Olga Tokarczuk’s Plastic Bag

Plastic bag in flight. Image sourced from Riverfront Times.

Earlier this summer my backyard welcomed a strange new citizen. Joining the multispecies community of plants, animals, insects, and fungi that populate our urban double lot was a uniquely adaptable yet asocial and materially foreign entity that took up residence high up in the branches of an Oregon white pine. I might not even have noticed its presence there had the golden light of evening not compelled me to look up and admire the glowing canopy above the yard. And there, bathed in the soft light, I saw it: checkered in white and beige and fluttering in the summer breeze—a plastic bag.

The bag’s high-altitude roost baffled me. How had it managed to get up there? What freak wind gust had it surfed to attain such an ambitious height? And how did it get so firmly lodged there? Somehow its handles had gotten snarled on a branch, grasping tightly enough to enable its body to billow freely with the wind. And there it has remained perched for weeks, even surviving the windstorms that have fueled Oregon’s recent (and, as I write, ongoing) wildfire apocalypse.

As the weeks have progressed I’ve often looked up to see if the plastic bag has moved on. But each time it’s still there, oddly animated despite being so securely bound in place. It’s weirdly creature-like, both in its bodily movements and its tenacious form of home-making. I wish to know the bag’s subspecies, but even under binocular observation the marks that might identify it remain obscured, tucked up against the underside of a branch.

What kind of being is this blank, remote guest, billowing emptily from its high perch?

Normally I wouldn’t think so much about a plastic bag stuck in a tree. I would simply consider it an aesthetic blemish and remove it. Being physically unreachable, however, the plastic bag made a different—and more durational—demand on me. It’s arrival in the Oregon pine also coincided uncannily with my reading of a fascinating work of fiction that features an excursus on plastic bags, as brilliant as it is strange and unexpected. I’m speaking of Flights, written by the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk.

I’ll return to Tokarczuk’s plastic bags in due time. But first, some words about the author and her work.

Like many others in the English-speaking world, I first heard Tokarczuk’s name when the Swedish Academy announced her as the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature. At the time of the announcement only about a third of Tokarczuk’s literary output had appeared in translation, and the first two novels—House of Day, House of Night and Primeval & Other Times, brought into English by Antonia Lloyd-James in 2003 and 2010, respectively—had limited distribution. Not until Flights appeared in 2018 did Tokarczuk take to the anglophone literary world’s mainstage, boosted by the superior marketing power of Penguin Random House as well as the high-profile win of the Man Booker International Prize, split with her translator, Jennifer Croft. The following year brought yet more renown for Tokarczuk, mainly through her winning the Nobel. She also had a fourth work appear in English, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (trans. Antonia Lloyd-James), which garnered rave reviews from critics.

As I’ve since learned, the anglophone world has yet to encounter Tokarczuk’s most ambitious and controversial work, one that has forever sealed her literary reputation in Poland. This novel, originally published in 2014 and set to come out in Jennifer Croft’s translation next year, is The Books of Jacob. Tokarczuk’s twelfth and most recent novel is a monumental, 900-page exploration of the life of the Jewish dissident, Jacob Frank. Set in the eighteenth century, the novel illuminates some of the shadowy corners of Polish history, and this illumination has sparked fierce polarization. On the one hand, it has earned Tokarczuk ecstatic praise from the Polish literary establishment, which largely considers the work her masterpiece. On the other hand, it has brought violent denunciation from Polish nationalists, some of whom have issued death threats and called for her expulsion from Poland.

For the moment, however, Tokarczuk’s reception among English readers rests on the two most recent translations. I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading both, starting with Drive Your Plow and proceeding to Flights a couple weeks later. The two works are wildly different in terms of both story and structure, yet in reading each I felt the same imagination at work—a certain plasticity of mind that revels in drawing together disparate images and ideas into odd and oddly satisfying relation. Drive Your Plow, for instance, is a kind of ecofeminist noir fable starring an eccentric middle-aged woman with a deep respect for animals, a penchant for charting strangers’ astrological “cosmograms,” and a practice of translating William Blake’s poetry into Polish. These elements come together to form a strange, ecologically inflected whodunnit that succeeds equally as “literary” and “genre” fiction (if indeed those classifications are meaningfully separable).

