A Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin Classics)

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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]

A Year in Reading: Ed Simon

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So. How are we expected to begin these things? How can I write about reading in this year of all years, this Annus Horribilis of American authoritarianism, American division, American plague? There’s no judgement in that question – it’s genuine. Because to not state the obvious would be callous: at the time of this writing there have been a quarter of a million deaths that were largely preventable if there had only been a modicum of concern from both the government and the collective citizenry. At the same time, to wallow in all of that misfortune, the pandemic death count rising, the spate of police murders of Black citizens, the brazen incitements to violence from the thankfully defeated president, could just be more fodder for doomscrolling (the term popularized by the journalist Karen K. Ho). No doubt you’re familiar with this activity, for the correct answer to the question of “What did you read this year?” would be “Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Comment sections. Comment sections. Comment sections.” If anything quite expressed the emotional tenor of this wicked reality for most of us, it was the feeling of being dead-eyed and exhausted, eyeballs vibrating in their sockets and blood straining in our temples, ensconced in the cold glow of the smart-phone screen as you endlessly stared at travesty after travesty. Androids with our Androids. Being who I am, I’ve got an inclination to write about the triumph of reading, the warmth from pages expressing the ineffable separateness of these people whom we happen to share the world with, for a bit. The way in which literature acts as conduit for connection, the building of worlds with words, kingdoms of interiority claimed through the audacious act of writing, and so on. But do you know what I actually did with most of my free time? Doomscrolling. Just like you. How could it be otherwise? Companion to our worry, companion to our fear, companion to our free minutes. To endlessly scroll through our social media newsfeeds fed that demon of acedia nestled in each individual skull, simultaneously giving us the illusion of control, the strange pleasure of anxiety, and the empty calories that filled our bellies but did nothing to finally satiate our hunger. Nothing new in this, what Daniel Defoe described of 1665 in his novel A Journal of the Plague Year, whereby the “apprehension of the people was likewise strangely increased… addicted to prophecies and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives’ tale than ever they were before or since,” something to keep in mind as I endlessly refreshed Nate Silver. It reminded me of the childhood feeling that I used to have after hours of Nintendo; that shaky, bile-stomached emotion that I imagine senior citizens feeding quarters into Atlantic City slot machines must feel. Easier to pretend that this was a type of reading; knowing facts without reflection, horror without wisdom. Yet I did read books this year. If I’m being honest, I didn’t read terribly widely or terribly deeply, and there is a distinct before and after as regards the plague, but I still forced myself to read even if it was at a glacial speed compared to normal, even if it was sometimes joyless. I did so because I felt that I had to, in the same way you white-knuckle it through flight turbulence by humming to yourself. I did it because I was scared that if I didn’t, I might forget how. And through that, I still had beautiful moments of reading, incandescent ones, transcendent ones. Books were still able to move me when two thousand people had died, or when two hundred thousand people had. Reading may sometimes feel like a frivolity, but it isn’t. All of that stuff I said in the second paragraph, the quasi-mocking tone about how I’m apt to argue that literature is about connection? Well, you knew I was setting that up rhetorically to knock it down. I don’t always feel that sentiment to be true, but you need not feel something to know it’s true (then again, I’ve always been a works instead of faith guy). Don’t fault me for being predictable. This is the third year I’ve been lucky enough to be able to write one of these features for The Millions, and maybe it’s the English teacher in me, but I always have a need to tie together what I’ve read into some sort of cohesive syllabus. Summers past I used to actually theme my beach reading around subjects; one year I read novels according to the very specific criteria that they had to be about tremendous changes which happened in an instant (Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers; Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination); in another season, all of the works on my docket were contemporary novels of manners (Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot; Dean Bakopoulos’s My American Unhappiness). This season of pandemic, it seemed that the dominant subject