Jordan Kurella is a trans and disabled author who has lived all over the world (including Moscow and Manhattan). In his past lives, he was a photographer, radio DJ, and social worker. His work has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Sturgeon Award, and the LA Times Book Prize. He is the author of the fantasy novella, I Never Liked You Anyway, the short story collection, When I Was Lost, and the climate fiction novella, The Death of Mountains. Jordan lives in limbo with his perfect dog and practical cat.
Today he tells us about his six books.
Right now I’m doing a re-read of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones as I am answering these questions a day or two before I’m due at the L.A. Times Book Festival. I’m on a panel with Stephen Graham Jones and Catronia Ward. I have Ward’s book ready to read on the train to Los Angeles. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of my favorite horror books I’ve read in a very long time, but then again, I’m an enormous fan of Dracula by Bram Stoker (probably read that four times). The book is paced and constructed similarly (but not samely) to Dracula but with more revenge, more justice, and more skill in voice (in my opinion). Jones does an absolutely incredible job in the narrative voice differences between Etsy, Good Stab, and the Pastor. This is the kind of thing I just gobble up. I’m about a third of the way through my re-read, and picking up on clues I dropped the first time.
This was originally going to be a very difficult question to answer, as my two big books I was anticipating were Year of the Mer by L.D. Lewis and Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman. But Year of the Mer is already out, so! This makes answering this question far easier (get Year of the Mer at your favorite indie bookstore). As Ignore All Previous Instructions is due out in May, I’ll talk about that one. This book is an incredible rocket-ride of spacefaring adventure and romance with the kind of drama that I don’t usually see in science fiction—by which I mean relationship/romantic drama—and that kinda messy stuff is totally my jam. I love fictional relationships that mimic soap opera levels of mess, and Ignore All Previous Instructions has that with trans characters, neurodivergence, space travel, and a total and scathing takedown of LLMs. Hoffman is an incredible writer, and I’ve been a fan of their work for ages. This book is my favorite of theirs so far.
I always want to re-read The Mountain and the Sea by Ray Nayler. This is my answer every time. When I’m in-between books, I see it on my shelf and want to read it again. Had the fortune of talking to Ray about this at the 2025 Seattle Worldcon, and he said that he wrote that in the hopes that folks would find it that way—like their favorite Pixies album—but to me, The Mountain and the Sea is itself about language and communication and the problems and benefits of it. So re-reading it again and again (I’ve read it twice) makes me understand the book on a deeper and deeper level, like listening or replaying a conversation in my head might do. See where I erred, or where maybe someone wasn’t being completely on the up and up. It also makes me a better writer, I think? Re-reading something that I love so completely? Because I can pick it apart and get to the makings of why it works so well.
No.
I don’t get jealous or envious about other authors’ work, and when someone else writes a book concept that was close to something I was thinking of, my immediate thought is, “Oh thank gosh, now I can put that idea aside.” And then I read their book to see how much better they did it than me, and then sit back and enjoy it. Authors are all unique and bring their own life experiences to the page. Ideas might be chaff, but every idea is built upon the backbone of experience. To get to the question? The closest I got to this was Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, which thank gosh he wrote that. Chandrasekera wrote Rakesfall as a far better book than I could write, and executed the nascent idea I’d been playing over in my head so much better and more masterfully than I ever could do. Which is cool! How can I be upset, now I get to read it! I just love reading, and I love reading a lot of things. So when I come across something that is similar to something I want to write? I am just super happy go along for the ride.
5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?
This is a complete toss-up between D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths and The Stranger by Chris Van Allsberg. Each of these books I was given by my parents when I was around nine or ten years old, and I wore the copies out so much that the covers fell out and pages fell out. I still have the originals I was given. But I’m going to talk about The Stranger. This book is not one of Allsberg’s more famous works, it’s about Jack Frost, who gets hit by a farmer’s car, and is brought into the farmer’s home to recover from amnesia. Like much of Allsberg’s work, the illustrations are phenomenal, and there’s a mystery to be solved. When the seasons don’t change, and the harvest doesn’t come, Jack Frost suddenly regains his memory, and winter arrives. I’m getting chills just typing this. It made me seek out and have curiosity about more things. Books, nature, and beauty in the world around me.
6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?
The last book I had published is called The Death of Mountains and it came out last year (March 2025). It features Plundered Mountain, who is a middling hill of the Appalachians who does not want to die. When she is visited by the Death of Mountains who has come to usher her along? Plundered Mountain bargains for her life through the trading of stories back and forth over the course of one night, but it becomes more involved than that, as stories always tend to do. Told in three points of view in novella length, this book was a fun thing to write, an experiment in how weird can I go? There’s a book called Before the Feast by Saša Stanišić translated by Anthea Bell. I read it about six years ago, and in it, there’s a town that speaks in a first person plural. Reading this book changed my entire perspective on how a book could be told. I could not have written The Death of Mountains without Before the Feast. But I’m getting lost in my answer: Death of Mountains, the character, is terrible at his job, while Plundered Mountain is exceedingly good (and stubborn) at being a mountain. The two clash in the kindest and gentlest of ways as they tell stories and ask questions over the nature of permanence, what is life, what is joy, and how there is no life without a little suffering. I had a lot of fun writing this book, and I hope others enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
This is a complete toss-up between D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths and The Stranger by Chris Van Allsberg. Each of these books I was given by my parents when I was around nine or ten years old, and I wore the copies out so much that the covers fell out and pages fell out. I still have the originals I was given. But I’m going to talk about The Stranger. This book is not one of Allsberg’s more famous works, it’s about Jack Frost, who gets hit by a farmer’s car, and is brought into the farmer’s home to recover from amnesia. Like much of Allsberg’s work, the illustrations are phenomenal, and there’s a mystery to be solved. When the seasons don’t change, and the harvest doesn’t come, Jack Frost suddenly regains his memory, and winter arrives. I’m getting chills just typing this. It made me seek out and have curiosity about more things. Books, nature, and beauty in the world around me.
The last book I had published is called The Death of Mountains and it came out last year (March 2025). It features Plundered Mountain, who is a middling hill of the Appalachians who does not want to die. When she is visited by the Death of Mountains who has come to usher her along? Plundered Mountain bargains for her life through the trading of stories back and forth over the course of one night, but it becomes more involved than that, as stories always tend to do. Told in three points of view in novella length, this book was a fun thing to write, an experiment in how weird can I go? There’s a book called Before the Feast by Saša Stanišić translated by Anthea Bell. I read it about six years ago, and in it, there’s a town that speaks in a first person plural. Reading this book changed my entire perspective on how a book could be told. I could not have written The Death of Mountains without Before the Feast. But I’m getting lost in my answer: Death of Mountains, the character, is terrible at his job, while Plundered Mountain is exceedingly good (and stubborn) at being a mountain. The two clash in the kindest and gentlest of ways as they tell stories and ask questions over the nature of permanence, what is life, what is joy, and how there is no life without a little suffering. I had a lot of fun writing this book, and I hope others enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Thank you Jordan!
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POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
