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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Reading Writers’ Houses
Roughly one hundred miles west of the Chilean capital of Santiago, in the sleepy fishing village of Isla Negra, a cylindrical stone tower flanked by tiered, red-roofed corridors winds across a sloping bluff overlooking the Pacific’s black-rock beaches. On first glance, it resembles a maritime vessel grounded into the jagged coastal landscape, more of an aesthetic construct than an inhabitable space. Scattered about the yard are mounted anchors, sidewalks inlaid with seashells, triangulated wooden posts festooned with rusted bells and, incongruously, a red-and-black locomotive. Pablo Neruda purchased this house in 1940 and, through a process of continuous renovation and expansion that lasted until his death in 1973, managed to shape it into a manifestation of what a life dedicated to poetry might look like. And largely because of this, Neruda’s house in Isla Negra is exceptional among existing writers’ houses.
On the whole, writers’ houses are uninspiring sites that fade from memory soon after the tours conclude. At Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, for example, I harbor vivid memories of the six-toed cats lounging about the yard but can’t recall anything about the house itself. In Concord, Massachusetts, the premier literary pilgrimage spot in the United States, I toured the houses of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, along with Henry David Thoreau’s reconstructed cabin at Walden Pond; yet what I remember most about that day is when the guide in Emerson’s house pointed to some thick curtains and remarked that Hawthorne, who was painfully shy, sometimes hid behind them during social gatherings. As soon as she said this, several members of my group scurried over to inspect the curtains. Someone asked if the curtains were original. The guide shook her head, but then indicated that they were exact replicas of the curtains that Emerson had used during his lifetime. Satisfied with the answer, we continued on to the next room, where I instantly tried to determine the corners and crevices that Hawthorne might have deemed appropriate hiding places.
While it’s amusing to envision a great American writer cowering behind the drapes at his equally renowned friend’s home, it is this sort of pithy anecdote that underscores why visiting writers’ houses often makes for an underwhelming experience. Writers’ houses offer a curious mixture of reverence, nostalgia, fabrication, and history; but there’s a limit to the information that they can impart. Seeing the refurbished domestic spaces where authors toiled away on their masterpieces does little to illuminate how the authors’ lives influenced their works and vice versa.
Of course, few people are in search of textual illumination during journeys to writers’ houses. Some are sightseers interested in the history of the region, while others want to feel closer to authors whose works have moved them. In A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses, a quirky and enlightening meditation on literary tourism, Anne Trubek notes that writers’ houses often serve as “secular shrines” that devoted readers frequent “because they believe that it will strengthen their faith to pay homage in person. The house—or the typewriter or the desk or the chair—is the mediating fetish object.” For these visitors, simply being in the study where the author wrote or, if the guide isn’t looking, touching the desk on which the literary alchemy took place is reason enough to have undertaken the journey.
Even casual visitors are drawn to writers’ houses for the opportunity, in Trubek’s words, to come “as close as possible to the precise, generative ‘Aha!’” moment of literary creation. Yet since such moments cannot be seen or sensed but instead must be either imagined or re-created, visits to the rooms where writers labored often prove anticlimactic. After all, the rooms themselves were tangential to their inhabitants’ creative processes, and they appear now as little more than sterilized set pieces that have been deliberately frozen in time. Ultimately, the meaning that visitors derive from these rooms varies according to their capacity to imagine what might have taken place there. Or, as Trubek argues, a writer’s house is a fiction that visitors “read” based on whatever desires compelled them to venture there in the first place.
In Trubek’s estimation, there are over seventy operating writers’ houses in the United States alone, a group as notable for its inclusions (Jupiter Hammon, Gene Stratton-Porter, Vachel Lindsay) as its exclusions (Sherwood Anderson, Dr. Seuss, Theodore Dreiser). Over the past decade I’ve trekked to over a dozen of these houses and gradually became inured to the standard assortment of polished period furniture and colorful biographical tidbits that each offered. I fell into the habit of reading writers’ houses as formulaic works of genre fiction: easily digestible, diverting, and unmemorable.
