Rape Conception: The Second Victim

| Michele Sharpe

On Rape Conception and the Audible documentary podcast, The Second Victim: Daisy’s Story

Do you remember how difficult it can be to talk about a subject when there’s no language or terminology for your own experience? Or when you’ve not yet found the language? Several years ago, Daisy (she uses this pseudonym to protect the identity of her mother) began posting on Twitter under the username rapeconception, offering necessary terminology for the experience of being conceived by rape. We chatted online, and then over Zoom during the first years of the pandemic, comparing the similarities and differences of our experiences.

My mother was fourteen when she became pregnant with me; Daisy’s was thirteen. We were both put up for adoption, me in the U.S. and Daisy in the U.K. Daisy’s a Black woman who was adopted by a White family, and I’m a 97% White woman adopted by a mixed Jewish and Catholic family — which, believe it or not, was called a “mixed marriage” in the mid-twentieth century.

Our biological fathers were both well into their adulthood at the time of our respective conceptions. In 2015, a DNA genealogist determined mine was one of two brothers, the younger of whom was ten years older than my fourteen-year-old mother. I’ve sent letters and emails to the brother who is still alive. These have gone unanswered. I’ve imagined strolling by his house and asking him about his garden as a way of getting him to talk to me. All I do is imagine; I take no further action.

Daisy’s father was also an adult, much older than her 13-year old mother. It takes a person of courage to bring another person to justice, whether through the law or through a private conversation. I am not that person, but Daisy is. Her activism on behalf of rape-conceived people changed the law in the U.K.

Daisy worked with the Centre for Women’s Justice to develop “a set of proposals that would recognise children conceived in rape, legally, as victims of crime, and entitle them to specialist care and support.”

So how many victims are we talking about? The proposals that became Daisy’s Law were inspired by Daisy’s personal experience and activism, but they relied on research and data as well. One study showed that in 2021, for example, between 2,080 and 3,356 people were conceived via rape in England and Wales. This estimate was based on calculations of the likelihood of conception after intercourse in rapes reported to law enforcement.

Rape is a notoriously underreported crime. A 2018 study in the United States found that 2.4 % of women reported experiencing rape-related pregnancy. The number of these pregnancies that women are forced to carry is likely on the increase in the United States. A 2024 research letter published by the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that 64,565 rape-related pregnancies have occurred in the 14 states that have enacted abortion bans since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted abortion rights in 2022.

The limited research on rape conception has shown an increased prevalence of negative developmental and educational outcomes for children conceived by rape. Daisy’s Law now recognizes rape-conceived people as victims in U.K. rape cases and makes victims’ benefits available to them. She tells her story of moving from awareness to activism with courage and compassion in the Audible documentary podcast, The Second Victim, released in November of 2023.

The Second Victim begins with Daisy’s early memories of being a Black girl adopted by a White family and living in a White community in England. At a very young age, Daisy struggles with a sense of disjointedness, the paradox of being singled out and also invisible. When she begins asking questions about her birth parents, she senses another complication, one that’s under the surface of her visible differences from the White people surrounding her, but she doesn’t quite have the language for it yet.

Daisy narrates her own story in her intelligent and expressive voice. She’s joined by people who have been close to her during her search for justice, who add their voices and observations. As someone unfamiliar with podcasts, the listening experience took me a bit by surprise; the added sound effects made the experience more like a film than an audio book by encouraging my brain to visualize conversations and events. Daisy’s story is dramatic in its scope as it tracks her journey through closed doors and roadblocks to find her truth and to achieve some measure of justice and support for people who were born from rape.

Like rape itself, rape conception has long been stigmatized, underreported, and kept a secret. Unveiling the secret brings it into the light of examination, which can benefit everyone. Thank you, Daisy.

Aging in place

| Michele Sharpe

A new poem in the fabulous (literally) journal, Rogue Agent

Jill Khoury's cover art for Issue 107 of Rogue Agent: a square surrounded by a pink border and splashed with streaks of black or brown paint. At the top, the word “gyna-“ disappears under a piece of loosely-woven peach-colored fabric that covers the upper right part of the image. The words “dead languages on our tongues” appear diagonally across its left side. The rest of the image is made up of several pictures including an eye, a digestive tract, lungs, a liver, and bursts of colored pills.

