Another Country

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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]

I’m Suspicious of Empathy: The Millions Interviews Jess Row

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Reading Jess Row’s White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination is like reading three books in one. The first book is a memoir of Row’s artistic coming of age. The second book is a scholarly critique of white writing and how work by people of color is excluded, ignored, and otherwise neglected. The third book is a meditation on aesthetics, craft, and ideology in creative writing. All three books are imbricated in a way that the seams are hidden but felt. I especially was taken with Row’s chapter on American Minimalism and the overarching and lasting (but eroding) influence of Gordon Lish. My interest lay in a compelling argument Row makes about Lish’s influence on minimalist writers like Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Amy Hempel, and Richard Ford. He claims minimalist writers aren’t “able to relax into something larger, even into idiomatic speech: the consecution method doesn’t permit that...What they are performing is a Morse code, a telegraphic effect: this is how we live, this is what the present entails. And: this is all that the present entails.” Row and I talked recently about minimalism, race, empathy, and White Flights. The Millions: Is White Flights a project built around empathy? Jess Row: No, I don’t think so. I’m suspicious of empathy for a lot of the reasons you see coming up in books like Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. There was a great roundtable about empathy published in The Boston Review several years ago. And in it was this psychologist, Paul Bloom. His basic critique of empathy is that it tends to focus our political thinking on objects that we feel an immediate emotional connection with, and it excludes beings and subjects we don’t feel a direct emotional connection with. There are a lot of people in the world of creative writing who put empathy at the center of their thinking about why literature is important and why fiction is important. My thinking about that is always a little more skeptical. Obviously, when you create literary characters, to some degree you’re looking for a connection, a recognition of the fictional consciousness of the character, if you’re in that realm of psychological realism. But I always think that using empathy as a justification is too simple. It requires some clarification about what empathy means. TM: Because the idea there is empathy is self-directed. It doesn’t come from outside of you. JR: Yeah, empathy is also circumstantial. To some degree, social media feeds on this quality. If you’re constantly seeing things popping up in your feed about some outrage in the world, it could be they’re designed by the algorithm for other reasons not having to do with creating any narrative or hierarchy of meaning. You could have someone being cruel to kittens and have widespread environmental destruction or homes destroyed in East Jerusalem. In other words, empathy can create a distorted sense of where your attention should be in the world. It’s easy to manipulate in that way. TM: The question is: Between logos, pathos, and ethos. Which one do you think is being used most? Overwhelmingly, it’s the emotional appeal, pathos. I wonder how much pathos is behind empathy, as opposed to, say, logic or credibility. JR: One thing I write about in the book (very briefly) is the three definitions of love in Christianity, which come from classical Greek thought. Philia-love, romantic love, and agape-love. This is something that Martin Luther King talked about all the time. When he talked about racism in the United States, he constantly talked about the importance of defining your terms when you talk about love and racism. You’re not just talking about philia-love. You’re obviously not talking about romantic love. He said you always have to be talking about agape. You have to be talking about the largest concept of love. Cornel West says, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” That’s a great way of summing up agape in the black prophetic Christian tradition. TM: You write “white American writers are almost never asked to bring their own sadness or their own bodies into play when writing about race or racism; their dreams, their sources of shame, their most nightmarish or unacceptable or crippling fantasies”—but it also seems that fear is to blame, because who wants to have a tin ear or come off sounding hurtful. Though, you also write that, “dealing with shame is meaningful.” Do you see fear playing a role like shame? JR: What you say is important. They’re definitely connected. I think fear of being exposed as being insensitive or being exposed as being racist or just not thoughtful in your speech or whatever—I would say that fear is absolutely debilitating for white people, writers, teachers. But I also think there’s a culture that sustains that feeling of paranoia: “No matter what you say, or try to engage in, you’re going to be criticized.” That’s why I say that I think that it’s really important to look at those feelings directly and ask yourself, Where did those feeling come from? Who is it that’s telling you that you can’t win? Who is it that’s encouraging these feeling of paranoia? And: For whom are those feelings politically useful? In an academic setting, that paranoia around race is extremely useful to the institution because it enables administrators and leaders to essentially treat racial justice and questions around it as an area of diversity that can be farmed out to the vice president of diversity or whatever. And the rest of us don’t have to think about it. Essentially, you hire people to do the uncomfortable work of raising awareness about these feelings and you yourself are feeling like you’re not—you, the white administration or professor or department chair—are not able to do anything about it because you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. That paranoia is structurally built into the institution. [millions_ad] TM: Do you find that Lish’s minimalist aesthetic, through what you describe as “beautiful shame,” fetishized the poor or the downtrodden? JR: I think those two things are related. And it’s always what I say about Lish: he pressured Carver to remove the direct reference to his own background. I think that Gordon Lish himself was never interested in fetishizing rural poverty, because I think his aesthetic interests were so different. His interests were late modern, Gertrude Stein, an obsession with the sentence as a self-fulfilling object. He was able to create this artistic aura, this sense of existential inner-poverty that translated easily to American literary culture into a larger way of fetishizing poor white people as the authentic or raw voices. TM: That reminds me of Sarah Palin talking about the “real America” back in 2008. JR: The fetishizing of the dirty realists in the 1980s, Tobias Wolff, John Dufresne, Richard Ford. Annie Proulx’s first book Heart Songs is in this category. A lot of things came together at same time: Lish’s approach to realism, the overwhelming popularity of Raymond Carver. But you also had the Reagan era, white American retrenchment, there was a broader cultural interest in white working-class authenticity that you have in Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp. If you look at Mellencamps’s hits, “Pink Houses,” “Small Town,” “Jack & Diane”—white t-shirts and blue jeans. That’s part of a wave of fetishization of American rural life that started in the post-war era and really flowered with the baby boomers because so many of them were moved away from that life. As soon as that way of life began to fade, it became a fetish for the up-and-coming suburban bourgeois