Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel (John MacRae Books)

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

Literary Deaths of 2022

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In 2022, we mourned the deaths of many literary giants who remained under-celebrated in their lifetimes. These are some of them. With his eye patch and no-bullshit demeanor, Andrew Vachss was a man on a mission. He was an author of hard-boiled fiction as well as poetry and comic books. He was also a lawyer, a supervisor of a juvenile prison, and an advocate for abused children, sitting near President Bill Clinton in 1993 when he signed the National Child Protection Act into law. It established a national registry of convicted child abusers and was widely known as “the Oprah Bill” because Vachss had advocated for it on Oprah Winfrey’s television show. She sat beside Vachss at the White House signing ceremony. Vachss (pronounced “vax”), who lost the sight in his right eye from a childhood accident, died of coronary artery disease on Nov. 23, 2021 at 79, but his death was not widely reported until months later. He published 18 hard-boiled crime novels featuring an antihero named Burke, an ex-con and unlicensed private investigator who doesn’t always play nice as he pursues people who prey on children. Vachss, unlike Burke, was not a victim of sexual abuse as a child, but, like Burke, he had a black-and-white view of such predators, including Westley Allan Dodd, who was executed by hanging in 1993 after he was convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering three young boys. “Some predatory sociopaths can be deterred,” Vachss wrote at the time. “None can be rehabilitated…. What makes sexual predators so intractable and dangerous is that, as Mr. Dodd candidly acknowledged, they like what they do and intend to keep doing it.” Burke had an equally uncompromising view of such monsters, and he treated them accordingly. Vachss explained his antihero’s unnerving rough edges this way: “I wanted to show people what hell looked like, and I didn’t think an angel would be the right guide.” * Though never a household name, Bruce Duffy drew rapturous critical praise for his 1987 debut novel, The World as I Found It, a fictional biography of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Duffy was unfazed when the dense and challenging book failed to catch on with readers. “You know,” he said at the time, “you don’t always have a choice of what you’re going to write. You’re not like a cow that can give ice cream with one udder and milk with another. So I said, ‘Screw it!’ I don’t care what anybody thinks.” Duffy, who died from complications of brain cancer on Feb. 10 at 70, produced just two more novels—an autobiographical tale about a 12-year-old boy who flees his home in the Maryland suburbs after his mother’s death, and a reimagining of the life of the scabrous French poet Arthur Rimbaud. All the while Duffy worked day jobs as a security guard, corporate consultant and speechwriter. Though The World as I Found It was reissued as a classic by NYRB in 2010, Duffy couldn’t find a literary agent willing to shop his fourth novel. Once again he said “Screw it!” and started writing a new book. He was working on it at the time of his death. * Duvall Hecht never wrote a book. Yet Hecht, who died of heart failure on Feb. 10 at 91, brought books to untold millions of avid listeners. Bored with listening to the radio during his long commutes on L.A. freeways in the 1970s, Hecht and his first wife, Sigrid, started a business in their living room called Books on Tape, which gave birth to today’s $1.3 billion audiobooks industry. The Hechts’ formula was simple: pay unknown actors to read every single word of books in the public domain, then sell or rent the cassettes through the mail to individuals, schools and libraries. It worked, but it wasn’t Hecht’s whole story. In his long and colorful life, he served in the Marines, won a gold medal as a member of the United States rowing team at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, coached college rowing teams, worked as a commercial pilot and in marketing for an investment banking firm. After the Books on Tape catalog reached 6,000 titles, Hecht sold the business to Random House for $20 million, then took one last career turn. He lived out a boyhood dream and spent seven years driving 18-wheelers. He loved the life of of a long-haul trucker: it was perfect for listening to audiobooks. * Twenty years before he dragged the United States into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara was crunching ordnance numbers for the U.S. military’s fire-bombing of Japanese cities, a campaign designed to break the nation’s spirit hasten the end of the Second World War. McNamara calculated the necessary number of planes for the bombing runs, the miles of flight, the gallons of fuel, the amount of jellied gasoline. When the campaign failed to accomplish its purpose, President Truman ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Katsumoto Saotome, who died of pneumonia on May 10 at 90, was one of the survivors of the fire-bombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945, which incinerated an estimated 100,000 people in a single day, most of them civilians. Saotome, a novelist, spent more than half a century amassing the memories of his fellow survivors, which eventually filled six volumes. The first, published in 1971, was modeled on John Hersey’s famous account of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The bombing of civilians has largely been a failure as war strategy. It failed during the Blitz in London, it failed during the bombing of German cities—the subject