Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation

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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]

On Isolation and Literature

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“The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” —John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” —Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670) In a field between Sharpsburg, Md., and Antietam Creek in the fall of 1862, more than 21,000 men would die in a single day. In a photograph taken by Matthew Brady of the battle’s aftermath, which in the south is named after Sharpsburg and in the north is referred to by Antietam, there is a strewing of bodies in front of the Dunker Church maintained by a sect of Pennsylvania Dutch Baptists. In their repose, the men no longer have any concerns; in the photograph it’s difficult to tell who wears blue and who wears grey, for death has never been prejudiced. Americans had never experienced such destruction before, such death, such a rupture from what they had defined previously as normal. If Americans had been cursed with their own erroneous sense of exceptionality in the decades before the Civil War, believing that suffering was something that only foreigners were susceptible to, then that carnage temporally availed them of their self-superiority. Drew Gilpin Faust writes in This Republic of Death: Suffering and the American Civil War that the “impact and meaning of the war’s death toll went beyond the sheer numbers. Death’s significance for the Civil War generation arose as well from its violation of prevailing assumptions about life’s proper end—about who should die, when and where, and under what circumstances.” The United States was unprepared for the extremity of this thing—22,717 young men dead in a day—with almost a million perishing by its end. Faust writes that “Americans of the immediate prewar era continued to be more closely acquainted with death than are their twenty-first-century counterparts,” though if the state of exception demonstrated by the war proves anything, it’s that nobody should be so sanguine concerning his privileges. One survivor of Antietam, a member of the Massachusetts 15th named Roland Bowen, castigated a friend who wanted ghoulish details of the battle. He writes in a letter that such images “will do you no good and that you will be more mortified after the facts are told than you are now.” Such suffering couldn’t be circumscribed by something as insignificant as mere words, nor was it the task of Bowen to supply such texture in fulfilling his friend’s prurient fascination. The task of putting words to this horror belonged to somebody with no allegiance to anything as crass as the literal, and paradoxically it wouldn’t come from somebody who was actually witness to the horrors. A year before Antietam’s blood-letting, and a 31-year-old woman sequestered in a 970-square-foot room in a yellow wooden house in Amherst, Mass., would presciently write on the back of an envelope that “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,/And mourners to and fro/Kept treading – treading – till it seemed/That Sense was breaking through.” Emily Dickinson is American literature’s most significant recluse. She is our hermit, our anchorite, our holy isolate. Despite Dickinson’s self-imposed solitude, first limiting herself to Amherst, then her family’s house, and finally, finally living only in her own bedroom where she would speak to visitors from the half-opened door, her poetry is the greatest literary engagement with the trauma of the war. She was a spiritual seismograph, transcribing and interpreting the vibrations that she detected through the land itself, and though she never saw the battlefields at Antietam or Gettysburg, never even leaving Massachusetts, her 1,789 short lyrics are the fullest encapsulation of that event, even while it’s never specifically mentioned—though lines like “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun” evidence her mood. Only a handful of her poems were published in Dickinson’s own lifetime, normally anonymously, with a notable example being a few lyrics included in the 1864 anthology Drum Beats whose proceeds went to Union veterans. The war’s apparent absence from her poetry is incongruously proof of its presence, for as Susan Howe writes in My Emily Dickinson, the “Civil War broke something loose in her own divided nature.” Other figures like Walt Whitman and Herman Melville produced brilliant poetry about the war as well, but the absence of explicit language about battle-field deaths in Dickinson’s verse is a demonstration of Bowen’s warning that mere reportage “will do you no good.” She isolates not only herself, but the meaning of her poems, from the brutal reality of that American apocalypse—such isolation mimics the brutality of the event all the more completely. “I have an appetite for silence,” she wrote, for “silence is infinity.” Within the cocoon of that silence, Dickinson made herself a conduit for the blood-sacrifice then taking place; despite being in solitude, she was not solitary; despite being isolated, she was not an isolate. There are two ways of producing literature; from her multitudinous contemporary Whitman there was the gospel of extroversion, the smithy of the crowd whereby the throngs are the source of his energy and the “sidewalks are littered with postcards from God.” His engagement with the war was visceral, forged in Washington D.C.’s hospitals where he tended to the injured. Dickinson’s poetry of seclusion was more abstract, but no less pertinent, and from her introversion a different variety of poetry could be produced. Dickinson is too often reduced to mere recluse, she is transformed into a crank sequestered in an attic, but she was actually a brilliant performance artist for whom the process was as integral as the product. Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor writes in The Art of Solitude that there is more to that state “than just being alone. True solitude is a way of being that needs to be cultivated. You cannot switch it on or off at will. Solitude is an art…When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Dickinson’s isolation wasn’t just how she crafted her verse, in some sense it was her verse. “Interiority” is one of those literary critical jargon terms that is overly maligned, for it expresses something useful about this quality of consciousness we share, a term for the many mansions in our head. There is a breadth and width to the human experience—and the experience of the human experience (if I’m to be meta)—that only “interiority” can really convey. Douglas Hofstadter writes in I Am a Strange Loop that “what we call ‘consciousness’ was a kind of mirage…a very peculiar kind of mirage…Since it was a mirage that perceived itself…It was almost as if this slippery phenomenon called ‘consciousness’ lifted itself up by its own bootstraps, almost as if it made itself out of nothing.” Such an ex nihilo self-creation can only take place alone, of course. And in her solitude, Dickinson, like all hermits, made the very substance of her thoughts a living work. Some people, perhaps most people, live their life on the outside, all thoughts conveyed in a running monologue to the world. But the isolation of crafting literature, even if done in a crowded room, is such that any writer (and reader) must be by definition solitary, even while entire swaths of existence are contained inside one human skull. Such is the idealism of Dickinson when she claims that “To make a prairie…The revery alone will do.” Isolation is the hard kernel of literature. Beyond the relatively prosaic fact that there have been reclusive writers and secluded characters, isolation is also the fundamental medium of both reading and writing, traceable back to our inherited numinous sense and the thread of expression that intimates works hidden, all that we shall never read but that nonetheless radiate outward into the world with beauty. A history of isolation is a history of literature, albeit a secret one. Historically we’ve valorized men of action, but it’s people of seclusion who just as easily move the Earth. Think of Christ’s Lenten vigil in the Negev, the way in which Satan tempted him and the Son of God so easily resisted, the Lord kept company only by silence and perdition. Isolation is a counternarrative of human existence; for every vainglorious general like Alexander the Great conquering until the ends of the Earth, there is the philosopher Diogenes living naked in an Athenian pot and imploring the former to get out of his sunlight. Emperor Qin Shi Huang can be answered by the sage Lao-Tzu riding off by himself unto the west, and every bishop and pope can be matched by the Desert Fathers and anchorites. For every Andrew Carnegie, there should be a Henry David Thoreau in his Walden cabin. Isolation is one of the fundamental themes of literature, the kiln of experience whereby a human is able to discover certain aspects of character, personality, and existence through journeying to the center of their being (though results are certainly varied). In fiction, there are the recluses damaged by their toxic loneliness: think of Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations in her filthy, tattered wedding dress sadistically toying with Pip and Estella, or of the psychically diseased anonymous narrator in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground who can intone that “To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.” For all of the sociopathic recluses, biding their time under floorboards and going mad in attics, there are also positive depictions of isolation. Daniel Defoe’s titular character in Robinson Crusoe, ship-wrecked upon a desert isle and thus forced to recreate civilization anew, has often been understood as a representative citizen of hard-working, sober, industrious modernity, whereby “We never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.” Something similar in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, when writing of the isolation of the Alaskan wild he could declare that there is an “ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such a paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.” Isolation, however, is far more than a subject authors describe now and then. Few religious traditions are lacking in the hermitage or the monastery, at least in some form. Among the ecstatic Hasidism there are stories of rabbis like the Baal Shem Tov who lived at least part of his life as a hermit, and according to tradition, the second-century founder of Kabbalah Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai resided in a cave for 12 years as the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, exploring mystical secrets. When he could finally leave, bar Yochai’s focus was so intense that he was able to smite people with his eyes. Christianity potentially adopted monasticism from the esoteric first-century Jewish group the Essenes, and from the Desert Fathers onward, men who lived their lives sitting atop tall columns or who would meditate among the sands of Sinai, would develop a full-fledged system of religious seclusion. The wages of silence have defined the life of figures as varied as the nun and sacred composer Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century to the Trappist monk and activist Thomas Merton in the 20th For Merton, to be silent was to be radical; in Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation, he explains that his vows are “saying No to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socio-economic apparatus.” Hermits are replete in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, as much as in Judaism and Christianity. To be a hermit, to make sister or brother with your own isolation, is to commit a profound act of courage. To have no company other than yourself can be dangerous. As the 12th-century Sufi Muslim hermit Al-Ghazali said, “I have poked into every dark recess, I have made an