Anthology of Unbearables

Central to the success of any literary anthology is the clarity with which its editor communicates both the book's purpose and how that purpose is embodied in the book's structure. It matters, for example, if the works the editor has chosen represent an historical overview, a "best of" collection, a response to a specific political moment, or an exploration of a single literary form, like the sonnet. Because any anthology is, by definition, an exercise in imperfections, this orientation allows a reader at the very least to distinguish between those that can and should be forgiven—differences in taste and sensibility, say—and those that may be worth identifying as flaws, plain and simple.

In his introduction to From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream, Ron Kolm, one of the book's editors, frames the collection as a response to the political, socioeconomic, cultural, and other changes we have seen in the United States between the bombings of 9/11 and the 2016 presidential election that brought Donald Trump and his administration to the White House. This framing raises some interesting questions. What does it mean to think of 9/11 as "somewhere," and of the United States under the Trump administration as "nowhere?" What does it mean that "nowhere" represents "the end of the American dream?" Whose dream, specifically, are we talking about?

That last question is particularly apt because From Somewhere to Nowhere is an anthology of work by members of The Unbearables, a group of writers about whom Kolm unfortunately tells us absolutely nothing. To get some idea of who The Unbearables are and why they might matter, we have to rely on two of the people whose blurbs grace the anthology's back cover, the well-known science fiction writer Samuel R. Delaney (who also has an essay in the book) and the Austrian writer Elias Schneitter. "The Unbearables," Delaney writes, "started as a tongue-in-cheek way to give unaffiliated American writers a sense of community," an idea that Schneitter, in his blurb, develops more fully. "This lively 'gang,'" Schneitter says, "has taken it upon itself from the very beginning to quicken the artistic and literary scene, injecting fresh air into the often stale atmosphere of established and academic writing."

The irreverence these descriptions imply is on display throughout the anthology's nearly six hundred pages, as is a self-conscious cultivation of outsider status, the potentially very rich lens through which Kolm and his fellow editors, Jim Feast and Shalom Neuman, clearly would like the work in the anthology to be read. The 9/11 attacks, after all, brought into stark relief—in a way we perhaps had not contended with since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941—the question of who truly "belongs" in the United States; and Donald Trump seems intent on doing everything he can to raise the stakes of that question, to the point where it does not feel like hyperbole to worry whether the foundations of our democracy will survive. The work collected in the six sections of From Somewhere to Nowhere—"9/11," "There Goes the Neighborhood," "Fusionism Centerfold" (an art portfolio), "It's The Economy Stupid," "O.W.S." (for Occupy Wall Street), and "Postscript: Trump"—take on this question of belonging, or not, with varying degrees of success, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by the irreverent and self-conscious outsider status I discussed above.

The pieces range from the immediate and visceral to the theoretical, intellectual, and even scholarly, but they all ultimately run up against the problem articulated by Thomas Zummer in the first few sentences of his "9/11" offering, "Some Notes on the Unspeakable:"

What recourse do we have, we who work embedded so deeply in language, when words fail? When they fail so completely and utterly, in confronting tragedy of such proportion. Is there anything which authorizes our speech, we who remain outside the hole...