I know, I know – we do not do blog tour stops at LGBTQReads, and that’s still true. But as a 2024 Sydney Taylor Honor Book awardee, I was asked to be a host for this year’s tour, and when I found out I would be featuring a queer book I happen to have absolutely loved, and processed the fact that we both got our Sidney Taylor stickers on queer books, I decided I get to break the rules, just this once. And so, I’m thrilled to be talking to A.R. Vishny today about Night Owls, Sydney Taylor Book Award and National Jewish Book Award winner for Young Adult. (Also, full disclosure: I judged this year’s NJBA for YA, so if you’re wondering how much I loved it, the answer is “Enough to help it when the top prize and then write the blurb for it.”)
Before we get into it with the author, though, here’s a bit more on the book:
Night Owls by A.R. Vishny
Clara loves rules. Rules are what have kept her and her sister, Molly, alive—or, rather, undead—for over a century. Work their historic movie theater by day. Shift into an owl under the cover of night. Feed on men in secret. And never fall in love.
Molly is in love. And she’s tired of keeping her girlfriend, Anat, a secret. If Clara won’t agree to bend their rules a little, then she will bend them herself.
Boaz is cursed. He can’t walk two city blocks without being cornered by something undead. At least at work at the theater, he gets to flirt with Clara, wishing she would like him back.
When Anat vanishes and New York’s monstrous underworld emerges from the shadows, Clara suspects Boaz, their annoyingly cute box office attendant, might be behind it all.
But if they are to find Anat, they will need to work together to face demons and the hungers they would sooner bury. Clara will have to break all her rules—of love, of life, and of death itself—before her rules break everyone she loves.
And now, check out my chat with A.R. Vishny!
So excited to be chatting with you for the STBA blog tour, and congrats again on your huge win! What was getting that call like?
So I was caught completely by surprise, the committee really outdid themselves. Talya, who coordinates the blog tour but was not on the committee, is a friend of mine (the Jewish book world is small) and asked me to hop on a Zoom call to discuss details regarding their wedding. It was a totally normal ask that raised zero alarm bells because they were actually getting married at the end of January and I was doing one of the sheva brachot. Shortly after I hopped on though, the committee suddenly appeared, and I genuinely didn’t understand what was happening, it took me a minute to realize that everyone who had joined the call had the Night Owls cover set as their background and plush owls. Truly the best day ever. I cried many happy tears.
I don’t usually host blog tours on LGBTQReads, but it just felt too fortuitous that I got to host the stop for a queer book for SBTA, and a queer book I really loved, at that! How does queerness inform the story you’re telling in Night Owls, and what does it mean to you to have it intersect with Judaism in your characters?
To me it was very important that Molly’s queerness mattered on the page both on a character and structural level. So big picture, the thing that my estries, ghosts, and demons all have in common is hunger, desires so great that it outlasts death. That was one of the core ideas I built out from when figuring out how the supernatural elements of the story would work. For my Estries, they needed to possess the hungers that historically have made Jewish girls into “villains” and “monsters.” They also had to be the kind of girls who get easily forgotten, because practically speaking I needed them to live on the same city block for a hundred years. It felt obvious to me that these hungers would therefore be rooted in ambition and queer desire. History has a very hard time remembering Jewish women, even more so when they would likely be understood today as queer or otherwise “unconventional” in how they lived their lives, and Estries became a way to literalize that.
It’s also an objective fact that if you scratch the surface of Jewish cultural heritage, especially in Jewish literature and Yiddish theater, it’s not hard to find expressions of queerness as well as ideas about gender that defy easy binaries. When I was building Molly’s character and her relationship with Lena and Anat, I was thinking about Got Fun Nekome (God of Vengeance), and also the rich tradition of cross-dressing narratives, drag, and gender-swapped retellings in the world of Yiddish theater, as well as a number of real life actors and labor activists. People often call something “a product of their time” to excuse bigotry and because there’s a tendency to imagine the past without nuance. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves. For me, I wanted to make it clear that a girl like Molly is in fact a “product of her time,” in that a girl like her is not an anachronism or a big reach in the Jewish context she emerged from, even if that’s not always how the history gets remembered.
Speaking of representation in your characters, I loved so much that Boaz is of Syrian descent, as many Jews (especially in New York) are. How did you come to create his character and especially his background?
So Boaz was always going to be Mizrahi. I wanted the Jewish world I depicted on the page to feel authentic to the way I grew up and to present-day Jewish New York, so a Jewish world that’s many things all at once. For me it’s also easier to write when I have very detailed family backgrounds of my characters, so I prefer getting granular whenever possible. I quickly I landed on him being Syrian because I wanted to incorporate the legacy of the Damascus Affair, one of the “modern” Blood Libels, and because Gravesend, which historically has been a Syrian Jewish enclave, was too good of a neighborhood name not to be the home of a kid who talks to dead people.
The specifics of his character are partly a result of me needing other natural pathways into his voice, because while a lot of my extended family and the Jewish network I grew up in is Mizrahi, my parents are Ashkenazi, and Brooklyn Syrian Jewry is something very specific. So, like me he has an Israeli dad and an American mom and is a product of that dynamic. This is also why I made him a box office attendant (it was my first customer service job) and why he has my particular sense of humor. Then, to fill in the parts specific to Syrian Brooklyn, I supplemented the things I already knew with research that ranged from history books to synagogue websites, and was also fortunate enough to work with an authenticity reader who was able to help me iron out details and check me on logistics (for instance, Boaz was originally a Ramaz grad, because while I’ve lived in the city for almost ten years, I’ve never lived in Brooklyn and did not consider how brutal that would be as a daily commute).
You wrote a great essay for the Jewish Book Council on the background of Estries, the shapeshifting vampire owls at the heart of your debut. How did you get from learning about these mythological creatures at a writers’ symposium to starring them in your work?