Jill Khoury’s cover art for Issue 107 of Rogue Agent: a square surrounded by a pink border and splashed with streaks of black or brown paint. At the top, the word “gyna-“ disappears under a piece of loosely-woven peach-colored fabric that covers the upper right part of the image. The words “dead languages on our tongues” appear diagonally across its left side. The rest of the image is made up of several pictures including an eye, a digestive tract, lungs, a liver, and bursts of colored pills.

Image and alt-text by Jill Khoury

Isn’t this cover image fabulous? As in like a fable, a fairy tale, a story. Collage art always captures my attention because of the work it does in juxtaposing images so that viewers can assemble a story to go with it.

Winter can be a difficult time for me and my old bones. My poem, “Aging in Place,” which appears in this current issue of Rogue Agent, reflects some of that difficulty.

Do you ever want to give up on healing? Why or why not?

My future snaps like a rusted latch
and hasp. I live happily severed after. . . .

https://www.rogueagentjournal.com/msharpe

Reviving Delight in Russian Literature

| Michele Sharpe

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Yakhina

Agnes, my current foster dog, with her copy of War and Peace.

2023 was the year of resuming my delight in Russian novels. Nearly fifty years of intermittent longing for a treasured copy of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky had passed; my first lover had torn and sliced the book into pieces and scattered it around my neighborhood. One day in 2023, I realized the same edition might be available through the internet. It was. 

Inviting a powerful object into your life can open a door. Shortly after the replica of my long-lost book arrived, I received an assignment from Foreword Reviews to review the Russian novel A Volga Tale by Guzel Yakhina, and from there came the adventure of writing a longer, hybrid essay/review about A Volga Tale for On the Seawall. From there came learning of the Footnotes and Tangents community’s 2024 slow read of War and Peace, which I’m participating in now. 

Aside from Nancy Drew mysteries and books about horses, there weren’t a lot of books in my childhood home, but a temporary subscription to a book club brought two new adult novels in. These were hardcovers that came in their own fabric-covered slipcases, which impressed me as classy. One was The Idiot, thick, heavy, and illustrated, a book that when open had a 14- by 10-inch footprint that could be draped across your lap like a small, sad dog. The Idiot’s illustrations, by Fritz Eichenberg, were wood cut prints, dark background and foreground with slashes and streaks of light outlining characters and their settings. The characters’ faces, for the most part, were contorted with emotion, like teenage life.  

Title page of The Idiot with wood cut print of a struggling and divided Dostoevsky

I first read The Idiot several years before the destruction of my treasured copy. If you’re not familiar with the book, one way to summarize the novel is to say Dostoevsky wanted to write about a “wholly good man.” The novel’s good man, Prince Myshkin, is afflicted with a seizure disorder, not unlike Dostoevsky himself, who became epileptic as an adult.  

This is a recurring trope — at least in certain stories — that moral perfection for men comes with injury to the body, or a physical difference from others. Think of the blinded, one-armed, and ethical-at-last Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre. Or, perhaps, Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones, who loses his hand and briefly subscribes to a moral idea about community. Or Jesus. 

When, in 2023, I opened the package with my new copy of The Idiot and slid the book from its classy slipcase, the slipcase came apart. The book itself was in better shape, and its heft brought back the sensation of being immersed in literature and the suffocating weight of a violent love affair. Being underwater feels powerful when I can swim, but frightening when I can’t swim away. But this is the story of reading, the one with a happy ending. 

Amazon.com: A Volga Tale: 9781609459345: Yakhina, Guzel, Gannon, Polly: Books

Nostalgia and excitement about something wholly new filled me in 2023 as I read A Volga Tale. The lush and rhythmic English translation by Polly Gannon reminded me of Constance Garnett’s translations of 19th century Russian fiction. Here were the sonic pleasures of subtle meter and rhyme, the roll of language as it meets with thought. Like Dostoevsky’s work, A Volga Tale employs magic realism and is concerned with “the relationship of the country and personality.” 

The novel’s central character, Bach, is an ethnic German who lives on the Volga, a descendant of one of the many Germans encouraged to relocate to Russia by Catherine the Great. Bach is a village schoolteacher who loves languages but becomes speechless when he must face the Russian brutality that robs him of his wife and leaves him a daughter, Antje. With Antje, he conducts “a perpetual, gravely serious conversation in the language of breath and gesture and movement. Each of them was like an enormous ear, poised to listen and understand the other.”  