Drive Your Plow feels generically recognizable despite its unexpected congregation of ideas. By contrast, Flights leaves me groping for suitable language to describe what it’s up to. Others have expressed similar difficulty. Looking through the blurbs of praise that appear in my paperback copy of the book (a very rigorous and scholarly review, I know!), I see that NPR’s Fresh Air calls Flights a “hard-to-classify work,” and The New Yorker exclaims that Tokarczuk’s book “scrambles conventional forms.” Other outlets make similar reference to the work’s nonlinear structure (The Millions), its fragmented form (The Washington Post), and its interweaving of “captivating vignettes” (Literary Hub) and “haunting narratives” (Library Journal). The Wall Street Journal summarizes the overall sense of the book’s generic ambiguity, describing it as “an unclassifiable medley of linked fiction and essays.” 

Whereas all of the blurbs referenced above underscore how Flights flouts literary convention, another set of blurbs introduce a word the first set carefully avoids: “novel.” Among the latter set of blurbs, the critics’ use of this word is at once tentative and assured. It’s as if they’re aware that the book doesn’t hang together the way we normally expect, yet unwilling to imagine that a long work of prose that isn’t a short story collection could be something other than a novel. Marlon James’s blurb nicely demonstrates what I’m talking about: “Flights works like a dream does: with fragmentary trails that add up to a delightful reimagining of the novel itself.” Not content to let the “fragmentary trails” remain in partial relation to each other, James invokes Freudian dream theory to suggest that the pieces of the work must “add up” to something greater than the sum of these parts. And the sum to which the parts add up is, he says, a “delightful reimagining of the novel itself”—which is basically to say, a novel. (The reimagining is delightful precisely because the result remains generically recognizable, if transformed.)

For most folks, I imagine, any debate about what is or is not a novel must seem a remote and academic exercise. And indeed, for the past century of so the debate has remained pretty academic, driven by philosophers like Georg Lukàcs and José Ortega y Gasset, as well as literary scholars like Ian Watt, Marthe Robert, Michael McKeon, and Nancy Armstrong. I have neither need nor desire to rehearse the key arguments that have contributed to this debate, and which encompass history, economics, religion, and the sociology of literary forms. Nor am I personally invested in dictating what a novel should look like. Yet I do sometimes ask myself what, if anything, we might miss when we automatically refer to all long-form works of prose fiction as novels. Indeed, the term novel has grown so capacious since the latter decades of the twentieth century as to encompass virtually all lengthy narrative fiction, no matter how fragmented or formally experimental. And with the recent rise of what literary critic James Wood has called “hysterical realism,” one wonders whether the novel now designates capaciousness itself.

Aerial pas de deux. Image sourced from Artlecture.

At this point it would perhaps behoove us to look briefly to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the various, contradictory meanings of the term “novel” coalesced into something more-or-less agreed upon. Broadly speaking, as literary historian Michael McKeon notes in his magisterial book The Origins of the English Novel, the novel as we know it emerged during a period of great epistemological and ideological instability. As such, the novel itself at once replicated that instability and mediated it for its contemporary readers. In this sense, McKeon writes, “the genre of the novel can be understood . . . as an early modern cultural instrument designed to confront, on the level of narrative form and content, both intellectual and social crisis simultaneously” (22). 

The novel came to serve as such a “cultural instrument” due to the particular methods it used to represent the apparently chaotic unfolding of human life as something meaningful in itself. The individual human life—the human life as individual—thus becomes central to the novel. In the early modern English context, there existed two camps with divergent philosophies about which aesthetic principles served best to represent human life. Whereas Samuel Richardson (author of Pamela and Clarissa) privileged a form of representation we would now associate most closely with realism, Henry Fielding (author of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones) took a much wilder and more chaotic approach to rendering life in prose narrative. But regardless of the aesthetic differences they and their camps of supporters privileged, and despite the competing visions of morality these differences entailed, both Richardson and Fielding remained fundamentally committed to representing the form of the individual human life.