But Pablo Neruda’s house in Isla Negra cut through my cynicism in surprising ways. It didn’t hurt that the house’s dramatic setting, perched above a particularly turbulent slice of the Pacific coast, stoked my imagination even before I’d entered. Most important, it was the only writer’s house I’d ever visited whose very structure and interior decoration seemed to offer insight into the author’s creative processes.
While additional Neruda homes are open to the public in Santiago and the port city of Valparaiso, neither is as fully realized as the house in Isla Negra, which served as Neruda’s primary residence during the latter half of his life. Neruda once referred to himself as a “carpenter-poet,” but if his house in Isla Negra is any indication, he was also a “poet-carpenter,” cobbling together images, objects, and textures in jarringly effective ways. Each idiosyncratic room looks and feels as uniquely constructed as Neruda’s poetry, overflowing with seashells, mastheads, ships in bottles, antique maps, mounted insects, and countless other oddities accumulated from a lifetime of travel and collection. Some rooms attest to his love of the sea, resembling ocean liners with low ceilings, porthole windows, and rounded corners; others are stocked with the sort of unvarnished wood furnishings that recall the author’s rustic childhood in the northern Patagonian town of Temuco. Overall, this distinctive house brings to mind the person who, while in Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, declared that “my hobbies are shells, old books, old shoes,” and then, true to his word, promptly spent a hefty portion of his winnings on a stunning array of seashells and rare books.
In her memoir, My Life with Pablo Neruda, Matilde Urrutia, Neruda’s third and final wife, asserted that the house had a “unique atmosphere, not so much because of what is actually there, but because the house took shape from a collection of images rooted in [Neruda’s] passions.” According to Urrutia, Neruda endeavored to transform the modest stone tower that he had originally purchased into “his dream world,” adding that only “he understood the value of things in it.” Neruda himself mused in his posthumously published memoirs that “in my house I have put together a collection of small and large toys that I cannot live without. I have also built my house like a toy house and I play in it from morning till night.” What these passages suggest is that while Neruda didn’t physically build the house in Isla Negra, it nonetheless grew out of his seemingly childlike ability to seek out and celebrate the poetry inherent in all manners of spaces and objects.
This combination of bottomless creativity and wide-eyed wonder formed an integral—and widely documented—part of Neruda’s personality. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, “I Sell My Dreams,” the unnamed narrator spends a morning in Barcelona with a lightly fictionalized version of Pablo Neruda and marvels at how Neruda “moved through the crowd like an invalid elephant, with a child’s curiosity in the inner workings of each thing he saw, for the world appeared to him as an immense wind-up toy with which life invented itself.” Similarly, Matilde Urrutia’s memoir portrays Neruda as an “overgrown boy” enthralled by the minutiae and happenstance of life. For example, Urrutia recalls that Neruda’s desk—a thick, weathered slab of driftwood—was something that had washed ashore on a beach near their house after a violent storm. When Neruda rushed out to retrieve it, he “chortled like a little boy who had just received the most wonderful gift.” My guide in Isla Negra told comparable stories about an eclectic array of displayed objects—how Neruda had encountered the objects, infused each one with value, and then strung them together, like words on a page, into the larger poetic design of the house.
As such, it is tempting to read Neruda’s house in Isla Negra as an extension of the author’s literary output. The house as a whole is as capacious, detailed, and imaginative as Canto General, Neruda’s lengthy masterwork on the history and geography of the Americas. At the same time, the attention that Neruda lavished on his possessions evokes his poems that glorify everyday objects, such as “Ode to the Onion” and “Ode to the Spoon.” By the end of the tour, I’d already come to the conclusion that Neruda’s poetry and houses were tightly intertwined, informing and playing off each other in a continuous creative loop.