Coming across familiar ideas brings the pleasure of recognition, and this can open my mind to new ideas, as if I’m also an enormous ear, poised to listen. What was new to me in Yakhina’s novel was her concern with “the issue of internal freedom and its ratio to the external freedom.” In Dostoevsky’s novels, freedom is sometimes granted through religious faith, but more often, it’s the characters’ own thoughts and actions that free them or shackle them, creating liberating epiphanies or inescapable prisons of remorse.  

Yakhina’s outsider status as an ethnic Tatar woman in Russia may have contributed to her insights about the pressures of external freedom or lack thereof on a character’s internal freedom. In the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution depicted in A Volga Tale, the young people of Russia are swept up in a new life of communal effort for the communal good. Bach’s daughter Antje grows strong, happy, and free of gender constrictions with her comrades during that brief, pre-Stalin era.  

The young women in The Idiot don’t experience such freedom; the main characters exist at opposite ends of literature’s traditional womanly spectrum: Aglaya Ivanovna, the virgin daughter of a general, and Nastassya Filipovna, an orphan, sold in some vague way to a wealthy man. By the time I read The Idiot, I’d already learned about the two ends of the womanly spectrum from Jane Eyre — the very good, innocent woman (Jane) at one end, and the very bad, experienced woman (Bertha) at the other end.  

As is the habit of many readers, after the last page of A Volga Tale, I looked for more books by Guzel Yakhina and found her debut novel, Zuleikha, which is based on her family stories about life under Stalin and in the Siberian gulags. It is a spellbinding, cross-country epic, and because it won numerous literary awards around the world, I was able to get a copy from my local library. I’m hoping that Yakhina’s third book, a historical novel about the 1921 famine in Russia, will be translated into English soon.

In November of 2023, as if reading my mind (or my clicks, which are similar), Substack alerted me about a 2024 slow read of War and Peace. It had been decades since I read that book. Was it a coincidence that the used bookstore in my part of town had a paperback copy of War and Peace in the Constance Garnett translation, the translation I’d read in the 1970’s after The Idiot sent me in search of more Dostoevsky, which took me to the library and The Brothers Karamazov, The Possessed, Crime and Punishment, and later to War and Peace? Is it reckless of me, that with so many books and so little time, I turn to re-reading at least once a year?  

Now it’s 2024, and I’m (re)reading a chapter a day of Tolstoy, thanks to an algorithm and to Simon Haisell and his Footnotes and Tangents group. Tolstoy’s words sound both familiar to my ear, and wholly new; I’d forgotten how funny he can be. This may be an even happier year than last year, when the used but new-to-me copy of The Idiot sat on my lap like a small, sad dog. Its pages felt soft, and miraculously whole. 

Susan Kiyo Ito’s New Memoir Will Meet You Anywhere

| Michele Sharpe

DEC 19, 2023

Front cover of I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir, by Susan Kiyo Ito, featuring a background of blue fabric with white cranes and an evergreen branch sewn onto it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all happy families are alike; each family formed by adoption is unhappy in its own way.” [Apologies to Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy for the mashup of opening lines from Pride & Prejudice and Anna Karenina.]

Susan Kiyo Ito’s memoir of her on-again, off-again relationship with her blood mother is a marvel of pacing. Scenes crucial to the narrative are slowed down to the moment-by-moment level of specific gestures, dialogue, interior thoughts, and exterior observations. This strategy allows readers to fully inhabit Susan’s real-time experiences of searching, finding, and accommodating Yumi, the woman who gave birth to her.

Susan’s adoptive parents supported her search for and subsequent relationship with Yumi, and tried to bring everyone in the adoption triad together. What was intended as loving and supportive ironically intensifies questions of family loyalty. During early meetings with Yumi, when Susan is in thrall to the very idea of being near to her own flesh blood, it’s as if she wants their relationship to be private. In aching, honest prose, she describes the awkwardness of feeling pulled toward Yumi and toward her adoptive parents when the four of them meet.