class. TM: Who would be an example of an author who goes past the fear and beautiful shame? You mention Dorothy Allison and Allan Gurganus as examples back in the 1980s and 1990s. What about today? JR: The landscape of American fiction is fractured as compared to how it used to be. You don’t have one aesthetic that’s nearly as dominant as the minimalist aesthetic was in the 1980s. Are you asking about specifically white writers who are going beyond shame? TM: Yes. I mean, I’m taking your book to be a call to stronger self-reflection, as a challenge. That is, for writers to ask, “In my next story, how will I deal with shame?” I’ve been super self-conscious about who I could write. I’m like a vestigial Platonist, a latent essentialist. I read you claiming that we need to stop thinking there’s an essentialist aspect to writing others. JR: When you talk about being a vestigial Platonist, you have to think about Plato’s critique of poetry in The Republic. This is a central tension in Western aesthetics. Plato hated the idea of mimesis and mimetic art because of what you’re saying. It is anti-essential. If an essence can be replicated, what is it? Do we need it? The central challenge in fiction is representing other lives and consciousnesses. That’s always the core artistic challenge. I think that, in some ways, American fiction writers have essentially sort of sat back and avoided the central artistic question that should’ve been discussed in the 1960s and 1970s: Given that the country is becoming so equal and more egalitarian (superficially, anyway) and poly-cultural, how do fiction writers deal with that? That was a big subject of American fiction in the early 20th century. Along with the kinds of cities there were and new immigrants, there was all this discussion of the social novel and naturalism. What happened after 1970 in American fiction is things went radically the other way, especially in the highbrow white aesthetic universe. Nobody wanted to talk about that stuff. No one wanted to talk about the crisis of representation. There were all these postmodern systems novels and the New Minimalists, but even the most ambitious novelists, like Don DeLillo, were flattening, reducing, altering, and manipulating surface difference to create some otherworldly universe. No one was interested in the basic question about how you write a novel where a Chinese immigrant women falls in love with a black man from Mississippi. No one wrote that novel. That novel should’ve been written in the late ’80s. But that novel didn’t make the front page of The New York Times Book Review. People are writing that now. Atticus Lish’s novel Preparation for the Next Life is a little bit like that, which is ironic. In some ways, the central artistic question hasn’t been discussed because writers are always so weighted down with fear, paranoia, and anger, legitimate anger about the bad attempts at racial representation that have happened in the past. TM: Do you think the blowback over William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) had something to do with that? JR: I do. I wrote about this in the book a tiny bit. I’ve written about Styron and Nat Turner before. That was a huge thing for me. When I was 17, in my first writing workshop, my teacher told us, an all-white class, that white writers cannot write about race because Nat Turner proved that we will be punished for doing so. He was expressing the conventional wisdom at the time in his circles. This was 1992. The teacher of the class, Lee Abbott, a wonderful person, who knew Ray Carver and Richard Ford, was a short story writer very much of that time, of the late ’80s and ’90s. He was essentially expressing the literary consensus of the white American creative writing community. Of course, that had a huge effect on me. It basically convinced me that I could not do that. I spent years trying to write in an all-white way. [millions_email] TM: Whatever “writing in a white way” means, right? JR: Yeah. In my case, what it meant was relying only on white models. It meant I went through all of 20th-century American fiction and picked out the white prominent writers and tried to read all of them and tried to ignore everyone else. That was what was being taught in creative writing classes. I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan from 1999 to 2001, which is, in the greater scheme of things, not long ago. I don’t believe there was a single text by an African-American author taught in any of my classes. Maybe one in a craft class. One or two; that’s it. Nobody, none of my teachers in fiction workshop, made any but the most sort of marginal reference to a black writer. TM: Five years later in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis, I definitely had African-American writers and writers of color included in my workshops and courses. JR: You’re lucky. The way that I teach fiction workshops now couldn’t be more different, self-consciously so. Not just in racial representation but in looking at different aesthetics, which wasn’t really done much in any of my writing workshops. I never had a teacher who encouraged us to work with experimental texts. TM: You mention how writers “outside of whiteness” use white writing as an anti-metaphysics. Like Colson Whitehead adopting DeLillo’s style in The Intuitionist or Monique Trong’s The Book of Salt. I think about when I first read Toni Morrison and wondered, “How in the hell do I learn to write like her? How can I do what she does?” And after reading your book, I wonder, about the reverse way that writers of color, borrowing rhetorical styles from white writers, can operate backwards, for white writers to work within African-American and non-white rhetorical styles? JR: I think it’s hugely important for white writers to talk about how influenced they are by writers of color. It doesn’t happen nearly enough. The only way to start talking about American literature as a whole literature is to talk about the interplay among the different voices, and that just doesn’t happen enough. I talk about that issue in the book in many places. For me it came up so vividly when I read James Baldwin and was so intensely captivated by his novel Another Country. I said to my wife, “I want to write a novel exactly like this.” That is a crucial artistic step forward, acknowledging the influence—and it should be obvious and go without saying, but it isn’t obvious and it doesn’t go without saying. Toni Morrison is held up as a larger-than-life person, an icon (which is all true), but for fiction writers she’s so important because of her technical skill and stylistic, artistic skill. As a humanist voice, yes, she’s important, but for fiction writers, it’s that she’s so good at writing. Her technical abilities and her innovations are hugely influential. When I read Beloved for the first time, which was not until graduate school, I suddenly understood why so many other writers I had seen were doing things or using the chapter beginnings or the kind of voice that they were using. “Oh, it’s because they’re influenced by Toni Morrison!” This strikes me all the time whenever I hear discussions about American memoir and hybrid texts. “Is a memoir actually fiction?” Someone no one ever talks about is Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior is the text that invented the modern American memoir, the text that started the whole movement toward so much of what is happening today. That text only gets acknowledged as quote-unquote multicultural literature. And, of course, it’s vital for Chinese-American culture. But for writers, it has so much to teach us about the overlay between autobiographical narrative and fictional narrative, and she does it so openly and skillfully, weaves in and out so skillfully. Everybody should be learning from that—that should be the center of the canon.

Should We Still Read Norman Mailer?