of the novels which I read was family. In all of their complexities, almost every novel which I pleasure-read in 2020 examined family in its multitudinous complexity. Happy families and broken families; families of fate and families of choice; tragic families and triumphant families. I couldn’t have known it on New Years Day, but there was something appropriate in this, for this year was – in all of its darkness – for many a year of family. In the elemental stillness of quarantine people got to know their families with a new intimacy (for good and bad); some broods found themselves broken, some made new again. Most crucially, and at the risk of being maudlin, the pandemic distilled to an immaculate purity the centrality of family. My family’s own year was divided by the beautiful caesura of welcoming our first child into this world, the miracle of new life deserving of every cliché that can be said about it, a grace and gift that all of the beautiful rhetoric I can muster would scarcely be worthy of. If novels serve any purpose, it’s to act as engines of empathy (whether or not that makes the world a better place is a question for somebody of a higher pay grade), and so I was able to see a bit of myself in Jonathan Safran Foer’s description of being a new father from his door-stopper of a book Here I Am. Jacob Bloch reminisces on moments with his first son, “the smell of the back of his neck; how to collapse an umbrella stroller with one hand… the transparency of new eyelids… my own inability to forgive myself for the moments I looked away and something utter inconsequential happened, but happened.” While Jacob and I share a parents’ love and a District of Columbia mailing address, the Blochs of Cleveland Park live in a slightly different universe from my own, though one marked by similarly tumultuous global crises, a throwback to the great male mid-century novelist canon for our century, set against the backdrop of a potentially apocalyptic war in the Middle East. The Blochs are an unhappy family. Jacob is petty, anxious, and narcissistic; his wife Julia is unfulfilled; his father Irv is opinionated and hypocritical; his grandfather Isaac is a suicidal Holocaust survivor; his children Sam, Max, and Benjy each have their fair share of neuroses for being so young, and his Israeli cousin Tamir is simultaneously boastful and sensitive, flashy and wise. Across the daily travails of the Bloch family, from the threat of a cancelled Bar Mitzvah, the indiscretions and infidelities, and the sufferings of a beloved elderly family dog (which lent itself to one of the most moving scenes I read this year), there is the omnipresent question of Judaism and its relation to Israel, played out in a world where antisemitism is very much not a past phenomenon. Envy has always made it difficult for me to appreciate Foer, but for its occasional indulgences, Here I Am is a novel of profound beauty – especially in its dialogue, though all writers should have some humility. When Jacob gets into a fight with Max about the respective influence of Roth versus Kanye West, his son responds about the former that “First of all, I’ve never even heard of that person.” From Cleveland Park to Harlem, Imbolo Mbue imagines a very different family experience in Behold the Dreamers, though perhaps not such a very different family (for all parents want what is good for their children). Jende Jonga has overstayed his three-month visa, and has brought over from their native Cameroon his wife Neni and their young son. Working as a livery driver, Jenda’s cousin is able to get him a job as a private chauffeur for Clark Edwards, investment banker at Lehman Brothers in 2007. Mbue depicts the ways in which money and legal status effect two radically different groups of people during the last major economic collapse. Fundamentally a novel about the American Dream, which is to say a novel about money and the way it differentiates one man from another, Behold the Dreamers movingly and brilliantly tells the sort of New York story that can be so easy to overlook. Immigration is at the core of Behold the Dreamers – what it means to forever fear deportation, the sort of hard work that puts a pain in the back and feet that require five Tylenol at a time, the crowding of a one-bedroom Uptown apartment with husband, wife, son, and newborn daughter. So triumphant are the dreams of immigrant aspiration, that there is a surreal beauty in a (c.2008) boast that “He will take us to a restaurant in the Trump Hotel… He will hire Donald Trump himself to cook steak for us,” so that the nativist is made to humbly genuflect before the very sort of people whom he has subsequently tortured.  Mbue writes about her characters with a such a humane tenderness that even when they’re cruel, or shortsighted, or fearful, there is still a fundamental love which makes their full humanity apparent, so that by the conclusion a reader will even have some sympathy for the investment banker who is implicated in all that went wrong in 2008. With almost perfect pitch for how people talk to one another, Mbue moves from the kitchens of Harlem where Cameroonians prepare ekwang and ndole, to the gilded living rooms of Park Avenue and the spacious backyards of the Hamptons. “Why did you come to America if your town is so beautiful?” Clark asks his driver. “Jende laughed, a brief uneasy laugh. ‘But sir,’ he said. ‘America is America.’” Both of these books came to me from the neighborhood mainstay of Capitol Hill Books, across the street from the red-bricked environs of the palatial nineteenth-century Eastern Market. The proprietors of the bookstore had an ingenious concept whereby readers would fill out a form about their reading preferences, and an upper limit on how much money they’d be willing to spend, and then they would compile a sealed grab-bag of mystery tomes which would be left in front of the store at an agreed upon time, like some sort of illicit literary handoff. My main method of finding totally new books, not pushed by algorithm or article, was precluded after the libraries closed, and so Capitol Hill Books’ invitation to take a literary leap into the unknown was a welcome diversion. Because the store is an amazing place, only a few blocks from the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court, with creased, underlined paperback volume crammed into every conceivable inch of the converted townhouse (including the bathroom), and because the coronavirus has demolished the economy and small business people received little of the relief which they were due from the federal government, I’m going to feature several other independent bookstores in Washington D.C. who deserve your money more than the website named after a South American rainforest. Please consider buying from them, or from any of the other bookstores I’m featuring – you don’t even have to live in the District (but of course I encourage you to buy from your own local independents – if you’re a fellow Pittsburgher I can attest to the glories of Classic Lines, Amazing Books & Records, and White Wale Bookstore). Maybe save some of your lucre for the funky cool Solid State Books on H Street, in the neighborhood variously called NoMA or the Atlas District, depending on which gentrifying real estate agent you talk to. Solid State Books is the type of simultaneously sleek and cozy storefront that calls for you to wander after a dinner of Ethiopian or Caribbean food, coffee in hand, as you paw through the delicious tables of new novels. It embodies the sleek urbanity of bookstore wandering that’s become all too rare in mid-sized American cities, and though the pandemic makes that singular joy impossible right now, Solid State is available for curbside pickup. Consider purchasing Annie Liontas’s Let Me Explain You or Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes, two novels that share with Behold the Dreamers a sense of immigrant possibility (and failure, pain, and tribulation) in the greater New York metro area. If Mbue had a love for the city from Malcolm X Boulevard down to Washington Square Park, then Liontas looks across the Hudson to the great Jersey Purgatory of Meadowlands strip malls, oil refineries, and diners, all the way down I-95 to New York’s greatest suburb of Philadelphia. It’s there that Stavros Stavros Mavrakis owns the Gala Diner, and where following a series of prophetic intimations concerning his impending death, sends accusatory emails to his three daughters and his ex-wife. “I, Stavros Stavros, have ask God to erase the mistakes of my life; and God has answer, in a matter of speaking, That it is best to Start Over, which requires foremost that We End All that is Stavros Stavros. No, not with suicide. With Mercy.” Liontas’ character is King Lear as filtered through Nikos Kazantzakis, and in her main character’s incorrigibility – his yearning, his toxicity, and his potential for grace – she writes a tragi-comic parable about the American Dream. Let Me Explain You is a fractured fairy tale recounted by Stavros Stavros, and his broken, suffering, and triumphant daughters Stavroula, Litza, and Ruby. The Gala’s proprietor is one of the most distinctive voices since, well, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Ukrainian narrator Alex in Everything Is Illuminated, and Stavros Stavros hilarious and moving exposition marks Liontas as a major talent. Within Let Me Explain You there is an excavation of the layers of pride and woundedness, success and failure, which marks much of the immigrant experience, a digging deep into the strata of its characters’ histories. Liontas goes beyond the smudged and laminated menus of the Gala – the plates of crispy gyro meat smothered in tzatziki; pork roll, egg and cheese sandwiches; the disco fries covered in gravy; and the flimsy blue-and-white cups of cheap coffee with their ersatz meander design – to demonstrate that Shakespearean drama can happen even in Camden County. Keane’s Ask Again, Yes takes place in points farther north, along the section of the Acela corridor immediately north of New York, as the upwardly mobile suburbs of Westchester stretch onward from outside the Bronx to leafy Connecticut, in communities like New Rochelle, Scarsdale, and Gillam. The last place is where two NYPD rookies – Francis Gleason and Brian Stanhope – who worked the same beat together in the 1970s Death Wish era of urban blight, coincidentally find themselves as neighbors, both following a suburban dream of fenced in lawns, Fourth of July grilling, and strip mall supermarkets. Like both Stavros Stavros and Jende, Francis is also an immigrant, this time from the west of Ireland. “One minute he’d been standing in a bog on the other side of the Atlantic,” Kean writes, “and the next thing he knew he was a cop. In America. In the worst neighborhood of the best known city in the world.” A reserved man, Francis isn’t particularly fond of Brian’s American volume, or of the latter’s erratic wife Anne Stanhope, who like Gleason was also Irish-born. Despite Francis’ reservations about the Stanhopes, their children – young Kate Gleason and Peter Stanhope – develop an intense adolescent romance that spans decades and has combustible implications for the families. The story features a single instance of incredible violence, the trauma of which alters both the Gleasons and the Stanhopes, forcing them to ask how life is lived after such a rupture. Keane’s novel is that rare thing in our contemporary era, where the culture industry has for too long been obsessed with anti-heroes and gentle nihilism – it’s a narrative of genuine moral significance, that’s just as concerned with redemption as damnation, that takes contrition as seriously as that which gets you to the point where grace is even necessary. If you still haven’t gotten New York City out of your system, and if pandemic restrictions have you missing colleges and universities (as Zoom instruction is inevitably so much more anemic), then consider picking up a copy of James Gregor’s campus novel Going Dutch from East City Bookshop. A charming Capitol Hill mainstay that’s half descended into a basement right on Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the string of restaurants and shops known as Barracks Row, East City Bookshop has excellent sections of history, politics, and contemporary novels, and is the sort of place where you can get twee mugs produced by the Unemployed Philosophers’ Guild. It’s the sort of bookstore that if it were in the Village, could predictably be perused by Gregor’s characters Richard and Anne, two New York University comparative literature grad students who enter into a strange psychosexual affair. Both are working on their dissertations in medieval Italian literature, but only Anne can be said to have any preternatural talent in her scholarship, which Richard is more than happy to exploit in his own research. While Richard unsuccessfully flits through Grindr, he and Anne fall closer and closer together, the two eventually agreeing to a relationship that is equal parts sex and plagiarism. “Part of him found her annoying,” Gregor writes of Richard’s feelings towards Anne, “another part was curious to observe her. There was something both needling and captivating about her that he couldn’t explain… emitting waves of musky, indeterminately foreign glamor… [he] found himself strangely excited by her presence in the classroom. It wasn’t attraction exactly, but he felt the blurred outlines of that category.” Anne is a very particular type of paradoxically worldly ingenue, a spinster with an edge, and Richard and her relationship falls deeper and deeper into pathology and the pathetic. Washington D.C. and Los Angeles are some 2,654 miles apart, but a visit to Dupont Circle’s classic Kramer’s (because of the coffee bar it features it is now officially known as Kramer Books and Afterwords) can bestow upon you sunny California in novel form, with three titles that feature the Golden State in all of its seedy resplendence – Tracy Chevalier’s At the Edge of the Orchard, Patrick Coleman’s The Churchgoer, and The Millions’ staff writer Edan Lepucki’s Woman No. 17. District hullabaloo had it that the storied Kramer’s was potentially going to leave its Dupont Circle location, making the neighborhood infinitely poorer, but luckily the owners opted to continue their lease on the storied storefront where Monica Lewinsky once purchased a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for Bill Clinton. Once our plague year has ended, shoppers will still be able to stop into the Connecticut Avenue location in this neighborhood of embassies and gay bars, and pick up any of the aforementioned California titles (in the meantime, consider ordering them online). For pure folkloric Americana, Chevalier’s At the Edge of the Orchard is an equally beautiful and brutal novel, immaculate in its consummate weirdness. Chevalier recounts tale of Robert Goodenough, son of Ohio apple growers James and Sadie Goodenough, who in the decade before the Civil War searches for tree saplings in northern California on behalf of a British naturalist who sells them to his countrymen that have the unusual desire to grow sequoias and redwoods on the grounds of English country estates. While traipsing through the hills north of San Francisco, humbled by the forest cathedrals of the redwoods, Robert relives the traumas of the unspeakable domestic violence in the frontier country which left him an orphan. “Though grafted at the same time, they had grown up to be different sizes; it always surprised James that the tree could turn out as varied as his children.” Chevalier’s novel examines the ways that human motivations can be unpredictable as the route that branching roots might take, pruning back the exigencies of an individual human life to an elemental, almost folkloric essence, and testing the soil of myth and memory to write a luminescent novel that’s part fairy-tale, part parable, part Greek tragedy, and part Western. A different American myth is explored in Coleman’s The Churchgoer, a brilliant neo-noir that true to that venerable genre’s greatest of conventions places its seedy subject matter of sex and criminality in the estimably pleasant and sunny- forever-75-degrees of southern California. Mark Haines is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, a night watch security guard, a San Diego beach bum, and a former youth pastor who has lost any faith in the God that failed him. He becomes embroiled in the affairs of a mysterious and beautiful young runaway (as one does) named Cindy Liu, a woman who comes from the same world of evangelical platitudes and megachurch hypocrisies as he does, and when she goes missing and his night watch partner is murdered (perhaps connected?) Haines embarks on an investigation every bit worthy of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Reflecting on a former parishioner who may be involved in sundry affairs, Mark notes that “I didn’t like any of this. I didn’t like being questioned… If they wanted to know what he was afraid of when he was seventeen, what he asked for prayers about, how many times a week on average he committed the sin of self-pollution against his better intentions, I could dig all that out from somewhere in my brain… [but] Confession usually pulled up well short of the deeper truth.” The true pleasure of Coleman’s novel isn’t plot (though the speed of pages turned would recommend it for that alone), but rather language, which is always true of the best noir books. The Churchgoer tastes like a gulp of cold black coffee at an AA meeting which a cigarette has been cashed into, it sounds like the static of a television left on until 3a.m. and the hum of a neon light in the bar window of an Oceanside dive, it feels like insomnia and paranoia. Lepucki makes great use of the oppressive sunlight of California in her Hitchcockian domestic tragicomedy Woman No. 17. Her second novel after the excellent post-apocalyptic California, Lepucki explores the sultry side of Hollywood Hills, where wealthy writer Lady Daniels hires a college student as a live-in nanny to care for her young son while the former finishes an experimental memoir, made possible off of alimony from her still-close film producer ex-husband. “It was summer. The heat had arrived harsh and bright, bleaching the sidewalks and choking the flowers before they had a chance to wilt… I preferred to stay at home: ice cubes in the dog bowl, Riesling in the freezer,” Lady says. Alternating between Lady and S., the art student whom she hires without a proper vetting, Woman No. 17 explores the intersections of obsession and sexuality, transgression and performance, in recounting how S. becomes increasingly unhinged in an “art project” which involves imitating her alcoholic mother and seducing Lady’s mute, adolescent, older son. As At the Edge of the Orchard explores the traumas of family, and The Churchgoer examines what it means to both be rejected by family and to construct a new family of your own volition, so too does Lepucki interrogate the illusions of intimacy and the way in which the mask we choose to wear can quickly become our face. As the final two novels I’m writing about take as their subject the very soul of the nation, I recommend that you put in an order to buy Nell Zink’s Doxology and Kathleen Alcott’s America was Hard to Find at the District of Columbia literary institution of Politics and Prose. Perhaps the most foundational of bookstores in the D.C. literary ecosystem, Politics and Prose shares a Cleveland Park setting (or at least half-of-one) with Zink’s much anticipated novel, while Alcott’s America Was Hard to Find ranges over the entire continent, and the surface of the moon as well. Drawing its title from a poem by the radical priest and anti-Vietnam War activist Father Daniel Berrigan, Alcott’s novel is a bildungsroman for the American century. Audaciously reimagining the last fifty years of history, America is Hard to Find tells the story of the brief liaison of Air Force pilot Vincent Kahn and bartender Fay Fern, which results in the birth of their illegitimate son Wright. Kahn goes on to become the first man to walk on the moon, and Fay a domestic terrorist in a far-left group similar to the Weather Underground or the Symbionese Liberation Army. Easy to imagine the two as proxies for a type of Manichean struggle in the American spirit – the square astronaut and the radical hippie. Yet Alcott is far too brilliant of an author to pen simple allegory or didactic parable, for