Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki

Fiction, 2021

Ever since I’ve been old enough to really understand the world (these past two years or so), I’ve never once cried at a scene in real life. Whenever something serious happens, I just convince myself it’s no big deal. I do my best to avoid any kind of shock. I’ve been fooling myself this way for long enough that it’s become a habit, and now nothing affects me. But in the world of make-believe, I can still relax enough to let flow my tears.

The short stories in this collection are crisply written, striking in their thoughtfulness, and icy as the back corner of the freezer. The stories are unmistakably science fiction, but Izumi Suzuki grounds the material so much in recognizable human relationships and instincts that the material often feels like it’s playing out only a few years ahead. Some technological advance has shifted the shadows of an ongoing dilemma, and yet the story could maintain its fundamental soul if transported a few millennia in either direction.

These short stories were written and originally published in Suzuki’s native Japan during the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties. They weren’t collected in an English-language version — Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan are all credited translators here —until a few years ago, thirty-five years after her death by suicide. Knowing the bsic details of Suzuki’s tragic biography does alter the sensation that comes with reading these airy, clinically precise works, or at least it did for me. They exist in some limbo state between a dream and a haunting.

The Secret History of the Rape Kit by Pagan Kennedy

Nonfiction, 2025

In the 1970s, Marty Goddard’s name peppered the Chicago newspapers. Despite her fear of public speaking, she had become the sort of campaigner who answered the phone on the first ring and gave journalists salty quotations that punched up their stories. She bounced around town, from work meetings to dinners, and kept in touch with dozens of friends and colleagues. But by the year 1985, she had faded into invisibility. Friends lost track of her and weren’t even sure where she was living. What had happened?

Pagan Kennedy makes the act of investigative journalism intensely personal in this book about Marty Goddard, the activist who invented the rape kit that erroneously bore the name of a Chicago police detective. There is a clear mission here: to right a wrong. Kennedy wants to give Goddard her due, a task that proves extremely difficult due to the way the inventor withdrew from the public sphere and the ease with which she was erased from the story about the widely used — and too often set aside without proper follow-up by law enforcement — evidence-gathering toolkit.

Along the way, Kennedy is frank about her own personal history with sexual assault, giving the reportage deeper meaning. She is also open about the challenging process of researching the book, making the story as much about the hunt for the facts as it is about the facts themselves. The Secret History of the Rape Kit is therefore revelatory in a multitude of ways.