I would venture that, perhaps more than any other element, it is this commitment to the distinctiveness of human individuality and the individual human life that “originally” distinguished the novel from the romance, and might well continue to distinguish it from other prose narrative forms. To quote McKeon again, the novelist’s fundamental job has been to render the big picture through the lens of individual experience—that is, “to explain large, public macrohistories by quite self-consciously distilling them into the smaller, more accessible, private microhistories of individual and familial life that are to us so recognizably ‘novelistic’” (215). 

But there can be no fiction of “the individual” without its companion fiction of “society.” As McKeon goes on to explain later in his study, such fictions gradually precipitated out of the muddled ideological and epistemological fog that shrouded seventeenth-century England:

Hypostasized over against the individual, “society” slowly separates from “self” as “history” does from “literature,” a ponderous and alienated structure whose massive impingement on the individual paradoxically signifies the latter’s autonomy, the very fact of the individual’s “rise,” as well as the subjection of self to this greater power.

Which gives way to McKeon’s main point:

The autonomy of the self consists in its capacity to enter into largely negative relation with the society it vainly conceives itself to have created, to resist its encroachments and to be constructed by them. The work of the novel after 1820 is increasingly to record this struggle. (419)

Of course, the methods for dramatizing this fundamental tension between self and society have changed in the ensuing centuries. The novel has needed to transform itself in order to represent and mediate the shifting nature of the tensions that persist between self and society. The novel has also needed to multiply its representations to accommodate (and in turn influence) the many cultural contexts where it has since taken root around the world.

Once again, I don’t aim to limit what the novel can be or what it can do in the many contexts where it has come to matter. Yet I still cling to a basic idea: only those prose narratives that explore human individuality in its complex relationship to its social context (or contexts) can meaningfully be called novels.

Such an idea seems capacious enough to encompass significant divergences of philosophy and style across time and space. Obviously, the sprawling fictions of the nineteenth century “do” the novel differently than the closely imagined psychological fiction of the early twentieth. Yet despite their preferred methods for seeking and divulging reality, both remain resolute in a basic dichotomy between self and society—even if, as in the fictions of Samuel Beckett, for example, society gets reduced to a void in which the individual, now barely a consciousness, nihilistically floats.

With these observations in mind, I have recently grown curious about what critical language we might use to describe the particular forms or shapes of human individuality that the novel has learned to accommodate. Ordinarily we speak of characters, a much-maligned term that a lively trio of critics has recently salvaged for scholarly usage (see Anderson, Felski, and Moi). I celebrate these scholars’ wonderful work, and encourage all to read it. I would also highlight Maria DiBattista’s 2010 book Novel Characters for the way it attends to what is peculiar about novelistic character.

I myself am particularly interested in a slight variation on these themes. I’m curious to know whether the novel’s particular investment in human individuality might be more specific than that blanket term—“human individuality”—suggests. Despite the many ways of knowing and being that have flourished on this planet both historically and into the present, I want to know whether and how the novel enforces a certain model of the human individual—a form of subjectivity that we might call novelistic personhood.

Historically, we know that novelistic fiction is entangled with the fiction of individuality itself. And if the fiction of individuality manifested in the novel has its grounding in a fiction of society and its particular moral, ethical, social, political, and financial concerns, then it seems reasonable to posit that the novel accommodates a particular form of human personhood as its native and ideal model. How would we define such a model? What definition of novelistic personhood would satisfy the many forms the novel itself has taken in its global peregrinations? Would such a definition reflect the historical reality of the novel’s spread via imperialism? Or would such a definition itself bear the marks of colonialist (self-)projection?

I’m only in the first stages of asking these questions. Really, I’m only just learning how to ask them. So, I offer no answers here. But the reason I mention these questions about novelistic personhood in this essay is that, quite unexpectedly, the chameleonic form Tokarczuk pioneers in her book Flights recalled them to me. Apropos of the book’s critical status as both a novel and other than a novel, I spent most of my time reading curious to see if and how the many narrative fragments that make it up would eventually come together. Would the individually titled sections remain a collection of loosely affiliated short narratives, or would they coalesce into a more fully integrated whole?

