The Legend of Good Women

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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]

It’s All For Keeps: David Vann on Truth, Fiction, and How We Find Out Who We Are

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For a writer whose own life has been so central to his work, David Vann is nothing like what you might expect from reading his books. His writing is thrillingly dark, haunted by personal trauma and utterly ruthless in its exposure of human perversity and frailty. In person, however, he is among the warmest, most open and good-humored people I have ever interviewed. He is quick to break into laughter even when discussing the blackest of topics. And the blackest of topics cannot possibly be avoided when speaking about Vann’s work. Legend of a Suicide, the book for which he was made justly famous, is a sequence of five short stories and a novella, all of which approach, from a variety of fictional starting points, the central and very real fact of Vann’s father’s suicide. That novella, “Sukkwan Island,” is among the most stunning and compelling pieces of fiction I have read by a contemporary author in recent years. His first novel Caribou Island was published earlier this year, and it deals with topics of similar weight and consequence: broken marriages, failed lives, and suicides. He has also written a memoir, entitled A Mile Down: The True Story of A Disastrous Career at Sea, about his ruinous attempts to restore a ship and to start a charter tour company in Turkey. The cover of the book is a photograph of a mast disappearing beneath the surface of a turbulent sea. Once you know that the picture was taken by Vann’s wife from the deck of the lifeboat, you will have some idea of the accuracy of the book’s title and subtitle. I met him at his hotel in Kilkenny, Ireland, where he was due to do a reading that evening at the Kilkenny Arts Festival with Tobias Wolff. The latter's iconically mustachioed presence, incidentally, briefly threw me off my interviewing game when he appeared behind Vann on his way from the bar and clapped him manfully on the shoulder before strolling off again. The Millions: The first thing I wanted to talk about was the unusually long gestation of Legend of a Suicide. You started writing it when you were 19, right? David Vann: Yeah, it had a gestation of ten years. I was writing it from when I was 19 until I was 29. And then it took another 12 years to find a publisher. It finally got published when I was 42. I did no work at all on it between the ages of 30 and 42. TM: So why did it take so long to find a publisher? DV: Well, it wasn’t publishers. It was agents. It didn’t even go to publishers. No agents would send it to publishers. They all liked it, but thought it couldn’t possibly sell. It wasn’t clearly either a non-fiction book or a novel. So I finally sent it to a contest where they just read it blind and don’t care whether it will sell copies. Because I realized no agent was ever going to send it out. TM: And then the creative gestation itself spanned a decade. DV: The reason it took so long to write is that I was trying to write about my Dad’s suicide, and that was a big mess for me emotionally and psychologically, and also for my family. Everyone in my family had a different version of what had happened, what it meant, and who he was. And none of those lined up, so there was no one clear story to tell. The format that Legend of a Suicide takes reflects the meaning of the word “legend” as a series of portraits, taken from Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, and from the hagiographic tradition. And I loved that form, the idea that you could do a series of portraits which could be conflicting, and that together they would provide a more complete picture. That’s what I came to late in the process. It was when I was writing the story “Legend of Good Men,” which is the third story. When I was writing that I sort of discovered the idea that I get this all to fit together that way. Because before that, the first three or four years, I just threw away everything because there was just too much emotion on the first page. It took ten years from 19 to 29 because I was learning to write. The novella within the book, “Sukkwan Island,” came at the very end, and that was a huge surprise for me. The event that happens half-way through was not where I thought I was going. I didn’t see it coming until I was half-way through the sentence. That was the first time I really understood that writing is unconscious, that it’s not about control or ideas or shaping it in some kind of conscious way, that when it takes off and does something more interesting is when there’s an unconscious pattern and cohesion. So to me in a way all those other stories that frame “Sukkwan Island” are in a sense failures. I like them, they’re all in a somewhat different style and form a kind of debate, but they’re all limited by being still conscious and the result of a controlled process. TM: It’s really interesting to hear that it came as a surprise to you, because anyone I know who has read Legend of a Suicide, that’s the moment they talk about, where you invert the facts of your father’s suicide. And I think that’s because when you read it, the reader feels as though