Rae DelBianco's Blog

I'm thrilled to share Publishers Weekly's starred review of Rough Animals:

In DelBianco’s furious and electric debut, a contemporary western, Wyatt and Lucy Smith are twins living a hardscrabble existence on a cattle ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. Early one morning, Wyatt discovers that one of his steers has been fatally shot. The killer is a barely-teenaged girl, who, during a brief shoot-out, wounds Wyatt and kills three more of his cattle before escaping. Knowing the entire ranch enterprise has been economically doomed by the shooting, Wyatt decides to go after the girl, who is wounded herself, and demand restitution. With Lucy holding down the fort, Wyatt follows the girl south towards Salt Lake City, tracking her through an inhospitable desert of armed outlaw bikers, camouflaged meth labs, drug deals gone wrong, and hungry coyote packs. Interspersed with Wyatt’s narrative are flashbacks to the twins being raised by their father, who schools them in the cruel lessons of nature. Although clearly influenced by the prose styles of Cormac McCarthy and the late Jim Harrison, DelBianco nevertheless develops her own distinct voice, alternately laconic and roughly poetic. And though the girl is more device than actual character, the novel succeeds as a viscerally evoked and sparely plotted fever dream, a bleakly realized odyssey through an American west populated by survivors and failed dreamers. (June)
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-...

I've spent the past few days obsessed with Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan's Sarong Party Girls. It's a far cry from my usual genre— written in Singlish, the English-based Singaporean slang that includes influences from Malay to Cantonese, and from the point of view of a young woman hard bent to get a husband. It's light and fun, but then also becomes darkly honest, satirical, and deeply emotionally resonant as Tan tackles sexual harassment, sexism, and the cultural complication of the valuing of white men as "a way out," with dire consequences. That's a topic I attempted to write on while I lived in Bali and saw it firsthand— I believe in writing in others' shoes through fiction, but I also believe in recognizing when you've failed at it, and I did. I was thrilled to find this subject tackled in Sarong Party Girls. I highly recommend it. What's a book outside your usual taste that became a surprise favorite for you?

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow is the sequel to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, one of the best non fiction works I've ever read– Yuval Noah Harari discusses why homo sapiens emerged as the dominant species, and how today's societal structure is in many ways at odds with what we are evolutionarily tuned to gain happiness from. As an artist, his discussion of the importance of fictions in fulfillment hit me hard. Lately, as I haven't had time to write, I've been learning the hard way that it's not that my characters exist within me, but that I only exist within them. For those of you who write, why do you do it? And for the others, what are you reading this weekend?




Photo by Rae DelBianco
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bd5sXXZjY...