From the beginning the reader can trace two distinct themes. Some of the short narratives explore ideas about travel, migration, and movement. Others explore matters of human anatomy, and in particular the bizarre history of scientists who sought a perfect method for preserving partially dissected bodies. (Think of Body Worlds, the popular traveling exhibition that displays dissected human and animal bodies preserved by a process known as “plastination.”)

These two themes run parallel to one another throughout the book. And though their presence provides a semblance of form, throughout most of the book I felt unclear whether these two strands merely ran parallel or if they were, unbeknownst to me, already spiraling into an interconnected double helix. Having finished the book, I confess I’m still not completely sure. Yet upon reflection I believe that Tokarczuk’s sequencing of fragments may give us a few glimpses of how we might think these two themes together.

More specifically, I think that in Flights Tokarczuk uses fragmentation to play with our expectations about what kind of character should stand as the central narrative focus of a novel. In short, she seems to ask the following: What kind of person (or representation of personhood) is adequate to carry or convey contemporary novelistic form?

Interestingly, given its kaleidoscopic composition, Flights does have a central narrator. This anonymous individual’s voice dominates the opening sections of the book. They speak in the first person, offering fragmentary memories from their childhood and making nods to the various secular “pilgrimages” they’ve taken as an adult.

The narrator also informs the reader that they studied psychology at university and retain a keen interest in the weird inner workings of the human mind. They mention their particular fascination with the mercurial nature of personal identity. At one point they poke fun at personality tests and the certainty with which they promise to reveal to us our real selves: 

What a methodology! It is tacitly assumed that people don’t know themselves, but that if you furnish them with questions that are smart enough, they’ll be able to figure themselves out. They pose themselves a question, and they give themselves an answer. And they’ll inadvertently reveal to themselves that secret that they knew nothing of till now. And there is that other assumption, which is terribly dangerous—that we are constant, and that our reactions can be predicted. (15)

Linked to the narrator’s understanding of the human personality as a changeable thing is their fascination with the idea of syndromes, which they associate with the mobility-based discourse of travel psychology. Rejecting the concept of personality types, which the narrator thinks are totalizing, syndromes allow for partial, transitory accounts of psychological phenomena: “A syndrome is small, portable, not weighed down by theory, episodic. You can explain something with it and then discard it” (16).

The narrator’s preference for this “disposable instrument of cognition” brings them to a discussion of their own particular syndrome, which they describe as a perverse fascination with “all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken” (17). Wherever the “abnormal” disrupts the “normal,” wherever disability undercuts assumptions about what is whole, well made, or properly functioning, the narrator sees not breakdown but an eruption of Being (note the Heideggerian capitalization):

I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly, that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature. A sudden fluke disclosure. An embarrassing oops, the seam of one’s underwear from beneath a perfectly pleated skirt. The hideous metal skeleton that suddenly pops out from the velvet upholstery; the eruption of a spring from within a cushioned armchair that shamelessly debunks any illusion of softness. (17)

 Thus, the human personality is a changeable thing, and Being itself shines forth from the inevitable cracks in the construction of personhood. The self is inconstant and unstable.

Now, anyone familiar with literary modernism and its legacy will find something familiar in this narrator’s predisposition to reject the notion of a self-consolidating individual. Much of twentieth-century literature, critical theory, and indeed psychology has worked overtime to disabuse us of our fantasies about the rational subject—that miraculously fictional, perfectly whole and self-knowing creature that reasons and acts with absolute self-control.

Tokarczuk may be similar to early devotees of Freud (and, to a lesser extent, Lacan) in her adoption of pop psychology to make a literary point about the instability of personhood. She may also share something with the postmodernist writers who took up the modernist project with an ironic grin. But what’s perhaps different is that she doesn’t belabor that instability by emphasizing the complexities of a single mind’s cognitive processing, as many modernists did. Nor does she turn her writing into a playfully ironic (but in my opinion ultimately hollow) hall of mirrors, as many postmodernists did. Tokarczuk makes no nods to stream-of-consciousness techniques, and she doesn’t linger in one character’s mind. She also doesn’t explode point of view to include a range of narrators. Instead, Flights reads more like an assemblage of third-person essays and fictions held together loosely by a sometime first-person narrator who makes only infrequent appearances.