This early, innocent awkwardness is short-lived; it quickly turns into anger, anxiety, and pressure, for Susan’s existence is Yumi’s secret shame. Yumi is married and has two other children who know nothing of Susan. Yumi is anxious to keep the truth from them and everyone in her circle who knows her as a successful wife, mother, and businesswoman. A fragile, intermittent, under-the-radar relationship between Susan and Yumi results from this pressure. Even though Yumi cuts Susan off again and again, Susan keeps welcoming her back when Yumi turns up after years of estrangement as if everything is okay.

Maybe Susan keeps welcoming Yumi back because severing ties is too painful for a woman who who was separated from her mother as an infant. And maybe Yumi cuts Susan off and keeps coming back because it’s too painful for her, too. A survivor of the World War II Japanese internment camps, Yumi was also a survivor of misogynist American culture that shamed unmarried women who became pregnant, and then coerced them into giving up their babies to a predatory adoption industry. Maybe the blood ties between mother and child are so strong they cannot be permanently destroyed, so strong that they can overcome the pressures of culture.

I wouldn’t know. My own mother, fourteen when she became pregnant with me, died one year before my adoption search was successful. I’m childless, too, so the whole mother/child thing is mysterious to me, something I can only learn about from other people’s stories. Susan Kiyo Ito’s memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere is one of those stories: it brims with the contemporary details that translate another’s experiences and embraces the distance needed to interpret those experiences and give them meaning.

Tolstoy knew that on the surface at least, a happy family is one that conforms with societal values, like the Ozzie and Harriet family of the 20th century, and the Instagrammable family of the 21st century. A family that’s cobbled together by another family’s loss and grief — what’s usually the second best choice of adoption — is by definition unconforming and “unhappy in its own ways.” Reading about and listening to the experiences of adopted people, told in their own voices, is the only way to understand those unique experiences. And every one of our stories will be different.

Substack

Re-reading as Prayer

| Michele Sharpe

2. Jane Eyre

Still shot from 1943 film adaptation of Jane Eyre with text, “If anyone asks me how you treated me, I’ll say you are bad, hard-hearted and mean.”

Down some internet rabbit hole, I saw the title Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice. I will read almost anything about Jane Eyre, and when a quick browse revealed that Praying with Jane Eyre was written by Vanessa Zoltan, a Jewish atheist, I was relieved. Fundamentalist religion pasted on top of literature irritates me. On to my library’s database!

I first held Jane Eyre as a chronically ill child confined to bed, a girl who’d read every book in the house and whined for more. My adoptive mother drove to the local library. There, she asked for help from a miraculous but anonymous-to-me librarian who ended up having the most lasting and positive influence on my childhood.

[Please thank a librarian today, especially if you live in a state that’s under pressure from self-righteous book-banning organizations.]

Praying with Jane Eyre by Vanessa Zoltan
Cover of Praying with Jane Eyre

Praying with Jane Eyre is a combination of memoir, sermon, and literary criticism. I couldn’t stop reading it, even though there’s a bit too much concrete spirituality for me in it, and I disagree with some of Zoltan’s opinions about the novel (the Reeds never deliberately tortured Jane? Please). Still, it’s Jane-adjacent, which I cannot resist, and Zoltan make many meaningful observations about Judaism, Atheism, the epigenetic impacts of the Holocaust (all four of her grandparents were Holocaust survivors), and the process of re-reading. Believing that re-reading can be a sacred act, she has this to say about faith and re-reading:

“what I came to mean by faith was that . . . the more time you spent with the text, the more gifts it would give you.” Even when “you realized it was racist and patriarchal in ways you hadn’t noticed when you were fifteen or twenty or twenty-five, you were still spending sacred time with the book.”

Honestly, I’m not clear on the idea of sacred time. Is it like when I take to the bed all day with a book? Is it like Mary Oliver paying close attention during her morning walks? Or is it about repetition? Or all of these?

Is sacred time forgiveness time? Is it a deliberate disregard for perfection? Most, maybe all, nineteenth century European literature is racist and patriarchal. Charlotte Brontë was not a feminist saint. But her most famous book is more than the sum of her writerly parts, maybe because she trusted in the magic of her unconscious. If she was stuck, as a writer, she asked her own dreams for help and illumination before falling asleep at night.

