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Summer Brenner

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Summer (Rebecca Susan) Brenner was raised in Georgia, the daughter of first-generation Ashkenazim, whose parents fled eastern Europe and wended their unlikely way to Dixie.

She was born into a South of extreme segregation (if it was better than before, she could not tell). Atlanta, Boston, Italy, and Paris where she believed she might become an authentic poet if life were sufficiently scrappy and French. Scrappy indeed, with spare centimes saved for cigarettes and Cinematheque.

After returning to the States, she drifted west, first to New Mexico and eventually to Berkeley. She currently works in Richmond, California on transportation justice and literacy projects. She is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction. Forthcoming in 2009-2010 are Richmond Tales – Lost Secrets of the Iron Triangle, Nearly Nowhere, and My Life in Clothes.

Click here for an interview with Summer on KPFK or get the podcast of her interview with David Wilk on Writers Cast.

A novel of crime, transport, and sex, I-5 tells the bleak and brutal story of Anya and her journey north from Los Angeles to Oakland on the interstate that bisects the Central Valley of California.

Anya is the victim of a deep deception. Someone has lied to her; and because of this lie, she is kept under lock and key, used by her employer to service men, and indebted for the privilege. In exchange, she lives in the United States and fantasizes on her future freedom. Or as she remarks to a friend, "Would she rather be fucking a dog...or living like a dog?" In Anya’s world, it’s a reasonable question.

Much of I-5 transpires on the eponymous interstate. Anya travels with her “manager” and driver from Los Angeles to Oakland. It’s a macabre journey: a drop at Denny’s, a bad patch of tule fog, a visit to a “correctional facility,” a rendezvous with an organ grinder, and a dramatic entry across Oakland’s city limits.

Praise:

"It has a quality very rare in literature: a subtle, dark humor that’s only perceivable when one goes deep into the heart of this world’s absurd tragedy, or tragic absurdity."
-- R. Crumb

"Completely outside my normal reading pattern, I found myself staying up one night with a quick-read page-turner: Summer Brenner’s I-5, a hard-boiled feminist thriller that tells a seamy story of a young Russian sex slave’s struggle to survive and escape as she’s being trafficked up the interstate in California. Well written, without a superfluous word, it’s a big chase, practically a movie on the page; I can’t believe some major action director hasn’t ponied up a wheelbarrow full of money for the rights."
--Ned Sublette, writer, anthropologist, musician, performer

"Insightful, innovative and riveting. After its lyrical beginning inside Anya's head, I-5 shifts momentum into a rollicking gangsters-on-the-lam tale that is in turns blackly humorous, suspenseful, heartbreaking and always populated by intriguing characters. Anya is a wonderful, believable heroine, her tragic tale told from the inside out, without a shred of sentimental pity, which makes it all the stronger. A twisty, fast-paced ride you won't soon forget."
--Denise Hamilton, author of the L.A.Times bestseller The Last Embrace.

"I'm in awe. I-5 moves so fast you can barely catch your breath. It's as tough as tires, as real and nasty as road rage, and best of all, it careens at breakneck speed over as many twists and turns as you'll find on The Grapevine. What a ride! I-5's a hard-boiled standout."
--Julie Smith, editor of New Orleans Noir and author of the Skip Langdon and Talba Wallis crime novel series

"In I-5, Summer Brenner deals with the onerous and gruesome subject of sex trafficking calmly and forcefully, making the reader feel the pain of its victims. The trick to forging a successful narrative is always in the details, and I-5 provides them in abundance. This book bleeds truth--after you finish it, the blood will be on your hands."
--Barry Gifford, author, poet and screenwriter

"Her prose style is a mirror reflection of the interstate: parched, fast, and tense, with an emotional timbre that matches the velocity of the plot."
--East Bay Express

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The Latest News:

Bay Area Switchblade Launch
Last night near downtown Berkeley, a small Victorian house was crowded with well-wishers for the launch of Switchblade Books and the publication of The Jook by Gary Phillips and I-5 by Summer Brenner. Usually, a sizeable party would spill onto the...

Behind I-5
MARCH 2009 The seed for I-5 was planted by a local news story: the 1999 death of an East Indian teenager, asphyxiated in a Berkeley apartment by a leaky gas pipe. News of the tragedy was unveiled by two persistent high-school journalists, Meg Gree...

What Others Are Saying...

Reviews

I-5: Golden State Gulag: Znet
I-5: Writers Cast
I-5: BSC Review
The Evil Men Do: Read All Day
Resiliency By Degrees: Gently Read Literature
I-5: Silliman's Blog
I-5: NerdOfNoir
Driving I-5: Meta Magazine
Summer Brenner's I-5: Berkeley Daily Planet
Sex Traffickers on Interstate 5: The East Bay Express

Interview with Summer Brenner
By David Wilk
Writerscast

This is a slim novel that packs a pretty powerful punch. Summer Brenner was best known to me as a poet, but it turns out she has been writing fiction for quite some time. She has a political interest, as this novel demonstrates, but it is not a tract. It’s a sensitive portrayal of an Eastern European woman who has been tricked into coming to America, where she has been enslaved in a money for sex ring that makes a business out of the correlation between the desires of women to escape the misery of their lives and men who are willing to pay for sex of all kinds with women, whose real lives they care nothing about.