Although in theory this could be the same narrator, now recounting a variety of similar stories à la Scheherazade, Tokarczuk gives us no reason really to believe that. Instead, the fragments that compose the book might better be understood as something like “lines of flight” (lignes de fuite), a term Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use to think about transformation and adaptability. As their English translator, Brian Massumi, puts it, “Fuite covers not only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance (the vanishing point in a painting is a point de fuite)” (in Deleuze and Guattari, xvi). Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of lines of flight belongs to a larger theory of assemblages, which at once emphasizes the complex fluidity of relationships between “parts” and “wholes” and destabilizes our sense of what distinguishes part from whole in the first place.

Mark Ingham, “BoyPool”: Rhizome (1998–1999). Image sourced from Ingham’s personal website.

We needn’t get drawn too far down the Deleuze-and-Guattari rabbit hole; my point here is simply that, in its very title, Flights may announce both a thematic interest in flight as travel (“physical” mobility) and a theoretical interest in flight as an interplay of destabilization and adaptability (“mental” mobility). In the case of the latter, destabilization doesn’t completely undo the self, but rather rescripts it enough to enable adaptation to ever-changing conditions. The self is not mere illusion or fiction. Instead, it’s a collusion of energies, like a force or a vector. Such a collusion of energies may not enjoy a lasting, fully consolidated existence, but it does have real agency and impact despite its tendency to dissipate. 

Such observations might help clarify the uniqueness that so many critics have identified in Tokarczuk’s book. It doesn’t recapitulate modernist preoccupations with the prison-house of consciousness. Nor does it adopt postmodernist preoccupations with the self as so unstable as to be little more than a trope—literally an illusion of discourse. Flights is certainly “more” than a collection of short essays and fictions, but what holds it together isn’t exactly the kind of character we’d easily accept as specifically “novelistic.” And yet the book does display an enduring thematic and formal interest in the trajectory of human personhood, however flighty that trajectory might be.

In closing, I want to point to what I consider Tokarczuk’s boldest and most bewildering vision of the shape of human personhood. 

Near the end of the book, in a short section titled “On the Origin of Species,” Tokarczuk’s first-person narrator discusses a uniquely adaptable, “anemophilous” (i.e., wind-loving) creature that has fluttered its way to all corners of the globe and now occupies every conceivable type of ecozone. That creature, we learn, is the plastic bag—“mobile and light,” with “prehensile ears [that] permit them to latch on to objects, or the appendages of other creatures, thus expanding their habitat” (396). The narrator sketches out some vectors of the plastic bag’s expansion, beginning in “suburbs and trash heaps,” then migrating further afield to “gigantic highway junctions,” “winding beaches,” and even “the bony slopes of the Himalayas.” 

The final paragraph of this brief section then takes a turn that, for me at least, provides a kind of key to the book’s philosophy of personhood:

Never before have we been faced with such an aggressive form of being. Some, in a kind of metaphysical rapture, believe it’s in the bags’ nature to take over the world, to conquer all continents; that they are pure form that seeks contents but immediately tires of them, throwing themselves to the wind yet again. They maintain that the plastic bag is a wandering eye that belongs to some imaginary “there,” a mysterious observer taking part in the panopticon. Others, meanwhile, with their feet more firmly on the ground, assert that these days evolution favors fleeting forms that can flit through the world while at the same time attaining ubiquitousness. (397)

Though ostensibly an ironic description of a new “species,” I read the narrator’s discussion of the plastic bag’s unique mode of being as an uncanny vision of what human being may yet become—or indeed is becoming—in its ongoing bid to maintain its social and ecological dominance. The “aggressive form of being” outlined here is our own; the plastic bag mirrors our own toxic agency back to ourselves.

A plastic bag stingray ad from the World Wildlife Fund. Image sourced from thinglink.