That’s the quality I most admired about Jane when first reading the book: she trusted her own mind, both the conscious and the unconscious parts. She was self-reliant.

Since childhood, I’ve re-read Jane Eyre yearly. There must have been skipped years, but since my obsession began at eight years old and I’m now sixty-six, I’ve probably read it fifty times. With each re-reading, the world of the novel is somehow made at once new and familiar.

How is it made new? Partly by what I notice. Children are the ultimate underdogs, and as a child, I noticed my own powerlessness as bitterly as Jane notices her powerlessness in the novel. As a teenager in a Karl Marx phase, I noticed the novel’s class struggles. In my early twenties, a second wave feminism phase, I noticed the caging of Bertha Mason.

Time can make a book new, too, if one’s well of compassion for others varies. Imagine my shock during my last re-reading when I felt compassion for the odious Mrs. Reed, that bad, hard-hearted, and mean substitute parent. Before that, even when my beloved Jane insisted on compassion for Mrs. Reed, I’d resisted. A year has passed, only a year, but I feel exponentially older and crabbier. I expect to have the pleasure of detesting Mrs. Reed again soon. It’s time.

In 2024, I’ll be joining a slow-read re-reading of War and Peace, a book I haven’t read for . . . let’s just say decades since I can’t recall exactly. Organized and hosted by Simon Haisell on Footnotes and Tangents, this will be my first experience of a slow-read and a communal internet read.

Maybe next summer I’ll host a slow read of Jane Eyre. Meanwhile I recommend the Rosenbach Museum’s free and streaming series “Sundays with Jane Eyre,” which covers satisfying chunks of the novel via discussions with Eyreheads from around the world.

The driveway writing retreat

| Michele Sharpe

I’ve been intrigued by the connections Summer Brennan makes between prosody and prose in The Essay Series #1: The Essay as Energy. I experimented with some of these connections in a revision of a “5 Things” draft that came out of my participation in her Essay Camp this month.

The questions that fascinated me most are: What happens to prose when short sentences come in a series? When short sentences alternate with sentences of moderate length or sentences that meander like stream of consciousness work? What about repetition in prose? What about actual meter?

The Driveway Writing Retreat

One year ago, I got a popup camper, a 10.5 foot box so tiny I can tow it with my 2012 minivan. It doesn’t have room for anyone but 5 foot 2 inch me and my 15 pound dog. It’s a perfect getaway vehicle for me, even if I don’t go anywhere in it.

Losing my train of thought in reaction to sudden, loud noises is now my default fault. Here’s a word problem: I have two dogs, one husband. Two are loud. I won’t say who. Every month, I take my tiny camper to a state or county park with the quiet dog.

My plan for November is escaping to the camper in the driveway where it’s parked. Today is my first driveway day. And also the next day. Do Catholic priests say, “Peace be with you,” so you’ll say, “And also with you” to the priests? Peace be with you.

Sudden loud noises aren’t my sole distraction. Inside my house, I distract myself. Houseplants need watering. Laundry needs doing. Dinner needs cooking. Bathroom needs cleaning. I’ve loved writing for over fifty years. I’ll do anything to avoid it.

I’ve been a woman for over fifty years, too. In the tiny camper, there’s no houseplants, no laundry, no cooking, no bathroom. No reflex to meet a need. I wish to be as unresponsive as weather. Some much needed rain has fallen in the past two days.

The tiny camper is a triangular aluminum can. The drizzle pings it. The drip from overhanging trees pongs it. The wind throws twigs at it. None of this distracts me. I have wanted to be alone all my life, all my life, all my life. It’s not about the noise.

Re-reading for Brain Soothing

| Michele Sharpe

Fingersmith by Sara Waters

No photo description available.
Buttonbush in flower. Photo by Michele Sharpe

Repetition is soothing. Looking at an image with a fractal pattern like this photo of a buttonbush in flower is soothing for many people. Listening to music that repeats a rhythm or melody is soothing for many people.

You can also try re-reading a favorite book. Your brain recalls much of what will happen in the book, but not everything, so re-reading is a soothing blend of the familiar with sprinklings of new discoveries. Falling back into the world of a book you’ve already entered can be relaxing, and re-reading can also reveal how you’ve changed since last reading the book.

