Grief Dreams: How They Help Us Heal After the Death of a Loved One

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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]

Dreams of My Father

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1. When I started to dream about my father, every one started like this: Me: It’s good to see you. Him: It’s good to see you. Me: I thought you died. Him: I didn’t die. I was somewhere else. And then the dream goes the way it will, the way all dreams go, to lunacy, and then it ends, always, before the cancer rots his insides, as it did in real life, turning him sallow and gray so suddenly that after he was in the hospital just a few days I could see, for the first time ever, the outline of his cheekbones. He was 59 years old. I was 15. For years, decades, I did not dream of my father. I thought of him. I resented him occasionally for my imperfect childhood. Never was he in my dreams. Sometimes I wondered why that was. Everyone dreams of the dead, sooner or later. 2. It wasn’t until 1900 that Sigmund Freud published his landmark work, The Interpretation of Dreams, which advanced his theory that all dreams are wish fulfillment; that the unconscious is entirely animalistic, instinctual, and sexual, and dreams a way of concealing one’s basest urges from the waking mind. This was disputed by his protégé, Carl Jung, who agreed with Freud on the existence of the unconscious, but viewed dreams as a window to it. Nightmares, according to Jung, are the mind’s way of smoothing over a past trauma through repeated exposure to it. The science and study of dreams and their meanings, if they have any, continues. There is considerable scientific evidence in favor of the theory that all of it is meaningless, that dreams are simply the product of “activation-synthesis,” a random process by which electrical brain impulses gather indiscriminate thoughts and images from our memories, mainly in the deeper recesses of the amygdala and hippocampus. In the meantime you can’t blame a man for trying to figure out why he has started dreaming about his father, 35 years dead and buried. Dreams that drive him to boxes of curled, dusty photos and conversations with long-forgotten relatives in service of reconstructing a man and a life he never satisfactorily knew: what 15-years-old boy really knows his father? 3. My father was the fourth of four children, born in 1922 in Newark, N.J., to a pair of German immigrants. His father, John, made a decent living as a tool-and-dye man even during the Great Depression, but he was an incurable drunk and most days headed straight to the bar after work to drink away all that currency. If it wasn’t bad enough that his family went hungry while he drowned his demons, they also caught hell when the bars closed and he and the rest of the regulars spilled back onto civilization. He handed out 3 a.m. beatings like so many whiskey shots. When little John, their first-born son, was still in his short pants, his mother would send him down to the bar to try to liberate some grocery money. He’d peer through the windows from the curb, trying to assess his father’s degree of drunkenness. If he saw some indication of retreating wits but general lucidity, he’d hang around outside, kill some time. Eventually, when the old man was good and sloppy, John would slink in, wedge himself into the crowd, and try to slip a few bills out of his father’s pocket. He’d catch a beating for it later -- if someone in the bar ratted him out or if the old man’s stupor was such that he could still detect and recognize a close relative. But he’d catch a beating later anyhow, so what was the difference? Frequently, John protected his little brother, my dad, from their father. Seven years older, he took the brunt of it, the way dutiful eldest sons of drunken brutes always have. By the time my dad was old enough to really understand the hell of it, the worst had more or less passed. The old man was still a drunk, but he wasn’t around enough to terrorize everyone. He’d disappear for days, weeks at a time. Drunken binges. Eventually he moved out altogether. I know this because when I was about 10 years old I asked my dad to help me fix a flat tire on my bicycle -- the second flat I had gotten that week. He’d just gotten home from work, was tired, and as he wedged the handle of a claw hammer between the frame and the tire to keep the wheel in place, he snapped, “Do you think my father was around to help me do this kind of stuff?” A few years before that, my grandfather had come to live with us, the result of having been evicted from his apartment and arrested following an incident in which, while hopelessly drunk and, probably not coincidentally, naked, he chased his landlady around the apartment building in which he lived while waving a butcher knife. It seems now a curiosity that my parents subsequently made available to him a basement bedroom in a home where three young children lived, and even more so given our proximity directly across the road from the neighborhood tavern. The arrangement was doomed at the start. I remember my mother berating him in the kitchen for doing the inevitable, and my father, standing