However, reading a writer’s house in this manner is exactly what Trubek cautions against. In particular, Trubek warns that “if the fit between the author and his history—or biography—is too perfect, then the house becomes a cage, and the author, a bird.” This point is especially apt for the narrative constructed about Neruda at Isla Negra. My guide there repeatedly characterized Neruda as “a child in a man’s body,” and by doing so the tour accentuated Neruda’s eccentricities while effectively minimizing a more serious and equally important part of his life: his political activism.
It may strike many as comical that an individual with three sizable houses would define himself as a communist, but Neruda’s political convictions ran deep. He was someone who ran for President of Chile on behalf of the Communist Party, lived for nearly five years in hiding and exile to avoid political persecution, and titled one of his poetry collections Incitement to Nixonicide and Praise for the Chilean Revolution. When Neruda died on September 23, 1973, twelve days after a military coup had overthrown his country’s Socialist government and outlawed the Communist Party, his houses were ransacked and shuttered. The house in Isla Negra remained closed to the public for seventeen years, reopening only after democracy had been restored to Chile. Yet the tour does not dwell on this portion of the house’s history, perhaps because of its potential to polarize visitors, or because some of Neruda’s political views have subsequently fallen out of favor, or simply because it doesn’t fit comfortably within the airbrushed narrative put forth throughout.
But this shouldn’t be surprising. Even those readers that perceive of their treks to the choppy Pacific coast as pilgrimages must reconcile themselves to the fact that they’re also engaging in a tourist activity, and as with all forms of tourism, time restrictions and obligations to entertain typically trump concerns about historical accuracy and comprehensiveness. To capture a broad audience, my tour of Neruda’s house in Isla Negra seemed invested in canonizing a specific incarnation of the former inhabitant—the whimsical lover of wine, women, and words that has taken hold in the popular imagination over the past few decades.
And who’s to blame them? After all, this incarnation jibes with the unusual objects on display and, if my experience is any indication, is powerful enough to seduce even the most disenchanted literary tourist. Halfway through the tour, I’d become, in spite of myself, a willing accomplice in the constructed narrative, vividly imagining Neruda shuffling about the rooms, rearranging his scattered seashells and colored bottles, staring out at the Pacific while seated at his driftwood desk, waiting for inspiration to strike. Through it all a faint voice in the back of my head kept reminding me that for a more nuanced portrait of the author, I would have to wait for the tour to conclude. Invariably, a gift shop would await me then, conveniently stocked with biographies and assorted literary works at full retail price.
(Image credit: Luke Epplin)
Country of Quakes
1.
Around noon on February 20, 1835, Charles Darwin was lying down in a forest outside of the southern Chilean town of Valdivia when a massive earthquake jolted him upright. Appropriately for someone who had spent the past three years voyaging on the H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin related the vertiginous experience to seasickness, as if the earth were undulating over ocean waves.
When the ground stabilized, Darwin returned to Valdivia, where panicked villagers were inspecting their damaged homes and bracing for the inevitable aftershocks. In his journal, which would later be included in the travelogue, The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin wrote: “A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid.”
Over the following week, Darwin journeyed through several coastal towns where tsunamis had crashed through neighborhoods clustered along the shore, scattering boats about the streets. According to villagers, cows that had been grazing near the beaches had simply rolled into the ocean. Shortly thereafter, Darwin arrived in the devastated city of Concepción, where entire rows of houses had been reduced to rubble, and looters roamed the streets after dark. For Darwin, it was evidence of how much earthquakes affect not only the economics of a country but also its citizens’ worldviews. As Darwin mused: “If beneath England the now inert subterranean forces should exert their powers…how completely would the entire condition of the country be changed!”
Darwin’s journals fit into an eclectic group of writings that take as their subject matter an occurrence that has been constant through Chile’s long history: the earthquake. It is, in many ways, an alluring topic—a cataclysmic incident that can kickstart a plot or ratchet up a story’s emotional levels; but it also can function as an almost irresistible metaphor of instability, rupture, or suppressed memories or emotions that rumble unexpectedly to the surface.
2.