So sometimes you encounter details or ideas that you really want to use in a book but don’t know how at that exact moment, so it goes into the mental filing cabinet for another day. That was very much estries for me. It was a concept I instantly loved, as someone with lots of Big Jewish Feelings(TM) about my hair and who came of age during the first wave of YA vampires. But I didn’t know what to do with it, especially because for the longest time the conventional wisdom in publishing was that vampires were done and that no one ever wanted them again.
But, the beauty of publishing trends is that they’re often cyclical. Over time, I started seeing editors and others post about how much they missed and wanted vampires back in YA, partly out of Twilight nostalgia and also because things like What We Do In The Shadows or First Killwere reminding people that there’s actually a lot of ways to do vampires and a lot of vampires we hadn’t seen yet. There was a growing sense that people were maybe coming around to the idea, and that energy was what made the timing feel right to start brainstorming what would become Night Owls.
One thing that’s really wonderful about Night Owls is that it digs deep into Jewish history, but a part that isn’t much discussed in YA lit, specifically the era of Yiddish Theatre and the community of the Lower East Side. What inspired this element of the book, and what did your research look like?
I’m a Jewish history nerd and a theater nerd and at the intersection of that is Yiddish theater, but my first exposure to it was actually in an undergrad in a course on the history of Jews in comics. My professor for the course believed strongly that Yiddish theater was important to understanding the comic book as a Jewish cultural creation, because they both were products of the same Jewish immigrant community and left lasting impacts on American pop culture. But while it’s easy to see the impact of superheroes and comic books, Yiddish theater is slightly less obvious, in part because it’s often underestimated. Yiddish theater was more expansive and more influential to the development of modern American theater than people often give it credit for. As part of that class, we watched a lot of Yiddish films, and it really made an impression on me.
Then I moved to NYC for law school, and by my second year found myself living a block over from Village East by Angelika, a former Yiddish playhouse and current cinema, which would come to heavily inspire The Grand Dame. I also had access to and started taking advantage of the endless amount of live theater, including Yiddish theater and Yiddish-theater-adjacent work. I am a huge fan of the work of Folksbiene, the Yiddish theater company behind the recent Fiddler on the Roof Yiddish adaptation and which regularly stages Yiddish productions. I also am obsessed with Indecent, Paula Vogel’s play chronicling the history of Got Fun Nekome, and how the play, which featured the first romantic same-sex kiss on a Broadway stage when it was translated into English. was shut down on charges of “indecency”. So I was drawing on all of that when I started working on Night Owls, and supplementing it with what I’d consider the definitive book on American Yiddish theater, New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway, edited by Edna Nahshon.
The Lower East Side isn’t the only part of the City with relevance to Night Owls; as an NYU alumna, that felt like a fun meta part of the read as well. What about NYC do you think makes such a great literary setting?
At least for my purposes, the fun of writing NYC is how much history is hiding in plain sight, how many seemingly ordinary buildings and parks and features are actually of major cultural and historical importance, and how any one neighborhood can visibly tell a story of multiple generations of peoples and cultures that have passed through. There’s so many ghosts and an endless sense of story that makes it easy to write about. No matter how much is said about NYC, there are always new and interesting threads to find and pull on.
Both queer and Jewish literature have evolved and grown a lot in recent years, in some ways that’ve been really fascinating to see. What have you in particular observed about that growth, and where do you think we could still stand to see more representation?
The speed at which the YA landscape has shifted is incredible, I started seriously pursuing publication in 2016, which doesn’t feel that long ago, but in YA it’s just a completely different landscape. The options and variety are so much greater, I can find lots of examples of the kind of book that in 2016 would have been basically impossible to find. But I do worry that a lot of these gains are fragile and may already be rolling back. Of course, the ongoing book bans and related censorship efforts are making it increasingly hard to publish and sustain a career writing queer books for kids and teens. It’s also pretty clear to me that Jewish YA is also struggling in part but not exclusively because of the bans. We’re currently trending downward: in 2024 there was less Jewish YA published than in 2023, and in 2025 there will be even less. My theories for why that is could fill its own book, but I know a lot of us in YA, really struggle to get meaningful support both from publishers and also from Jewish organizations, and we actually do need those things in order to build sustainable writing careers.
The thing I always want in terms of rep is more. More variety, and more specificity. I want to see people and backgrounds and histories and levels of religious observance, and I want it to be substantive. A book doesn’t need to be “about” being Jewish for it to have substantive cultural specificity that informs and enriches the text, I want people to not think about it as an either/or situation. I want books that cover a wider scope of our history. I want the Jewish world in books to reflect the Jewish world we all live in, and I want more Jewish authors to feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to their work and to write without fear.
Not only did you win the Sidney Taylor Book Award, but the National Jewish Book Award as well? How did you celebrate these monumental accolades?
I bought a Breads Bakery babka! And then I whipped out my Alphasmart and got back to writing. Honestly, this came at a moment for me when I was feeling a bit unmoored and unsure of whether YA was where I belonged as a writer. And while you should never, ever assign the worth of your work to a metric that’s outside of your control…this was definitely a major confidence boost.
>What’s up next for you?
I don’t currently have a book under contract just yet, so I am in my writing cave and having a good time with it! More to come, but whatever I publish next will definitely be for fans of Night Owls.
For more information about A.R. Vishny, visit her website!
A.R. Vishny was born and raised in Massachusetts, but now calls New York City home. Her essays on Jewish representation in pop culture have appeared in Teen Vogue, The Washington Post, and Hey Alma. She earned a B.A. in English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a J.D. at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she was a Law and Literature fellow. When she’s not writing she’s at the theater, or else hunting for the perfect slice of cheesecake.