behind her, looking defeated, ashamed, trying to keep the peace. “Grandpa” moved out a short while later and recalling now the interactions between he and my father, I get the sense that if my father resented him for his myriad and profound failures, that resentment was equal in measure to the desire for his approval. Years later, when Alzheimer’s consumed my grandfather and landed him in a nursing home, we visited him. “Dad, don’t you recognize me?” my father pleaded. “No!” he snapped and turned away. The ride home was silent, and grandpa died in that nursing home at 96 years old in 1985, outliving both his sons. I’ve always felt it a minor tragedy that in his last years he had no recollection of what a shit he’d been, the disease effectively absolving him. 4. In her comprehensive book, The Twenty-Four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives, Dr. Rosalind D. Cartwright submits that dreams reveal, “how we think about ourselves, and our relations to significant others and the world about us.” Dreaming, then, is, in part, a kind of mood regulator. “The dream process that actively mediates the negative mood associated with some waking experience seems to have the effect of stabilizing a better morning mood and that mood progressively improves.” 5. I did not shed a tear at my father’s funeral. I don’t know how I could be expected to. It would be like expecting an adolescent maple tree to weep at the loss of the sun: He’s too naïve and it’s too large for him to comprehend. So he goes on for a while just being a maple and for some time nothing changes. He’s a maple. I pondered that perhaps the sudden and regular appearance of my father in my dreams represents a kind of delayed grieving, and that maybe these dreams will somehow bring on the “closure” that is so coveted and revered among mourners and survivors who appear on daytime talk shows and crime dramas. Maybe the dreams mean I have never “processed” the loss. “That’s a hypothesis. It’s not been my clinical experience,” Dr. Pauline Boss told me in an email. Boss is the author of several books about grief and loss, most notably Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. “I don’t believe in ‘closure’ so there’s an element of grief that we live with when we’ve lost someone we love and I consider that normal that you might be sad at a certain time five years, 20 years, a generation later,” she wrote. “I think the proposition I would put forth is the more a person can discuss their dreams the more likely they are to be on the road to health, and I don’t mean closure or recovery,” she said. “We live with loss across the lifespan. You don’t get over it; you learn to live with it.” Boss said she still dreams of her father, who died 20 years ago, and of her younger brother, who died from polio at age 13, the summer before Jonas Salk’s revolutionary vaccine effectively eradicated the disease worldwide. 6. My grandparents divorced in the early-'40s. Given my grandfather’s chronic absenteeism, it didn’t much matter. My dad, at 19, was already a man, even if he didn’t entirely look it. Taking after his mother’s side of the family, he stopped growing at about 5’8” and retained a generous layer of baby fat, which made him look younger than he was (and which clung to him for the rest of his life). Moreover, whereas his older siblings each portrayed a classic German stoicism informed further by the harshness of their upbringing, he was outgoing and garrulous, with a large personality and generous sense of humor. As a middle-aged man he kidded around with the waitress and with the mechanic and with the cashier at the supermarket, and with the kids when he got home from work. Photos taken during his youth show him grinning merrily. He dropped out of high school and in November 1942 followed his big brother into the Army to save the world from the Nazis. Basic training was at Camp Edwards in Massachusetts. It was from there that he began writing endearingly self-conscious love letters to his sweetheart back home, a tall, curly-haired, and freckled brunette with whom he’d fallen in love not long before. Priscilla Bescherer was born in Newark in 1925, the second-youngest of seven children who raised her when their parents died few years later. She was fun-loving and energetic and, like Bill, loved to laugh. She had a magnificent space between her two front teeth, and, as he would later discover, an explosive temper that complemented a remarkable capacity for self-pity. More than anything, she wanted kids. They married in 1943, and shortly after, he was shipped off to Luzon and then New Guinea. He achieved the rank of “Technician 5th grade” before being honorably discharged in January 1946. He went to school and received certificates in tool-and-dye making, and later landed a job as a machinist at an electrical instrument company in Newark. Soon they moved to the suburbs and for the next 10 years tried unsuccessfully to have kids. To help fill the hole their childlessness created, they took in foster children, and then in 1957 adopted a baby girl and named her Patti Ann. My father was 35 years old. 7. The romantics believe that when we see the dead in our dreams, it