assault on every problem, I have plunged every abyss.” What’s brought back from the emptiness at the beating heart of every ego is something ineffable, and only privy to those willing to look for it. BBC reporter Peter France asks in Hermits: The Insights of Solitude if it is “possible that solitude confers insights not available to society? Could it be that the human condition, even the ways we’re related to each other, is better understood by those who have opted out of relationships?” Certainly there has long been a religious tradition of answering that question in the affirmative; a literary one as well if we think of authors like Dickinson and Thoreau as psychological astronauts who returned from inner space with observations not accessible to those of us enmeshed in the cacophonous din of everyday social interaction. In a more modern sense, imagine the singular focus, the elemental personality, the bare simplicity of Christopher Thomas Knight’s life. From 1986 until 2013, the North Pond Hermit of Maine’s Belgrade Lake’s pushed the stolid and taciturn New England personality to extremes, living alone on campgrounds and surviving from pilfered supplies and burglarized cabins, while only once speaking the single word “Hi” to a hiker sometime in the ‘90s. When finally apprehended by local police, the harmless eccentric supposedly told the officers that he thought Thoreau had been a “dilletante.” A voracious reader, Knight had consumed Walden and thousands of other books, often on the subject of solitude, and if he found Thoreau lacking, he saw great value in other works. Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, the collected essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and of course the collected poetry of Dickinson were all held in high esteem by the hermit. Journalist Michael Finkel recounts his conversations with Knight in The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, whereby the dedicated Mainer claims that “solitude bestows an increase in something valuable…my perception. But…when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for.” Stripped of all of the socially constructed, arbitrary, imposed, and chosen definitions of the self, Knight had become a singular consciousness, an aggregate of experience divorced from the humdrum job of applying meaning, significance, or gloss to the fact that things happen one after the other. “To put it romantically,” he said, “I was completely free.” Knight had become, in a manner, God. Nomads as these are cracked, their extremity such that they dance on the precipice of either saintliness or madness. When journeying to the center of one’s own mind, care must be taken not to lose it. Knight was able to return relatively unscathed from both the chill New England forests and from the solitary experience of only having himself for company for almost three decades, but he is in some sense lucky as regards extreme hermits. For example, there’s Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s bestseller Into the Wild, who followed Jack London dreams into the Alaskan brush, where the aspiring naturalist’s decomposing corpse would be discovered next to his extensive diaries in a broken-down bus that he’d been living in. Krakauer writes about how for McCandless, to hike alone was to “constantly feel the abyss at your back,” where the “siren song of the void puts you on edge,” yet as with Knight, a type of elemental solitariness emerges as well. For McCandless, existence could become “a clear-eyed dream,” wherein a “trancelike state settles over your efforts.” A danger with dreams however, for it’s never clear to the dreamer himself just how clear-eyed they actually are, so that the zealotry of a McCandless that confuses the echoes in his own mind for other voices can easily transmogrify into a different type of hermit. Witness the former mathematics-professor-turned-recluse-turned-domestic-terrorist Theodor Kaczynski. In Walden, Thoreau claimed that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” That’s clearly not identical to Kaczynski’s claim in his anarcho-ecological manifesto Industrial Society and its Future that “almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not,” but there are some resonances. A special type of wag would claim that the Unabomber was simply an angrier Thoreau with a chemistry set, but they both arguably are examples of not unrelated strains of American antisocial individualism, albeit with incredibly different outcomes. “Whosoever is delighted in solitude,” wrote Francis Bacon in the 17th century, “is either a wild beast of a god.” Thoreau would be instrumental to any cultural accounting of isolation; from a literary perspective he’s the most obvious of hermits in our national tradition. His biographers Robert D. Richardson and Barry Moser note in Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind that the hermit “argued with himself in his journal…about his need for solitude versus the merits of society,” an incredibly American argument, and as the authors note, his conclusion was also particularly American: “He came down repeatedly for solitude.” Thoreau’s understanding of solitude derived from that sense of the frontier, that desire for unlimited elbow room that distinguishes this country from the Old World. When my wife and I used to live in Massachusetts, it took less than half an hour to drive to the recreation of Thoreau’s cabin on the shores of that glacial pond, and it’s understandable why he chose to spend a few years there pretending to live off the land. It’s an exceedingly pleasant space, and his example spoke to some sort of romancing of solitude that exists deep within my Pennsylvania soul. I’m a city boy who grew up in a house that was so close to our neighbor that we could hear when that gentleman sneezed, and I’ve lived in apartments since I was 18, yet I harbor some delusion that if given half a chance I’d live in the middle of nowhere surrounded by nobody. A foolish dream, but my rightful inheritance as an American. The author