CANR

• Yours for the Taking St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2023
• The Shutouts St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2024

1. The shutouts : a novel LCCN 2024022278 Type of material Book Personal name Korn, Gabrielle, 1989- author. Main title The shutouts : a novel / Gabrielle Korn. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : St. Martin's Press, 2024. Projected pub date 2412 Description pages cm ISBN 9781250323484 (hardcover) (ebook) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Yours for the taking : a novel LCCN 2023023652 Type of material Book Personal name Korn, Gabrielle, 1989- author. Main title Yours for the taking : a novel / Gabrielle Korn. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : St. Martin's Press, 2023. ©2023 Description 322 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9781250283368 (hardcover) (ebook) CALL NUMBER PS3611.O74313 Y68 2023 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Gabrielle Korn website - https://www.gabriellekorn.com

  Gabrielle is an author, editor, and strategist. She’s from New York and currently lives in Los Angeles.

  About Gabrielle
  Gabrielle Korn is the author of the essay collection Everybody (Else) Is Perfect (Atria, 2021), the novel Yours For The Taking (St. Martin’s Press, December 2023), and its sequel, The Shutouts (December 2024).

  She is a full-time author and professional ghostwriter, though in another life she served as the editorial and publishing lead of Most, Netflix’s digital home for queer storytelling. Under her leadership, Most doubled in size in under a year, launched its first-ever podcast, and won Webby awards.

  She's known for her work as the Editor-in-Chief of Nylon Media (2017-2019), where, while overseeing a team of 20 people across five departments, she guided a full print-to-digital transition and rebranded the editorial to reflect more contemporary values and interests, like racial diversity, body positivity, and queer inclusivity, while also creating, writing, and hosting a weekly news show that ran exclusively on Amazon Prime.

  She also served as the Director of Fashion & Culture (and, earlier, the Beauty Editor) of Refinery29, where she helped shape what aesthetics mean for a millennial audience, including writing a portion of the brand guide that, almost ten years later, is still used in the brand's marketing materials about inclusivity.

  Her writing has been published in Elle, McSweeney’s, Literary Hub, The Millions, Domino, Oprah Magazine, Instyle, Nylon, Refinery29, Autostraddle, The Huffington Post, and more.

• Write or Die - https://writeordiemag.com/author-interviews/gabrielle-korn

  Gabrielle Korn: On First Pages, Queer Stories Becoming Less Niche, Literary Agents, and Her Debut Novel ‘Yours for the Taking’
  Dec 5
  Written By Kim Narby
  Gabrielle Korn first popped up on my very queer Instagram feed in early 2021. Her first book, Everybody (Else) Is Perfect (Atria, 2021), had just been published, and the gays were raving. Everybody (Else) Is Perfect is a collection of essays recounting Gabrielle’s time moving up the ranks in online media to become the youngest Editor-in-Chief at Nylon — and the first out lesbian to hold the title. I eagerly devoured it that winter. The book was about fashion and exclusivity and the struggle with disordered eating having grown up with the flat exposed stomachs and jutting hip bones of the early aughts. But it was also about being young and gay and femme in New York City — a camp I fully placed myself within. One ex was referred to only by their astrology sign, and Gabrielle detailed her many years marshaling with the NYC Dyke March, an organization and annual protest in celebration of dyke joy that is very close to my heart.

  Like any other avid reader with a roster of favorite authors, I was ecstatic to learn about Gabrielle debut novel, Yours for the Taking (St. Martin's Press, 2023). Set in New York City twenty-seven years in the future, it depicts a world in which climate change has made most of the United States unlivable. Humans are migrating north into Canada. As a partial solution, governments have begun to create cities that have been completely enclosed to protect humans from the onslaught of disasters. A millennial billionaire, Jacqueline —whose family fortune has ties to fracking— funds the New York City “Inside” in order to have complete control on the society within, as well as who is approved to enter. The book follows three women over the course of nearly thirty years —Shelby, who is Jacqueline’s assistant, Ava who is one of the few in New York whose application to Inside was accepted, and Olympia, the head of the health department at the New York Inside. Decades pass by and the three women become more closely entwined as they begin to feel more and more skeptical about Inside, and whether its purpose is truly for the greater good.

  Brooklyn dyke connections landed me one degree away from Gabrielle and I was thrilled to get the chance to sit down with her this fall to discuss Yours for the Taking, her writing process, and what makes fiction most interesting.

  Kim Narby: You started your career in online journalism and media, and your first book, Everybody (Else) Is Perfect, was a collection of essays about your time as editor-in-chief at Nylon. How was it transitioning from non-fiction to fiction for this project?

  Gabrielle Korn: I found writing fiction to be a lot more vulnerable than writing nonfiction. Writing nonfiction didn't feel dissimilar to what I had been doing my entire career. As an editor and as a journalist, you assess the totality of events and find the narrative in the truth of things that really happened. And with fiction, it's like, here's the darkest, weirdest corner of my brain, and if I didn't write it down, it wouldn't exist. So it feels a lot more like exposing my inner life than non-fiction did. But I also love doing it. It's why I started writing in the first place; I wanted to write fiction and then after college I was so concerned with having a job and making money that I forgot that if you don't just write the book you want to write, it doesn't get written. I put off doing what I had wanted to do for a really long time and then decided to try to get back to it.

  KN: What was the journey from the idea for this book to getting it sold and now finally having it out in the world

  GK: It was fall of 2019. It was a really specific period of time in my life because I had left Nylon, which came really suddenly. It was a job I had wanted to be in for a long time, and then it kind of all went away. I went to Refinery29 to be the fashion director. And I was just in this rut of feeling like the things I was doing professionally didn't feel authentic to me. And so when I thought about what I wanted to write, I kept thinking it had to be science fiction because that's always been my favorite genre. Around the same time, these two separate but connected facts made their way to me. The first was that climate change is happening faster than we can adapt to it. And the second was that climate change will be here before women have equal rights. And I couldn't stop thinking about these two things because it was like, what do you mean it will be here before we can adapt to it? What will that look like? And I really couldn't find anything in the climate reports I was reading that talked about what life would look like other than a worsening of all the things we're already experiencing. So at that point I thought, okay, maybe it is the stuff of science fiction to start to imagine life after climate change. There was this idea that I had many years ago about sealing up New York City and living inside.

  It was the end of the Trump presidency. I think we were all feeling this kind of nihilism, like can we please just end it all? Can a comet just take us all out? And in that line of thinking, I started to imagine, what if we just kind of deny climate change while also having this nihilism and we enter this doom spiral and women still don't have equal rights? It kind of felt like the world and the central characters came to me all at once. And then the pandemic started and it was really weird because I had already started writing this story about being “Inside” and then we were inside. Refinery29 cut our pay by 25% and gave us Fridays off, so I spent Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and then mornings and evenings for the first year of the pandemic writing it.

  I sent it to my agent and she was like, this is not a book.

  KN: Helpful feedback.

  GK: Yeah. She was like, I love you but not yet. So then I worked on it for a few more months and then she took it out again and you know, you only need one yes. We got 20 nos and then one yes. And that’s how I found my perfect editor at St. Martin's Press, Hannah O'Grady. She saw something in it that nobody else did. And then everything happened pretty quickly after that.

  KN: I wanted to ask you a little bit about your world building. There are a lot of blurb comments that mention the world building in your book, and I do think it is so strong. What kind of tools did you use to go about building a dystopian society?

  GK: I don't know if I used tools. I think that I saw it all really clearly. And every time I went back and revised, I tried to add in more details about the place because I think the thing that comes most naturally to me is writing about relationships. I think originally [the details] had been pretty sparse. But that was the thing that people were most curious about when I had my friends read it. So I feel like because I went back and layered in details so many different times, it became a lot more robustly conceived than it originally was. It was a learning for me. Just because you can picture something clearly does not mean you've communicated it on the page. It was hard for me because as a journalist you make everything as tight as possible and in fiction it's like, no, you actually do have permission to explain things lyrically and have details just for the sake of details. But I think a lot of the world Inside was inspired by working in women's media honestly. A lot of the things that are said and the things that happen and just the general vibe of what it means to have a space that's mostly women and what it actually looks like was pulled directly from real experiences.

