A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction

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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]

Extinction Stories: The Ecological True-Crime Genre

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In a comment on a recent New York Times editorial, a reader in North Carolina reported noticing that there were no butterflies on her bushes for the first time this year. The spring peepers were growing fainter in the pond, there were few bees, and for the first time, every birds’ nest in her yard had failed, she said. It’s familiar news. Here on the other side of the country, where I am sitting now, there have been fewer hummingbirds at the feeders this year.  Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, a biologist conducting a survey of elephants found 36 at a reserve where he’d expected to see 300.  It seems that such absences, repeated again and again, are coming to define our time. They are signs of a greater calamity, it’s true, and we often read them as such—failing to register them as events in their own right.  But the truth is that our planet is growing lonelier now.  Do we remember, for instance, the intimacy we shared with other animals, the ones not kept in zoos?  The way bats would start flickering above us as the summer evening grew dim or the childhood bee stings we’d get running barefooted over the lawn? The loss of such small, local experiences are more than just environmental facts but are emotional truths. We are living in the midst of the worst die-off since the dinosaurs fell victim to an asteroid 65 million years ago, and though certain local effects are noticeable, the scope of the carnage is hard to picture as a whole. In The Sixth Extinction, New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert attempts a rough accounting: If global warming continues apace, it’s estimated “that one-third of all reef building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.” Amphibians, the most vulnerable group, are disappearing at as much as 45,000 times their normal rate, hence the lack of peepers in the pond. “Look around,” one scientist tells Kolbert. “Kill half of what you see…That’s what we could be talking about.” Coral reefs are not expected to make it to mid-century. The etiology of this crisis is indisputable: Whatever the proximal causes, human beings are the asteroids this time. This is not news; we’ve been aware of our destructive potential for some time, though there are those still who deny it. It’s not quite as clear what we should do with this knowledge, though, and so—whether from guilt, nostalgia, or as a way to put off a reckoning—we tell each other stories about extinction. In fact, Kolbert’s Sixth Extinction falls into a tradition stretching back at least as far as 1848’s The Dodo and its Kindred—a genre of ecological “true-crime” that chronicles disappearance and implicates human beings in the mass death of others in our world. 1. Joel Greenberg’s recent A Feathered River Across the Sky is an exemplary entrant in the genre. Meticulously researched and almost loving in its level of detail, it tells the story of the passenger pigeon, which was once the most numerous bird in America but now one of our emblems of loss. In 1860, at Fort Mississauga in Ontario, Major W. Ross King watched a group of passenger pigeons blot out the sun for hours. This flock was later estimated to include 3,717,120,000 individual birds passing over in a single long sheet. In 1895, two flocks were observed in the province: the first made up of 13 birds, the second just 11. By 1910, there were no flocks at all, and all that remained of the passenger pigeon was a bird named Martha, living in a cage at the Cincinnati Zoo; she died four years later. This year marks the hundredth anniversary since the passenger pigeon’s extinction. Greenburg traces the natural history of the vanished bird like someone trying to describe a phantom, taking care to present its case as faithfully as he can: its diet, breeding habits (as far as they can be guessed at), and tendency to roost in concentrations so great that they could destroy entire forests overnight. Much of the book is dedicated to a condemnatory account of humans’ wholesale slaughter of this abundance of meat in the sky. The pigeons were apparently good eating and easy entertainment; hunters used everything from rifles, nets, and poles to bare hands and even cannons to gather the bounty. As a result, more birds were killed than could be consumed; the rest were used as fertilizer, fed to dogs and pigs, or simply thrown away. Greenburg’s displeasure at the enthusiasm of 19th century hunters is typical of many extinction narratives. We are meant, as the title of another recent passenger pigeon story has it, to take a “message from Martha.” Self-flagellation is all very well, but knowing—and condemning—the human tendency not to care much for the wellbeing of other species is neither surprising nor especially helpful in terms of effecting change. We have not become better. Greenberg—not just an elegist but an activist as well—points out that similar forms of profligate slaughter continue today, having merely changed venue. On open ocean, seine nets and other modern gadgetry allow commercial fleets to net more than four million tons of tuna—from just four species—every year.  