I learned the Spanish word for earthquake before the word for thunderstorm. But that’s not uncommon for someone who learns the language in a country where thunder rumbles infrequently but the earth shakes every few months.
In 2004, I lived in a three-room bungalow behind a stately, turn-of-the-century house in a middle-class neighborhood of Santiago. By the end of the first month, the family that owned the estate already had fallen into the nightly habit of buzzing the speakerphone that connected our two living spaces to invite me to dine with them. During the weekends, we would sit down to a midday, three-course meal with members of their extended family, after which the father, a reticent government employee who had grown up in the Atacama Desert, would pluck cedrón leaves off a backyard tree for us to mash into boiled water for tea. Pretty soon, I started to think of them as my Chilean family.
Several times throughout the year, while sitting down for either lunch or dinner, a family member would ask me if I had felt the tremor the night before. Invariably, I slept through these bits of seismic activity, which were too weak to even register in the morning news. Still, the idea of Chile being a country whose ground shook remained ever-present in my thoughts, and became a frequent topic of mealtime chitchat.
Over a dessert of flan and quinces that summer, I remember talking with one of the grandparents about the earthquake that rocked the country in 1960, registering a 9.5 on the Richter scale, the most powerful on record. She spoke of it as though it had happened only the week before, the awe still palpable in her voice. Many years later, while living in Chile again, I took a trip to Argentina and struck up a conversation with a tour guide there. When I asked her what she thought of Chile, she said, in a manner that is typical of the sibling rivalry between the countries, “Well, we’re just waiting for Chile to fall off into the ocean.” Even though the line was spoken in jest, there was still something slightly uncomfortable about it, as if behind its hyperbole was a sliver of plausibility.
When the next big one struck Chile during the early morning hours of February 27th, 2010, I thought immediately of my good friend Felipe, who works on a vineyard near the southern Chilean town of Talca, which was close to the quake’s epicenter. Luckily, Felipe had spent that weekend in Santiago with his fiancée. Upon feeling the rumbling, they leaped out of bed and rushed to the front door, the tremors knocking them repeatedly against the walls of the narrow hallway. Furniture toppled over and glass smashed onto the floor. But they came out unscathed.
While communicating with them over the next several days, I was reminded of the opening lines of Pablo Neruda’s poem, “Earthquake,” which was included in the author’s magnum opus, Canto General:
I awakened when dreamland gave way beneath
my bed.
A blind column of ash tottered in the middle
of the night,
and I ask you: am I dead?
The power of these lines derives largely from their lack of context; they’re almost purely experiential. One moment the anonymous speaker is asleep, and the next an earthquake upends his life, plunging him into a terrestrial inferno. Upon recovering his senses, the speaker asks: “Why does the earth boil, gorging on death?” This question frames the earth—and, by extension, the natural world—not as indifferent but as ravenous, gluttonously feeding on the destruction it’s caused. But perhaps the most haunting image comes in the closing lines, when the sun rises:
And today you dawn, O blue day, dressed
for a dance, with your gold tail
above the listless sea of debris, fiery
seeking the lost faces of the unburied.
Following a night of death, the dawn incongruously arrives in full splendor, its clear blue skies seeming to mock the ruins below. There’s an eerie, impersonal silence at the end of the poem. The speaker has retreated, and all we’re left with is the illuminated aftermath—heaps of rubble and unclaimed bodies.
Overall, Neruda’s poem treats the earthquake as lived experience—a natural incident that indiscriminately and terrifyingly transforms the physical and human landscapes.
3.
Of course, there are numerous lenses that literary works have applied to Chilean earthquakes over the centuries. For the protagonists in Heinrich von Kleist’s short story, “The Earthquake in Chile,” the earthquake, oddly enough, offers salvation and redemption.
