Mentioned in:
A Year in Reading: 2024
Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose.
In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it.
Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.)
The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger.
Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small
Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love
Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor
Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Zachary Issenberg, writer
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves
Nicholas Russell, writer and critic
Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
Deborah Ghim, editor
Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety
Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship
John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things
Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
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
[millions_email]
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.
[millions_email]
Leonora Carrington’s New York Year
New York
1941–1942
If Peggy Guggenheim had believed that leaving Lisbon would be a means of separating Max Ernst from Leonora Carrington, she realized as soon as they reached New York that it hadn’t worked. On their very first evening, in the restaurant where they had supper (accompanied by a detective, since Max was German and still had to be processed on Ellis Island), the first person they saw was Catherine Yarrow, the friend with whom Leonora had left Saint-Martin. Max became very upset. He knew Catherine had been instrumental in Leonora’s decision to travel to Spain, and the shock he had felt on returning to Les Alliberts after his release and finding her gone was still fresh in his memory. He refused to shake hands with Catherine, and there was “almost... a dreadful scene.”
Peggy quickly made contact with André Breton, whom she had helped financially to leave Europe with his wife Jacqueline Lamba and their daughter, Aube. Breton, she recalled in her memoir, wanted to hear all about Max and our life in Lisbon and what had gone on between Leonora and Max. The report had gone around New York that Max would not leave Leonora in Lisbon, and that was why we had remained there so long. Breton did not gather that I was in love with Max. We talked a lot about Leonora and Max, and Breton confirmed my opinion that she was the only woman Max had ever loved.
Leonora and Renato Ludic arrived in New York by sea a few days later. They moved into an apartment on West 73rd Street provided for them by the Mexican government, for whom Renato would continue to work (Leonora seems never to have been entirely clear about what he did, but apparently it was something in the technical department of the tax office). For her, as well as the relief of having finally put her family and Hitler behind her, this new chapter in New York represented a chance to reconnect with the artists she had known in Paris. “I saw the Surrealists all the time. I saw a lot of Breton. Buñuel was there, and Masson was there. Everybody was there. And Duchamp was living at the time at Max and Peggy’s. They had a mansion on Sutton Place.” Peggy’s apartment was a hub for the group of exiles and there were many gatherings, parties and soirees, as well as a series of photoshoots of the Parisian artistic superstars reconvened in their New York setting. There had been a subtle but important shift in Leonora’s status since the Paris days. Then, she had been included in the circle on account of her love affair with Max. Now she was part of the group on her own terms, recognized as the increasingly proficient artist she was becoming.
André Breton was the first to notice this. In early January 1942 he wrote to his friend Benjamin Péret, who was living in Mexico with his wife Remedios Varo, that the two “most vital” people in New York were the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, and Leonora Carrington. He and Leonora, he wrote, “experienced a total degree of understanding.” Even when she mocked him, laughing audibly when he tried to bring a surrealist meeting to order in a Greenwich Village bar as he had in the old days in Paris, he accepted the insult without comment.
It was Leonora’s close friendship with Breton in this period that led her to create Down Below, one of her most important written works. All of her writing, she told me, was autobiographical, but many of the stories—like “Little Francis”—were disguised, because there were others to consider as well as herself. Down Below, though, was different: it really concerned her alone, so she could be entirely frank about what had taken place. The only filter to truth was that sometimes, her perception of what was happening may have been somewhat different from objective reality.
Breton was fascinated by Leonora’s memories of the asylum and wanted to publish an account of her time there in VVV, the surrealist magazine he had established in New York. In the end it was the surrealists’ doctor, Pierre Mabille (whose escape from Europe Peggy had also financed), who persuaded her to write about it, arguing that setting the experience down would help liberate her from it. Leonora’s attempts to do this, though, didn’t work—and in fact she had made an earlier attempt to write about it, which had also failed, and that manuscript had disappeared. Mabille came up with another idea. If Leonora couldn’t write it down herself, could she dictate her experiences to his wife, Jeanne Megnen, who would transcribe them? This explains why Down Below was originally written in French, Megnen’s language, and then translated for publication in VVV. It appeared in the fourth issue of the magazine, in 1944, by which time Leonora was no longer in New York. Breton wrote to Péret that he found it “sensational.”
Remembering what had happened in Spain, though, was only one of the ways in which Leonora was making sense of her new situation. She was also engaging properly again with painting. Her teacher from the Kensington days, Amédée Ozenfant, was in New York, as was one of her friends from his London academy, Stella Snead. Leonora painted a portrait of Stella with her cats at around this time, but the first painting she produced in the city was a more sinister work, Garden Bedroom. It can be seen as a companion piece to Inn of the Dawn Horse, her self-portrait begun in Paris and completed in the Ardèche; but where that earlier work is enigmatic and measured, this piece is cha-otic and disturbing. It features a disheveled Leonora, this time sitting astride the rocking horse. Her hair is splayed out around her head and she has a look of grim determination on her face. She is moving on, riding on: away from Europe and towards the better life she knows will one day be hers.
