Ten Writers Who Are Reinventing the Art of Storytelling

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Half of Our Sometime Sister is the tale of Pearl Christomo, a bright, unhappy teenager whose divorced mother is engaged to a smarmy, vaguely sinister personal-growth guru. Pearl is still fiercely loyal to her scholarly father, a professor of history, and fights a guerrilla war against her new fake father. Eventually, the adamant Pearl is packed off to an exclusive school, where she begins a long struggle to find herself as a writer.

It may seem like a standard-model coming-of-age story, but the 31-year-old Labiner, who labored on the novel for nearly 10 years, while studying at the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota, had something richer and stranger in mind from the beginning. Pearl is a novelist, and interspersed between chapters of the main story, we hear the voices of the fictional characters Pearl is creating: the handsome, charismatic, unfaithful Aaron; the beautiful actress Theresa; the pale young playwright Winston; and assorted younger siblings and older mentors. It's soon clear that all these figures reflect different aspects of Pearl's imagination and yearning.

This is not a story with a standard buildup and “climax.” “I think of that way of writing as a masculine paradigm,” Labiner says. “I try to let my writing just swirl and swirl around a center.” Equally important to her is the deft mix of cultural references, from old TV shows to Shakespeare's Hamlet. “Someone once asked me how I claimed the right to use Shakespeare in my book,” says Labiner, who lives in Minneapolis. “Well, I just like Shakespeare. He's the ultimate entertainment text, with something for everybody. And high and low culture mix in everybody's lives. Shakespeare and Harlequin romances draw on the same themes, and I'm going to draw on them too, to tell the story I want to tell.”

DANZY SENNA
The absurdity of race—in black and white

Danzy Senna says her debut novel, Caucasia (Riverhead), is “the book I've been waiting all my life to write.” The 28-year-old daughter of the poet Fanny Howe, who is white, and the Mexican–African American journalist Carl Senna, Danzy had what she calls “an extremely racialized upbringing” in the ethnically polarized Boston of the 1970s. “I was raised according to what seems like a paradox,” she says. “To be very vigilant and conscious of myself as black, and to understand the absurdity of race. It's not really a paradox; race is absurd when you see it as science, but exactly because it's a social construction it makes sense as a political, social, and personal choice.”

The absurdities and poignant truths of race run through Caucasia, which is the tale of Birdie and Cole, the daughters of a Harvard-educated black intellectual father and a radical activist mother whose bloodlines are Puritan New England blue. Birdie could pass for Italian or Jewish; Cole is “cinnamon-skinned, curly-haired, serious.” Their father favors Cole, to Birdie's constant sorrow, while the girls' icily patrician maternal grandmother practically disowns her darker granddaughter.

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