  KN: I was really intrigued by one of your primary protagonists, Jacqueline. She's set up to be kind of the primary villain of the novel. But there is a moment towards the end of the book where she gives another character a hug and references her double mastectomy, and I found myself feeling so much empathy for her because of how lonely she seems even though she has this profound financial and professional success. What was your thought process while creating that character?

  GK: She had to be three-dimensional. It's really fun to make a villain who is pure evil, but I don't think it reads as real and this belief system that she has this kind of core gender essentialism had to come from somewhere and so I think it does have to come from being betrayed by and let down by men first and foremost. And then she has to project that onto everybody. The excerpt from Shelby's book towards the beginning [of the novel] really tells you all of the biographical details you need to know. That is kind of a guide to Jacqueline because she did fall in love with somebody and did have this whole life with him and then got sick and he just absolutely failed her. And I think a healthy person's reaction to that would not be to globalize that and think it's indicative of an entire gender, but she's not necessarily a healthy person. And so that's kind of what she does with it.

  KN: I'm working on a very sapphic novel myself and I've had a lot of conversations with other queer authors about how as a manuscript becomes something for commercial consumption, you might have to widen the circle a bit so that it not only appeals directly to your core audience. Is that something you considered while in the writing or editing process?

  GK: It came up a few times. I had one reader who didn't understand the sex scene and I made the choice to not clarify because, you know, Google exists, and I also think that people are curious about queer stories at this point. I think there definitely was a large period of time when a queer story meant a niche book, but I don't necessarily think we're in that time anymore. If you think about the sapphic booktok community, not all of those women are actually queer. They just appreciate the genre. When you think about representation and diversity and relatability, I think what's true is that the more specific you get with a story, the more relatable it is because I think if you can highlight a universal truth that connects us all, no matter who we are, that that's just so much more successful than something that's trying to be everything for everyone.

  KN: On the topic of diversity, I know that while working at Nylon one of your core goals was to ensure the brand was as diverse as possible. I was curious how that was going to translate to fiction because as you said, the best fiction is very specific. But I found it really interesting how that carried over into your novel. Not all of your protagonists are cis, not all of your protagonists are white. The ones that are white are clearly called out as such, so it’s not just assumed. Can you talk to me a little about this?

  GK: I just don't think that it makes for interesting fiction when you only write characters who have the same identities as you. It's ultimately a story about people who come together to take down this woman who turns out to be a TERF or a white supremacist. You can't really tell that story without having a character who's Black and a character who's trans because it just doesn't make sense. And I was so much more interested in what the experiences of working for Jacqueline would be for these Black and trans characters —they were always there. This story doesn't exist without them. You just kind of have to take a leap of faith with it because I think it's also a scary time to write anything that has a point of view because people love to take your work out of context and do bad faith reads. But it felt like a risk worth taking because in honor of these characters and the integrity of the story, they just needed to be there.

  KN: Did you have sensitivity readers in light of that?

  GK: Yeah, we had a handful of authenticity readers. They were incredible and had some really interesting points that I learned a lot from.

  KN: I know we talked a little bit about the first pages of the novel. It starts off with an excerpt from Shelby’s memoir [Jacqueline’s assistant], 35 years after the novel takes place. I listen to this podcast called the Seven AM Novelist. It's hosted by a writer named Michelle Hoover and she recently did a series on first pages. Every episode an author came on and spoke with Michelle about their first pages and the process for getting there. I want to borrow one of her questions and ask you: Were these always your first pages, and if not how did you get to these final first pages?

  GK: I love this question. It was not the [original] first pages. In the first few versions of this, I didn't separate out points of view into different chapters. And I think this is a journalist hangup. When you report a story, you're pulling in a lot of different points of view and you're weaving them together to make one narrative. And so that's what I tried to do with this. And then it just kind of became unreadable. You can't have all of these voices. So I started separating them out and then what I realized was there had been this omniscient narrator who had been doing world building and describing Inside and describing the point of it and describing Jacqueline's life woven throughout everything. And once the points of view were separated out there was no one character who could possibly speak to these things unless it was in the form of someone else's research.

  So I just went through and pulled out all of the world building I had done and repackaged it into a prologue. And that's when I had the idea oh, Shelby has written a book and her book is how this is explained to us. But the first line that I wrote ended up being in the middle of the book. It's when you finally catch up to Orchid who has been living up north. And the line is: “The strangest part about living through the beginning of the end of the world was that she began to fantasize a bit about it finally just happening already.” That was the first line of the book.

  KN: That was a beautiful line.

  GK: That was to me where the story started. But it just didn't make any sense at the beginning of the book.

  KN: I know there are a lot of heavy topics in the book —the fallacies of a non-male run utopia, climate change, the dangers of white feminism. Do you find that you still have hope for the future after immersing yourself in this world?

  GK: Sometimes. I think it’s important to note that I didn't write this book to feel realistic. And so the fact that a lot of the blurbs ended up saying how frighteningly real it feels, that was very shocking to me. I wrote it to be kind of ridiculous and insane and you know, I don't think this is a world that is possible, [the one] I created. I do have a lot of fear around climate change. Especially because I broke my algorithm and now the only news I get is climate change news. But I also think that more people than ever are paying attention to it and the smartest people in the world are working on it. And I think every day there are new discoveries and I think what's unfortunate is that it is not on individuals at this point.

  The people responsible for climate change are the corporations, it's the richest people in the world, it's the governments. And so I think what I struggle with after living in this book is a feeling of powerlessness and a feeling like nothing I do matters because the impact that I make is kind of nothing compared to the changes that need to happen. But at the same time I feel that if every single person took responsibility for their own footprint, then we actually could make a difference. And there are certain statistics that drive me insane. Like if everybody in America stopped eating beef, we would stop climate change.

  Overall, I think we're gonna be okay. I think life is gonna look different and certain things will be more expensive. A friend who knows a lot more about this than me was like, look coffee beans are gonna be more expensive, but otherwise you're gonna be okay.

  Gabrielle Korn is the author of Everybody (Else) Is Perfect, Yours for the Taking, and its forthcoming sequel, The Shutouts. She's the former Editor-in-Chief of Nylon. She recently led LGBTQ+ strategy at Netflix, and her writing has been published across the internet since 2011. Originally from New York, she now lives in Los Angeles with her wife, and together they run The Pink Door artist and writer residency.

• Literary Hub - https://lithub.com/pink-dystopia-gabrielle-korn-on-how-a-decade-in-womens-media-inspired-her-novel/

  Pink Dystopia: Gabrielle Korn on How a Decade in Women’s Media Inspired Her Novel
  “What no one said out loud was that it already did mean something—to other people’s bottom line.”
  By Gabrielle Korn
  December 12, 2023
  Science fiction made me want to be a writer.

  As a child in the ‘90s I read Interstellar Pig because my older sister loved it, and that’s when it started—a lifelong obsession with alternate universes, aliens, time travel, dystopia; a compulsion to read and eventually tell stories to make sense of the world. My mom introduced me to the idea that if you love a book, the next thing to do is read every other book by that author.

  So after I read everything by William Sleator, I tackled Madeline L’Engle and Philip Pullman, then Octavia Butler, Isaac Asimov, Margaret Atwood. I’ve never been a science or math person, but even then, science fiction read like poetry. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of the science, I fell in love with the construction of the metaphors.

  It wasn’t books alone; watching Jodie Foster’s intergalactic travel in the movie Contact was the closest thing I felt to a spiritual awakening. I fell in love with any film where someone whispers grave news in the president’s ear—the size of the comet headed for earth or the fact that the aliens are already here—his response, on cue, a trembling “Dear God.”

  I found myself wanting to write the story of an all-female utopia that becomes a dystopia because categories of gender are flimsy.
  Later, when I tried to write my own science fiction, I came up short. I could whip up a strong beginning—a mysterious supernatural situation with high stakes and a dash of romance—but felt blocked after that. At the time, I thought that I had nothing bigger to say.

  So I gave up.