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There is a marvelous scene in Dick Fontaine’s underseen 1968 roustabout documentary Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? where we are in a bar watching people watch Norman Mailer on Merv Griffin’s show. He’s ostensibly being interviewed about his latest novel, Why Are We in Vietnam?. But just as that book is only obliquely about Vietnam, Mailer is only obliquely being interviewed. Griffin lets the pugilistic author hurl denunciatory roundhouses about the war at the camera, the instinctive performer going for where the real audience is. In the bar, the patrons take it all in passively, much as we all do while watching TV unless the Cubs are winning the World Series or the president is announcing that bombing has begun. Eventually there is grousing at Mailer’s fury, though, and the set duly disconnected. America’s great public intellectual is silenced. The movie is a companion piece of sorts to The Armies of the Night, Mailer’s nonfiction novel—a genre he had disparaged when Truman Capote, one of his rivals in the world of literary TV jousters and quipsters, had tried it out—about attending and being arrested at the 1967 March on the Pentagon. Like Fontaine’s quizzical and half-jesting film essay on celebrity and authenticity, Mailer’s book is not so much a document of the thing itself but a cockeyed jape about his vainglorious participation. Yoked as it is to a brooding and half-baked analysis of American sin and militarism, The Armies of the Night is fitfully incandescent. But it rewards for being reported on the ground without resorting to canned narratives. All is filtered through Mailer’s sensibility, trained by years of fiery raging against the creeping totalitarianism of American life. It’s best read with Miami and the Siege of Chicago, the other great grounding component of the new boxed set of Mailer-ana from Library of America: Norman Mailer: The Sixties. At nearly 1,400 pages packed into two volumes, it’s all too much at once, like a supercut of Mailer’s TV appearances, those bright dark eyes and halo hair, his machine-gun sentences snapped out one after the other until the white flag is waved. The delineation by decade isn’t particularly helpful, because it necessitates including a couple of Mailer’s noisier but lesser novels. Although he had spent much of his writing life after the war trying to be recognized as a novelist, nothing after his still-notable debut, The Naked and the Dead, attracted the kind of heat he desired. 1965’s An American Dream was noisy at the time but embarrassing now. It’s a feverish mess related by Stephen Rojack, a war hero turned philosophy professor and politician who just can’t keep himself out of trouble—a character who, in other words, reads purposefully like an exaggeration of all Mailer’s traits (lest we forget that time he ran for mayor with Jimmy Breslin). After murdering his wife, Rojack wastes no time bedding her maid and then falling into bed with a nightclub singer, not to mention nearly killing the singer’s lover and making friends with the cop who’s investigating him. There is some snap to Mailer’s voice here and there (“the air had the virile blank intensity of a teller’s cage”). But its ludicrous potboiler elements are laughable, and the turgid antihero narrative, reflecting his unfortunate tendency for romanticizing violent outsiders, leaves a sour aftertaste. As for the collection’s other novel, 1967’s Why Are We in Vietnam?, this slogging faux-Burroughs picaresque mockery of American male braggadocio tries to fashion itself as some kind of commentary on the war and the species, but chases its own tail in exhausting fashion. One can see why everybody at the time wanted to know why the whole book, which only directly references the war at the very end, seemed like a tiresome setup for an unfunny joke, like Portnoy’s Complaint without the wit. It was Mailer’s nonfiction—an earlier batch of which had been collected in 1959’s Advertisements for Myself—staggering under more ideas than they could conceivably carry and redolent with doom, which ultimately did for him and his reputation what his novels’ scandalous content never had. By the time The Armies of the Night opens, Mailer is in the full bloom of naked self-regard of his brilliance and contradictions. He views himself as a character—“the novelist,” or simply “Mailer.” Bumbling about a pre-march party in D.C., he gets heroically tanked and makes catty little remarks about fellow peace-marching literati like Dwight Macdonald and Robert Lowell. Then comes a shambling speech at the Ambassador, which he relates in the book as a kind of verbal performance art, but which looks in Fontaine’s movie as garbled and occasionally racist nonsense. “He laughed when he read the red bordered story in Time about his scatological solo at the Ambassador Theater—he laughed because he knew it had stimulated his cause.” What cause was that, exactly? He doesn’t discuss the war itself much at all, in fact. When Mailer can wrest the book away from contemplation of “Mailer,” Armies is a tactical work about how the protestors formed, scattered, and regrouped in their move on the Pentagon, a building whose sheer size made any confrontation or encirclement impossible. (There’s an irony here, in that Mailer had a few years earlier complained about James Jones’s The Thin Red Line, which had been compared to his own World War II Pacific Theater combat novel, The Naked and the Dead, saying that “it is too technical. One needs ten topographical maps to trace the action.”) In Mailer’s highly personal history, there isn’t any grand forward momentum. Rather, it’s a chaotic melee in which batches of fuzzy-headed youths and intellectuals, and the odd tight phalanx of true activists, swarm fitfully toward a monstrous and unassailable target with no idea of what victory would constitute. As such, Mailer analyzes the whole “ambiguous event” with enough distance to keep from romanticizing it. A note of sorrow pervades the account when he can wrest his eyes from himself, worrying over a “terror” that “nihilism might be the only answer to totalitarianism.” He looks over it all like a tactician studying a dusty book of battle: “they assembled too soon, and they attacked too soon.” Strategies are also promulgated throughout Miami and the Siege of Chicago. A tighter and angrier piece of work than Armies, it finds Mailer in leaner form. Leaving behind some of those toys that cluttered up the earlier book, he keeps to the subject while not abandoning his orotund voice. It’s an account of a seemingly doomed nation told in two meetings: the 1968 Republican convention in Miami in early August and the Democratic convention that followed in Chicago later that month. Mailer’s voice is fulsome but not playful, as though he has come to the end of things after the killing of Bobby Kennedy two months before: “Like pieces of flesh fragmented from the explosion of a grenade, echoes of the horror of Kennedy’s assassination were everywhere.” The “Nixon in Miami” segment is a classic slice of New Journalism. Spiky with overblown metaphors and