is because they are reaching out to us from another existence -- the afterlife. The Internet is lousy with all manner of paranormal mystics, psychics, and others who claim to connect with the dead and in many cases offer to teach you, for a small fee, how to do the same. I wasn’t able to convince a single laborer in the paranormal arts to speak with me, but one, Anne Reith, co-director of the Impart Wisdom & Wellness Center and director of the Institute for Mediumship, Psychic, Astrological, & Reiki Training, invited me to quote freely on the subject from her blog. It is actually easier for spiritual entities of all kinds (e.g., deceased loved ones, guides, angels) to communicate with us while we are sleeping. Why? Because when sleeping, we are in that ‘in between place’ between our Earthly reality and ‘the other side of the veil’ (the spiritual world). During this time, our rational mind and our ego are not engaged. Things can happen in our dream world that we would normally stop or discount while awake. There are several characteristics associated with “true” visitation dreams. One of these is that they feel “real.” Also, the dead person typically communicates a strong message of reassurance, and the dreamer will immediately recognize the unusual vividness of the dream. “The person (or animal) will almost always appear in the dream to be completely healthy and behaving in a loving manner. They will rarely appear sick or injured. They will never be angry, disappointed, depressed, or punishing.” 8. My mother became a Girl Scout troop leader and a vocal PTA member. She was active in the neighborhood and, among other adventures, spearheaded a fund-raiser for the muscular dystrophy association. She filled scrapbooks with family keepsakes and photos, and later, to help make ends meet, took a job as a waitress at a local diner. In 1966 my parents adopted my twin sister and me and although they now had by most standards a satisfactorily-sized family, they continued taking in foster children for the next five or six years. And, one after the other, my fun-loving, hard-working, ever-popular mother brutalized them. It was not uncommon for her to beat these poor children for trivial offenses, and to viciously berate them. I recollect her screaming at one little boy, who was crying for his mother and couldn’t have been more than five years old, “Don’t think you’re going to back to your mother, because she doesn’t want you!” A similar scene took place with an older boy, probably around 12, just on the edge of puberty, whom my mother accused, not for the first time apparently, of masturbating in bed and thus soiling the sheets. His fervent denials roused her to a vicious frenzy -- she towered over him, belaboring him, slapping him, humiliating him, until finally he gave up on convincing her of his innocence and yelled, “I’ll stop!” Whenever this happened, it was my father who pulled her off the child, saying, “That’s enough, that’s enough.” He couldn’t bear the violence, a softness for which she ridiculed him. After one incident, in which she challenged a misbehaving six-year-old boy to a fistfight in the bathroom, she turned her ugliness on him, presumably because she'd had to do the dirty work. “What kind of man are you?” she demanded. “You’re no man.” He sat smoking at the dining room table, defeated, embarrassed, and said in reply, “Thanks a lot.” I, in my pajamas, stared at him from a few feet away. It was his fault she didn’t have a dishwasher, like her sisters did. It was his fault she had to work. It was his fault we didn’t live in Florida, where she always wanted to live, for reasons that were never clear. If there was something wrong with her life -- and there always was -- it was his fault and she wasn’t shy about letting him know it. He almost left. After one explosive fight he emerged from the bedroom with a worn, brown suitcase at his side. He stopped and surveyed my sister and me, both sobbing. He put down the suitcase, approached my sister and knelt down. “Why are you crying?” “Patti said you were leaving!” she bawled, and the sobbing began anew. He looked at us hard. He stood up. “I’m not leaving until you two are 18.” He turned and took his battered suitcase back into the bedroom. Later, my mother made us lunch. 9. I asked Dr. TJ Wray, author of Grief Dreams: How They Help Heal Us After the Death of a Loved One, how common dreams of the dead are among mourners, and what purpose they serve. “Grief dreams are a universal experience among mourners,” she wrote in an email. First, they help us to absorb shock (particularly in the aftermath of the death of a loved one); second, grief dreams help to sort our emotions. These emotions run the gamut from extreme anguish, to anger, to remorse, to even relief. Third, grief dreams can continue our relationship with the deceased. For example, in cases where a child has had a complicated relationship with a parent, dreams can help the survivor resolve problems and issues that were roadblocks in life. 10. It’s true that my relationship with my father was complicated, at least in my thinking. When I got a little older, I often defended him against my mother’s barbs, only to have