  *

  In college, I studied feminist theory and afterward I worked at an abortion clinic. It was 2011. I lived in Queens with my girlfriend, my two sisters, and their boyfriends, and worked in organizing with the New York City Dyke March and volunteered at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. But I desperately wanted to write, and the digital media boom meant there were writing jobs within reach. And, women’s digital media was now feminist, or at least that’s how it was described—by everyone from the public-facing founders to the brands who advertised on their sites.

  I found a place in this new, allegedly feminist media world, and my life took a sharp pivot. My title? Beauty editor. My job? Writing about hair, makeup, skin care, nails. I was surprised by how much I liked doing it, as though some ancient undercurrent of aesthetic knowledge had always been running through me, just waiting to be called upon.

  I was one of the only lesbians doing this kind of work at the time, but I wasn’t the only odd girl out. There had been a changing of the guards. Many of us had identities previously left out of a magazine culture infamous for catering to only the straight, cis, white, thin, wealthy. In digital media, we were promised something new and different; the ever-increasing demands of clicks and traffic meant brands were no longer focusing on being exclusive, but simply growing their audiences however possible.

  It meant the writers and editors could be openly feminist, in a kind of roundabout way. If we could improve the diversity of the content—and keep our jobs because we were helping grow traffic by reaching more people—maybe that could make all of this, the late nights and the low pay and the frequent verbal abuse doled out by the girlbosses we worked for, mean something to readers. What no one said out loud was that it already did mean something—to other people’s bottom line.

  *

  Almost a decade later, I was still working in women’s digital media, but between annual layoffs, battling with traffic goals, fighting with various stakeholders about diversity, and clawing my way into a liveable salary, the magic had worn off. I had recently signed a book deal for a memoir in essays, and while I felt proud of it, I also felt something was off. The truth was I still imagined myself writing fiction, and the book, much like my beauty and fashion writing, didn’t really feel authentic to my most ardent dreams.

  There’d been a handful of novels over the past few years that I’d loved—and also felt a little jealous of—like Station Eleven, Exit West, Severance, The Power. They all applied a contemporary sensibility to genre fiction in a way that was timeless; the characters and situations felt familiar, real, and relevant, with sci-fi elements used to make larger points about our current world. It was exactly what I had imagined myself doing at some point. Only I hadn’t yet.

  There was no invisible hand guiding me toward my goals, I realized. The only way to write the novel I’d always wanted was… to write it. I started digging through my old files of stories I’d started and stopped writing. There was this one real estate horror story I’d written in college about a New York City where there’s no more room left on the ground and so people keep building on top of skyscrapers, making them higher and higher. It had no plot and no characters, and a lot of embarrassing sentences. I found something else I’d scribbled down, something about a beauty industry conspiracy where women become so dependent on products that they accidentally start a cult. Again, nothing really there. Then I found a bunch of cringey notes app poetry. Maybe this was a bad idea, I thought.

  Also around this time, toward the end of the Trump presidency, I started to notice a new strain of gleeful nihilism online. News about the melting of icebergs or a rogue comet that might swoop near Earth reliably resulted in people publicly wishing for it all to end, for the rising seas or a fiery rock from outer space to just take us all out. I began to wonder what that end might look like for all of us. Who would we become and what would we care about, with different stakes?

  I looked back at all my half-starts with a renewed focus. Maybe I had been trying to write one story, jotting down different pieces of it that needed to be pulled together. I started to imagine a weather-ravaged world where people apply to live inside a city-sized structure safe from the elements, forever. The Inside Project, I wrote. Once you enter, you can’t leave. The backdrop? Not just a country ruined by lethal storms, but also by things that were already creating cracks in our society, like gender essentialism. I imagined a future men’s rights movement so successful it pushes feminism back into the binary thinking of the second wave, a logical continuation of the commercialized feminism we were currently living through. Inside, I decided, would be formed as a reaction to these gender wars—it would be a place with no men.

  It is anywhere you’ve gone to work for some promised lofty mission and suddenly found yourself complicit in things that compromise your values in order to keep your job.
  I have always been interested in the way queerness and second wave feminism bump up against each other. I found myself wanting to write the story of an all-female utopia that becomes a dystopia because categories of gender are flimsy; because even if you call something feminist, once you have a hierarchy along a gender binary it’s just recreating power structures.

  Not unlike women’s media.

  *

  It was February 2020 and I was in Paris for Fashion Week. Those of us who worked in the States started getting word that upon our return, we’d need to quarantine for fourteen days. How odd, given I’d just written the first chapter of a story about a world in which living inside is the only guaranteed safety. On one of my last nights there, alone at the hotel bar, I opened my computer and as though possessed, I typed: “The strangest part of living through the beginning of the end of the world was that she began to fantasize about it finally just happening already.”

  I could see her clearly: a masculine-of-center lesbian at the end of her rope. She knows too much about climate change; she knows they’re all doomed. So when her girlfriend is accepted to the Inside Project and she isn’t, she abandons everything, fleeing into the wilderness, because fuck it, why not, right? And then she spends the rest of her years regretting it, even as she’s fighting to survive. I had never felt more invigorated as when I wrote that sentence. I couldn’t wait to write more.

  Of course, when I got back home, it wasn’t just a two-week quarantine. I never went back to that office. I kept writing this strange story that was taking over my life. It was all I could think about. A welcome distraction from thinking about the pandemic, which was otherwise inescapable.

  What I realized as I worked on the first draft of the science fiction novel I’d dreamed of writing for so long was that I was more interested in the central relationships between my queer characters than in the apocalyptic backdrop I’d written for them. But, when I let friends and family read it, they wanted to know more about Inside, this place I’d stuck my characters. They wanted to read more about the woman I’d created to run it, who had her own avaricious agenda under the guise of feminism. So although at first I only pictured this one queer couple, I then had to build their world. A world that was looking more and more like the one I’d been part of for so long; pink, glossy, and built on contradictions.

  So many people have asked me what Inside is supposed to represent. Is it Glossier? The Wing? Goop meets Tesla? To which the answer is always: Yes. All of them and more. It is anywhere you’ve gone to work for some promised lofty mission and suddenly found yourself complicit in things that compromise your values in order to keep your job.

  It’s also none of those places. It is, crucially, fiction.

  __________________________________

  Yours for the Taking by Gabrielle Korn is available from St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc.

• Coveteur - https://coveteur.com/gabrielle-korn-leaving-nyc

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  I Wanted to Live In NYC Forever
  I thought I was a lifer, but a move to Los Angeles changed my life.
  Gabrielle Korn
  December 14, 2022Living
  I Wanted to Live In NYC Forever
  Talun Zeitoun
  Welcome to Expectation vs Reality—a monthly column from writer Gabrielle Korn about the lifelong process of realigning what you expect with what you experience, and what we can all learn from the bumps along the way.

  I grew up an hour outside of New York City. As soon as I was allowed to, I spent weekends taking the LIRR to Penn Station, catching indie rock shows at record stores that are now condos and shopping at thrift stores that are now H&Ms, probably. Following my heart, I moved to the city at 18. For fourteen years I lived around Manhattan and Queens and North Brooklyn and South Brooklyn, could navigate the subway with my eyes closed, felt high off of the constant oh my god, hi how are you of running into acquaintances almost everywhere I went, as though the city was just one inch big. I felt, as so many do, that the city was somehow mine, or I was the city's. Either way, something or someone was being possessed.

  None of this felt like a choice—this was my life, wasn't it? Where else could I possibly live? I was a Jewish lesbian who worked in media, and I did not drive (not anymore—my licensed expired, and then I lost it in the shuffle of one move or another).

  Even when everything was as good as it was ever going to be, in hindsight, life in the city was always kind of bittersweet. I'm thinking in particular of 2019; I was two years into my job as the editor-in-chief of Nylon Magazine, a role I figured I could stay in for the next five to ten years. (A foolish thing to think, given what media is, but everything was going so well, and the work felt meaningful, and I guess more than that, it made me feel like I—in a sea of millions of people trying to make it—mattered.)