you’re breaking some kind of rule, which is a very rare thing now in literature. You feel that this isn’t supposed to happen, that this isn’t what the writer is supposed to be doing with this autobiographical material. DV: In the UK and Ireland especially I think people thought that maybe I did something formally interesting. But it’s not like I had this idea of subverting a reader’s expectation of the form or anything like that. And I’m not a tricky writer at all. Really for me the thing about writing is that everything has to be true. It all has to be real. It was never meant to be tricky. That’s just what happened in the writing with Legend of a Suicide. It wasn’t faked. It was a real transformation. TM: Well I think that’s exactly what’s so powerful about it — about that book and about that moment of rupture — is the fact that you’re not, you know, John Barth. DV: I know. And it scared the shit out of me when I wrote it. The next day I planned to cut it and go back to my plan. But I read all the pages up to it, and I could see that there was all this pattern leading up to that moment, and it was the first time that I really understood what the book was about. And so now I really feel that that process was alive in Caribou Island too. And although there’s not some major rupture, I didn’t know what the characters would do or say each day, because since I’d had this experience with “Sukkwan Island” I went into it knowing it’s better not to know what’s going to happen. And so everything that happens — especially the interactions between the characters — that was all happening each day as it was going along. And for me the places of invention are mostly in the description of landscapes. It’s almost as if every paragraph of landscape has some kind of life for me in that way, where there’s some kind of shifting and transformation going on. The real stuff of my life has been reshaped and redeemed through the unconscious, and that’s really the whole point of writing. TM: You mentioned that everything you write has to be true, or feel true. Do you feel that there’s a level of truth that you have access to in fiction that you don’t have access to when you’re writing in a traditional memoir form, like you were in A Mile Down? DV: Yeah, I do. I also have a non-fiction book about a school shooting coming out in the Fall. That book is true in that I had access to a whole 1,500-page police file on the shooter, and I write about it like he’s a protagonist of a short story. It’s very close to him, and follows his experience. But every scene is built up through a mountain of facts that I have. And to me that’s incredibly constraining. The book doesn’t come alive in the way that fiction does. For me, fiction does have access to a higher sense of truth, an emotional and psychological truth, by being open-ended. TM: Early in A Mile Down, there’s a line where you say, “I’ve come to realize that a life can be like a work of art, constantly melted away and reshaped.” I feel as though there’s an exploratory element to your work both thematically, in terms of what your characters are doing, and in terms of what you yourself are doing as a writer. There’s an attempt to find something real, something true in a new way. DV: Yeah, absolutely. In A Mile Down you see both of those working. My real life was essentially an experiment. I was driving myself toward destruction, toward a repetition of my father’s life, getting closer to his disasters and his end, because really what I was testing was my own sense of doom that I had for 22 years after his death. That I’d be destined to repeat his suicide. That some day I’d get depressed and hit a low point and that suicide would be there waiting for me. That it would be inescapable, something that I couldn’t possibly outrun, like Oedipus. So in real life I was actually heading toward disaster at sea, just as my father did, and I think trying to hit a low point to find out what would be there. And I found out that suicide wasn’t waiting for me. It was a wonderful release to find out that, when I hit the low point and lost everything, I wasn’t thinking of suicide. That it wasn’t there. So it actually worked. It was a strange experiment that worked in real life, but it was done entirely unconsciously. I didn’t realize that I was experimenting with my life. And so now I do have the same sense about my real life that I have about my fiction, which is that I make all these decisions but I have no idea why I’m doing what I’m doing. That life is essentially shaped by the unconscious in the same way that fiction is. TM: I think with your male characters particularly there’s this need to get to a place of simplicity and self-sufficiency which is, on the face of it, quite noble and in some ways quintessentially American. People tend to mention Thoreau a lot in talking about your work, for instance, and I think that’s not a bad point of reference. But the urge for self-sufficiency in your work is a self-defeating and also, I think, a self-destructive urge. Does that strike you as true? DV: I’ve actually thought about this a lot, because I teach nature writing and I think that our ideas in contemporary American nature writing come from the British Romantics really, through the American Transcendentalists. I like Blake the best