of Kurt Vonnegut’s blistering novel Slaughterhouse Five—and it appears to be failing today in Ukraine. After watching news footage of Ukrainian women and children trying to escape Russian artillery attacks, Saotome said he was reminded of scenes in Tokyo nearly 80 years earlier: “I feel like I am seeing scenes of many Japanese people wandering around trying to escape just in front of my eyes.” * Nancy Milford was a two-hit wonder, the author of best-selling biographies of two of the most incandescent women of the Jazz Age: Zelda Fitzgerald and the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. While researching Zelda (1970) and Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001), Milford’s dogged research was aided by strokes of dazzling good luck. Her research for Zelda included letters, albums, scrapbooks, interviews with friends of her subject and her subject’s husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as reports by psychiatrists who treated Zelda for schizophrenia. The luck came when Zelda’s daughter, Scottie, handed her mother’s papers to Milford in shopping bags—a trove no one else had seen. For Savage Beauty, the luck sprang from a visit to the upstate New York home of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister, Norma. The house was stuffed with thousands of Edna’s notebooks, letters and drafts of poems that no one else had seen, treasure the biographer pored over for four summers. Milford, who died of an unspecified cause on March 29 at 84, spent more than three decades working on the second of her two hits. In those years she spent countless hours teaching, bombing around the Berkshire Mountains in an antique Morgan sports car, and helping found the Leon Levy Center for Biography in Manhattan. Milford made no apologies for the long lull between books. “Pish posh,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s my life, and I can do with it what I want.” * With his hyphenated name, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith staked a claim to the territory of the Rio Grande Valley, a slice of borderland between two cultures that he called Belken County. This imaginary county’s imaginary county seat was Klail City, which was surrounded by the towns of Flora, San Pedro, Ruffing and Jonesville-on-the-Rio. Readers and critics invariably linked this self-contained universe to the extraordinary Yoknapatawpha and Macondo, and even to above-average Lake Wobegone. Hinojosa-Smith, who wrote in English and Spanish (and taught himself German), was best known for his 15-volume Klail City Death Trip series, but he also wrote short stories and essays, freely mixing in poetry, sketches, letters, police procedurals, autofiction, border noir, fragments of dialog and monolog. Time got chopped up. Narratives rarely moved straight ahead. They teemed with, as Hinojosa-Smith put it, “the fair and the mean, the fools and knaves, the heroes and cowards, those who are selfish, and those who are full of self-abnegation.” Like the people and the world it tries to capture, there is nothing conventional about the writing. And there was nothing conventional about the writer. Hinojosa-Smith, who died from complications of dementia on April 19 at 93, served in the U.S. Army, worked in a chemical plant, taught high school and worked as a civil servant before turning to fiction. After he made his name as a writer, he taught literature at the University of Texas for 35 years. Writing in Texas Monthly, the novelist Richard Z. Santos summed up what Hinojosa-Smith did for the residents of Belken County and every other borderland in the world. “The people are no longer mutants or outcasts but hybrids and the future of both society and literature,” Santos wrote. They are also, he added, “something new and beautiful.” * In 2018, Duncan Hannah published a first-person account of the 1970s downtown New York art and punk rock scene, 20th Century Boy: Notebooks on the Seventies. Partying at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, hanging with the Warhol crowd, appearing in underground movies with Debbie Harry, drinking and drugging and fucking heroically, Hannah seemed to be everywhere and to know everybody. Few of them knew that the young man from Minneapolis had artistic dreams backed by a trust fund, and few would have predicted that he would sober up and have a respectable late career as a painter of realistic pictures that he described as “a love letter to art history.” My own review of 20th Century Boy ended with a premonition of this unlikely second act for Hannah, who died of heart attack on June 11 at 69. “(The book) ends almost sweetly,” I wrote, “with Hannah’s stubbornly conventional paintings winning him a solo gallery show, where he arrives sober, gets treated like a prince, and actually sells a bunch of pictures. Hannah has come to realize that the coolest thing of all is the courage to do what’s uncool. It’s a grace note of an ending to a long grubby harrowing wallow. Somehow, it feels perfect.” * Melissa Bank was a textbook “overnight” success. She spent 12 years polishing her first batch for short stories, writing on weekends and at night after working a day job as a copywriter for an advertising agency. Then, when the collection’s title story was published in the literary magazine Zoetrope, the book world woke up. A bidding war ensued. When it was over, Bank was handed a $275,000 advance from Viking for her first book, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which became a New York Times bestseller, got translated into dozens of languages, sold 1.5 million copies and, for better and mostly worse, got tarred with the brush of “chick lit.” The book follows Jane Rosenal as she moves from