Despite emblematic cases like the passenger pigeon’s, it seems as though we have little real grasp of what extinction really means—for us, for the future of this world of ours, or (though their feelings are rarely considered) for those going extinct. Passionate reports like Greenberg’s have the feeling of histories neatly boxed up and removed from our immediate physical and emotional realities despite their relevance to us now. In such accounts, anxiety over the present alternates with a sort of excited interest in the past— fascination bordering on nostalgia for what amounts to a biological curio. 2. Interest is a primary driver of The Sixth Extinction, in which Kolbert provides an entertaining, if occasionally troubling, geological and biological history of our moment in the context of die-offs past. The story, laid out in chapters using a single species as a way into a theme, is full of human character, humor, and unexpected facts. Kolbert herself can be seen speaking to scientists and observing animals and fossils in the wild. Part of her accomplishment is in underlining the scope of the current cataclysm. As research into the previous five major extinction events teaches her, the environment is changing so quickly that survival will be largely a product of chance. Mass extinction happens when the rules of survival are suddenly changed and traits that have been adaptive in the past become no use at all. Still, everything exists today because something happened to survive before, and the future will be populated by creatures evolved from whatever happens to survive us now. Most likely that will be those hardy invaders whose territory we’ve inadvertently expanded ourselves—probably rats. The biomass of the future will be a human artifact, in other words, like the climate, the course of rivers, the amount of fixed nitrogen, and the variety of habitat, among many other things. And so this moment offers a strange, geological lengthening of time, inscribing our errors onto millions of years of history. Yet as extensive as the changes of the Anthropocene have been, Homo sapiens were always troublesome beasts. Early humans were responsible for extinctions, too, she finds, from moas to saber tooth tigers and giant ground sloths, as well as some of our own relations, including the Neanderthal, the Denisovians, and the Florensian “hobbit.” (It does seem as though we were bent on being alone; all the great apes that survive today, ourselves excepted, are currently in danger of extinction.) Given this propensity, Kolbert largely chooses not to offer hope. Her conclusion is a troubling one: “With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it…[which] is also the capacity to destroy it…If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.” Where Kolbert locates the root of our environmental destructiveness in the capacity for symbolic thought, a more common explanation—though no less problematic in its way—is that an attitude of anthropocentrism is to blame. This means not just the firm separation of “human” and “nature,” but the belief that the planet is intended for our use and has meaning to humans alone. Knowing that the human-spread chytrid virus is almost certain to destroy most of the world’s amphibians, I think at once of the eeriness of a quiet spring pond and only later think what that pond was to the frogs. Given new research into animal consciousness and capacity for thought, such oversights become harder and harder to justify. 3. Still, our perspective is human, and excepting a kind of radical empathy, we have no other. It’s the human perspective the poet Melanie Challenger takes in her book On Extinction. She examines the question of mankind’s alienation from nature through the lens of cultural loss, grappling with the emotional aspects of extinction by reading it through a progressive human shift away from dependence on the natural world. The loss of distinct, local forms of knowledge based on a relationship to place is “akin to the disappearance of diversity in nature.” Her well-made point is that as we became less dependent on local landscapes, we stopped caring as much for the things that were in them. The environmental devastation that followed then only turned us further away. The problem with Challenger’s argument is that the equivalence of cultural and biological diversity confuses the question. That some Inuit shop at supermarkets rather than hunting on the land is of a different order than the fact that there is no longer a golden toad.  Casting human cultural loss in the light of extinction also covers over the need to consider the fact that “human nature” is not solely human at all: not only was it formed through our interaction with other species—from ancient predators, to various microbes, to the creatures we kill and eat—but our very bodies represent a mass of co-existing life forms in themselves. Only 10 percent of the cells in what we consider the “human body” are actually human at all. Despite this, Challenger does get at a question Kolbert’s work provokes but doesn’t confront: “In the great swathes of time given to the Earth, did it really matter if some forms of life died out?” Is the world worse because there’s no longer such thing as a great auk? Of what value is a dolphin in the end? Pointing the finger human-ward, the answer to this question is not as self-evident as people who care about biodiversity, as a good in itself, might believe. In fact, to return to Kolbert’s broad geologic survey of mass extinctions past, our own is just another blip in the long history of life on earth. Yes, it has taken millions of years for