heavy with luxuriantly dark language (“the vegetal memories of that excised jungle haunted Miami Beach in a steam-pot of miasmas”), it delivers cynicism by the truckload as Mailer stumps around the plasticine pirate place, sweating in his reporter suit as he delivers the nit and the grit of delegate counting. The competition between a desperately mugging Richard Nixon and serene but outmaneuvered Nelson Rockefeller is handled as mostly a foregone conclusion whose result at this phenomenally dull Potemkin event is ultimately beside the point: “unless one knows him well...it is next to useless to interview a politician.” At one point, Mailer aims a full racist sneer at the black musicians playing for the white crowd, calling them “a veritable Ganges of Uncle Toms.” This racism is of a piece with many other moments throughout this collection. Witness his observations in Armies of the black people at the march who he thought held themselves apart, referring once to a “Black contingent [drifting] off on an Oriental scramble of secret signals.” Or, after he was arrested, seeing the “sly pale octaroon” with “hints of some sly jungle animal who would scavenge at the edge of camp.” Like in Armies, with its uncertainty over tactics and goals, at the start of “The Siege of Chicago,” Mailer arrives in town as no friend of Daley’s pro-war hippie-thumping fascists. But it takes time for him to line up behind the protestors. Delving somewhat back into his old self-regarding ways, Mailer puffs himself up as a supposedly unique breed of “Left Conservative” as though there weren’t also millions of Americans who hated the war and the reactionary attitudes of its supporters but still wanted nothing to do with the slovenly utopian narcissism of the Yippies and their compatriots. But the war veteran who first wonders if “these odd unkempt children” were the kind of allies with whom “one wished to enter battle” is turned around once he witnesses the “nightmare” of the police riot on Michigan Avenue and sees the tenacity of the bloodied protestors who faced down assault after assault: “Some were turning from college students to revolutionaries.” Mailer presents himself as the grounded intellectual, one who might find common cause with the agitators but still holds himself to the side. Some of this is the querulous discontent of the middle-aged man (born in 1923, he was well into his 40s by the time he marched on the Pentagon). Part of that constructed image is also a leftover of that detachment he tried to identify in 1957’s “The White Negro,” that weird firebomb of an article on the permutations of Hip. But in the '60s, some things were different. Mailer had determined to put drugs behind him. His contempt for the liberal establishment, especially after they gained power in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, grew ever larger. The divorces and children kept adding up, as did the bills. Paying journalism kept the paychecks coming in more than those pieces for Dissent or the novels that never blew the doors off as much as he imagined they would. So he kept himself going on TV to stir the pot and keep his name out there. He also kept knocking out the articles that fill up this collection’s second volume. [millions_ad] As in any collection of Mailer, this batch is part premature wisdom and part gasbag. Some pieces have both in abundance. “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” supposedly about the 1963 Patterson-Liston heavyweight fight in Chicago, has top-notch material on the fight itself and a half-comic ode to the “shabby-looking” sports reporters feverishly bashing at their typewriters, all worked into soliloquies on “the Negroes,” the nation, and whatever else was coursing through Mailer’s overtaxed neurons at the time. Occasionally he fixates on a person, and the result is never good, as seen in “An Evening with Jackie Kennedy,” which contains among the most meaningless sentences one could ever read: “Afterward one could ask what it was one wanted of her, and the answer was that she show herself to us as she is." But, then, he was writing about a woman, and they eternally flummoxed Mailer. Take 1963’s “The Case Against McCarthy,” a clumsy blatherskite of a piece supposedly reviewing Mary McCarthy’s The Group. It was not only a bestseller, which infuriated Mailer, but written by a woman and about women, which pushed him over the edge.  Loosely framed as a trial enunciating the author’s transgressions, Mailer’s piece windmills frantically. Even as he acknowledges her craft, he huffs and condescends about this lady daring to ascend the Olympus of Male Writers, calling her, a “duncy broad” and “Mary” (nowhere does he say “William” for Burroughs), imagining her as a shop lady with “a little boutique on the Avenue,” and concluding that “she is simply not a good enough woman to write a major novel.” Unlike, say, Mailer, who was a good enough man to have stabbed his second wife, Adele, with a penknife three years before writing this piece. She had reportedly told him he wasn’t as good as Dostoyevsky. Misogynist character assassinations aside, the essays are replete with literary jousting of the kind one doesn’t see anymore. While savaging Another Country, Mailer extends a deft and graceful appreciation of James Baldwin (“Nobody has more elegance than Baldwin as an essayist, not one of us hadn’t learned something about the art of the essay from him”) before twisting the knife one more time just for fun (“and yet he can’t even find a good prose for his novel”). It’s illuminating also, in this time of shellacked appreciation for J.D. Salinger, to read this dismissive and probably correct assessment: “there is nothing in Franny and Zooey which would hinder it from becoming first-rate television.” The digressions are, as ever, not just rampant but part of the attraction. In the middle of “The Debate with William F. Buckley,” Mailer finds time for an extended journey into “the plague” of the century: Even 25 years ago architecture, for example, still told one something about a building and what went on within it. Today, who can tell the difference between a modern school and a modern hospital, between a modern hospital and a modern prison, or a prison and a housing project? The airports look like luxury hotels, the luxury hotels are indistinguishable from a modern corporation’s home office, and the home office looks like an air-conditioned underground city on the moon. What was his point, again? Something about alienation and the Right Wing and our disconnection from reality and responsibility in the great postwar malaise of homogenized madness. Doesn’t matter—he was essentially correct even without being anybody’s idea of an architecture critic. Mailer and his writing was essential to his time because he declared it so. Later, with the onetime public intellectual’s turn to gaseous fictions (Harlot’s Ghost, Ancient Evenings) and a retreat from the constant engagement demanded by nonfiction journalism, that was not the case. But in the 1960s, he planted himself in the streets and in the pages where battle took place, told what he saw, and made his stand.

The March of Progress Is Never Neat: Merle Miller’s On Being Different

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1. Merle Miller’s On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual is remarkable in part for where and when it first appeared, in the pages of The New York Times Magazine in January 1971. There have been many additions to the coming-out genre in the years since, in fiction and non-fiction. Everyone knows the conventions. The lonely child is burdened by primal needs. He nurses his secret in a world that despises him and slowly, after years of heartbreak, overcomes fear of societal or familial rejection and admits to the world the man he truly is. His family and his society at that point either accept or reject him. Quite often, they already knew his secret; his behavior had many “tells.” But by relieving himself of his secret he discovers at least a modicum of peace. This is the stuff of People magazine, high-brow literary fiction, long-form journalism, celebrity memoirs, Marvel Comics, alternative comics, young-adult literature, Oprah and Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project. Miller’s piece came first and by publishing it The Times made it respectable. A few months later Miller expanded it into a book. Miller had endured many insults by the time he told his story and a quiet anger permeates his prose as he asserts his dignity and refuses any further humiliation. It’s been 41 years since the piece was first published and the gods of publishing have returned to confer upon it now not respectability but prestige in the form of a Penguin Classics reissue. It’s a handsome edition, but I wish it included the essay that caused Miller to tell his story in the first place.  I’ll get back to Miller in a bit, but first a word on Joseph Epstein’s “Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity”. In 1970 Harper’s, a publication few if any considered an incubator of right-wing cruelty, published Epstein’s study of homosexuality. It’s a long piece, taking up 11 pages in the magazine, but few people today remember more than a couple choice lines. Veterans of the nascent gay-rights movement still quote them through hisses. “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth,” Epstein wrote. “I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it, because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime...” The cruelest cut came at the end of the piece when Epstein, a father of four sons, imagined the greatest horror of all. [N]othing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual. For then I would know them condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men, their lives, whatever adjustment they might make to their condition, to be lived out as part of the pain of the earth. It’s obvious from reading this line or at least it seemed obvious to some reading this line in 1970 that Epstein preferred his children to become rapists or murderers. He was expressing an illiberal rage incongruous with his Jewish name. A sit-in at the Harper’s offices followed. But the protesters weren’t entirely accurate in their characterization of Epstein’s essay. It’s always easier if bigots wear swastikas and white robes, and by that metric Epstein disappoints. I for one wish every genocidal hate monger posed as many questions to himself as Epstein did in his essay. Unfortunately, he was a good man. And the essay was a portrait of an intelligent human being whose prejudices made him less intelligent. Epstein read all the popular materials on homosexuality then available to members of his intellectual class. He quoted Gide, Freud, Dr. David Reuben, M.D. -- the anti-gay author of Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex...But Were Afraid to Ask -- as well as some early studies of homosexuality in the animal kingdom. On the nature vs. nurture debate he was an agnostic. “[O]ne can’t say with the same old confidence that homosexuality is unnatural, however deeply one might feel that it is.” He had enough sense to feel uncomfortable about comedians who would never think of telling black or Jew jokes, but who had no problem making fun of the faggots, well-aware of the “assured approval from their audiences.” He also condemned anti-sodomy laws. But the piece took strange directions. Epstein pointed to several homosexuals he had met throughout his life, the pederast in Chicago, the lecherous mayor of a small Southern town, and a Lebanese army buddy who moonlighted as a drag queen. They were all miserable, or if not miserable, at least troubled and strange. He admired those who repressed their homosexual desires. “Men who are defiant about their homosexuality, or claim to have found happiness in it, will, I expect, require neither my admiration nor sympathy.” The essay’s meandering logic and its eerie condescension outlined the kind of conversation a husband and wife might have had at their Upper West Side apartment in 1970, after taking in the latest Edward Albee or Stephen Sondheim production. “My god the way those homosexuals understand some of our weird lives!” “It’s because they’re homosexuals. Everything we do looks weird to them.The talented freaks.” Merle Miller was one of the many gay men who read Epstein’s casual bigotry as a declaration of war. Miller was a novelist and journalist whose work was fun, light and funny, if a little square. His life was interesting. He had done work for the ACLU in the '50s during the McCarthy years. Later he tried to develop an aborted TV series that was to feature Jackie Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, and spent hundreds of hours interviewing Harry Truman for another aborted TV series. In between, he had written a few bestsellers. He had many friends in Manhattan and after reading Epstein’s piece, he complained about it to one of them, the editor of Harper’s. A few days later he had lunch with Victor Navasky, who was then a staff member at The Times Magazine. This is the account of that lunch from the book version of his memoir: [Navasky] said he thought it was brilliant. He said, “At a time when everybody is saying we have to understand and accept homosexuals, Epstein is saying...” I said, “Epstein is saying genocide for queers.” And then for the first time, in broad daylight, before what I guess you would call a mixed audience, in a French restaurant on West 46th Street, I found myself saying, “Look, goddamn it, I’m homosexual, and most of my best friends are Jewish homosexuals, and some of my best friends are black homosexuals, and I am sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.” There it was, out at last, and if it seems like nothing very much, I can only say that it took a long time to say it, to be able to say it, and none of the journey was easy. Epstein was not calling for a roundup to the camps. He simply wished, in his good honest heart, with his pompous style, that they be freed from the affliction of homosexuality. But it may have been a good thing that Miller misread Epstein, for it filled him with righteous fury and provoked him to come out for the first time to his straight friends, there in that restaurant, at the age of 51. Miller would claim that he reluctantly agreed a few days later to Navasky’s request to write about what they had discussed over lunch. Who knows how reluctant he really was. There’s nothing that agitates a writer more than to listen to someone speak poorly on a subject the writer himself knows well. Miller had spent years listening to people with no knowledge speak about a particular at the very core of his being. At some point he had to answer back. 2. In 1971, a good few thousand years into human history, a literate man would have had access to several books about homosexuality. Gore Vidal had published in 1948 The City and the Pillar, a novel about a man doomed by a youthful love. In the mid-50s James Baldwin wrote Giovanni’s Room about white gay people, and then in 1962, Another Country, an interracial melodrama. More patient readers had the novels of Jean Genet, that aged outlaw who was then hanging out with the Black Panthers. On the stage, the love that dare not speak its name howled it in Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, which had by that time been adapted to the screen by William Friedkin. This is to say nothing of the older books everyone knew about, Gide’s Corydon, Wilde’s De Profundis, Melville’s Billy Budd, Proust and Shakespeare. Every freshman at Columbia University spent their first week of school reading The Iliad, which featured the love story of Achilles and Patroclus. Camp had seeped into the wider culture, but these books treated the subject of homosexuality as text not subtext. If you chose to condescend to gay people, you did so in the shadow of a canon. The '50s and '60s can look at one angle like a sexual dark age in which certain highly-sexed monks guarded the great secret of a more liberal civilization in libraries for a future time that would be better able to handle these fantastic truths. But these books were widely read and all easily misunderstood. Shakespeare, Melville, and the Greeks were all located far enough in the past for their homosexuality to be considered part of a distant culture’s strange customs. Vidal and Baldwin were iconoclasts. And their genius, whether in the form of Vidal’s exoticized Waspiness or Baldwin’s blues-intoned blackness, was filtered through an outsider’s bent. Their novels were not about happiness. They were paeans to self-loathing. Vidal’s tragic narrator: “[I]t would be a difficult matter to live in a world of men and women without participating in their ancient and necessary duet.” Baldwin’s hero in Giovanni’s Room is suspicious of the effeminate men who surround him. “I always found it difficult to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them.” The