of those Romantics, and I think his idea of the corrosive process — where you burn away the veils of experience and reveal the infinite which was hidden, the mind of innocence — is really at the core of this idea of finding your goodness and your self-sufficiency out in nature, through being tested. What I don’t share is the faith that we find goodness. And so that’s where my writing ends up departing from it. I don’t believe I can return to Eden, or find any innate goodness or innocence. I think that happiness is more likely to be found in engagement. Which is not denying our bad sides, but just being engaged. TM: I don’t know what you’ll make of this, but it struck me that there are strong elements in your work — more in Caribou Island and A Mile Down than in Legend of a Suicide — that are, purely in terms of the material rather than how you handle it, essentially comic. DV: Oh yeah, definitely. In A Mile Down especially I think there are moments that are comedic even in my version. I don’t think I was very good at writing comedy, but it could have been much funnier. TM: Well, perversely, it’s funnier by virtue of not being funny at all. Which I suppose is the way with a lot of things. DV: Well, Toby Wolff told me that he and his brother read it and they called each other and just laughed about it for about an hour. TM: Really? I’m in good company then. Because as horrible as all those experiences you describe in that memoir are, what you are laying out is basically a classically, straightforwardly comic situation. The guy in over his head, under unbelievable stress and headed for certain disaster with lots of DIY mishaps along the way. DV: Yeah, absolutely. And it strikes me as comic now too. But when I was writing it, I was closer to it and I was trying to describe what happened, and trying to understand it, and I didn’t take full advantage of the comedic potential in it. TM: You seem much less coy than most other fiction writers in talking about the relationship between your life and your fiction. DV: Well, I’m still trying to understand it. To me, the work is more interesting if you understand more about that relationship. If you know the real story behind it and can see the way that it was changed — if you know for instance that my Dad asked me to come spend a year in Alaska with him, and that I said no, and that he killed himself soon after — you can understand that, in "Sukkwan Island" when the boy does go with his father, that’s a chance for me to go back and say yes to spending a year with my Dad. It’s not something I realized when I was writing it, but now in retrospect it seems obvious. So to me, a reader being able to know that changes the work for them. The more a reader can see what an author has experienced — where the transformations are, where the unconscious work is being done — the more they see what the work is. And also, the other reason why I feel as free as I do to talk about everything is that my family has had so much tragedy. My family has been so broken for so long that there’s no pretending anymore that things are fine. So I really feel like I’ve essentially lost shame. I had incredible shame for three years after my Dad’s suicide. From when I was 13 until when I was 16 I told everyone he died of cancer. And I just feel, like, never again, because that was so debilitating. And so to me there’s tremendous freedom in being able to talk freely with people and to not hold anything back. I don’t ever want it to be a canned thing. I never prepare for anything. When I teach, I go in and I know the works well, and we have a conversation about it. I want that conversation to be free to go anywhere. Not just to follow my lecture notes, or plan of what points we have to cover. To me that kills a class, and it would kill an interview, and it would kill a reading. And it would kill writing a book. TM: That doesn’t surprise me. I would never have imagined you as the type of writer with the post-its on a corkboard over your desk and the character outlines and so on. DV: No, no. I actually hate all other forms of writing. I find them to be garbage. I can’t stand the idea of writing a journal or writing a note. I fucking hate it. I hate writing a letter. I can do emails fine, because it’s very fast, but all other forms of writing I view as garbage. I especially don’t like obligatory forms. I never wrote letters to anyone, so email has saved a lot of friendships. I really think that all writing is for keeps. None of it is preparatory or an exercise or whatever. It’s all for keeps. Whenever I write I’m trying to engage in that process and discover something. That’s all I want. TM: Right, because when I read your writing it feels in a lot of ways unworked-over, unsmoothed. It feels spontaneous and rough in a good way. DV: Caribou Island was published in exactly the same version as my first draft. I worked on it every day, two or three hours each morning, for five and a half months. And every two weeks I’d read the whole thing. And each day I’d read through 20 or 30 pages before the point where I had to add new material. So I’ve read through it many, many times before I get to that first draft. And I made little adjustments here and there. But when I finish a book, that’s almost exactly what’s published. The only thing that I changed is I added the seven or eight paragraphs of background material on Irene that my editor requested. A little less than 1,000 words to an 80,000-word book. And that was it. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that I can’t do anything else. The book just is what it is. I’d always been told that writing is mostly revision, and for me that is just not true. It’s either the first draft works or the whole thing has to be thrown away. Within a couple of weeks, even, it gets this hard shell on it that I can’t crack anymore. I can’t go in and add new stuff anymore. I’m not pretending that book is perfect or flawless, but one thing that it is, I think, is one piece. The goal is that, for a reader, it’s supposed to feel like it was written in one day, in one sitting. So to me, that’s the beauty of having what is essentially the first draft published. The reader gets to see the book in all its connections and its roughness and its suggestion, and it’s all one dream. TM: So you’re not interested in trying to attain any kind of ideal of perfection? DV: Fuck no! It takes me years to understand what the hell I was doing in a book so, really, how am I supposed to go in and make it perfect if I don’t even understand it? I’m 67 pages into writing a new novel now. I had to take a break from it to do the final revision of Dirt, the novel that’s being published next May. Today was my first day back after that break. So my fear is that there’ll be some lack of connection that’ll happen because of the break. But what I loved about re-reading it today is that it does have all this strange stuff in it that’s working but that I don’t fully understand yet, but I feel some weight or pressure from it. And that’s what I follow when I’m writing — something that’s freaky or strange about it that I want to get closer to. TM: And that’s an instinct you’ve come to trust, obviously. DV: Yeah, I trust it absolutely. Because what’s the worst that could happen? At the end I throw away the whole book. So who gives a shit? It’s the only thing I really enjoy doing in life, so it’s worth following. I wish my students would be less tripped up about perfection and writing something great and would just write what they’re going to write, because we don’t get to choose, really. Like this new novel Dirt, I planned to write something set in Anglo-Saxon England, and then one day I started writing this thing set in California in 1985. And that’s it. Five and a half months later there it was. I had no plan to write that book. It just happened. I don’t follow any plans. I get little premonitions of what something might lead to, but I’m still going to follow wherever any paragraph takes me. TM: Is it the case that, because you feel like everything you write in fiction has to be in some sense true, you don’t then want to undermine or contradict that truth by changing something about it? DV: Absolutely. The novel I’m working on now, I have no idea what it’s about, and I might have to throw away the whole thing. I have zero idea of what the hell this thing is about. To me it’s thrilling and fun to write, and there’s also anxiety every day. There’s a lot of insecurity. Each day when I read through the 20 or 30 pages and I’m about to start my new page or two for the day, I have this moment where I think I’ll never write again, I’ll never write anything. But I think that that moment is important. You have to have that void. Otherwise nothing real ends up happening. You have to spend a little time sitting in the moment where it might be all annihilation and nothing to find out if there’s going to be something. Because otherwise your conscious mind kicks in and you just do whatever the easiest, most available thing is. The first thing you grab. And that’s always going to suck. TM: So something real has to happen in fiction for it to be worth imagining? Real in the sense of having some significant connection to an emotional reality. DV: Finally what’s important is what has meaning. For instance I think the difference between tragedy in real life and tragedy in fiction is that tragedy in fiction is meaningful. In real life, what’s terrifying about it is that it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t connect. When my Dad died, he was just gone and it didn’t mean shit. And that was terrifying. That’s what makes the whole rest of your life feel meaningless when something like that happens. Because you realize, fuck, there’s no solid ground for anything. But in fiction, tragedy can be meaningful. It’s all connected and bound together and we can test and measure ourselves against it. To me it’s not depressing to read tragedy; it’s reassuring to read tragedy. And it drives me crazy to read stupid reviews in the U.S. where they say the book’s well written, they like the book, they recommend it, but where they are effectively telling their readers not to read it because they say that it’s dark or depressing or whatever. To me that’s idiotic, because for 2,500 years most of western literature has been tragedy. And the reason we like to read tragedy is because reading tragedy is how we find out who the fuck we are. We measure ourselves against it. Are we good? Are we bad? What about the shapes of our lives, the decisions we’ve made? That’s how we test all of it.