biodiversity to recover after previous extinction events, but it has recovered in the end. “Across these spans of almost imperceptible evolution, other entities always emerged in the place of those that perished,” Challenger writes. The message here is life is pretty sturdy and “nature” or the “wilderness” fairly arbitrary concepts. There is no fixed point in our changing world that we can identify as “natural,” and so the thought of re-wilding becomes quickly absurd: Do we really want billions of passenger pigeons despoiling the crops or giant ground sloths stomping around? It’s perhaps out of the anxiety such uncertainty generates that extinction books like these are adventure stories of a kind. The author travels the world (Challenger, to her credit, considering her carbon footprint as she does) as a biological tourist of a kind—and the books find themselves solidly embroiled in the same anthropocentric attitudes they pin the crisis on. Despite purportedly addressing a period of mass death, little attention is actually paid to the dead and dying themselves. And yet, however much human exceptionalism is to blame, part of the lesson of the anthropocene mass extinction is how closely human lives are affected by it, a lesson we are vastly more likely to take to heart than the suffering of any bat or toad; perhaps there is no separation between their suffering and our own. This, in part, is the answer to Challenger’s “so what?” as offered by a new crop of philosophical thinkers, whose work provides a much needed bridge between the humanities and ecological science. If their efforts seem effete in comparison to Kolbert’s vastly more enjoyable narrative, they at least encourage us to step past self-loathing, pity, and the strange excitement those feelings produce. Philosophy, unlike straightforward nonfiction narrative, can hold the kind of uncertainty of which this moment is full. [millions_email] 4. Bill McKibben proclaimed the “end of nature” in the late 1980s, writing that there was no longer anything unaffected by human activity that could be identified as such. In Hyperobjects, philosopher Timothy Morton inverts this. In this age of global warming, species loss, and environmental degradation, there is nothing “human” still unaffected by “nature” and so to separate the two becomes absurd. Morton specializes in something called object-oriented ontology, and his book is as difficult as that concept sounds. Still, those able to wade through his occasionally hyperactive prose (the “gigantic coral reef of sparkling things beneath the Heideggerian U-Boat” or “the cupcake aisle of the ontological supermarket”) will find a fairly radical reconsideration of our place in the world. “This is not only a historical age but also a geological one,” Morton writes, echoing Kolbert. “In this period nonhumans make decisive contact with humans, even the ones busy shoring up the differences between humans and the rest.” Notably, by nonhumans Morton means not just animals but things like plutonium, plastics, and atmospheric carbon—what he calls “hyperobjects.” The extension is a little odd, but his demolition of categories leads to a series of forceful points. The end of the world means the end of an idea of a “world” as something other than us. We cannot “get back to nature” because there’s nothing to get back to. Instead, what the environmental crisis makes obvious is that what we called nature and the environment “are in our face—they are our face.”  In the context of human exceptionalism—as in narratives like Kolbert and Challenger’s—extinction happens “out there” in “nature.” One must travel and seek it out. But if, following Morton, we were to give up the idea of nature altogether—the idea that there is an “elsewhere” that our waste goes to when we toss it down the garbage shoot, an “elsewhere” where the animals die—we can recognize our intimacy not only with the toxic byproducts of our civilization but with the animals that are dying at our hands. Morton calls for an ecology that neither undermines, like Greenberg’s book might be said to do (refusing to see the big picture by focusing on the individual), nor “overmines,” like Kolbert’s at times (burying the individual in its larger system by focusing on the idea survival of “life”). Instead, he writes, what should be considered is our proximity to all of this death and how we can live with it. 5. The ethics of this proximity is the subject Australian environmental philosopher Thom Van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. The book is unique among extinction stories for looking less at the phenomenon itself and more at why it might matter in an emotional, moral sense. “What is lost when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?” he asks. Van Dooren, an academic in the new field of “Extinction Studies,” identifies the “multispecies entanglements” that not only play a role in an animal’s physical evolution but in that of human culture as well. Human culture in India, for instance, has developed in concert with vultures, which are relied on to dispose of cow carcasses and those of humans in certain burial rites. Now that the vultures are dying en masse, the Parsi can no longer “bury” their dead. Apart from its relevance to human culture, Van Dooren considers non-human animals not just as “life forms” but also as “forms of life,” each with a way of life—what he calls a “flight way”—that generates meaning for that creature itself. (It’s a sign of just how settled we are in ideas of human exceptionalism that this simple claim—not in the least bit radical, really—comes across as somewhat PETA-ish and tree-huggery.)  