enraged queens in Crowley’s play speak even crueler aphorisms. And this is where Miller, with all his unbearable whiteness, found a place. He was a middle-aged Midwesterner who wrote with irony when he had to but was just as capable of writing without it. “I dislike being despised, unless I have done something despicable, realizing that the simple fact of being homosexual is all by itself despicable to many people, maybe, as Mr. Epstein says, to everybody who is straight.” Vidal would never demean himself on or off the page by saying he wanted to be liked. Baldwin always demanded to be loved or at least, with a Whitmanesque lilt, to live inside you and for you to live inside him. Miller was comfortable with camp language and employed it in his 1972 novel What Happened, but here Miller described the basic need most humans, straight and gay, actually have, in a plain prose unencumbered by genius, the kind of voice you could hear over lunch at a restaurant on West 46th Street. The story Miller tells in On Being Different is self-consciously un-extraordinary. There is no Achilles and Patroclus. There is no melodrama and for that reason gay men easily found and still find in his story parallels with their own lives. Miller draws a portrait of himself as the one man on earth least capable of living the life of an outlaw. He was an effeminate boy, a budding pianist, growing up in Marshalltown, Iowa in the 1920s and '30s. From the age of four to the age of 17 someone called him a sissy everyday to his face, five days a week. “It’s not true, that saying about sticks and stones; it’s words that break your bones,” he writes. He had three close friends, all misfits in this small homogenous culture, a Jewish boy, a polio victim, and a middle-aged woman with a clubfoot. He headed to the local train depot for his earliest sexual encounters, picking up boys from freight trains lost in Depression-era America. "They were all lonely and afraid. None of them ever made fun of me. I was never beaten up. They recognized, I guess, that we were fellow aliens with no place to register." Just as young gay men in later years would read his essay for comfort, Miller would turn to the library for solace, finding a mirror in an effeminate schoolteacher at the center of one of the stories in Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Reading the story didn’t do him much good. Literature didn’t liberate or ennoble him. Later, as the editor of the University of Iowa’s student newspaper The Daily Iowan he found himself turning his years of pain outward, humiliating the theater queers at his school. It’s an old story and all too human. He didn’t go in for fag-bashing as an adult, but he spent his career ignoring the plight of people very much like himself. At the ACLU he would do nothing in response to the gay-baiting that characterized the McCarthy years. “The only group of outcasts I never spoke up for publicly, never donated money to or signed an ad or petition for were the homosexuals. I always used my radio announcer’s voice when I said ‘No.’” Activists can be annoying and obnoxious and the old writings from the Mattachine Society can sound shrill, naïve, and filled with a cloying self-regard. Those are also the people most willing to fight the necessary wars. If Miller’s book is an argument for dignity and acceptance, it is also an argument against politeness. It is an argument against letting stray homophobic remarks from your liberal friends just go in the interest of keeping the evening pleasant. It is an argument against letting someone change the topic of conversation when they tell you they feel uncomfortable about gay marriage. It’s an argument for demanding the part of the territory to which you are entitled. And that last part is an odd thing for a man with Miller’s background to be arguing. “I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, into a society in which they were supposed to be safe,” James Baldwin would say in his later years. “The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to the sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society.” There’s a wounded rage in Miller’s piece, a fury at having to negotiate this territory in the first place. The gay rights movement, despite what its depiction in The Advocate or the TV series Queer as Folk would suggest, was never a white movement. The greatest heroes of Stonewall were black and Latino drag queens. And then there’s Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s gay mentor. But part of the power of Miller’s piece came from the fact of entrenched prejudices beyond homophobia. The portrait Miller draws of himself is of a white man unable to find a proper place in a white world. As an Iowa boy in Manhattan, he could be something that Baldwin and Vidal and even the later Jewish gay activists Larry Kramer and Harvey Milk could not be. If not for that one thing Miller could have fit into society and perhaps enjoyed a less traumatic childhood. If not for that one thing he would have enjoyed the comfortable place of his straight high school classmates. His cultural background allowed him to obtain a pose that an ethnic marker would have made inauthentic. His Midwestern whiteness could make him always tantalizingly almost normal. There’s something else the book is arguing for. The gay man is miserable, in part, because of homophobia. The homophobe uses his misery not as proof of the evil of homophobia but as proof of the evil of homosexuality. How does one fight this line of attack? Miller was married to a woman for 10 years and they remained friends after their divorce. And though he doesn’t detail his adult male-male relationships, he does tell the story of a couple who had been together for 25 years who find a place for themselves in a dark time. “They still hold hands, though not in public, and they are kind to each other, which is rare enough anywhere these days.” This is something you do not read in Vidal or Baldwin or the rest of the canon Epstein had read. Miller’s book is a genuine argument for the possibility of such happy lives. 3. This is the part of the essay in which I am supposed to note the amazing march of history, the ways in which the world we now inhabit differs from the world in which Merle Miller first wrote his piece. We just re-elected a president who supported same-sex marriage, a position which seemed to help his campaign. A Midwesterner, a woman from Wisconsin, will become the first openly gay member of the U.S. Senate. Three states, including the state in which I grew up and the state where I now live, passed referendums legalizing same-sex marriage. When the first returns came in on the marriage question here in Seattle on election night I was at a party hosted by The Stranger downtown. Dan Savage and his husband Terry were dancing on stage. Gay men have an acute sense of history. Charles Kaiser, who wrote the afterword to this edition of On Being Different, was born about 30 years after Miller and remained in the closet throughout the '70s while working as a reporter for The New York Times. Savage, who wrote the foreword, was born about 45 years after Miller and came out as a teenager. Today, there is this new breed of young men and women who never knew the closet and never second-guessed their bodies’ desires. I was born in 1980 and, given the changes I have seen in my own lifetime, I believe that if I had been born a short five years later I would have known a less difficult adolescence and become a less anxious man. It does get better, as Dan Savage says, if not perfect. There are still the stories of gay kids killing themselves. I am surprised when I meet gay men my age who are not out to any of their straight friends. I am even more surprised by the gay people my age who are not even out to themselves. It’s even more surprising than that when I find that these souls enjoyed childhoods as I enjoyed mine in liberal communities, like the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. Such stories upset the historical narrative we are telling ourselves. The march of progress is never neat. For the moment at least the closet is still a part of American life and for that reason alone On Being Different is still an important book. But I foresee a time not all that far in the future in which the closet will no longer exist as we know it. Sure, people will still feel embarrassed about some of their sexual desires. Society will still hold onto certain gender roles, but the acceptance of gay people may allow society to tweak their stereotypes. What will no longer exist in the world I envision is the man who spends years lying to people about who he is, who marries a woman, and allows himself to grow cold, gray and isolated as the years pass. What will no longer exist is that weird English graduate student who doesn’t understand why everyone thinks Henry James or Walt Whitman is gay. Comic foils like David Cross’s Tobias in Arrested Development will have no corollaries in reality. Gay kids will go on their first dates when they’re 12 or 13 and they will go out with kids of the same gender and everyone will be happier for that fact. I don’t know what place On Being Different, this classic of the coming-out genre, will have in a world in which people no longer need to come out. Miller’s internal struggles may look as bizarre to future generations as the intrigues and marriage plots of 19th-century novels look to us today. Merle Miller’s book could just as easily survive. We humans have a long history of making people we don’t like feel that they are not fully human. Even if homophobia were to die, human nature would remain. In another 100 years On Being Different may simply serve as the record of one man’s attempt in middle age to declare that his particulars made him no better or worse than you.