Here’s an example of that reveal function: I loved all of Jane Austen’s novels as a kid until I got to Emma. It was so horrible, I didn’t believe it was written by the same person. When I revisited it as an adult, I saw why: Emma’s character faults (bossy, know-it all, and yet unperceptive when it came to what was right in front of her) were too much like mine. Re-reading revealed that I’d grown up enough to recognize those character faults.

This week, I extended my re-reading to a new book: the twistily plotted Fingersmith by Sara Waters, which I first read in 2008 or 2009 while living in Idaho. Here’s the set up: An elaborate confidence game brings two young women from different class backgrounds together in 1800’s England, and they fall in love.

The novel’s period details are riveting enough to transport me out of my 21st century world, and on re-reading those details brought me fresh pleasure. Or horror, like this detail: for the convenience of their keepers, the hair of asylum inmates could be shaved off — or it could be braided and sewn to their heads with cotton thread.

This is literary fiction with a plot twist, and another twist, and another twist, with an immersion in England’s 19th century class obsessions and oppressions, and a consuming love story. What did the re-reading reveal to me? That 10+ years of writing prose has made me more attuned to technique than when I first read the book.

Shout out to The Handmaiden, the 2016 South Korean film adaptation of Fingersmith directed, co-written, and co-produced by Park Chan-Wook. It’s a sumptuous, erotic beauty of a film that replaces the book’s British class conflicts with the ethnic status conflicts between Korean and Japanese people in the 19th century.

Got any reading recommendations?

Check out my Substack, So many books, so little time, where this piece was originally published

In the library, Every month is disabilty month

| Michele Sharpe

So many books, so little time.

July, the month when the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, was passed, is Disability Pride Month. Today, it’s not July, but every month is an opportunity to honor the history, achievements, experiences, and struggles of the disability community. Things many of us expect (sort of) now, like accessible public buildings and public transportation, only came about thanks to the tenacious activism of people with disabilities and their allies.

You can immerse yourself in the work of disabled writers in any month. In a previous post, I focused on the brilliant disabled poet, essayist, and activist, Laura Hershey. Here are some books by another favorite writer: Sandra Gail Lambert. Okay, she’s my friend, too.

Sandra’s memoir, A Certain Loneliness, published by University of Nebraska, is a classic text about growing up disabled. As an “old polio,” a person who contracted polio during the mid-twentieth century epidemic, growing into her adult identity as a disabled lesbian, she learns how disability can become more complex as we age. With the focus on the body personal and the body politic you might anticipate in a book from Sandra if you’ve read any of her fine essays, this memoir resonates with joy, even as it sometimes burrows into pain and frustration with forces that work against community. It contains some of the most eloquent, visceral descriptions of chronic pain I’ve ever read. Having access to her rendering of her arm and shoulder pain (think of hauling yourself around on crutches for decades) and the deadening fatigue of continuing to work as a book seller through that pain was analgesic for me when I struggled with chronic pain while working a desk job.

But wait, there’s more! Sandra recently published an environmental thriller on her Substack and as an ebook. The Sacrifice Zone is a wholly original page-turner that’s kept me up past my bedtime. Set in Georgia and Florida, the main character, Vicky Jean to her family and Vic to others, is a journalist who comes from a family attached to their coastal Florida environment in deep and sometimes disturbing ways. When a nuclear plant near her family home explodes, releasing a deadly toxin, Vic is in Washington DC in her first media job out of college. Told that her whole family has been wiped off the map, she doubles down on investigating the explosion, the toxin, and the chaos that follows. Something isn’t right, and it never was.

And still more! In March, 2024, University of Georgia will publish Sandra’s essay collection, My Withered Legs. The title, in case you’re wondering, is both ironic and sarcastic; it was a phrase tossed at Sandra by a long ago editor who thought she needed to describe how her legs look. The editor didn’t know what Sandra’s legs looked like, but still felt free to offer the phrase “withered legs,” a description the editor imagined on their own. Well, some people think they know what it’s like to be other people without even asking.

Thank the stars for reading, which does allow us to experience at least a smidgen of another person’s life if we can forego varnishing it with our own expectations. My Withered Legs is now available for pre-order from the University of Georgia press, and online outlets including Barnes & Noble and Amazon.