  Wallace, my then-girlfriend (now wife) had just moved into my one-bedroom in Bed-Stuy, and we'd quickly realized it was not big enough for the two of us and our two dogs. Every inch of the apartment needed to be used. There was nowhere really to be except on top of each other, and while that was great a lot of the time, it wasn't practical for living our lives. But when we started looking for a new place to live, we couldn't find one. Everything even slightly bigger in the same neighborhood was at least twice the cost. We knew we were part of The Problem—the neighborhood was rapidly gentrifying, and we'd been part of that wave—but regardless, we were now priced out.

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  Romantic comedies had taught me that as a magazine editor I should easily be able to afford a fabulous apartment. I started to look at my neighbors suspiciously: who are you that you can afford this? Who is helping you?

  The search got so dire that at one point we considered an apartment in Fort Greene because it was rent controlled, despite the information that legally had to be disclosed to us, which was that the tenants were leaving because they'd gotten bedbugs—twice.

  So we widened our search, and eventually found a two bedroom in South Brooklyn that checked all the boxes. We weren't familiar with the area. It was far from almost everyone we knew. In Bed-Stuy, almost all my friends lived in a four block radius around my apartment. But it would be okay, we thought, because she had a car, and we had each other.

  We were only in that apartment for maybe a month before Nylon was acquired, my dream of staying in that job for many years immediately shattered, and I quit, starting over as a fashion director somewhere else. And then, barely four months later, the pandemic started. I'm not sure what we would have done if we'd stayed in Bed-Stuy during the quarantined months. At least in the new place I could work in the second bedroom while Wallace could be in the living room/dining room area, which was cramped but still felt like a privilege, and of course it was—I watched my colleagues on Zoom as their toddlers climbed all over them during meetings, their partners working in the background. At least I could close the door.

  And then—as I was growing more and more disillusioned with being a fashion director (more on that another time, probably)—a tech company descended from the heavens and offered me a new job. It was an incredible opportunity for a lot more money than I honestly ever let myself dream of making. The catch was that we'd eventually need to move to LA. I put it off for a year, miserably working West Coast hours, and then our lease was up.

  There is a certain type of die-hard New Yorker who loves to make fun of the person who leaves for Los Angeles; Joan Didioning, the verb. Goodbye to all that, etcetera. The people who needed something more than the city could give, which in turn meant they were soft and boring. I was guilty of turning my nose up at them, too. I couldn't imagine ever wanting anything else, but also couldn't imagine what it might feel like to not be exhausted and broke and cramped. Didion said it best: “I talk about how difficult it would be for us to ‘afford’ to live in New York right now, about how much ‘space’ we need. All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.”

  Like her, I was young in New York, and then I wasn't that young, but I was still there and I still really loved it, at least, I loved a version of it that maybe existed only in my mind—the truth was that all my favorite places were closing, most of my friends were fleeing, and it had been a year since I left the job that felt like it was my main source of meaning. Perhaps the golden rhythm was broken. Perhaps it always breaks for people in this way—I'd wanted to blame the pandemic, but the city is always undergoing changes, and this time I wasn't changing with it. Perhaps this happens to everyone who has left, and everyone always feels as though it is uniquely happening to them.

  We felt we needed to ease out of Brooklyn, to find a neighborhood with a familiar energy, and our new realtor directed us to Silver Lake, a place so teeming with other ex-New Yorkers that living here is a bit of a cliche, but it's also so beautiful, more beautiful than anywhere I ever thought I'd live; hot pink bougainvillea growing wild against the bright blue sky, mountains in the distance, that sort of thing. We found a little house that was the same square footage as our Brooklyn apartment, but it was a house! My tech salary meant we could afford to live in it. We painted the living room pink, the kitchen green, and spent probably too much money turning the jungle-like garden into a tiny paradise. There was even a guest room that had a separate entrance, and I turned it into my office. Heaven. As we moved in, I joked: "If I ever get fired, we can just put my office on Airbnb."

  One major difference I immediately noticed between the people where I'm from and the people here is how welcoming they seemed; people we'd only met in passing or through the internet starting inviting us over for dinner, like over to their homes. Hard to describe what a vibe shift that is if you haven't lived in New York, where only my absolute top tier friends ever saw the inside of my apartments, and vice versa. It's not like that here; perhaps because people have more space with which to entertain, or perhaps because people understand how isolating it can be to move here from NYC; to go from being surrounded by people all the time to watching the hummingbirds and spotting coyotes. I sensed that if you don't put effort into having a social life, you really can just disappear into the void, and no one would notice.

  I made it almost a year before I lost the job that brought me to LA. I'd never been laid off before, though I'd certainly left jobs, and I couldn't stop repeating a story about it to myself and others: I moved across the country for a job I then lost. I'd left my family and friends and favorite places and my routines for something that fell apart, and now I was stranded.

  But also—because I'd spent two years in tech, and ten years in editorial, I had a really solid network in place, which meant that I could easily start freelancing. And as my own prophecy foretold, I did end up putting my office on Airbnb (love to be a little bit psychic). Because we got a house in such a desirable neighborhood, there's a steady flow of guests. Between freelancing and hosting, I'm certainly not making anywhere near what I was making at my last job, but I don't really need that kind of money to be happy (I mean, if anyone wants to give it to me, I'll take it, but, you know. I'm ok without it, too). And anyway, things have been going well enough that we decided to start inviting writers and artists to stay in the guest unit for free for a few nights every month, a little mini residency for people who can't afford to leave their lives for weeks at a time. Setting that up has felt meaningful, as has working for myself. It's a totally new way of existing in the world, and it's not something I could have done in New York. Sometimes, when people ask me what I'm up to these days, I just tell them I'm an innkeeper. It's not not true.

  So the I moved across the country for a job I'd then lost is really only one way of looking at things. The other way is: My time in NYC had expired, and a job with relocation benefits came along at the perfect time. It afforded me the immense privilege of buying a house in a nice neighborhood, and now I get to be here, even without that job.

  I get to be here. Here, in LA, a place where you can actually live off of freelance work, where I can take calls in the morning and then run around the reservoir and make a big salad with gorgeous produce and then clean the Airbnb for the next guest and then write an essay and go to bed early and still pay my bills.

  I’ve been back to the city a few times since leaving, and it already feels strange. Was everyone always so young? Where do they all live, and how? I often joke that I'd only move back as a billionaire—not because I believe anyone should be a billionaire, but because I would like to maintain my current lifestyle, and I just don't think you can have that in the city without an unending supply of money. It's amazing how quickly I've gotten used to having nice things. I still feel like the new kid—I'm still trying to find my people, still struggling to understand why the freeways are so scary, still missing home a lot—but it's December and it's warm enough to walk outside in a t-shirt, and we just picked a bunch of lemons from the backyard, and over Thanksgiving we drove out to the desert with my sister and her husband and I got to show off how amazing it is to live in a city that's driving distance from the most absurdly gorgeous nature you've ever seen in your life. People keep telling me it takes three years to understand why LA is great. It's been a year and a half, and I think I already get it. But who knows. Maybe it's great in ways that I can't even possibly understand yet.

  And I guess now that I'm here, living this life, I should probably re-learn how to drive.

• Chicago Review of Books - https://chireviewofbooks.com/2024/12/17/if-we-dont-help-each-other-through-this-we-wont-get-through-it-at-all-an-interview-with-gabrielle-korn/

  “If we don’t help each other through this, we won’t get through it at all”: an Interview with Gabrielle Korn

  by Stephen Patrick Bell
  December 17, 2024
  An interview with Gabrielle Korn about her new novel, "The Shutouts."

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  Doom is so thoroughly the vibe right now that a climate novel hardly seems an appropriate place to seek hope, but Gabrielle Korn’s The Shutouts peers down the dark tunnel of our unsettling present and catches a glimmer of what may save us on the other side. Her first novel, Yours For The Taking, showcases a future within the Inside Project, a capitalist feminist girlboss utopia gone horribly wrong. In The Shutouts, her tender and urgent prose illustrates the world outside the Inside, initially grounding us in a moment not unlike our present, then rocketing into a future thrown into chaos by climate change. Politicians and billionaire elites, accepting climate catastrophe as an inevitability, or rather something too costly to be slowed or changed, have opted to seize land and build massive weatherproof structures where the rich and privileged can live safely while abandoning the bulk of humanity to the ravages of an increasingly unstable planet, subject to unpredictable weather events, fire, plague, and famine. But, thanks to the heart Korn manages to cram into this bleak future, there’s hope.