Even though the German writer never visited Chile during his brief and tempestuous life (1777-1811), von Kleist nevertheless became inspired by an account that he read of the 1647 earthquake that devastated the Chilean capital of Santiago. He opens his short story in a prison cell where a young Spanish immigrant named Jerónimo Rugera is preparing a noose from which to hang himself. Earlier that year, he had fallen in love with Doña Josefa, a wealthy Chilean noblewoman whose father had forced her to join a convent. Undeterred, Jerónimo snuck into the convent and consummated his relationship with Josefa. When she gave birth to a baby boy nine months later, the Archbishop of Santiago sentenced her to death by beheading for their transgression. Jerónimo, who also had been imprisoned, vowed to take his life at the same time his lover’s was taken from her.
Immediately before Jerónimo slips the noose over his neck, violent tremors send him toppling backward. The prison walls collapse, allowing him to crawl through the debris to safety. He sprints out of the chaotic city and climbs a nearby hill, falling on his knees once he reaches the summit and weeping “with rapture to find that the blessing of life, in all its wealth and variety, was still his to enjoy.” Later that day he spots Josefa giving a bath to their infant son in the overflowing Mapocho River. After a tearful reunion, she tells him that the ground shook before she had reached the guillotine, burying the Archbishop in a pile of rubble. With nothing but destruction in sight, they abscond into the woods and reflect on “how much misery had to afflict the world in order to bring about their happiness.”
In their exhilarated solipsism, the lovers interpret the earthquake as both a rebuke to the institutionalized religious order and a divine miracle, as though the earth had intervened to spare their lives. In other words, they succumb to the all too human tendency to regard the earthquake as a personal event—a slightly mystical omen or verdict about one’s own individual fate. For Josefa and Jerónimo, the earthquake not only redeems their actions but also destroys those that had used their authority to keep them apart. It also serves as a societal leveler, for the world that the couple awakens to the next day is one where the rigid Chilean class system has been temporarily suspended, where noblepersons rush to the aid of beggars, “as if the general disaster had united all its survivors into a single family.”
As expected, this illusion does not last long. Overconfident in their interpretation of God’s will, Josefa and Jerónimo decide to return to Santiago to beg forgiveness at the church that had originally sentenced them. Once they enter the congregation, however, they discover that the priest has an alternate interpretation—namely, that the earthquake was divine retribution for the moral depravity of Santiago. When Jerónimo and Josefa are recognized, members of the church revolt and strike them both dead. Thus, the story is a sort of cautionary tale about the pitfalls of interpreting an earthquake as anything more than the seismic activity of an indifferent earth, and of assuming that a lone cataclysmic event can permanently alter culturally constructed power structures. In other words, an earthquake may affect the fate of humans, even positively so in rare instances, but human nature is another matter altogether.
4.
Unlike von Kleist’s story, there’s nothing redemptive about the earthquake in “Pandora,” an untranslated short story by the celebrated Chilean writer Ana Maria del Rio. In a manner reminiscent of Neruda’s poem, “Pandora” immediately plunges the reader into the experience of the earthquake: “The tremor didn’t come little by little. In reality, nothing in this life does. Everything happens just as it does in an earthquake: all at once. We are those who live one day at a time.”
The narrator, a teenage girl staying with her wealthy family at their country estate outside of Santiago, is still awake when the earthquake strikes, after which her father orders the family to spend the night in an oversize playhouse. The next morning, while surveying the damages, the mother, whom the narrator describes as a depressive woman whose youthful beauty had faded, falls to her knees and begins to dig into the earth with her bare hands. Unsure of how to respond, her children bend down and dig as well. Sobbing, the mother turns to her husband and exclaims, “Strange things emerge when you dig deep, Carlos.” The father quickly whisks her away from the children, who continue the excavation.
As the narrator turns up clumps of dirt with her hands, repressed memories emerge in her mind: her first menstruation that occurred when her cousin was performing oral sex on her, her mother’s unexplained decision to attend confession twice a week at the National Cathedral in Santiago. Soon, she enters a trance-like state: “By this time I was digging in a disorganized frenzy without quite knowing the objective of my search. I only knew that things kept appearing that were buried in the layers beneath words.”