America Was Hard to Find is the sort of novel where mystery and the fundamental unknowability of both the national psyche and those of the people condemned to populate it are expressed in shining prose on every page. The moon was everything he had loved about the high desert,” Alcott writes of Kahn’s first sojourn on that celestial body, “where nothing was obscured, available to you as far as you wished to look, but cast in tones that better fit the experience, the grays that ran from sooty to metallic, the pits dark as cellars. Most astonishing was the sky, a black he had never seen before, dynamic and exuberant. With a grin he realized the only apt comparison. It was glossy like a baby girl’s church shoes – like patent leather. Alcott’s prose is so lyrical, so gorgeous, that it can be almost excruciating to read (I mean this as a compliment), a work that is so perfectly poetic that a highlighter would run out of ink before you’re a tenth of the way through the novel. There are scenes of arresting, heart-breaking beauty, none more so than the doomed life of Wright, a gay man who perishes in our country’s last plague. “There is a kind of understanding that occurs just after,” writes Alcott, “If we are lucky, we catch it at the door on our way out, watch it enter the rooms we have left. It is not always possible to tell the exact moment you have separated from the earth. So much of what we know for certain is irrelevant by the time we know it.”   True to its title, there is something almost sacramental in Zink’s Doxology, with its poignant ruminations on both ecology and aesthetics as told througha generation-spanning story focused on Pam and Daniel Svoboda and their precocious daughter Flora. Originally 2/3rds of a Lower East Side 80s and 90s rock band situated somewhere on the spectrum between post-punk and grunge, the final member of their trio is Joe, a gentle musical genius with undiagnosed Williams Syndrome who was the only one to go onto any type of success before overdosing on September 11, 2001. Split between New York City and the Washington D.C. of Pam’s Fugazi-listening-Adams-Morgan-Clubbing youth, Doxology is an ultimately uncategorizable book about the connections of family forged in hardship and the transcendent power of creation. Zink’s narration is refreshingly Victorian, having no problem dwelling in exposition and displaying the full omniscience we require of our third-person narrators (though her Author as God has a sense of humor). Daniel “was an eighties hipster. But that can be forgiven, because he was the child of born-again Christian dairy-farm workers from Racine, Wisconsin” or that Joe’s “father was a professor of American history at Columbia, his mother had been a forever-young party girl in permanent overdrive who could drink all night, sing any song and fake the piano accompaniment, and talk to anybody about anything. In 1976 she died.” Contrary to the order in which I’ve recounted this syllabus, I read Doxology in January, and as with Lauren Groff’s excellent speculative epic Arcadia, Zink’s novel moves into the near future from the time of its publication date in 2019. Recounting the effect that historical events like Desert Storm, 9/11, and the financial collapse of 2008 have on the Sveboldas, not to mention the election of Donald J. Trump, Doxology ends in the summer of 2020, a year after it was written and half a year after I read it. Flora lives in Washington, having been effectively raised by her grandparents, and in our infernal year as imagined by Zink she is a wounded environmental activist living in the Trumpian twilight. “On the last Wednesday in July, Washington was bathed in an acrid mist. The roses and marble facades stood sweating in air that stank of uncertainty. It was a smell that ought to be rising from burning trash, not falling from the sky as fawn-colored haze.” Some sort of ecological catastrophe has befallen the United States – perhaps a meltdown at a nuclear power plant – and the burnt ochre sun struggling through pink overcast skies speaks to the omnipresence of death. The Trump administration, of course, denies any knowledge, telling people that they should simply live their lives, and FOX News runs exposes about noodle thickness rather than the radioactive plume which seems to be spreading over the east coast. With the uncanny prescience that can only be imparted to us by a brilliant writer, I remember finishing Zink’s novel and wondering what awaited us in the months ahead. Unnerving to think of it now, but when I read Doxology I’d yet to have worn a face mask outside, or heard of “social distancing.” I’d yet to have felt the itchy anxiety that compels one to continually use hand-sanitizer, or to flinch from whenever you hear a cough during the few minutes a day when your dog’s bladder compels you to leave your apartment. When I read Doxology, already fearful for the year ahead, not a single American had yet died of this new disease, and I hadn’t yet heard the word coronavirus. More from A Year in Reading 2020 Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. 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