  At this point, it is difficult to avoid concrete, actionable information on our warming world and what comes next if we, as a species, do nothing. Some of the most chilling sequences in The Shutouts—the fires, the pandemics, the people willfully ignorant to the situation, and the governments so unwilling to protect human life and enact change that they may actually be actively courting the end of the world—are chilling precisely because they are (almost) already mundane. Korn’s characters—a mother driving across an America increasingly hostile to unchaperoned women in search of her daughter, young lovers escaping a cult of doomsday preppers, a group of young activists desperate to draw anyone into action—are often queer people with more on their plates than they ought to have, with bigger hearts than seems wise. They are compelled over and over to stay connected to each other in what small ways they can. Their small acts of community, care, and hope in the face of insurmountable challenges are the only things that keep them whole and serve to illustrate the necessity and the bravery of kindness and love. Gabrielle and I passed this interview back and forth shortly after the 2024 election in the weeks leading up to the publication of The Shutouts.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  I need to know: how the hell are you? Very early in The Shutouts there was a line I underlined several times:

  I didn’t understand why everyone wasn’t walking around screaming hysterically? How could you be aware of what was happening and go about your day as though everything was fine and normal?

  How are you not screaming right now?

  Gabrielle Korn

  What makes you think I’m not screaming?

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  Fair! While the bulk of the action in both of your novels takes place in the future, The Shutouts gives us a glimpse into the 2020’s. How did you approach incorporating elements of the present into a work that pushes ahead nearly 60 years?

  Gabrielle Korn

  When I started writing a couple of years ago, I did assume that Trump would win the election, so my vision for the rest of the 2020s was based on that. I took elements of his first presidency and made them worse for the second half of the decade. I hate being right sometimes.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  I really wish we could be sitting here talking about how wrong and dumb you are but, since you’re neither of those things, your work may become something of a road map out of the mess we’re in. What do the characters in your books get right about problem-solving and what practices of theirs do you hope your readers adopt in their own lives?

  Gabrielle Korn

  Thank you, and also, I’m sorry. My characters have a really strong sense of community and of obligation to each other. They know that they are no good on their own. I wish we could feel more like this in the present moment; that if we don’t help each other through this, we won’t get through it at all.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  Which of your characters were you most worried about as you were writing them?

  Gabrielle Korn

  I was worried about Kelly driving across the country; I was worried about Brook seeing the world for the first time and not knowing a single practical piece of information; I was worried about Camilla always having to take care of everyone; I was worried that Orchid’s impulsiveness would get her killed. I was worried about all of them!

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  Given how The Shutouts and Yours For The Taking take place in the same world, how did you decide to differentiate the stories you’re telling in each book?

  Gabrielle Korn

  They’re interconnected stand-alones, so, in theory, you should be able to read either one without the other, or in reverse order, though of course I think you should read both of them and in the order they come out. The Shutouts functions as both a prequel and a sequel to YFTT. If you take both books into account, time is kind of circular. What happens in the past connects to the present connects to the past again. They’re separated by themes, too.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  The Shutouts starts in an epistolary format and the stakes are high off the bat with Kelly, a guilt-stricken mother, promising to cross the country and find her daughter. I found myself rooting for Kelly right away but was deeply curious and slightly afraid of what would happen if and when they finally met in person. Can you talk a little about you use this structure to build tension and release in the text?

  Gabrielle Korn

  There are a few reasons I did that. First, I wanted the reader to feel closest to Kelly. It’s her voice that drove the book for me. I think there’s something really emotional about the idea of her writing letters to the daughter she abandoned to try to explain herself. But we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. By having Kelly write letters instead of narrating in first person to some invisible audience, she has a motive to spin her own story to fit her goal. I wanted to create a layer of doubt. We love her—I really wanted to make her compelling and someone you’d root for—but can we believe her? No spoilers, but if you’ve read YFTT, you already know she doesn’t get to where she’s trying to go. So, I wanted to put some subtext around that.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  Kelly’s 2020s POV follows her life as an unhoused queer teenager freshly ejected from her home, centering the experience of people marginalized into invisibility in mainstream culture. Traumatized people in need of love and affection make messy choices in general. In the face of circumstances like poverty and minority stress, things get even more complicated. Kelly is accustomed to and anticipates rejection, she’s electrified by even the smallest bits of attention, and she’s only just becoming aware of her attractiveness to others. You’ve touched on this a bit in Everybody (Else) Is Perfect, but could you tell us about how your work in the beauty and fashion industry informed the way you approached Kelly’s understanding of her own body and appearance as a queer youth and later as a queer mother.

  Gabrielle Korn

  Oh, that’s an interesting question. If it did, it wasn’t something I was aware of, but I guess that’s how all inspiration works. You never really know what life experiences are going to show up disguised as something else on the page. I think I was thinking more about my own youth and how, once I got a handle on my own appearance, people started treating me differently. Being a pretty teen girl is a weird experience because in some ways you feel like you have a little power and in other ways you have none at all. I was interested in having Kelly go through that and in having her try to give her daughter advice based on what she learned—a daughter whose adolescence she hasn’t even witnessed.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  Kelly’s safety and agency are frequently attached to or dependent on more powerful men and she doesn’t always recognize the uneven power dynamics in her interpersonal relationships until she’s deeply entrenched. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the men in The Shutouts really mess everything up for everyone, but YFTT illustrates the dark side of a female-led utopia. How do your characters’ relationships with class and identity politics influence their perspectives on climate politics?

  Gabrielle Korn

  Another really good question. Yes, so, in YFTT we have a female utopia that forms in reaction to the political landscape; in The Shutouts, we go back in time to see why it was necessary in the first place.

  Every single character has a unique POV on climate based on who they are and where they come from. As we know, the groups of people most impacted by climate change are generally queer people, people of color, and people from low-income communities. Which is a lot of my characters. But also, some of them have slightly skewed perspectives, like Vero, who is a Latine trans masc activist who grew up with wealth and power. Vero appreciates the gravity of climate change but also overestimates what his role in the future should be because of how he was raised. For a lot of the characters, things aren’t so black and white.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  Was writing these books at all helpful for you, not as a writer, but as a citizen of a world that is on the brink of irreversible climate change?

  Gabrielle Korn

  Yes. It would have been easier to look away and hide in blissful ignorance, but ultimately, I’m glad that I did the research I did for these books and that I have a pretty firm grasp on what’s at stake. It’s scary—sometimes I feel like I stared into the void for too long and I wish I could unknow certain things—but being informed is always better. And these books have a lot of hope in them, which was helpful to me. It’s not really productive to just imagine a worst-case scenario; I think it’s also important to imagine what comes after that.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  Let’s talk a little about your research process. What books, people, or resources were helpful to you when establishing how the world of The Shutouts would work? What have you changed in your own life because of what you’ve learned?

  Gabrielle Korn

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  I read the most recent UN climate reports (I’m really fun at dinner parties!). I follow the news closely. I followed a bunch of climate activists on social media and listened to their takes. I found the book The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle to be very helpful in predicting what would happen to each part of the country and used it as sort of a guide for Kelly’s road trip. I revisited some old favorites like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Basically, I just consumed a lot of different kinds of content related to climate and the world of The Shutouts was born out of the cumulative knowledge. I already knew that things were dire, but I think I hadn’t let myself fully sink into the depths of how fucked we are until I started reading actual reports written by scientists, who no one seems to be listening to? I can tell you some facts and figures, but I don’t want to ruin your day if you don’t want me to. I’ve made some big changes in my own personal life; I couldn’t not. I stopped eating meat. I got an electric stove. I refuse to drive a car. I try to limit single-use plastics. I take quick showers. I never buy fast fashion. In fact, I try to keep my clothes out of the landfill for as long as possible. Of course, what we really need is a fossil fuel agreement, but if that can’t happen, I do think we have a collective responsibility to change our own habits, because everything counts.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  The Shutouts features a climate activism group, the Winter Liberation Army, that’s focused on technologies that could serve as practical climate-change solutions such as solar-radiation modification and homes built on magnetic foundations that would allow them to float above floodwaters and reduce the impact of earthquakes. How much of the tech in your books came from your research process?