her teen years to her mid-thirties, navigating the shoals of sex, love, money and death. The voice is controlled and knowing—“like John Cheever, only funnier,” in the opinion of one critic. There are grace notes sprinkled throughout the stories, as when Jane escorts her older brother’s older girlfriend into the bedroom they’ll be sharing at the family’s beach house. The room is furnished with a pair of bunk beds. The girlfriend, a Manhattan sophisticate named Julia Cathcart, surveys the setup: “A bunk,” she said, as though charmed. “Like camp.” Bank followed her debut with a second collection of linked stories, The Wonder Spot, in 2005. Though it did not sell nearly as well as Girls’ Guide, critics were unanimous in declaring it the better book. Bank was at work on a third book when she died from lung cancer on Aug. 2 at 61, an overnight success gone too soon. * The death of Barbara Ehrenreich, from breast cancer on Sept. 1 at 81, was a loss for every overworked, underpaid, unappreciated person struggling to survive in America—and for every clear-eyed person who sees through the rosy myths of the American dream. Ehrenreich eviscerated those myths most surgically in her 2001 best-seller, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. To research the book, Ehrenreich, who held a doctorate in cellular immunology, took on a string of minimum-wage jobs— waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, nursing home aide, Walmart associate—while living in trailer parks and cheap hotels. Though the book, like all of her writing, was fuelled by rage over the worsening inequality of life in America, her goal was less to vent than to give voice to the legions of invisible people working at the bottom of the ladder. In a career that produced more than 20 books, she also took on the pharmaceutical industry, the failure of America’s health care system, poverty, student protests, women’s rights, even the danger of the peculiarly American fixation with “positive thinking.” It was a career that pointed to a chilling conclusion. As Ehrenreich put it: “We turn out to be so vulnerable in the United States.” * Mike Davis was a seer, a writer who explored the hollow heart of the American Dream, Southern-California style. In 1990, shortly after the publication of his best-known book, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Davis said: “What we’re going to find out in short order is that for tens of thousands of people, there’s only one rung of the ladder. There’s no place to climb up.” That year, as crack cocaine coursed through L.A., an average of three people died every day from gun violence. Two years after the book’s publication, Los Angeles exploded with rioting in the wake of the acquittal of four white policemen who were captured on video beating a Black man named Rodney King. Davis was instantly anointed a prophet for his prescient insights into the city’s social fissures. In a 2006 reissue of the book, he dismissed such plaudits: “Every eleven-year-old in the city knew that an explosion of some kind was coming.” He added this dry assessment: “City of Quartz, in a nutshell, is about the contradictory impact of economic globalization upon different segments of Los Angeles society.” The city, he added a bit more poetically, “has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.” He followed his breakout success with Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster in 1998, which excoriated the heedless, market-driven urbanization of the desert. “As a result,” Davis wrote, “Southern California has reaped flood, fire and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets.” Disaster, as he predicted, is now at hand. Seven states, including California, are currently at war over rights to the Colorado River, which is at its lowest level ever thanks to climate change and the region’s insatiable thirst for water. Davis, who died of esophageal cancer on Oct. 25 at 79, grew up in a blue-collar family and spent his early years protesting the Vietnam War and working as a meat cutter and a truck driver. The former job got him a union scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles, which he entered at the age of 28, and the latter introduced him to off-the-radar pockets of Los Angeles County, which would provide the source material for his later writings. Despite all the dark foreboding in his books, Davis remained an optimist to the end. “Utopia is available to us,” he said in 2020. “You can never discard hope.” * When they were in eighth grade, 14-year-old Lloyd Newman and his buddy LeAlan Jones tape-recorded 100 hours of interviews with friends, family and neighbors in the Ida B. Wells housing project in Chicago, an oral history they called “Ghetto Life 101.” It caught the ear of a National Public Radio producer named David Isay, who boiled it down into a 28-minute segment for NPR in 1993. Three years later, the two friends produced an oral collage, “Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse,” that explored the horrific killing of a 5-year-old boy who was dropped from the window of a vacant fourteenth-floor apartment by two children, aged 10 and 11. Eric’s crime? He refused to steal candy for his killers. The collage made Newman and Jones the youngest winners in the history of the prestigious Peabody Award. A year later, the collage was adapted into a book, Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago, co-written with Isay. After the book appeared, Newman gave a succinct summery of death and life in an American ghetto: “People get thrown out of windows, drowned, stabbed, shot. But a lot of that killing would stop if the government would make it livable around here. We don’t have no parks. The