him scold me for speaking to her disrespectfully. He frequently took me to the barbershop with him, or to the market, or to the mechanic, and got up early on Sunday mornings to help me on my newspaper route, but during these outings we barely spoke. He showed me how to put chlorine in the pool (because “someday I won’t be here to do it”) and how to cut a two-by-four in half (“let the saw do the work for you”) but had to be harangued by my mother into playing catch with me in the backyard (the only time that occurred). In the year before he died, I started boxing. Three times a week he drove me to and from the gym, and when I won and got my name in the paper he bragged behind my back to friends and neighbors. He never attended any of my fights. I’ll never know why. 11. Ian Wallace, author of The Top 100 Dreams: The Dreams That We All Have and What They Really Mean, believes that dreams are not things that happen to us but, rather, episodes that we create during sleep toward gaining a deeper, better understanding of ourselves and our lives. “As we journey through life and become more mature and experienced, we often begin to connect with personal qualities that may have seemed less available to us when we were younger,” he said. “In my experience, if either of the parents died prematurely, then it is quite common for the dreamer to create a series of vivid dream episodes when they themselves reach the age that the parent was when they passed on,” he said. 12. My father quit smoking the day his brother died. He’d taken it up as a kid, had been at it probably 45 years. Winstons. My mother was on him all the time to quit, but he wouldn’t. For as far back as I can remember he had a consistent smoker’s cough that my sister and I used to locate him and my mother whenever we got separated from them in a department store or supermarket. When he laughed very hard it would get caught it his throat and turn into a coughing fit and my best memories are of the few times I was accidentally hilarious at the dinner table, the way kids sometimes are, and got him laughing so hard and coughing so much that he had to stand up and walk around to get his breath back. It was glorious. In the summer of 1981 my father’s telltale smokers’ hack took on a new feature -- a ghastly kind of whistle at the end that seemed something not intended to come out of the lungs of a human being. While in a department store shopping for clothes for my upcoming school year, he confided to me that he’d been getting pains in his back, and night sweats. He said that if he knew it was too late, that his quitting smoking had been pointless, he’d start right up again. In my early-teenage naiveté and narcissism it barely registered: I left the store without the slightest idea that he could be dying. He took little apparent joy at being alive. He rarely laughed anymore or kidded round. At a restaurant one night, my sister and I bickered. He scolded me and then proclaimed, “Jesus Christ, what am I alive for?” On the positive side, he and my mother started to spend time alone together, to go out to dinner or a movie. They held hands. Then one afternoon in September my mother got off the phone with a doctor and told my sister and me that our father was sick and would be going into the hospital. When he got home from work she led him into the living room and told him what he already knew: It was cancer. He lay on the couch, put his hands over his face and wept. She told him: “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay. We’ll just have to move to Florida.” She was confusing his lung cancer with emphysema, whose sufferers supposedly fair better in hot climates. Or, she was trying to reassure him. The next morning we prepared to take him to the local hospital, which had a well-earned reputation for being one’s last stop on the way to the morgue. I walked into the dining room to see my father on the phone. He saw me and waved me away. I stood where I had stopped and heard him say into the phone, “Hello, is this the number where people pray for you?” In the hospital, the doctors told him that they would give him chemotherapy and then remove his poisoned lung, and maybe even replace it with a new, younger one. Then they took us in another room and told us it was hopeless, that he soon would be dead. He figured it out quickly enough and a couple days later the pastor from our church came in and during an otherwise muffled conversation I heard my father say loudly, and not altogether unhappily, “I’m not afraid to die.”  My mother hushed him -- “Oh, knock it off, you’re not going to die.”  But he was. He knew it. And he was okay with it. He even started joking around again and of all the patients around him who also were waiting to die, I was told later that he was the nurses’ favorite. For the next several days we all sat with him, all day and mostly watched him sleep, the IV bag dripping sweet serenity into his dying veins. Someone decided it would be best if we didn’t miss any more school, so I was sitting in class when he died on an otherwise ordinary Thursday morning on September 17, 1981. Now, 35 years later, it is good to see him again. Photo courtesy of the author.