I-5: A Review
By Brian
BSC Review

I-5 by Summer Brenner is the second release from the Switchblade imprint of PM Press, and all I can say is wow. I don’t know if this one is on people’s radar screens, but it should be.

I-5 is a wholly original piece of dark fiction that never goes where you expect it to and ventures into uncharted waters. It’s uncompromising in ways that should be exceptionally appealing to readers of dark fiction. I-5 is as tough a crime tale as you’re likely to find anywhere.

The Evil Men Do
By Nina Sankovitch
Read All Day

Summer Brenner's I-5 is a grim and gripping noir novel about the sex slave trade: its victims, its perpetrators, and its ability to flourish in the shadowy outcrops of civilized life. Under the guise of business, Anya and other girls from Eastern Europe are plucked from the streets and brought to the U.S. by promises of work and help for their families. Kupkin, manager of the evil empire, holds them indentured and enslaved without hope of escape until all debts are paid off. He ruminates on the care he takes of his girls and his business: "forty girls have passed through orientation. Nine have worked their way out of the system after a production period of five years. Two have died...This latest enterprise has transformed Kupkin from rich to extremely wealthy."

Resiliency By Degrees
By Megan Burns
Gently Read Literature

Brenner braves a subject matter that is not easy to embrace, and she manages to create a character that is neither cliché nor uninspiring. I-5 moves at a clipped pace towards its conclusion, and the reader is wholly invested in finding out how Anya finally resolves her life.

Book Review: I-5
On Silliman's Blog
October 23, 2009

I have always thought of Summer Brenner as a poet who sometimes writes fiction, so I was surprised to see in the front matter to I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex, that Brenner has published six novels to just two volumes of verse, and that she hasn’t published a book of poems in 32 years. Having now read – and completely enjoyed – I-5, I still think Summer Brenner is a poet, but one with notable narrative skills & a deep commitment both to her characters & to justice. I-5 is an effective novel, tho certainly not perfect, and one that would translate easily to the big screen. It has all the elements: a tough-as-nails hooker heroine who is also the protagonist & very much the “good guy,” plus a variety of secondary characters, minor Russian mafia wannabes, other prostitutes, a trucker with an illicit cargo, prison guards with their own demons & secrets, and a villainous capitalist trying to control everyone in his orbit. It has an ending that is both very much what the reader will be hoping for & yet almost entirely a surprise.

Book Review: I-5
By the NerdOfNoir
June 18th, 2009

For a novel about a Russian sex slave, Summer Brenner’s I-5 sure as shit is a lot of fucking fun. And it’s not fun solely because the Nerd is a degenerate “pre-vert” (though that doesn’t hurt), no sir. This shit is a blast because Brenner’s chosen to make her prostitute protagonist a spunky, hard-edged survivor heroine instead of a pitiful victim. Anya is indeed a sex slave working off her “debt” to the rat bastard her tricked her into indentured sexual servitude - there’s no getting around that shit - but she’s also somewhat secure in the knowledge that she’s just a sex act or two away from freedom.

Summer Brenner's I-5
By Estelle Jelinek
The Berkeley Daily Planet
June 11, 2009

Summer Brenner regularly swims long distances in Berkeley’s public pools. She is also an accomplished author who writes as gracefully as she swims.

Her latest book, I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex (Oakland: PM Press, 2009), is a novel about sex trafficking along one of California’s major highways.

It is not at all sleazy or pornographic, as its subject may suggest, nor is it noir fiction, as its misleading sensational cover implies, and it is not a “new mystery,” as shelved at Moe’s. It is literary fiction told from the point of view of Anya, a Russian immigrant, falsely lured to the United States for legitimate work as a clerk or waitress, only to find herself a sex slave. Anya is savvy and sensitive, plotting her own escape even as she endures the unpleasant toils of her forced servitude...

Sex Traffickers on Interstate 5: Berkeley writer brings prostitution into the domain of hard-boiled crime fiction--and feminism.
By Rachel Swan
East Bay Express

Anya may be a noir protagonist, but she has little in common with the Philip Marlowes and Sam Spades who inhabited traditional pulp fiction. She's 23 years old; Russian-born but stuck in the United States (first in Atlanta, then Los Angeles, and finally, Oakland); flinty on the outside but soft and pliant within. She's a sex worker who slaves for a Russian pimp and becomes an accomplice in her own exploitation. As a moral center, she's dubious. But as a noir character, she's a feminist — albeit one whose actions stem entirely from her will to survive. At any rate, Anya is a departure from the gumshoe investigators and blood-sucking widows who predate her...

Author Portfolio

Fiction

Brenner, Summer. Dancers and the Dance. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press Books, 1990.

Brenner, Summer. Ivy: Tale of a Homeless Girl in SF. Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 2000.

Brenner, Summer. One Minute Movies. Berkeley: Thumbscrew Press, 1996.

Brenner, Summer. Presque nulle part. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.

Brenner, Summer. The Missing Lover. New York, Spuyten Duyvil (limited art edition with collages by Lewis Warsh), 2006.

Brenner, Summer. The Soft Room. The Figures, 1978.

Poetry

Brenner, Summer. Everyone Came Dressed as Water. Atlanta: Grasshopper Press, 1973.

Brenner, Summer. From the Heart to the Center. The Figures, 1977.

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Summer Brenner

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