He offers a beautiful and oddly touching reconsideration of what a species is: “Species are incredible achievements...[they are] shared, produced, and nurtured in the world through the work of successive generations of living beings.” More than just a lineage stretching out in time, a species is composed of the “work” each generation does—an albatross sitting on its egg for weeks without food, a human mother working three jobs. It is both more than the sum of the individuals living and dependent on their participation. Each individual invests a huge amount of resources in the species—it is their work and their striving (even if they are unaware of it) that achieves evolutionary continuity, and so the existence of everything that has evolved along the way, both from it and in being “carried by” it, is co-shaped as a member of its community. Considering species in this way changes how we think about what extinction might mean and the enormity of the rupture it creates. Martha’s death was a kind of formal mark, but extinction means more than whether or not there is at least one individual of a given species living, according to Van Dooren. As Greenberg’s account of its life makes clear, what it meant to be a passenger pigeon—a “flight way” of vast flocks and noisy, communal roosts—disappeared long before Martha took her last breath.  A part of what it meant to be a human in the American Midwest must have changed before then, too. Recognizing such “entanglements,” Van Dooren calls for an a mode of mourning that “does not announce the uniqueness of the human, but works to…grieve for the loss of a world that includes us.” Yet what we are bound up with specifically matters; we must “cast our lot for some ways of life and not others.” This is a surprising plea—unique as far as I can tell—in that instead of aiming for vague ideals such as “nature” or “ecosystem balance,” Van Dooren suggests embracing a form of “Cenocentrism,” fighting for a “continuity of the Cenozoic achievement,” which is to say, for the world that took form after the Cretaceous extinction—the community of life that includes our own species. This rather neatly solves the baseline problem Challenger and Kolbert posed, exchanging what Morton would call an “overmined” valorization of life generally for care of what is proximal to us and for our own, intimate world. Of course, whichever world we stand for, many individual animals and entire species will suffer, die, and disappear for good. The practical question this poses and the true dilemma of now is not what is going on but what one does with that information once one has it, besides lapsing into cynical resignation. Van Dooren suggests mourning as both the ethical and beneficial response. The fact that there has been so little public mourning for extinction is due to the human “inability to really get—to comprehend at any meaningful level—the multiple connections and dependencies between ourselves and these disappearing others.” We have learned not to be affected by the extinctions of those we consider fundamentally different (the same, of course, goes for those mass human deaths we find it convenient to ignore). But mourning forces us to “relearn the world and our place in it” and can teach us to get the connection, even if it is too late. To other crows, he writes, the body of a dead crow signifies danger, and the birds will often avoid a place where one of their species has died for years. “What must the death of a whole species of crow, alongside a host of others at this time, communicate to any sentient and attentive observer?” Van Dooren wonders. “How could these extinctions not announce our need to find new flight ways, new modes of living in a fragile and changing world?” Van Dooren suggests that we read extinction stories like these as acts of mourning in themselves, the way we read records of human holocausts, with respect and care for the victims.  As with any death, it’s in telling stories about the dead that life and death are put into relation; through mourning, survivors relearn the world and their place in it and, in that way, find new ways to live. This is, in its way, a kind of hope.  “In choosing to grieve actively,” as the author and philosopher of grief Tomis Attig wrote, “we choose life.”  Like any death, extinction represents the end of a certain portion of the world—of an idea of our world as we thought we knew it. They say shock at the loss of the passenger pigeon was so great that that no one believed it; some speculated it had simply gone to live in Australia or even the moon. For a while, Midwesterners continued to feel the shadows of great flocks passing above, the way an amputee can feel a missing limb. In stories like this, extinction touches us, making an animal’s absence as pointed and as intimate with our human lives as we perhaps never realized its presence to be. Stories like this force us to rethink what survival really means, for us as well as them, whether merely living is enough or at what point we become too alone. The stories we need now go beyond informing us of our errors. They have to be emotionally relevant, inhabiting all of the complexity—ethical, political, and personal—of this moment in time. Doing more than teaching us, such stories could be in themselves ways of mourning—eulogies for a world we thought we knew and that we must relearn.