Burnt-out Summer Reads

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There is no greater way to spend your summer than flat on your back on the hot sand or in a chaise lounge by a pool (preferably with nearby waiters serving adult beverages). So while you’re laid out and baking this season check out these books whose landscapes and characters are bone-dry, desolate, charred, or wasted. The relentless emptiness, absence of morality, and anesthetized and vacuous characters will provide a different kind of "trashy" beach read.  The ennui will be a perfect complement to your cocktail. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion Play It As It Lays follows the trajectory of Maria Wyeth, a burnt-out actress bouncing between Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and the Mojave Desert. The lovers, ex-husbands, and friends in Maria’s orbit take opiates and gin for menstrual cramps, rent apartments when the plumbing in their Beverly Hills mansion backs up, and wash up in motel rooms in the desert on the edge of movie sets. Play It As It Lays is precise, highly controlled, and, at least on the surface, utterly devoid of emotion. Her narrators report, they do not emote. What distinguishes Didion’s work is the polarity of that highly controlled narrative voice set against the utter disarray — “disorder was its own point” — of the worlds her characters inhabit. In other words, Didion composes scenes of excess, disintegration, and violence using a voice utterly devoid of all three. Polarities are Didion’s specialty — vulnerability and toughness, exposure and privacy, detachment and emotion, despair and hope — and her utilization of them injects her work with an extreme sense of pressure. The emotional weariness of her characters and their sense of doomed fatalism belie not just a wicked survival instinct, but also a sense of hopefulness – albeit a hopefulness whose origins and presence they themselves do not understand. It is Maria, the infamously detached protagonist of Play It As It Lays who says, “I know what ‘nothing’ means, and keep on playing. Why, [her friend] BZ would say. Why not, I say.” Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker Cassandra Edwards, a brilliant, intense Berkeley grad student, is hell-bent on sabotaging her twin sister Judith’s wedding, and returns to her family’s ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to do just that. Cassandra’s first person narration is utterly spellbinding and it takes no effort for the reader to understand how Judith falls for Cassandra’s manipulative charm over and over again once we so easily do the same (think verbal pyrotechnics). Cassandra is at once conniving, self-aware, frantic, irrational, despondent, lucid, adoring, and shockingly sympathetic. Her neurotic attachment to her sister as some extension of herself, their lush-of-a-retired-philosophy-professor father, and their willfully oblivious grandmother make for a family story like none other. As Cassandra discovers that that her force of will is not enough to keep the people she loves in orbit around her, her sense of order and ties to reality begin to crumble. Baker’s writing, like her protagonists, is vivacious and funny as hell and the dialog is as good as it gets. Cassandra is totally nuts and incredibly sympathetic — and you will be completely enraptured by her. Another Country by James Baldwin I have a friend who a reads Another Country every year, and I can totally see why. This is a book that contains worlds, and has something new to offer up with each reading. Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, Another Country centers around six people who are all, in some way, connected to Rufus Scott, a jazz drummer in New York City. Baldwin’s cast of characters leads us into the weeds of their lives, and we are privy to things that we should never see and won’t easily forget. Another Country is haunting and the pictures Baldwin conjures are searing. Thematically, it touches on pretty much everything: race, sexuality, gender, class, passion, love, loss, grief, friendship. You name it, it’s in here. It’s a book about how we hurt and need each other in equal measure; the ways in which we entwine ourselves into the lives, and the bodies of the people we love. The things we pay for, and how we pay. The Washington Post dubbed this book, “An almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience.” And really that sums it up perfectly. A Way of Life Like Any Other by Darcy O'Brien Born to movie star parents in the Golden Age of Hollywood, the unnamed narrator of A Way of Life Like Any Other grew up in the (kitschy) lap of luxury on the family estate, Casa Fiesta. “Was there ever an ass so pampered as mine,” he wonders at the outset of the novel? But the glory days are over. His parents’ careers have disintegrated and their marriage has come apart. In the wake of his former life this man-child struggles to make a path forward for himself. A deadpan, cutting, and catty comedy of manners, O’Brien uses a razor sharp and devastating wit to talk about the world and the family his narrator came up in. A surprisingly moving coming-of-age story laced with a healthy dose of glitter and camp. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson The only book on this list that has a sort of cooling effect, The Summer Book is an unsentimental series of vignettes that opens a window onto the lives of six-year-old Sophia and her grandmother who are spending the summer on a small island in Finland after Sophia’s mother dies. Pretty much nothing happens in this book: attention is focused on minutiae and things are handled from an emotional remove that we’ve come to expect from the Swedes. The writing is crisp and somewhat distanced and experiences are observed rather than felt; to wit: Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness. The can of kerosene is brought up from the cellar and left in the hall, and the flashlight is hung on its peg beside the door. According to The Independent (London),” The Summer Book manages to make you feel good as well as wise, without having to make too much effort... [it] says so much that we want to hear in such an accessible form, without ever really saying anything at all.” If that’s not the perfect summer read, I don’t know what is. Image via Stewart Butterfield/Flickr

Happy Belated Birthday James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – November 30, 1987)

