s speculative literary fiction,” she says. She is devoted, she says, to realistic details and “the poetry of the line,” and cautions that sci fi readers may be disappointed by the lack of special effects. We judge this possibility to be unlikely.
She’s a fan of the writing of Octavia Butler, as well as the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, who BTW appears on page 207 as a strap-hanger doppelganger for her father during a subway ride. Of her main character, she explains that Adina is experiencing what we consider to be normal, “real” life for the first time, in all its strangeness. She says “People are scared of what they don’t know and don’t understand. And people who wonder what’s beyond the observable universe are usually seen as fools and outcasts.”
“All of us are always looking for home,” says Bertino, perhaps with a nod to Spielberg. “It’s terrifying to leave, and to go far away from the people we love. It tests every part of our belief when we do this.” And who could feel more alienated than Bertino’s literally alien protagonist from a galaxy far, far away?
Although Beautyland lacks the furthest-out fantasy elements of classic sci fi, we remember that the Greek word planet means “wanderer.” This is a story of exile, the search “for one’s people,” an account of a young person who finds herself lost in the stars. And haven’t we all been there?
Beautyland affirms what storytellers of every century have known: that archetypes are liquid, and take on the distinct form and inflection of whatever contains them. This author successfully negotiates that most difficult of contemporary literary challenges: to relate an archetypal story with recognizably modern, sometimes hilarious touch-points – the not-unpleasant aroma of an inexpensive cranberry candle, for example.
Yangsze Choo, Bay area-based author of The Fox Wife (published in 2024, Henry Holt and Company), writes from a very different room of one’s own, with a very different view. Her first novel, The Ghost Bride, was made into a popular Netflix series, and her second, The Night Tiger, was a Reese’s Book Club Pick and a New York Times bestseller.
Set in Manchuria in 1908, The Fox Wife reads like a supernatural cookbook, or perhaps a travelogue fairytale written during a sleepless night of indigestion following a thousand-year-long banquet.
There is indeed a fox, an enchantress named Snow who sets off to avenge the death of her child.
Consider this context: “At the age of fifty, a fox can change into a woman. At the age of a hundred, it can change into a beautiful girl or a wizard or a man who seduces women; it can know about happenings a thousand li (500 meters) distant; it can bewitch people, leading them astray and causing them to lose their wits. At the age of a thousand, it can communicate with heaven and become a celestial fox.” – Kuo Po, 324 CE.
Choo’s pages burst and bubble over with culinary descriptions — braised goose, “Hairy crabs, trussed like neat packages and steamed for their luscious red roe and golden crab fat…a delicacy dipped in cold vinegar sauce,” drunken chicken, “…translucent jellyfish served in wine, cold pork dressed with pungent raw garlic and a drizzle of soy sauce,” ubiquitous noodles, paocai (which is, as we learn, “the pickled cabbage that’s a staple of Northeast China”), shochu (liquor made from sweet potatoes and barley), wild greens picked from the roadside, “…oysters folded into delicate chive omelets, and sweet-fleshed croaker fish pan-fried, then braised with garlic and fermented black beans,” and the offerings of fried tofu that foxes are said to savor when they can’t locate their traditionally preferred meal: human liver.
Even when not sharing recipes, the author employs evocative food metaphors, as in “Each shadow was sharp and black, crisp as a sugar wafer.”
The author gleefully admits that “food research” is a favorite aspect of her work. “I turned to old Malaysian cookbooks from the 1930s when I was writing The Night Tiger,” she says, “And whenever I travel, I go right to the supermarket to see what people there eat. That’s my hobby. My Dad, who’s 80 years old, still gets up every morning at 5 AM to go to the wet market in Malaysia.”
On the topic of the story bursting off the page, Choo laughs when I confess to breaking a cardinal librarian’s rule by scribbling in the book’s unusually wide margins.
“There is a long tradition of footnotes and marginalia in the Chinese literary tradition,” she assures me. “It’s not considered disrespectful to the author or to the book itself. People would often write poems inspired by what they read, and then pass the book around. This was one way that women could participate in literary discourse, even when they were not permitted to attend literary salons. In some cases, later editions of the book would be published with those footnotes included. I originally wanted to fill this novel with Snow’s personal footnotes and little backstories,” she says, noting that, across centuries of myth into today’s literal reality, foxes themselves inhabit the margins of society. Like visitors from other galaxies, foxes, too, are outsiders.
In Chinese literature, foxes are often linked with romance, typically casting the animal as an alluring fox-woman who can only be tamed or conquered by being married off to a human man.
Referencing the ancient fox cults rooted in the Han and Tang dynasties that later expanded to Korea and Japan, Choo writes of the duality of the “tricky” vulpine shapeshifter, who easily transitions from nine-tailed, celestial demigod to life-devouring demon. A master of understatement, she describes “…foxes as supernatural beings whose intentions towards humans are unclear.”
This ambivalence is the most compelling aspect of The Fox Wife, whose grieving protagonist may suggest La Llorona to some readers, propelled through the story by allusions reminiscent of our own continent’s long-legged canine counterpart to the foxy lady, Brother Coyotl.
And the author delivers one especially palate-cleansing morsel as a brief parting shot: in Chinese language, “hu” is both a homophone for “fox” as well as the term used in antiquity for foreigners, barbarians from the north and west of China.
The Pasadena Festival of Women Authors will begin with a pastry and coffee welcome, followed by the keynote address by Rachel Khong (author of Real Americans), as well as a panel presentation and breakout workshops with the various authors. Luncheon and time for book purchase and signing are included.
The mission of the Pasadena Festival of Women Authors is to celebrate the accomplishments of women authors and to raise money for literary programs at community non-profits.
Proceeds from the festival have funded over $500,000 in grants in keeping with its mission. The 2024 grantees were: Pasadena City College (Writer-in-Residence & Summer Creative Writing Academy), Pasadena Public Library (One City, One Story program), Pasadena Senior Center (Masters in Learning Series), PEN Center Los Angeles (You are a Writer workshops), and WriteGirl (Creative writing workshops and mentoring for high school girls).
DEETS
- Pasadena Festival of Women Authors
- Saturday, March 22
- 8:00 AM – 2:00 PM, followed by author signings
- Pasadena Hilton, 168 South Los Robles Avenue, Pasadena 91101
- 626-577-1000
- Google map
Note: This popular event has sold out, but there may be space on the waitlist. More information and video recordings of the festival can be found at pfwa2025.org.