Finally, the narrator’s fingers hit on something solid. After burrowing around it, she unearths a small white box with flowers decorating the sides. Inside is the decayed body of an infant. The narrator’s sister comes over to inspect, and states flatly that it was the child that their mother had presumably aborted after she found out that her husband was having an affair.
In this case, the metaphor of the earthquake becomes literal: what was once hidden beneath layers of earth rumbles back to the surface. But it’s more than just a geological excavation; the characters are also digging into the strata of their unconscious, sifting through the memories that they’ve repressed in order to keep their family together. It’s no surprise that, at the end of the story, after the narrator reburies the casket, she reflects on a feeling that she experienced during the initial seconds of the earthquake: that the world was coming to an end. And while the physical world didn’t dissolve, in many ways the imaginary world that the characters had constructed for themselves did.
5.
Despite the considerable seismic activity in Chile throughout the past centuries, it can be argued that the earthquake is under-explored in the country’s literature. At least, that’s the argument made by Alberto Fuguet, the enfant terrible of the Chilean literary scene, whose provocative novels mix urban realism, U.S. pop culture, and youthful malaise. In an interview with the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, Fuguet opined that “in Chile, neither our literature nor our people take earthquakes seriously.” Fuguet, who spent part of his childhood in Los Angeles, remarked that he was always aware of living in one of the most fault-ridden cities in the United States. But once he returned to Santiago, he was surprised that “nobody talked about the fact that the country was extremely seismic. Seismology as a science and as a concern ranked very low.”
Fuguet’s most recent novel, The Movies of My Life, directly addresses this perceived incongruity. The narrator, Beltrán Soler, is a middle-aged seismologist who relates nearly everything in his life to earthquakes. Before he catches a flight, he estimates how much damage a violent quake would inflict on the tarmac; when he looks at high-rise buildings in Santiago, he ponders their sustainability. As he tells it: “This is one of the drawbacks to being a seismologist: I always look deeper, I search for the cracks, I scan for flaws and resistances.” His profession has transformed him into a blunt realist. After a strong earthquake in 1997, Beltrán, as a representative of the country’s Seismological Institute, tells the President of Chile:
“The question, Señor Presidente, is not if it will happen again, but when. This is the question that no one in this country can or wants to ask. Every Chilean is going to die, yes, for this is the fate of every human being, but we bear an additional cross: we all will endure an earthquake that may either kill us or destroy everything we’ve fought to have.”
The novel opens with Beltrán preparing to fly to Tokyo, where he will spend a semester as a visiting professor at Tsakuba University. Unmarried, disconnected from his family, and depressed about the recent death of his grandfather, who also was a seismologist, Beltrán strikes up a conversation with the woman sitting next to him on the flight about movies that have sentimental value in their lives. When the plane lands in Los Angeles, Beltrán impulsively decides to skip his connecting flight, rent out a hotel room, and write his autobiography based on the movies that he watched during his childhood.
This rather forced contrivance threads throughout the novel, but it is the metaphor of the earthquake that ties it all together. For Beltrán, the earthquake is neither salvation nor rupture; it is an inevitable reality, an intrinsic attribute of the country. Or, as his grandfather tells Beltrán: “Everything moves in [Chile], from the ground to the hilltops to the people. They all change, they all hide things. Such instability can be really disturbing.”
In this sense, the country’s peoples, politics, and cultures become inextricably intertwined with the metaphor of the earthquake, so much so that, at least according to Beltrán, inhabitants measure their lives according to past bits of seismic activity: “Everyone remembers at least one earthquake, everyone has a particular angle or distinct detail that gives them the right to tell us a story that we know like the back of our hand, a story whose ending we already know full well.”
Overall, then, earthquakes form a part of the national identity, which holds especially true for the most recent quake. These are events that are collectively shared, even if the circumstances in which individuals experience them vary drastically. They unite generations and fuse the present with the past. Or, as Beltrán so poignantly puts it: “Earthquakes and aftershocks: the things that turn us into brothers, the glue that binds our broken country together.”
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