New York could have been the setting for that better life. In the eighteen months she spent there between the summer of 1941 and the winter of 1942/3, she was making a name for herself. Breton wasn’t the only person to have noticed: the artist Hedda Sterne remembered her as “simply the most beautiful creature… she went around in jodhpurs and boots—nobody was doing that. I remember a show, a Surrealist show… and at the opening night Leonora Carrington, when people didn’t do that, came in a dress from a thrift shop, a high-necked lace dress. She looked absolutely beautiful.” The dress sounds like the one in which Lee Miller photographed Leonor Fini at Saint-Martin the previous year; perhaps it had traveled to New York in the REVELATION suitcase. How interesting, too, that Leonora wore jodhpurs in real life, just as she does in Self-Portrait/Inn of the Dawn Horse.
Her art was going well: she was “painting at her best” one day in autumn 1941 when she had a visit from the Polish make-up entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein and one of her seven younger sisters, Manka. Helena bought a painting of five black dogs, and Manka asked if she could commission a work. They spoke for a while about Mexico, since Leonora had a Mexican husband and might one day be going there. Before they left, Helena offered Leonora two hundred dollars to paint a mural with a theme of her choice. Leonora was thrilled by the sales—the only problem, she realized once they had left, was that she had no idea where to acquire a canvas for a mural-sized painting.
Marc Chagall was one of the most successful artists in New York at the time, so Leonora decided to approach him to ask for help: could he loan her a canvas? Chagall looked at her paintings, refused to lend her a canvas, and left her with the patronizing comment that she should “Keep painting, my little one, keep painting.” Fortunately, “[a]t the eleventh hour, Breton rescued the day by giving her one of his bed sheets, and she was able to paint the mural with Ernst, Duchamp, and Roberto Matta as assistants. Ernst momentarily shifted out of the assistant mode and painted his signature bird in the upper left corner to complement the work. Carrington titled it “Summer.” Manka loved it.”
There were plenty of parties in New York at this time, and most of them took place in Hale House at 440 East 51st Street, the Sutton Place mansion Peggy Guggenheim had rented for herself, Max and her huge art collection. The biggest room was a space Peggy called “the chapel” because it had “a balcony above with five little windows overlooking [it]. Here five choirboys might well have sung Gregorian chants.” Instead, she got the surrealists to pose for photographer Hermann Landshoff: fourteen of them are gathered in an image that also features a medley of Peggy’s Native American artworks. No doubt they were there for one of the parties, at which she typically served whisky and potato chips. Peering out through the arched windows are Ozenfant, Duchamp, Berenice Abbott and Piet Mondrian. Peggy herself is in the center. Perhaps she arranged the line-up, because Leonora and Max are as far from one another as possible—Leonora far left, Max far right. As she was honest enough to admit, Peggy was always keen to put distance between them.
The fact was, Max was still devoted to Leonora, and Peggy was acutely aware of it. In the days before the SS Exeter docked in New York he had been desperate to see his former lover again, and in the weeks that followed the two saw a lot of one another. They do not seem to have reignited their intimate relationship, though that was of little consolation to Peggy. She had already guessed that Max loved Leonora in a way he had never loved her—or, quite possibly, anyone else—and probably never would. Leonora, meanwhile, always confessed to being quite puritanical about relationships. She believed people should be together because they truly loved one another. She also admired Peggy greatly (indeed, the feeling was entirely mutual) and would have seen sleeping with Max again as a betrayal of her.
But she had another reason, too, to keep her distance physically from Max. Because what had begun as a marriage of convenience with Renato had matured into something more meaningful: if it wasn’t true love, it was certainly sexually sparky, with a great deal of mutual affection. Leonora had also, as Peggy had noticed, come to depend on Renato as a kind of father figure in the same way she had first been drawn to Max. Peggy had rightly pointed out that Max was too much of a baby himself to be anyone’s father—Renato, though, fulfilled Leonora’s fantasies. When she needed someone to care for her, to put her first, to marry her and to get her to where she wanted to be, he was there; to the end of her life, she spoke about him warmly and with gratitude.
[caption id="attachment_149444" align="aligncenter" width="512"] Leonora in Mexico (West Dean College of Arts and Conservation)[/caption]
A series of letters discovered after Leonora’s death, written to Renato while they were living together in the apartment on the Upper West Side, reveal her feelings towards him. One, written on 22 September 1941, is addressed to an absent Renato: he has gone missing, out with friends, and Leonora sounds desperate to have him back. “I die slowly and painfully waiting to see you,” she writes (the letter is typed, in French). “Come back soon. I love you, I want to sleep with you, I want to kiss you and lick you. I would give the cat, my hair and my left hand for you to come back.”