of Walden is the primogeniture of that particular counter-cultural vision—it’s not wrong to see him as a kind of proto-hippie, living off the land and spouting mistranslated versions of the Upanishads, the grandfather of both John Muir and Edward Abbey. But the boot-strapping, the rugged individualism, the obsession with industriousness—Thoreau is a proto-survivalist as well. When he writes in an 1847 diary that “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty,” it sounds more a creed for somebody with a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag decal on their truck as much as somebody with a “Coexist” bumper sticker on their Volvo. As our favorite hermit, Thoreau is in some manner the patriarch of us all, both left and right, liberal and conservative, anarchist and libertarian. He proves that Americans are nothing so much like each other, especially when we’re alone. Thoreau isn’t our only reclusive writer. Gravity’s Rainbow author Thomas Pynchon eschews almost all media spectacle and refuses to update his author bio from a senior yearbook picture (though he did do a voice on The Simpsons); Harper Lee retired after To Kill a Mockingbird from Manhattan to her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., where she supported the local high school drama club; and Cormac McCarthy living rugged and without punctuation in a New Mexico trailer only broke his silence to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show, as one does, when the book club read The Road (he has since been more chatty). For most supposedly hermit authors, the reality might be more prosaic; as an irate Pynchon told CNN, “My belief is that ‘recluse’ is a code word generated by journalists… meaning ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters.’” No accounting of literary isolation can credibly ignore J.D. Salinger whose The Catcher in the Rye, despite read less frequently by adolescents today than it once was, remains the Great American Teenage Novel. Within The Catcher in the Rye there are intimations of that profound desire to be left alone, with its main character Holden Caulfield ruminating that “I’m sort of glad that they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.” Salinger’s biography has an unmistakable romance, the scion of the Upper East Side who was feted by The New Yorker and The Paris Review, a brilliant enfant terrible who produced perfect short stories and the immaculate novel with which he’s most associated, only to retire to rural New Hampshire, reject all media and appearances, and yet continue to prodigiously write until his death in 2010. His last story appeared in The New Yorker in 1966, yet according to journalist and novelist Joyce Maynard in At Home in the World, her memoir about her affair with Salinger in 1972 when he was 53 and she was only 18, he “works on his fiction daily,” claiming that since he’d last been published he’d written two more novels. By the time of his death, Salinger had written 13 more. His dedication to the craft itself was pure—in a rare interview with The New York Times in 1974 Salinger said that “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing…I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” The purest form of composition. Upon his death, journalists discovered that the residents of Salinger’s New Hampshire hamlet fully knew who he was, but helped to mislead gawkers from tracking down the author. Katie Zezima writes in The New York Times that “Here Mr. Salinger was just Jerry, a quiet man who arrived early to church suppers, [and] nodded hello while buying a newspaper at the general store.” Keeping with a venerable New England sentiment that perhaps both Knight and Thoreau would recognize, a woman quoted in Zezima’s article says that his neighbors did “respect him. He was an individual who just wanted to live his life.” It’s unknown if any of them read those 15 novels. Solitude and quiet are often figured, albeit in perhaps fewer extreme examples than Salinger’s method, as integral to the process of composition. Susan Sontag opined that “One can never be alone enough to write;” Ernest Hemingway said that “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life;” and the Romantic poet John Keats enthused that “my Solitude is sublime.” Peruse the rightly celebrated author interviews in The Paris Review, and you will discover that a space carved out for the self’s sovereignty is one of the few things that unite writers with their varying schedules, methods of research, and editorial eccentricities. The private John Updike, fully inhabiting the 9-5 ethos of his suburban Pennsylvania middle-class youth, wrote his novels in a rented office above a restaurant in Ipswich, Mass.; Wallace Stevens composed his poetry in the quiet of his own head, pounding out the scansions in his steps as he walked to his job in a Hartford, Conn., insurance office. Isolation can take many forms, not all of them literal, but in the pragmatic necessity of a writer needing a “room of one’s own,” as Virginia Woolf famously described it, there need be, well, a room of one’s own. Woolf’s formulation was of course gendered; her point throughout A Room of One’s Own was the way in which the details of domestic responsibility (among other factors) contributed to the silencing of women. In short, if you don’t have the dedicated space and the leisure time in which to write in peace, you’re not going to be writing in peace. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard says as much in The Poetics of Space, noting that the house is “psychologically complex,” whereby “the nooks and corners of solitude are the bedroom.” Living collectively dampens the interior a bit, which is why the privacy of an individual space becomes instrumental in producing individual works. “The house, the bedroom, the garret in which we were alone,” Bachelard writes, “furnished the framework for an interminable dream, one that poetry alone, through the creation of a poetic work, could success in achieving completely.” A direct causal relationship could be drawn between the architectural development of independent bedrooms in the early modern period and the evolution of the novel, the literary genre that most aggressively displays subjectivity. Like all things we take for granted, the bedroom, or the office, or the study, and all places of individual and solitary repose have their own history. Bill Bryson explains in At Home: A Short History of Private Life that the “inhabitants of the medieval hall had no bedrooms in which to retire,” and that “Sleeping arrangements appear to have remained relaxed for a long time.” The word “bedroom” itself didn’t exist until well later; Bryson writes that as “a word to describe a dedicated sleeping chamber… [it] didn’t become common until” the 17th century, the exact period in which the novel began to emerge. People wrote long narratives before the novel and the bedroom, and for that matter there have always been venerable forms of collaborative writing as well. Yet the possibility of privacy and solitude—not just for a St. Jerome sequestered in his study or a Trappist whose taken his vow of silence—arguably contributed to certain literary forms that not only require isolation in their production, but in some sense mimic a type of isolation as well. To argue that writing requires quiet is in some ways too prosaic an observation. Writing is silence—writing is isolation. By shielding themselves in the cocoon of composition, writers are in some sense able to create rooms of their own, wherever they happen to be writing. Writing can function as its own type of sensory deprivation, an activity that can erase the outside world in the construction of a new internal one. Think of Stevens lost in his rhythmic reverie pounding out poems on his way to the office, or of James Baldwin writing Go Tell It on the Mountain in a busy Parisian café. Being ensconced within the process of writing, letting yourself become a conduit for words (and wherever they come) is a type of armor against the outside world; it’s a form of isolation that can be brought with you wherever you go. Which is also true of reading, the only cultural medium that is purely mental and can be done in any situation, circumstance, or setting, and that if we’re considering its non-digital forms can be rapaciously consumed free of any outside interference, a universe cordoned off in a book. Reading a book on the bus or a subway, in a Starbucks or on a park bench, is a manner of building your own room within the public. It’s the profoundest type of privacy there can be as you generate an entire new reality alongside the author of the words you’re reading. When language was primarily an oral form, it was delivered collectively, and there is great power in that. But the proliferation of wide-spread literacy several centuries ago, the promulgation of affordable print, and the development of book forms like the 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius’s innovation of the cheap and portable octavo form made it possible for people to dream with their books not just while sequestered in a monastery, but anywhere that they pleased, from the encampments by the side of Renaissance Europe’s roads to a New York City taxicab. Alberto Manguel describes the innovation of silent reading (which becomes common in late antiquity, in the fourth century around the time of St. Augustine), whereby readers could “exist in interior space…[where] the text itself, protected from outsiders by its covers, became the reader’s own possession, the reader’s intimate knowledge, whether in the busy scriptorium, the market-place or the home.” When I argue that the history of literature is the history of isolation, I mean something more than writers often require solitude, or that the hermit is a popular figure to be explored in fiction. Rather, the deep vein that runs through the experience and definition of both reading and writing is precisely the sort of solitude of that Manguel describes. Isolation is not a medium for literature, nor is it a method of creating literature; it is the very substance of literature itself. If there is something special about seclusion, about quiet, about aloneness that defines our literature, if something about isolation defined the shift from oral cultures to written ones, then perhaps it’s in the imitation of that original Author who was the first to compose in quarantine. Judaism’s God was distinguished from His pagan colleagues by being a singular creator-being, from forming His world not out of raw materials in collaboration with a pantheon, but of His own singular volition from nothing at all. Nobody could have been more isolated than God in the beginning, and no literary work emerging from that aloneness more powerful than all of existence. Such a model, of creation ex nihilo, is the operational essence of literary composition, a medium that requires no performers and no audience and exists only in the transit from one mine to another (and not necessarily even that). As Dickinson approached her death, she asked her sister Lavinia to immolate her correspondence, but disregarded instructions concerning the poetry, assuming it didn’t even merit mention. It appears that Dickinson never intended her work for publication, that the author and audience were one, the purest form of poetry conceivable. Lavinia recognized their brilliance, which is the only reason that we’re able to read them today. What’s remarkable isn’t that they were almost destroyed, but that Dickinson’s poems survived at all. How many comparable works were penned by names unknown, by women and men innumerable? How much is written and read in glorious isolation never to extend to an audience beyond its creator? What shall be written in the coming days and weeks and months of isolation, existing only for the delight and glory of its creators, and none the less for its impermanence? In the end all works are immolated. Even that of the Creator’s shall be deleted. That Book’s glory is no less because of it. Image Credit: Wallpaperflare.