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Buzz Poole, the managing editor of Mark Batty Publisher, has written for numerous publications, and is an infrequent contributor to The Millions. Keep up with him and his adventures in surprising iconography at the Madonna of the Toast blog.The first time I encountered James Baldwin, when I read Another Country, his work resonated immediately. With his ability to render an educated, upper-middle class white woman as perceptively as an ignored, begging-for-attention black musician who hurls himself off the George Washington Bridge, Baldwin revealed to me the problem with the race problem: no one really wants to talk about it. In America, it seems preferable to avoid the problem, or ignore its magnitude all together. Nothing in any of Baldwin's writing seems dated today. The reason for this is simple (and disheartening): he understood America because it had made such an indelible and problematic impression on him, the people he grew up around and lived amongst, black and white.In identifying the central issue of racial tension in America as America's unwillingness to accept the fact that it doesn't have the faintest clue how to endeavor the Herculean feat of resolving the problem, Baldwin proselytizes the faith of the individual, investing in every single person the power to enact change.In the March 31, 2008, issue of the New Yorker, George Packer wrote a piece titled "Native Son," a response to Senator Barack Obama's, "rap on race" (to borrow another title from Baldwin, and Margaret Mead) at the US Constitution Center in Philadelphia on March 18. With the exception of some random comments in blog posts, this article marks the only searchable connection that has been made between these two figures.Packer accurately characterized Obama's Philadelphia speech as one of "moral and intellectual intricacy," likening it to Baldwin's essay "Notes of a Native Son," which is framed by the death of Baldwin's father, "the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas." The essay wrestles with Baldwin's realization of why his father had become so full of hate, for everyone, and how that hatred was really Baldwin's only inheritance. Baldwin's father's attitude about the world at large was a symptom of a rage that "can wreck more important things than race relations... [and] one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it."Packer wrote of Baldwin's essay that it is "about the distorting power of rage, the charge to acknowledge the inheritance of racism without being defined by it." These last five words - "without being defined by it" - undercut one of the revelatory tenets of Baldwin's entire body of work, however. For Baldwin, it was not the fact that he was black that caused him consternation, but what it meant to be black in America. It was racism that defined his country and his place within it.To be sure, at the heart of all of Baldwin's writings, fiction and nonfiction, the issue of race throbs. It cannot be denied that issues of race formed America, and continue to do so today. What Baldwin urged readers to do is accept this fact and from acceptance create a dialogue that permits true communication. In his seminal essay, "The Discovery of What it Means to Be an American," Baldwin declared, "The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here." Perpetuated by entities such as the government, media, corporations and the church, the American myth has always been very powerful, but also very misleading. Baldwin recognized this contradiction and spent a lifetime attempting to defeat the deception, or if nothing else to confront it head-on. For all of the constrictive structures Baldwin dealt with in his writing, both social and physical, he ultimately laid the responsibility for change in the only place change can really occur: with the individual. In the essay "Everybody's Protest Novel" he wrote, "[O]ur humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult - that is, accept it."The essay "A Stranger in the Village," from the collection of essays Notes of a Native Son, exemplifies this notion of acceptance in his dissection of how the residents of a small, isolated Swiss mountain village react to his presence, which includes shouts from children of "Neger! Neger!," the children oblivious to the "echoes this sound raises in [Baldwin]." Such reactions, in light of the setting - namely, not America - did not offend Baldwin so much as magnify for him what it takes to approach an understanding of who we are as individuals defined by characteristics that only account for a portion of our identities: "No one, after all, can be liked whose human weight and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted." Baldwin wrote of African Americans looking to trace their ancestry back to Africa, that "to go back so far [they] will find [their] journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature of the bill of sale which served as the entrance paper for [their] ancestor." According to Baldwin, it is a lack of history, the newness of America, that damns us all, black and white, should we not tare the scales of understanding to compensate for the void of an American history that pre-dates the arrival of African slaves in an unnamed America.The issue is not black and white, or even the concept of racism; racism is human and not particular to America. It is an issue of defining what it means to be an American, and by default, an issue of defining America as an entity that can freight such a definition. Beyond citizenship, defining an American seems damn near impossible. We certainly do not all speak English as a first language; our geographies vary greatly, as do our incomes, values and priorities. How then do we reconcile the past and present to best forge our future?In "Notes of a Native Son," Baldwin announced, "nothing is ever escaped." Baldwin knew he needed to define his home in order to cope with it, even when he lived abroad. It was his time observing the Old World that illuminated for him the intricacies of the New World. His definition of Americans relied on the intimate relationship between black Americans and white ones, as described in "Stranger in the Village": "He is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him - the Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than themselves by virtue of the fact that the challenge he represented was inescapable." As Baldwin saw it, the only way we could arrive at any sort of cogent definition for us as citizens of a single nation is when we accept what it means to be as inexorably linked to our African and European (and Asian and South American and Australian) pasts as we are severed from them by this magnificently unwieldy country that we all now call home.Baldwin biographer W.J. Weatherby wrote of how accusations by one of Baldwin's most outspoken critics, Eldridge Cleaver, were framed as "a politician's, not a writer's, a would-be spokesperson, not a witness.'" This is not intended to be a political piece, yet in this political season, where there is so much talk about what it does mean to be an American, the ideas that define Baldwin's work signpost a path that might just lead us out of the labyrinth of pundits, spin doctors and politicians because of his ability to relate his life's hardships and epiphanies, resulting in his readers being provided a perspective they may not have otherwise had.If nothing else, if you pick up one of these collections of essays, or Another Country, or Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone or Giovanni's Room, all of which exude Baldwin's constant demands for individual empowerment, and what happens when these demands are ignored or repressed, you can realize that Baldwin's need to plumb these difficult depths was because they were all too often the barriers that prohibited what Baldwin believed was the essence of life: the apotheosis of love through human communion.Happy belated birthday, James Baldwin, you would have been 84 years old. I don't think much has changed since you left us, though it certainly isn't because you didn't supply us with enough ideas to think about and discuss.