In presenting the plastic bag as its own species, Tokarczuk plays on the way that recent environmentalist campaigns have figured the plastic bag as pseudo-animate creatures that pollute natural resources (especially the ocean) while seeming never to degrade. The plastic bag also has clear ties to consumerism. Oddly enough, though, this isn’t its strongest link to capitalism, since the plastic bag is perhaps less associated with disposable spending and more connected to everyday shopping at grocery stores, bodegas, pharmacies, and take-out restaurants. More relevant here is the plastic bag’s origins in oil. As a petroleum product, the plastic bag is bound up with the oil industry. Its ontogeny thus gives this otherwise lowly form powerful inroads into politics both national and international. One needs only glance at the day’s headlines to witness the plastic bag’s links to sweeping neoliberal policies that reinvigorate imperial power dynamics and enable the global North to enact violences both fast and slow on the South. Vibrant matter indeed.

Additional irony resides in what Tokarczuk’s narrator describes as the mystical, almost cultish appreciation of the plastic bag as pure form and hence perfectly adaptable. The plastic bag is, of course, capable of housing content. However, its power comes not in its ability to carry stuff, but in its ability to empty itself. Contents are not essential to the plastic bag, for the plastic bag requires no sustenance. It doesn’t process food or information. It requires no ideology. It’s form is all. Though built with the capacity to accumulate, the plastic bag specializes in liquidation. Liquidation gives the plastic bag its ecological advantage. Its emptiness makes it mobile.

Aren’t these all features that would make for excellent human adaptations to a global society regulated by the fast pace of late-stage capitalist consumerism? A society where the sheer overabundance of content conceals a yet purer form of control? Where the deepest code (social, political, genetic, computational) can be found in market economics, where the buying and selling of stocks proceeds according to algorithms that make trades on the order of microseconds? Surely, those most able to thrive in such a society are those who possess the plastic bag’s basic capacity to accumulate and liquidate at a whim. 

You might justifiably consider this an overreading, but what keeps me curious about Tokarczuk’s plastic bag as an inauspicious model for human subjectivity is the way it helps me understand how the two main thematic preoccupations of Flights come together. I mentioned earlier that two distinct themes run in parallel throughout the book, but remain separate. On the one hand, we get stories about human anatomy and the development of plastination, a technique designed to preserve dissected bodies. On the other hand, we get stories about movement, understood in terms of both physical and mental mobility. Though in an unexpected way, the plastic bag unites both themes. It literalizes the theme of plastination while maintaining an emphasis on movement. Durability and mobility coalesce in the plastic bag as pure form.

Furthermore, understood as a bizarre model for the essence of human personhood under conditions of neoliberal capital, the plastic bag also (at last!) provides the means to return to the question of genre.

I said earlier that what distinguishes the novel from other genres—epic and romance principal among them—is its compulsion to represent the uniqueness of human individuals in all their exceptionality and banality. If we accept this basic precept, and if we accept that Tokarczuk’s book offers an experimental examination of a particularly flighty form of human personhood, then it seems necessary to think of Flights not as a loose collection of vaguely interconnected fragments, but specifically as a novel. Indeed, it’s a novel in the double sense that Maria DiBattista identifies in the punning phrase “novel characters,” meant to highlight “the relation between what is ‘new’ in the novel’s emphasis on people and what is intrinsically or generically ‘novel’ about the particular forms it invents to accommodate them” (viii). Key here is the relation between character and form: the novel is as much about the kind of personhood represented as it is about the form in which that representation is made possible. 

Flights might not exactly give us the kind of distinctive individuals we typically associate with the novel, but if we think of the novel as the relation of character and form, then the plastic-bag model of being that emerges near the end of the book could be said to offer a weird model of individuality made possible by a literary form that accommodates itself to twenty-first century personhood. The plastic bag may lack the charisma of Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe or Clarissa Harlowe, three distinctively novelistic characters from the period of the novel’s European “rise.” Yet maybe one point of Tokarczuk’s novel is that, in the twenty-first century, character—and indeed personhood itself—threatens to become distinctively indistinctive.

Olga Tokarczuk. Image sourced from Lubimy Czytać.

Works Cited 

Anderson, Amanda, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi. Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

DiBattista, Maria. Novel Characters: A Genealogy. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. London: Radius, 1988.

Tokarczuk, Olga. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019.

———. Flights. Trans. Jennifer Croft. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.

Wood, James. “Human, All Too Inhuman.” The New Republic, 23 July 2000, newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-inhuman. Accessed 15 September 2020.