Quintessence Press
Sumer wrote first — and wrote some of its gods out again. This series follows the ones the record does not keep: seven who came up out of the water and were set down as fish, a daughter given to the dark so her brother's sun could rise, and the woman who cut her own name into the body of a hymn.
Reading order
IWhat Seeps
Seven came up out of the water. The city wrote them down as fish.
At the bottom of the fresh water under the earth, a god shapes seven bodies out of clay, opens their skulls, and lets the water carry in everything he knows — the movement of stars, the logic of seed and soil, how to cut stone so a wall holds. And beneath all of it, the thing that is not knowledge: why any of it is worth the carrying. The Abzu grows lighter by the weight of what he gives away. They break the surface at dawn, walk into Eridu on legs that have never held weight, and teach a city to build, to write, to make law. And on the riverbank, through all of it, someone else sits. No scales. No gills. When a hand rests on the water, the water rises to meet it.
IIWarmth Below, Void Above
Before she was Queen of the Dead, she was a daughter.
A prophecy says the sun will not rise. The dark is eating it from the edges — not killing it, but erasing it. There is one way to close the abyss: give it a life of the same blood. Ereshkigal's parents choose her, and send her out at the blackest hour to gather a flower that opens only in deepest night. Her father shears a fistful of moonlight from the air and pours it over her head, and she believes it is protection. Above, her sister rises — Inanna takes the temple of E-anna, takes the mes, takes whatever is set in front of her. There is one place her light has never reached, and she decides to go there.
IIINear and Not Mine
Every season he comes back. She counts the days and will not say she is counting.
The dark does not let anyone go free. Inanna walks back up through the seven gates, and the price of her return is a body to take her place — so the shepherd Dumuzi is sent down for half of every year. He arrives in the Netherworld the way a man arrives at a house he intends to stay in. He brings a wildflower that has no business being there. He sweeps the dust. He fills the cracks the queen has never been able to fill herself, because she made them. And then the months run out, and the season turns, and he goes back up to the world that wants him, and she does not ask him to stay.
Books II & III together The two halves of one arc — the sister who goes down and stays, and the shepherd who comes back every season. Published complete as Goddesses of the Ziggurat. IVWritten in Earth
Her father called her his seal on their clay. A seal can be filed off.
Before her, writing belonged to no one. Lists of grain. Counts of sheep. Dedications that named the king. Then a conqueror's daughter is installed as high priestess in Ur — a Sumerian city her Akkadian father took by force, and she is the instrument that presses his design into its ground. She holds the office twenty-five years and writes forty-two hymns. Her name is nowhere inside them. It sits at the end of the collection, outside the work: the maker's mark on the made thing. Then a revolt puts her out of her own temple, and she writes one more — with an accusation built into its grammar — and sets her name not at the end, not as a signature, but in the body of the hymn, in the line where the god's name stands. I, Enheduanna. Kings were removed and their seals filed off. Hers was in the weight-bearing place.
Companion volumeThe Deep: Nammu
Everything in this series happened inside her. The name stayed in the stone, and no one came for it.
Nammu is the fresh water under the earth — the one the tablets call the mother who gave birth to the sky and the earth, and then never mention again. No temple was built for her. No hymn survives in her voice. The gods who come after her are born in her, fed by her, and go on to divide the world between themselves while she stays where she has always been, holding it up from below. This is the book underneath the other four: the water the seven rose out of, the water that does not rise. Complete in itself; deepest after Book I.
From the tablets
The Sumerian in these books was put into English from the transliterations, sign by sign. It follows no modern translation. Sometimes that changes a word.
lugal-ĝu₁₀ níĝ ù-tud na-me lú nam-mu-un-ù-tud
The last line of the Temple Hymns, where Enheduanna signs her name. The verb is tud — to give birth. Translations usually say created. A thing has been born. No one has given birth to it before.
Temple Hymns, line 544uzu níĝ-sig-ga ĝešgag-ta lú ba-da-an-lá
What Inanna's corpse is hung on in the Netherworld. The sign carries ĝeš, the determinative for wood. Not a hook. A wooden peg — the kind you hang meat on to dry.
Inanna's Descent, line 172aga zid-de₃ ki aĝ₂ nam-en-na → aga zid nam-en-na mu-da-an-kar
In the fourth line of Enheduanna's hymn, Inanna loves the true crown of the en-priestess. A hundred lines later, the same crown is taken from the woman writing the hymn. The echo is in the Sumerian.
Nin-me-šara, lines 4 and 107Free to read with Kindle Unlimited. For readers of Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint and Anita Diamant.
Nobody in these books is lying. That is what makes them work. Each of these people is most certain, and least real, in exactly the same place — the place where they are being counted. The platform does not need anyone to lie. It only needs them to keep going.
Books
1Peep
He asked the machine to write his anger for him. Then he edited it until it sounded like a man.
Three people who have never met. A father of fifty-three, out of work, who has found that the rage he posts gets answered and the rage he says out loud at home does not. A woman who underlines a verse at 5:14 in the morning and posts it at 5:31, and watches to see who is awake. A mother who organizes rallies and can count a room to within ten, and whose seventeen-year-old daughter keeps her door shut.
2Behind the Post
She typed seventeen words to strangers at 9:51 PM. Her husband read them in his feed and scrolled past.
The second book is told from inside the machine. A woman who wants a child and has never once said it out loud. A widower of sixty-three who has learned which hours of the night have other people in them. A barista whose textbook has been open to page 142 since spring. The system does not judge any of them. It measures how long they look, decides what that means, and quietly adjusts who they are allowed to see next.
From the dashboard
Between the chapters of the second book, the system files its own notes. It is not hostile. It is not even interested. It is doing arithmetic.
Dwell on comment: 14.8s (user average: 2.1s) Interaction: 0. No ♡. No reply. No repeat. Classification: low-affinity relationship. Action: reduce exposure, both directions.
A husband reads his wife's comment in his own feed. He stays on it for seven times his average. He does not press anything. The system draws the only conclusion it has a field for — and quietly begins serving each of them less of the other. They were sitting on the same couch.
Behind the Post, chapter 12Free to read with Kindle Unlimited. For readers of Dave Eggers's The Circle and Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This.