  Gabrielle Korn

  Almost all of it! A lot of really smart people are working on brilliant solutions and safety measures. The part I imagined was the government conspiracy to stop them (though, that’s feeling less and less like fiction right now). The only thing I totally made up was the genetically modified super bean and all of its uses.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  The WLA also makes a distinction between climate-change deniers and climate-change doomers. Which of these groups is more powerful or dangerous in our current situation?

  Gabrielle Korn

  That’s a good question, and I think you’d need a scientist to answer it. My take is that both are extremely dangerous because neither opinion leads to positive action. That being said, I do think that while doomers tend to do nothing, deniers tend to actively make things worse, so my vote would be that the deniers are still more dangerous.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  When did you start sharing work with your sister, Miriam Jayaratna, and how has she influenced your work?

  Gabrielle Korn

  This is such a nice question! My sister is not just a brilliant humor writer, she’s a great editor. There are not very many people I trust with my raw copy—it’s really vulnerable. It helps when you can send it to someone who loves you no matter what sort of ridiculous words you put on the page. I started sending her parts of YFTT when I first started working on it, which was deep in the pandemic. When she started writing humor, she began sending it to me as well, so a few years ago I think we started a very mutually beneficial exchange of writing. I feel so lucky to have a sister who is so brilliant, trustworthy, and generous with her time.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  Have you been reading from The Shutouts?

  Gabrielle Korn

  You know, I have only read from it once so far! But when I finished it I read the entire thing out loud to myself. I knew it was working when I started getting emotional at certain moments hearing myself read it back.

  Stephen Patrick Bell

  You read this out loud, beginning to end, just to yourself? I need to know everything about this part of your process. Is it cringe? Were there parts that you felt absolutely certain about that didn’t hold up once you read them aloud?

  Gabrielle Korn

  I did. I told you; I’m fun. I didn’t do this with either of my other books and ended up really regretting it once I started reading from them in public, so I figured I might as well get ahead of the regret and make sure every single sentence flowed smoothly! It took a week, because I had to keep taking breaks to save my voice. There were a few sentences that I realized were clunky, and I caught some word rep. It was actually much less cringe than you’d think, because I was able to fix the things that weren’t working, and I ended up realizing how happy I was with the overall book. By the end of it, I was like, okay, I really did something here, which isn’t a feeling I usually have. I’m glad I did it. I’ll be doing it with the rest of my writing forever.

  FICTION
  The Shutouts
  By Gabrielle Korn
  St. Martin’s Press
  Published December 3, 2024

• Sunny's Bookshop - https://www.sunnysbookshop.com/sunnys-journal/gabrielle-korn-talks-the-shutouts-climate-fiction-and-writing-process

  Gabrielle Korn Talks ‘The Shutouts,’ Climate Fiction, and Writing Process
  Interview
  NOV 29, 2024
  Written By Nikki Munoz
  Sunny's Bookshop | Sunny's Journal | Gabrielle Korn | The Shutouts | Gabrielle Korn Interview
  Author Gabrielle Korn – who was previously the Editor-in-Chief of Nylon Media – has created a dystopian, near-future world, in which the effects of climate change have irrevocably altered humanity's way of living. This world was introduced in 2023’s Yours for the Taking, in which a select few were chosen to live in the Inside Project, a series of weather-safe, city-like structures that are located around the world – although the safe haven may not be as safe, nor as straightforward, as it seems. Korn’s second novel in this world, the soon-to-be-released The Shutouts, focuses on those who were left to deal with the rapidly changing world outside of the Inside Project – as well as couple Inside Project escapees. The Shutouts takes place in two timelines: in 2041, a mother named Kelly writes letters to her estranged daughter to explain why she left her several years ago; in 2078, a collection of those who were “shut out” continue on with their lives. These characters include Ava and her daughter, Brook, who leave The Inside Project in search of someone important to them.

  In these novels, the future that Korn presents is grim and dark, but not without its moments of lightness. Despite the darkness, this world is all-encompassing and engrossing, while Korn’s prose is sharp and skillfully crafted. Climate change fiction is becoming all the more important and Korn’s work stands among the best of this fairly new – but rapidly growing – genre.

  Below is our conversion about the world of both novels, the writing process, and more.

  Sunny's Bookshop | The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn | book
  Nikki: Firstly, I’d love to hear about how you knew you wanted to be a writer and, specifically, that you wanted to write fiction.

  Gabrielle : I can't remember ever wanting to be anything else. Writing has always been something that I’ve loved doing as soon as I learned how to do it. I think where I struggled was [figuring out] how to make money off of it. So I did always imagine myself writing novels, but when I was graduating college, I couldn’t really reconcile that drive with supporting myself. So I went into journalism and I stayed there for ten years. At the end of that period of time, I just had this feeling of yes, I could keep doing it but it’s not really what I always saw myself doing. Also [I felt like] if I don’t write a novel [now], I’ll never write a novel.

  Nikki: That must have been so satisfying then, when Yours for the Taking came out.

  Gabrielle: Yeah, it felt amazing. I wished I had done it sooner.

  Nikki: How did you decide to set The Shutouts in the same world as Yours for the Taking? Now, hearing your first answer, I’m wondering if it was a way to extend the satisfying feeling of publishing your first novel?

  Gabrielle: Yes and no. We had always talked about this being a series – we being me and my editor Hannah O’Grady at St. Martin’s Press. I ended Yours for the Taking on a cliffhanger. I love a vague ending but a lot of people don’t, so when we were talking about what to write next, my editor was very much like, ‘I really think you should write the sequel.’ It had been kind of abstract to me but because I had her support to do it, then I started doing it. And there were all of these little seeds that I planted throughout Yours for the Taking while I was writing it, and I thought to myself, this could be a whole other book.

  Nikki: Yeah, there is so much to explore within this world and I loved that. The Shutouts is described as “in the same world” as Yours for the Taking, rather than specifically a sequel. So, I dove in without reading Yours for the Taking first, so I feel like I had an interesting experience reading it. Do you want readers to read Yours for the Taking first or did you intend for The Shutouts to stand on its own?

  Gabrielle: It’s a good question and I would love to know what you think too, reading it in reverse order. I wanted it to stand alone. In my mind, these are interconnected standalones. I think if you read Yours for the Taking first, there is a lot of pay off in The Shutouts, but my hope was if you come to The Shutouts first, then you won't be lost.

  Sunny's Bookshop | Gabrielle Korn Interview | Quote 1.png
  Nikki: That’s exactly how I felt. And it just made me more excited to read Yours for the Taking. What was your process like for creating this world? Specifically, how did you get the idea for the Inside Project?

  Gabrielle: It’s a hard question to answer because I felt like the world came to me all at once. So the work was figuring out a way to write it down [in a way] that was coherent. In early drafts of Yours for the Taking, I had approached it as though I was writing a reported feature because that's what I had been doing. So instead of having different chapters, each one being one perspective, I tried to have an omniscient narrator in which everyone's point of view is woven together. But it was a mess. So I ended up going through and separating everything out and pulling out all of the world building details and doing a prologue to establish the world. And that became a lot easier for readers to digest from how I originally thought of it. But, how I thought of the Inside Project, I was in Paris for Fashion Week, it was February 2020. My last day in Milan was when Italy shut down for the pandemic. I just had this feeling like we were all fleeing a thing and then getting to a new destination where there was all of this denial that the thing was coming. I wrote the idea for the Inside Project before we knew what quarantining was, but it just felt like an odd coincidence that we then all went inside. But also, I was spending so much time in airports and hotels and feeling very claustrophobic and I think it came from that.

  Nikki: I think that makes a lot of sense. And, of course you needed time to write it, but it would have been so interesting for readers to experience Yours for the Taking during quarantine.

  Gabrielle: Oh I know!

  Nikki: But it was so fresh, no one is forgetting what that time was like.

  Gabrielle: Yeah, totally. I also was having some climate change anxiety and decided to research when exactly the shit is gonna hit the fan if nothing changes. And that’s 2050. In that research, what I was also looking for was [the question of] how are we going to live with it and what does it actually look like. Of course the answer is we can’t. If nothing changes, then we will no longer be able to adapt. So I tried to imagine what a future society would think was a solution and what sorts of technology would be invented to try to adapt to it. The only thing I could think of was that we would have to live in a protected space.

  Nikki: How did you decide to make it as grim as it is? Were you going for it as the worst possible outcome?

  Gabrielle: Yeah! But also Yours for the Taking started off as satire. I was like, what sorts of people will come to power in a worst case scenario and what sort of ridiculous ways can I make them behave in? The book got a lot more serious over the course of working on it, but, at first, I didn't intend for it to feel realistic. I tried to stretch things to their worst logical conclusion, but I think as we watch what’s happening politically, the consequences for the climate become closer and closer to what I wrote.

  Nikki: Yeah, I think, as I was reading it, there were many elements where I thought, I could see that happening. It got me thinking about the growing genre of climate change fiction and wondering how the genre will affect how people view what’s happening in the world or even if it could somehow impact future policy decisions.

  Gabrielle: I don’t know if books can change what people in power do, but I do think that there’s a lot of potential on an individual level. I know that I made a lot of changes to my own lifestyle in the process of researching for this book because after you know certain things, you just can't proceed in the same ways. I just don't think that a Republican government is going to make the changes needed to slow global warming. So I think it is going to come down to us and I think we have to try to change people's minds however possible. So if that means more climate fiction books, then that's what it means.

  Sunny's Bookshop | Gabrielle Korn Interview | Quote 2
  Nikki: Yeah, I like that. I think there’s a bit of hope when you think of it in that way, that enough individual people care and that’s how a difference can be made.

  Gabrielle: I don’t think we have to be doomed.

  Nikki: How did you approach the tone of both novels? As grim as it is, there are plenty of moments of lightness and people living their lives and finding joy.

  Gabrielle: It was really important to me that both books feel very, very human. I think that The Shutouts is a lot more character-driven than Yours for the Taking, which was really enjoyable for me to spend more time with the characters. But when you think about the way that people behave in disasters, we don't stop being human, we don't stop loving and needing each other. I think, if anything, all of those things become heightened. So I really wanted to show that and to show that there’s no point to survival if you don't have other people. That's why we're alive. To me, the connections between people in the book are just as important as the natural disasters happening in the background.

  Nikki: Do you have any plans for a third book set in this world?

  Gabrielle: I would love to, but it’s not up to me. If there was a lot of interest in a third book, then I think I'll be able to do one, but it’s kind of a wait and see moment.

  Nikki: Half of the book is in the form of letters, as Kelly writes letters to her daughter. How did you know that you wanted to include that format?

  Gabrielle: I just heard Kelly’s voice in my head. So much of fiction is just being delusional and just accepting that you’re writing down what the voices are telling you and her voice was just so clear. It just felt like letters. It felt like she was speaking to someone and that someone wasn't the reader. It was hard to imagine telling the story any other way.

  Nikki: What books or authors inspired The Shutouts?

  Gabrielle: I’ve always been a big Octavia Butler girl, specifically her climate change fiction and the travel-on-foot storyline was really inspirational to me. Obviously Margaret Atwood, in terms of feminist dystopia. I think also Kazuo Ishiguro was really inspiring to me, in terms of the way that he reveals the mystery over time of what he’s writing about. I think those are the big ones.

  Nikki: The way a mystery unravels over the course of a story is hard to get right.

  Gabrielle: Yeah and my editor is really good at mystery. She ended up pushing me to put off the reveal of who Kelly is further and further in the book. I originally wanted it up front, but the feedback was to put it off as long as possible and I think that makes the book a lot more propulsive.

  Nikki: What other genres are you interested in writing? Are you working on anything right now?

  Gabrielle: Yeah, I have a book that’s literary nonfiction that I’ve been working on for a few years. It’s really interesting to not be writing science fiction because I feel like I’m approaching the world building in the same way, like thinking of myself as alien to what I'm writing and thinking about what details an alien would need. So even though it’s grounded in the present, it's kind of a similar way of thinking

  Nikki: What contemporary books have you read lately and loved?

  Gabrielle: Oh my god, so many. The most recent book that I finished was Carrie Carolyn Coco by Sarah Gerard, which is the true account of a woman who was stabbed to death by her roommate in Bushwick. The author was a friend of the victim and she does an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the murder. It was brilliant and really upsetting. I’m listening to Sally Rooney’s newest book [Intermezzo] on audiobook – I always do Sally Rooney on audiobook because I think you need to hear the accents. And recently I read Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker, which was amazing.

  Nikki: Is there anything else you want readers to know about The Shutouts?

  Gabrielle: Come to the event at Sunny’s!

  RSVP here!

  Nikki: First and foremost, come to our event [on December 13 at 7 pm].

  Gabrielle: But in all seriousness, I think that these books are more relevant than I realized they would be to what's happening in the world. And I think it’s easy to want to look away from what’s happening, but I think that fiction is your second best option. What I tried to do in The Shutouts, specifically, was build in a lot of hope and love and joy. So I think that if you feel hopeless and you feel doom, especially about climate and reproductive rights and rights for queer people, I think this is a good book to validate your fears and to also find moments of levity.

  This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

By Cate Burtner

Jan. 16, 2024, 11:37 p.m.

With the growth in climate change concern over time, imaginations of the planet's future have flooded literature and media.

In her most recent novel "Yours for the Taking," Gabrielle Korn envisions a dystopian wasteland that raises interesting questions about identity, feminism and social justice. The story begins in 2050: The planet is rotting, society suffers from extreme economic disparity and, interestingly, tension between feminists and men's rights activists. Jacqueline Millender -- celebrity, feminist and heiress to a powerful company -- wants to create a physical utopian bubble called "The Inside" to protect people from extreme weather, solve all forms of oppression and expand her scope of power while she's at it.

Amid skepticism, Jacqueline executes her plan, the implications of which reverberate far into the future. The sci-fi novel follows this development through the perspectives of several women from different backgrounds and circumstances.

I found the reading experience subpar. While the novel's representation of futuristic feminism was interesting, many of the other elements were somewhat trite, almost familiar. These included a decaying planet, an oppressive government, space travel, mind control and exacerbated inequality.

The novel ultimately felt like an unnecessary addition to the climate fiction genre. The premise is such a stretch that it doesn't serve as a warning or a call to action in the way that other sci-fi books do. If you're looking for a better written and more innovative work of climate fiction, I would recommend Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower" or Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."

While the writing in "Yours for the Taking" is not groundbreaking, it does give characters unique voices, explore the ideas of power and powerlessness and represent modern-day political issues in a new light.

Characters and their perspectives are at the center of the novel. These include Ava and Orchid, a queer couple forced to reckon with limited opportunities for safety; Olympia, a black, queer female doctor who bends her own moral compass out of desperation and Shelby, a transgender woman from a working-class family who grapples with her life's purpose.

Korn goes beyond exploring diverse perspectives of LGBTQ+ women and people of color. She asks her characters: who are you, and what tools do you use to define yourself? For some, it is their marginalized identities, their relationships or their bond to their children. For others, it is a much more perplexing desire.

Jacqueline wants to eradicate sexism, but can't see beyond her heterosexual, white feminist perspective as she crafts the only safe space for human life.

Olympia wants to create change from the inside, but what if that idea is a fiction?

In the end, characters want social justice, and readers want poetic justice -- is achieving both too good to be true? We see characters manipulated and characters in denial. We are confronted with the human tendency to believe what is most convenient to us and even find ourselves questioning this tendency in our own lives, identities and politics.

When characters are given the chance to discover the truth about "The Inside," they must decide whether to live in ignorance or to create crucial change. "Inside" is a clever name for the bubble: each character in the story is trapped, stuck or imprisoned in one way or another.

This led me to examine our society's tendency to passively follow daily tragedies of current events and let values like individuality and morality fade away. While the novel's imagined future is an implausible one, we can certainly draw thought-provoking parallels between our world and the fictional world.

Aside from an interesting conception of a dystopian future, what's distinct about Korn's story is her use of dramatic irony. Readers are almost regarded as characters in the story -- the third-person omniscient point of view strategically gives us insight and withholds information from us, too. This lends itself to an at-times entertaining and suspenseful reading experience. Every now and then I found myself sitting up, leaning in and even gasping as the story unfolded.

As we contemplate the future of our planet, we can all relate to the desire for poetic justice as a story ends. In Korn's "Yours for the Taking," we come to learn that there is no justice, poetic or otherwise, in a dystopian future.

Editor's Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

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"'Yours for the Taking' is a subpar speculation on feminism and the planet Login or create an account." UWIRE Text, 16 Jan. 2024, p. 1. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A790626471/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d90c77ca. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025.

Yours for the Taking

Gabrielle Korn. St. Martin's, $29 (336p) ISBN 978-1-250-28336-8

Korn makes her fiction debut (after the essay collection Everybody (Else) Is Perfect) with an alluring story of a feminist dystopia. It's 2050, and unchecked climate change has caused civilization to crumble amid dangerous storms and disappearing coastal areas. The story unfolds through intersecting narratives of various women. Among them are Shelby, who is accompanying her billionaire boss Jacqueline Millender on a space shuttle orbiting Earth, and Ava, who gains acceptance to Jacqueline's city-size Inside Project, a series of weather-resistant tunnels in New York City that allow people to move between buildings without exposure to the worsening climate. Korn also portrays life on Earth for the less fortunate, including Ava's ex-girlfriend, Orchid, who is forced to fend for herself on the dying planet. As a member of Inside, Ava lets her life be designed and controlled by Jacqueline. There are no men allowed into the tunnels, as Jacqueline has determined that the planet can only be healed by eliminating the patriarchy. Before the end, though, Ava uncovers the dark side of Jacqueline's vision for populating the next generation. Korn's conceits are as provocative as her characters are well-rounded. Readers will eat up this distinctive piece of climate fiction. (Dec.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
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"Yours for the Taking." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 38, 18 Sept. 2023, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A767497268/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=732ab18d. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025.

Korn, Gabrielle YOURS FOR THE TAKING St. Martin's (Fiction None) $29.00 12, 5 ISBN: 9781250283368

A feminist multibillionaire's solution to a climate change-induced housing crisis comes with a dark underbelly in this debut novel.

Ava is a white 20-something trying to stay afloat in 2050s New York City. Opportunities--and the island itself--are shrinking, so when applications to the Inside Project go live, both she and her girlfriend jump through all number of hoops to apply. Greenlit by the United World Government and funded in part by the enormously wealthy tech innovator Jacqueline Millender, Inside is supposed to provide state-of-the-art insulated housing for three million people selected by lottery. When Ava alone is chosen to go Inside, she starts on a path that will intersect with two other women--Shelby, Jacqueline's white, trans assistant, and Olympia, Inside's Black, queer medical director--and reveal how much the program is shaped by Jacqueline's personal desires and willful ignorance. Korn's premise couldn't be more timely, mining ecological anxieties and the disappointments of girlboss feminism, but the novel's engaging opening act doesn't provide enough structural support for the back half. Despite regularly deployed reveals, the novel rarely surprises, seeming more interested in taking Jacqueline to task on the page than making her a compelling villain. Each point-of-view character is allowed serious relationships (romantic, familial, or friendly) with a maximum of three people, which gives a book ostensibly about community a very lonely feeling. While the point of Inside may be its unsustainability, the lack of thought about basic functionality (Olympia realizes, 43 chapters in, that there are no codified rules against romantic relationships between Inside medical staff and residents) becomes an indictment of the author as well as the characters.

Like the woman at its center, this novel sparkles with interesting ideas but struggles to delve deeper.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Korn, Gabrielle: YOURS FOR THE TAKING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A766904174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b7af579c. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025.

Yours for the Taking. By Gabrielle Korn. Dec. 2023. 336p. St. Martin's, $29 (9781250283368); e-book (9781250283375).

As the world steadily becomes uninhabitable, a select few are invited to join completely sealed enclaves through the Inside project. But the New York City Inside, funded by billionaire women's rights activist Jacqueline, is secretly being designed as an experimental society that seeks to eradicate the patriarchy in a single generation. In this inventive novel, Korn (Everybody Else Is Perfect, 2021) follows three people whose lives are forever altered by the promise and peril of Inside. Shelby drops out of school and leaves her family to be Jacqueline's assistant in the confines of a space station. Ava splits with her girlfriend, Orchid, when she is accepted into Inside, but Orchid is not. Olympia becomes Inside's medical director after she's targeted for doxing by a men's rights group. Prioritizing plot over character development, Korn has developed an immersive, future-focused, and highly engaging thought experiment that's startlingly relevant to today's society. As the drawbacks and blind spots of Jacqueline's particular brand of capitalist feminism bend toward ever more ghastly outcomes over decades, each woman must decide whether safety is worth her price.--Bridget Thoreson

YA Recommendations

Adult titles recommended for teens are marked with the following symbols: YA, for books of general YA interest; YA/C, for books with particular curricular value; and YA/S, for books that will appeal most to teens with a special interest in a specific subject.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 American Library Association
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Thoreson, Bridget. "Yours for the Taking." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 5-6, 1 Nov. 2023, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A774988408/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2a67e1ef. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025.

Korn, Gabrielle THE SHUTOUTS St. Martin's (Fiction None) $29.00 12, 3 ISBN: 9781250323484

A group of survivors finds new ways to live and love as the world burns around them.

Set in 2041 and 2078, Korn's dystopian sophomore novel serves as both a prequel and sequel to her debut novel,Yours for the Taking (2023). In 2041, the world is falling apart due to rapidly accelerating climate change. As storms, fires, and viruses destroy cities, millions of climate refugees find themselves without homes. Kelly, a hacker and activist, is traveling across the United States and writing letters to the daughter she left behind. Seven years earlier, Kelly joined a group she believed would save the world. Starting from her childhood, Kelly recounts in devastating detail how and why she left--and, even more importantly, why she's returning. In 2078, a group of queer characters seeks out new ways of surviving in a world that is unimaginable and nearly uninhabitable. Max, a nonbinary person who grew up in the Winter Liberation Army, discovers truths about their home that make it impossible to stay. Survivalist Orchid sets out to save her ex-girlfriend Ava from the Inside Project, a highly selective, government-funded climate protection program. Meanwhile, Ava and her daughter, Brook, have escaped the Inside after unearthing a deadly secret. Finally, climate refugee Camilla decides to wait for her friend Orchid to return, while their group travels further north for safety. As Max, Orchid, Ava, Brook, and Camilla try to survive both together and apart, they begin to discover the known and unknown connections among them. As the novel races to a finish, the dual story lines converge satisfyingly, if a bit too conveniently. However, Korn's worldbuilding and character development (especially Kelly) breathe life into the novel as it explores societal collapse, political conspiracies, and the pliable nature of historical narratives. The novel ends with a perfect blend of sadness and hope that refuses to downplay the dangers of climate change nor discount humanity's desire to survive.

A page-turning queer, feminist dystopia.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Korn, Gabrielle: THE SHUTOUTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883703/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8d626aa5. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025.

"'Yours for the Taking' is a subpar speculation on feminism and the planet Login or create an account." UWIRE Text, 16 Jan. 2024, p. 1. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A790626471/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d90c77ca. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025. "Yours for the Taking." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 38, 18 Sept. 2023, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A767497268/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=732ab18d. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025. "Korn, Gabrielle: YOURS FOR THE TAKING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A766904174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b7af579c. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025. Thoreson, Bridget. "Yours for the Taking." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 5-6, 1 Nov. 2023, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A774988408/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2a67e1ef. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025. "Korn, Gabrielle: THE SHUTOUTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883703/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8d626aa5. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025.

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