swings are broken. There’s nothing for people to do. There’s no fun. Life isn’t worth living without some fun.” Newman died on Dec. 7 from complications of sickle cell anemia. He was 43. * And here, in alphabetical order, are a few of the more towering literary figures we lost this year: Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. (86) was a product of generations of New England wealth. That wealth—its sources and manners, its mores and foibles—became the topic of his best-known work, Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America, a knowing, clear-eyed dissection of the upper classes that won deserved comparisons to The Education of Henry Adams. Baseball was more than a game to Roger Angell (101). It was an obsession and a metaphor and a source of joy. He was both an elegant reporter and a shameless fan. In his 1977 book Five Seasons, he tried to explain what drives the sports fan: “It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.” Jason Epstein (93) was an oxymoron—a hard-nosed businessman with a soft spot for fine literature. As an editor he helped shape the writings of a stable or thoroughbreds that included Gore Vidal, Jean Strouse, W.H. Auden, Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer, among many others. As a businessman he saw the market for quality paperbacks, and he helped give birth to the New York Review of Books during a bruising newspaper strike in 1963. It’s still going strong today. After it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982, A Soldier’s Play by Charles Fuller (83) caught Hollywood’s attention. The story about the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for his killer was a breakthrough because it moved beyond idealized or demonized types and served up flawed, three-dimensional characters, both Black and white. The movie version, retitled A Soldier’s Story, had a cast that included Denzel Washington from the original off-Broadway cast. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for best picture and one for Fuller’s adapted screenplay. Despite this pedigree, the play did not make it to Broadway until 2020, when it won the Tony Award for best revival. It’s too late to ask Fuller: Is vindication sweeter after such a long wait? In addition to winning a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry, Richard Howard (92) translated the works of dozens of French writers into English, among them Charles Baudelaire, Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet. On a different note, he also translated Charles de Gaulle’s war memoirs. Herbert Janklow (91)and Sterling Lord (102) were two giants among literary agents. The former was known for his longevity and for making his clients rich, including Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, Nancy Reagan and Pope John Paul II; the latter was known for his longevity and for making his clients famous, including Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Doris Kearns Goodwin and, counter-intuitively, Robert McNamara. “This is a business of self-fulfilling prophecies,” Janklow declared. “One of the reasons to drive for big advances is not to make authors and agents rich. It’s to make the publisher aware of what he’s bought.” Her trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell—Wolf HallBring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light—won two Booker Prizes and an adoring worldwide readership for Hilary Mantel (70). She said she decided to reimagine the inner life of Cromwell, one of the most trusted aides of King Henry VIII, because everything she’d read made him out to be a stereotyped villain. “I realized,” she said two years before her death, “that some imaginative work was due on this man.” It’s unthinkable that an American writer could inspire the critical acclaim and public adulation that were showered on the Spanish writer Javier Marías (70). His novels drew freely on spy thrillers and murder mysteries, and he turned this material into literature with intricate plots and a rambling, discursive style. He also wrote a popular newspaper column, translated the work of British and American writers into Spanish, and sold some eight million copies of his 14 novels, four books of short-stories and dozens of essay collections worldwide. In his decorated life, Marias was regularly mentioned as a favorite to win of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the one award that eluded him. There didn’t seem to be a subject too big for the capacious talents of David McCullough (89). He wrote fluid best-sellers about disaster (the Johnstown flood), marvels of engineering and human will (the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal), presidents (John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman), and about the momentous year of 1776. “I think of writing history as an art form,” McCullough said in an interview for an HBO documentary. “And I’m striving to write a book that might—might—qualify as literature. I don’t want it just to be readable. I don’t want it just to be interesting. I want it to be something that moves the reader. Moves me.” As an art critic at The Village Voice and later The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl (80) wrote out of deep knowledge or art and an even deeper love for artists and their creations. His criticism could cut, but it always came out of that love. He was also a published poet, and he said that writing poetry taught him the art of “tracking truth by ear.” Late in life he became the subject of Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, a memoir by his daughter, Ada Calhoun. “I compulsively reread it,” Schjeldahl wrote to Calhoun shortly before he died, “deeply joyful.”