She goes on: “Renato for the love of the devil, come home. If you’re annoyed by this love, you need to know it’s not convenient to fall in love with crazy women, we are all like that. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. I’m tortured, I’m in agony, I’m angry, I’m exaggerating.” She won’t go to bed on her own, she says; but ‘when you come back you will be calm, and you won’t imagine the storm and sorrows I have endured.”
Why is it rare, she asks in another letter, for people who are living together to write to one another? “In writing, one becomes freer. I want to put the jewels of my personality before you.” But Renato has left her alone again—clearly, it’s a pattern of behavior that she loathes—and she says she is crying, becoming emotional… “pure female tricks to eat you better my child (as the wolf said to Little Red Riding Hood).” And then comes this line: “Every time I cry alone I put on the crown of a martyr… maybe it’s the spoiled girl who cries in me then. Maybe I have to dismiss her—and how do I do that?”
Some of these feelings are also played out in her short story “Waiting.” It follows a conversation between two women: “Margaret” (“her clothes were too long and her hair much too untidy, like someone saved from drowning”) is Leonora. She tells a passing stranger, Elizabeth, that she is “waiting for Fernando,” who is forty-three (like Renato) and has blue-grey hair that Margaret loves. But she has become so sad waiting for him that she has no tears left. The two wander into Elizabeth’s apartment, where Margaret realizes that Elizabeth and Fernando are lovers too. Perhaps the tale conflates her relationships with Max and with Renato at this point.
Leonora was divided between quite different lives in New York. Some of the time, she was a lovelorn wife pining for her husband to come home while he was out with his mates; other times she was an up-and-coming surrealist superstar. Through the late summer and autumn of 1942, she was central to a major exhibition of the exiled group that took place at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan between October 14 and November 7. Billed as the biggest ever surrealist exhibition in America, it aimed to convey what the refugee artists had had to go through to get themselves across the Atlantic. Leonora, who exhibited alongside Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Hedda Sterne, Remedios Varo and others, was also heavily involved in creating a setting that spoke to the difficulties of the artists. She helped weave a criss-cross web across the gallery; the idea was to place barriers between the visitors and the work, suggestive of the barriers its creators had encountered during their long journeys.
Throughout all of this Max continued to betray his feelings for Leonora in countless ways, and Peggy was acutely aware of all of them. In France she had seen him paint Leonora’s portrait over and over again, but it was a long time before he painted Peggy. Now, in New York, he would spend entire days with Leonora, something he never did with Peggy.When Peggy asked Max to dedicate a book to her, he wrote something cold, although she had seen the warmth with which he had inscribed books to Leonora.
It couldn’t go on, and it didn’t. Just as Peggy was thinking of leaving Max, in the late autumn of 1941, Leonora decided to leave New York and accompany Renato back to his native Mexico. That had long been the plan, although worries over money and the uncertainty of finding work in Mexico City had delayed their journey. The hiatus had given Leonora a chance to experience the life of an artist in New York City. It was fun, and interesting, and she was making headway in her career; but these were not her guiding stars. What mattered more to her was following her own intuition—and also playing out the adventure she had embarked on five years earlier when she left her family, and Britain, behind. Still feeling close to Renato, and believing that Mexico held adventures she could not yet imagine, she agreed to make the long trip by road with him and a group of other Mexican staff from the embassy.
Precisely when and where her final meeting with Max took place is not recorded. Neither of them ever spoke in detail about their feelings for one another, so the deepest story of their relationship remained with them, and they took it to their graves.
In New York, Peggy—who had married Max soon after Leonora’s departure—was working hard on an exhibition to take place in the spring of 1943 at her gallery, Art of This Century. It would include the work of thirty women, including Leonora. Max helped her with the curation and when he suggested adding another artist, so that it became “31 Women,” she readily agreed.
That, she later realized, was a mistake: the additional artist was Dorothea Tanning, for whom Max would eventually leave her. In her memoirs Peggy calls Dorothea “vastly inferior to Leonora, who really was a creature of genius.” The painter Buffie Johnson, also part of the New York group, observed that Peggy “couldn’t understand why Max fell for [Dorothea]. It seemed absolutely incredible, because Leonora Carrington was so marvelous.” Leonora and Max would never meet again. He spent the rest of his life with Tanning, and died in 1976 at the age of eighty-four.
“Do you believe that the past dies?” Elizabeth asks Margaret, in Leonora’s story “Waiting.” Yes, says Margaret. But only if the present cuts its throat.
Excerpt by Joanna Moorhead from Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington © 2023 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London
Related Books:
