Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is; Revised Edition (Penguin Classics)

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

Elegy of the Walker

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By the conclusion of Mildred Lissette Norman's 2,200 mile hike on the Appalachian Trail in 1952—the steep snow-covered peaks of New Hampshire’s White Mountains; the autumnal cacophony of Massachusetts’ brown, orange, and red Berkshires; the verdant greens of New York’s Adirondacks and Pennsylvania’s Alleghanies; the misty roll of Virginia’s Blue Ridge; the lushness of North Carolina and Georgia's Great Smoky Mountains—she would wear down the soles of her blue Sperry Topsiders into a hatchwork of rubber threads, the rough canvas of the shoes ripping apart at the seams. "There were hills and valleys, lots of hills and valleys, in that growing up period," Norman would recall, becoming the first woman to hike the trail in its entirety. The Topsiders were lost to friction, but along with 28 additional pairs of shoes over the next three decades, she would also gain a new name—Peace Pilgrim. The former secretary would (legally) rechristen herself after a mystical experience somewhere in New England, convinced that she would "remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace." Peace Pilgrim's mission began at the Rose Bowl Parade in 1953, gathering signatures on a petition to end the Korean War. From Pasadena she trekked over the Sierra Nevada, the hardscrabble southwest, the expansive Midwestern prairies, the roll of the Appalachians and into the concrete forest of New York City. She gained spectators, acolytes, and detractors; there was fascination with this 46-year-old woman, wearing a simple blue tunic emblazoned in white capital letters with "Walking Coast to Coast for Peace," her greying hair kept up in a bun and her pockets containing only a collapsible toothbrush, a comb, and a ballpoint pen. By the time she died in 1981, she had traversed the United States seven times. "After I had walked almost all night," she recalled in one of the interviews posthumously collected into Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, "I came out into a clearing where the moonlight was shining down… That night I experienced the complete willingness, without any reservations, to give my life to something beyond myself." It was the same inclination that compelled Abraham to walk into Canaan, penitents to trace Spain's Camino de Santiago, or of the whirling Mevlevi dervishes traipsing through the Afghan bush. It was an inclination toward God. Something about the plodding of one foot after another, the syncopation mimicking the regularity of our heartbeat, the single-minded determination to get from point A to point B (wherever those mythic locations are going to be) gives walking the particular enchantments that only the most universal of human activities can have. Whether a stroll, jog, hike, run, saunter, plod, trek, march, parade, patrol, ramble, constitutional, wander, perambulation, or just plain walk, the universal action of moving left foot-right foot-left foot-right foot marks humanity indelibly, so common that it seemingly warrants little comment if you're not a podiatrist. But when it comes to the subject, there are as many narratives as there are individual routes, for as Robert Macfarlane writes in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, "a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells." Loathe we should be to let such an ostensibly basic act pass without some consideration. Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking that "Like eating or breathing, [walking] can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic." Walking is leisure and punishment, introspection and exploration, supplication and meditation, even composition. As a tool for getting lost, both literally and figuratively, of fully inhabiting our being, walking can empty out our selfhood. A mechanism for transmuting a noun into a verb, or transforming the walker into the walking. When a person has pushed themselves so that their heart pumps like a piston, that they feel the sour burn of blisters, the chaffing of denim, so that breathing's rapidity is the only focus, then there is something akin to pure consciousness (or possibly I'm just fat). And of course, all that you can simply observe with that consciousness, unhampered by screen, so that walking is "powerful and fundamental," as Cheryl Strayed writes in her bestseller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail: an account of how Strayed hiked thousands of miles following the death of her mother, and learning "what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets… It seemed to me it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild."      Maybe that sense of being has always attended locomotion, ever since a family of Australopithecus pressed their calloused heals into the cooling volcanic ash of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania some 3.7 million years ago. Discovered in 1976 by Mary Leaky, the preserved footprints were the earliest example of hominoid bipedalism. Two adults and a child, the traces suggested parents strolling with a toddler, as if they were Adam and Eve with either Cain or Abel. Olduvai's footprints are smaller than those of a modern human, but they lack the divergent toe of other primates, and they indicate that whoever left them moved from the heel of their feet to the ball, like most of us do. Crucially, there were no knuckle impressions left, so they didn't move in the manner that chimpanzees and gorillas do. "Mary's footprint trail was graphically clear," explains Virginia Morell in Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings, "the early hominoids stood tall and walked as easily on two legs as any Homo sapiens today… it was apparently this upright stance, rather than enlarged crania, that first separated these creatures from other primates." The adults were a little under five-feet tall and under 100 pounds, covered in downy brown fur with slopping brow and overbit jaw, with the face of an ape but the uncanny eyes of a human, the upright walking itself transforming them into the latter. Walking preceded words, the ambulation perhaps necessitating the speaking. Australopithecus remained among the pleasant green plains of east Africa, but by the evolution of anatomically modern humans in the area that is now Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, and walking became the engine by which people disseminated through the world. Meandering was humanity's insurance, as Nicholas Wade writes in Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, that as little as 50,000 years ago and the "ancestral human population, the first to possess the power of fully articulate modern speech, may have numbered only 5,000 people, confined to a homeland in northeast Africa." In such small numbers, and in such a circumscribed area, humanity was prisoner to circumstance, where an errant volcano, draught, or epidemic could have easily consigned us to oblivion. Walking as far as we could was our salvation. Humans would walk out of Africa into Asia and perhaps by combination of simple boat and swimming down the Indonesian coast into Australia, across the Bering Strait and into North America, and over the Panamanian isthmus and into South America, with distant islands like Madagascar, New Zealand, and Iceland waiting for sailing technology to ferry people to their shores millennia after we left the shade of the Serengeti's bulbous baobab trees. We think of our ancestors as living in a small world, but there's was an expansive realm, all the more so since it wasn't espied through a screen. Partner to burrowing meerkats peaking over the dry scrub of the Kalahari, nesting barn owls overlooking the crusting, moss-covered bark of the ancient Ciminian Forest, the curious giant softshell tortoises of the Yangtze River. To walk is to be partner to the natural world, it is to fully inhabit being an embodied self. Choosing to be a pedestrian today is to reject the diabolic speed of both automobile and computer. Macfarlane writes in The Wild Places that nature is "invaluable to us precisely because… [it is] uncompromisingly different… you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share." Sojourn into a world so foreign was the birthright of the first humans, and it still is today, if you choose it.  All continents, albeit mostly separated by unsettlingly vast oceans, are in some form or another connected by thin strips of land here or there, something to the advantage of Scottish Victorian explorer Sir George Thompson who walked from Canada to Western Europe, via Siberia. More recently there was the English explorer George Meegan who from 1977 to 1983 endeavored to walk from Patagonia to the northern tip of North America, which involved inching up South America's Pacific coast, crossing the Darien Gap into Central America, circling the Gulf Coast and walking up the Atlantic shore, following the Canadian border, and then walking from the Yukon into Alaska. Meegan's expedition covered 19,019 miles, the longest recorded uninterrupted walk. Effected by the nervous propulsion that possibly compelled that first generation to leave home, Meegan explains in The Longest Walk: The Record of our World's First Crossing of the Entire Americas that "once the idea seemed to be a real possibility, once I thought I could do it, I had to do it." Along the way Meegan wore out 12 pairs of hiking boots, got stabbed once, and met peanut-farmin' Jimmy Carter at his Georgian homestead. Meegan's route was that of the first Americans, albeit accomplished in reverse. The most recent large landmass to be settled, those earliest walkers observed a verdant expanse, for as Craig Childs describes the Paleolithic continent in Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America, the land east of the Bering Strait was a "mosaic of rivers and grasslands… horizons continuing on as if constantly giving birth to themselves—mammoths, Pleistocene horses, and giant bears strung out as far as the eye could see. It must have seemed as if there was no end, the generosity of this planet unimaginable." A venerable (and dangerous) tradition to see America as an unspoiled Paradise, but it's not without its justifications, and one that I've been tempted to embrace during my own errands into the wilderness. Raised not far from Pittsburgh's Frick Park, a 644-acre preserve set within the eastern edge of the city, a bramble of moss-covered rocky creeks and surprisingly steep ravines, a constructed forest primeval meant to look as it did when the Iroquois lived there, and I too could convince myself that I was a settler upon the frontier. Like all sojourns into the woods, I found that my strolls in Frick Park couldn't help but have a bit of the mythic about them, especially at dusk. One day when I was a freshman, a friend and I took a stack of cheap, pocket-sized, rough orange-covered New Testaments which the Gideons, who were standing the requisite constitutionally mandated distance from our high school, had been assiduously handing out as part of an ill-considered attempt to convert our fellow students. In a pique of adolescent blasphemy, we went to a Frick Park path, and walked through the cooling October forest as twilight fell, ripping the cheap pages from the bibles and letting them fall like crisp leaves to the woods' floor, or maybe inadvertently as a trail of Eden's apple seeds. No such thing as blasphemy unless you already ascent to the numinous, and as our heretical stroll turned God on his head, a different pilgrim had once roamed woods like these. During the Second Great Awakening when revivals of strange fervency and singular belief burnt down the Appalachian edge, a pious adherent of the mystical Swedenborgian faith named John Chapman was celebrated for traipsing through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Briefly a resident of the settlement of Grant's Hill in what is today downtown Pittsburgh, about several miles west of Frick Park, and Chapman's mission was to spread the gospel of the New Church, along with the planting of orchards. Posterity remembers him as Johnny Appleseed. Folk memory has Johnny Appleseed fixed in a particular (and peculiar way): the bearded frontiersmen, wearing a rough brown burlap coffee sack, a copper pot on his head, and a trundled bag over his shoulder as the barefoot yeoman plants apples across the wide expanse of the West. I'd wager there is a strong possibility you thought he was as apocryphal as John Henry or Paul Bunyan, but Chapman was definitely real; a Protestant St. Francis of whom it was said that he walked with a tamed wolf and that due to his creaturely benevolence even the mosquitoes would spare him their sting. Extreme walkers become aspects of nature, their souls as if the migratory birds that trace lines over the earth's curvature. Johnny Appleseed's walking was a declaration of common ownership over the enormity of this land. Sometime in the 1840s, Chapman found himself listening to the outdoor sermonizing of a fire-and-brimstone Methodist preacher in Mansfield, Ohio. "Where is the primitive Christian, clad in coarse raiment, walking barefoot to Jerusalem?" the minister implored the crowd, judging them for their materialism, frivolity, and immorality. Finally, a heretofore silent Johnny Appleseed, grown tired of the uncharitable harangue, ascended the speaker's platform and hiked one grime-covered, bunion-encrusted, and blistered black foot underneath the preacher's nose. "Here's your primitive Christian," he supposedly declared. Even Johnny Appleseed's gospel was of walking. "John Chapman's appearance at the minister's stump," writes William Kerrigan in Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History, made the horticulturalist a "walking manifestation of a rejection of materialism." Not just figuratively a walking embodiment of such spirituality, but literally a walking incarnation of it. The regularity of putting one foot after the other has the rhythm of the fingering of rosary beads or the turning of prayer wheels; both intimately physical and yet paradoxically a means of transcending our bodies. "Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned," writes Solnit, "as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord." Hence walking as religious devotion, from the Australian aborigine on a walkabout amidst the burnt ochre Outback, to the murmuring pilgrim tracing the labyrinth underneath the stone flying buttresses of Chartres Cathedral, and the Hadji walking over hot sands towards Mecca, or the Orthodox Jew graced with the gift of deliberateness as she walks to shul on Shabbat. Contemplative, meditative, and restorative, religiously speaking walking can also be penitential. In 2009 the Irish Augustinian Fr. Michael Mernagh walked from Cork to Dublin on a pilgrimage of atonement that he single-handedly took in penitence for the Church's shameful silence regarding child sexual abuse. Not just a pilgrimage, but a protest, with Fr. Mernagh saying of the rot infecting the Church that the "more I have walked the more I feel it is widespread beyond our comprehension." Atonement is uncomfortable, painful even. As pleasant as a leisurely stroll can be, a penitential hike should strain the lungs, burn the muscles. If penitence isn't freely taken, however, then it's no longer penitence. Especially if there's no reason for contrition, then it's something else—punishment. Or torture. "The drop outs began," recalled Lt. Col. William E. Dyess. "It seemed that a great many of the prisoners reached the end of their endurance at about the same time. They went down by twos and threes. Usually, they made an effort to rise. I never can forget their groans and strangled breathing as they tried to get up. Some succeeded." Many didn't. A Texas Air Force officer with movie-star good looks, Dyess had been fighting with the 21st Pursuit Squadron in the Philippines when the Japanese Imperial Army invaded in 1942. Along with some 80,000 fellow American and Filipino troops, he would be marched the 70 miles from Marviales to Camp O'Donnell. Denied food and water, forced to walk in the scorching heat of the jungle sun, with temperatures that went well over 100 degrees, it's estimated that possibly 26,000 prisoners—a third of those captured—perished in that scorching April of 1942. Bayonet and heat, bullet and sun, all goaded the men to put one foot in front of the other until many of them couldn't any more. Transferred from the maggot and filth infested Camp O'Donnell, where malaria and dengue fever took even more Filipinos and Americans, Dyess was able to escape and make it back to American lines. While convalescing in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., Dyess narrated his account—the first eyewitness American testimony to the Bataan Death March—to Chicago Tribune writer Charles Leavelle. Prohibited from release by the military, Leavelle would finally see the publication of Bataan Death March: A Survivor's Account in 1944. Dyess never read it; he died a year before. His P-38G-10-LO Lightning lost an engine during takeoff at a Glendale, Calif., airport, and rather than risk civilian casualties by abandoning the plane, Dyess crashed it into a vacant lot, so that his life would be taken by flying rather than by walking. Walking can remind us that we're alive, so that it's all the more obscene when such a human act is turned against us, when the pleasure of exertion turns into the horror of exhaustion, the gentle burn in muscles transformed into spasms, breathing mutated into sputtering. Bataan's nightmare, among several, was that it was walking that couldn't stop, wasn’t' allowed to stop. "It is the intense pain that destroys a person's self and world," writes philosopher Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, "a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe." Torture reminds us that we're reducible to bodies; it particularizes and universalizes our pain. With some irony, walking does something similar, with the exertion of moving legs and swinging arms, our wide-ranging mobility announcing us as citizens of the universe. Hence the hellish irony of Bataan, or the 2,200 miles from Georgia to Oklahoma that more than 100,000 Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw were forced to walk by the U.S. federal government between 1830 and 1850, the January 1945 40-mile march of 56,000 Auschwitz prisoners to the Loslau train station in sub-zero temperatures, or the 2.5 million residents of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, forced to evacuate into the surrounding countryside by the Khmer Rouge in 1975. These walks are as hell, prisoners followed by guards with guns and German shepherds, over the hard, dark ground. Harriet Tubman's walks were also in the winter, feet trying to gain uncertain purchase upon frozen bramble, stumbling over cold ground and slick, snow covered brown leaves, and she too was pursued by men with rifles and dogs. She covered similar distances as those who were forced to march, but Tubman was headed to another destination, and that has made all the difference. Crossing the Mason-Dixon line in 1849, Tubman recalled that "I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven." But she wasn't in Heaven, she was in Pennsylvania. For Tubman, and for the seventy enslaved people whom she liberated on thirteen daring missions back into Maryland, walking was arduous, walking was frightening, walking was dangerous, but more than anything walking was the price of freedom. Tubman would rightly come to be known as the Moses of her people (another prodigious walker), descending into the antebellum South like Christ harrowing Hell. The network of safe-houses and sympathetic abolitionists who shepherded the enslaved out of Maryland, and Virginia, and North Carolina into Pennsylvania, and New England and Canada, who quartered the enslaved in cold, dusty, cracked root cellars and hidden passageways, used multiple means of transportation. People hid in the backs of wagons underneath moldering produce, they availed themselves of steamships and sometimes the Underground Railroad was a literal railroad. One enterprising man named Henry Box Brown even mailed himself from Richmond to Philadelphia, the same year Tubman arrived in the Quaker City. But if the Underground Railroad was anything, it was mostly a process of putting one foot before the other on the long walk to the north.               Familiar with the ebbs and flows of the brackish Chesapeake as it lapped upon the western shores of Dorchester County, Tubman was able to interpret mossy rocks and trees to orient herself, navigating by the Big Dipper and Polaris. Her preferred time of travel was naturally at night, and winter was the best season to abscond back, deploying the silence and cold of the season as camouflage. Dorchester is only a scant 150 miles from Philadelphia, but those even further south – South Carolina, Georgia, even Mississippi – would also walk to freedom. Eric Foner explains in Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, that "Even those who initially escaped by other means ended up having to walk significant distances." Those nights on the Underground Railroad must have been terrifying. Hearing the resounding barks of Cuban hounds straining at slave catchers' leashes, the metallic taste of fear sitting in mouths, bile rising up in throats. Yet what portals of momentary grace and beauty were there, those intimations of the sought-after freedom? To see the graceful free passage of a red-tailed hawk over the Green Ridge, the bramble thickets along the cacophonous Great Falls of the cloudy Potomac, the luminescence of a blue moon reflected on a patch of thick ice in the Ohio River?             During that same decade, and the French dictator Napoleon III was, through ambitious city planning, inventing an entirely new category of walker – the peripatetic urban wanderer. Only a few months after Tubman arrived in Philadelphia, and four thousand miles across the ocean, something new in the annals of human experience would open at Paris' Au Con de la Rue – a department store. For centuries, walking was simply a means of getting from one place to another; from home to the market, from market to the church. With something, like the department store, or the glass covered merchant streets known as arcades, people were enticed not just to walk somewhere, but rather to walk everywhere. Such were the beginnings of the category of perambulator known as the flâneur, a word that is untranslatable, but carries connotations of wandering, idling, loafing, sauntering. Being a flâneur means simply walking without purpose other than to observe; of strolling down Le Havre Boulevard and eyeing the window displays of fashions weaved in cashmere and mohair at Printemps, of espying the bakeries of Montmartre laying out macarons and Pain au chocalait; of passing the diners in outdoor brasseries of the Left Bank eating coq au vin. Before the public planner Georges-Eugène Hausmann's radical Second Empire reforms, Paris was a crowded, fetid, confusing and disorganized assemblage of crooked and narrow cobblestoned streets and dilapidated half-timbered houses. Afterwards it became a metropolis of wide, magnificent boulevards, parks, squares, and museums. Most distinctively, there were the astounding 56,573 gas lamps that had been assembled by 1870, lit by a legion of allumeurs at dusk, so that people could walk at night. If Hausmann – and Napoleon III – were responsible for the arrival of the flâneur, then it was because the city finally had things worth seeing. For the privileged flâneur, to walk wasn't the means to acquire freedom – to walk was freedom.  "For the perfect flâneur," writes poet Charles Baudelaire in 1863, "it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite… we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness." Every great city's pedestrian-minded public thoroughfares—the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and Cromwell Road; Fifth Avenue and Sunset Boulevard—is the rightful territory for the universal flâneur. Writers like Baudelaire compared the idyl of city walking to that other 19th-century innovation of photography; the flâneur existed inside a living daguerreotype, as if they had entered the hazy atmosphere of an impressionist painting, the gas lamps illuminating the drizzly fog of a Parisian evening. For the 20th-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who analyzed that activity in his uncompleted magnum opus The Arcades Project, the flâneur was the living symbol of modernity, writing that the "crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flaneur." I often played the role of flaneur for the two years my wife and I lived in Manhattan in a bit of much-coveted rent-controlled bliss. When your estate is 200 square feet, there's not much choice but to be a flâneur, and so we occupied ourselves with night strolls through the electric city, becoming familiar with the breathing and perspiring of the metropolis. Each avenue has its espirit de place: stately residential York, commercial First and Second with their banks and storefronts, imperial Madison with its regal countenance, Park with its aura of old money, barely reformed Lexington with its intimations of past seediness. In the city at night, we availed ourselves of looking at the intricate pyrotechnic window displays of Barneys and Bloomingdales, of the bohemian leisure of the Strand's displays in front of Central Park, of the linoleum cavern underneath the 59th Street Bridge, and of course Grand Central Station, the United States' least disappointing public space. Despite gentrification, rising inequity, and now the pandemic, New York still amazingly functions according to what the geographer Edward Soja describes in Thirdspace as being a place where "everything comes together... subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable." Yet Manhattan is perhaps more a nature preserve for the flâneur, as various economic and social forces over the past few decades have conspired to make our species extinct. The automobile would seem to be a natural predator for the type, and yet even in the deepest environs of the pedestrian unfriendly suburbs the (now largely closed) American shopping mall fulfilled much the same function as Baudelaire's arcades. To stroll, to see, to be seen. A new threat has emerged in the form of Amazon, which portends to end the brick-and-mortar establishment, the coronavirus perhaps the final death of the flâneur. If that type of walker was birthed by the industrial revolution, then it now appears late capitalism is his demise, undone by our new tyrant Jeff Bezos. The rights of the flâneur were never equally distributed, with scant mention of the flâneur needing to be hyperaware of his surroundings, of needing to carry keys in his fist, or having to arm himself with mace. While it's not an entirely unknown word, flâneuse is a much rarer term, and it's clear that the independence and assumed safety that pedestrian exploration implies is more often than not configured as masculine. Women have, of course, been just as prodigious in mapping the urban space with their feet as have men, with Lauren Elkin joking in Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London that many accounts assume that a "penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane." She provides necessary corrective to the male-heavy history of the flaneur, while also acknowledging that the risks are different for women. Describing the anonymity that such walking requires, Elkin writes that "We would love to be invisible the way a man is. We're not the ones to make ourselves visible… it's the gaze of the flaneur that makes the woman who would join his ranks too visible to slip by unnoticed." As a means of addressing this inequity that denies more than half the world's population safe passage through public spaces, the activist movement Take Back the Night held its first march in Philadelphia, after the 1975 murder of microbiologist Susan Alexander Speeth as she was walking home. Take Back the Night used one of the most venerable of protest strategies—the march—as a means of expressing solidarity, security, defiance, and rage. Andrea Dworkin stated the issue succinctly in her treatise "The Night and Danger," explaining that "Women are often told to be extra careful and take precautions when going out at night… So when women struggle for freedom, we must start at the beginning by fighting for freedom of movement… We must recognize that freedom of movement is a precondition for everything else." Often beginning with a candlelight vigil, participants do exactly that which they're so often prevented from doing—walking freely at night. So often paeons to walking that are penned by men wax rhapsodic about the freedom of the flaneur, but forget how gendered the simple act of walking is. Dworkin's point is that women never forget it. Few visuals are quite as powerful as seeing thousands of women and men moving with intentionality through a public space, hoisting placards and signs, chanting slogans, and reminding the powers that be what mass mobilization looks like. There is a debate to be had about the efficacy of protest. But at their absolute most charged, a protest seems like it can change the world; thousands of feet walking as one, every marcher a small cell in a mighty Leviathan. In that uncharacteristically warm February of 2003, I joined the 5,000 activists who marched through the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Oakland against the impending war in Iraq. There were the old hippies wearing t-shirts against the Vietnam War, the slightly drugged out looking college-aged Nader voters, Muslim women in vermillion hijabs and men in olive keffiyeh, the Catholic Workers, and the Jews for Palestine, the slightly menacing balaclava wearing anarchists, and of course your well-meaning liberals such as myself. We marched past Carnegie-Mellon's frat row, young Republicans jeering us with cans of Milwaukee's Best, through the brutalist concrete caverns of the University of Pittsburgh's campus, and under the watchful golem that was the towering gothic Cathedral of Learning, up to the Fifth Avenue headquarters of CMU's Software Engineering Institute, a soulless mirrored cube reflecting the granite gargoyles blackened by decades of steel mill exhaust who were watchfully positioned on St. Paul's Cathedral across the street. Supposedly both the SEI and the adjacent RAND Institute had DoD contracts, developing software that would be used for drone strikes and smart bombs. With righteous (and accurately placed) indignation, the incensed crowd chanted, and we felt as a singular being. On that same day, in 650 cities around the world, 11 million others marched, history's largest global protest. It felt as if by walking we'd stop the invasion. Reader, we did not stop the invasion.       Despite those failures, the experience is indicative of how walking alters consciousness. Not just in a political sense, but in a personal one as well (though those things are not easily extricated). There is a methodology for examining how walking alters our subjectivity, a discipline with the lofty and vaguely threatening name of "psychogeography." Theorist Guy Debord saw the practice as a means of reenchanting space and place, developing a concept called dérive, which translates from the French as "drifting," whereby participants "drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there," as he is quoted in the Situationist International Anthology. Sort of a hyper-attenuated version of being the flaneur, psychogeographers perceived familiar streets, squares, and cities from an entirely different perspective. Other psychogeographical activities included tracing out words by the route a walker takes through the city, or mapping smells and sounds. The whole thing has an anarchic sensibility about it, but with the whimsy of the Dadaists, while just as enthused with praxis as with theory. For example, in his travelogue Psychogeography the Anglo-American novelist Will Self journeys from JFK to Manhattan while on foot. Sneakers crunching over refuse alongside the Van Wyck, the metropolitan detritus that exists in those scrubby brown patches that populate the null-voids that exist between somewhere and somewhere else. Nothing can really compare to entering New York on foot, as Self did. It's fundamentally different from arriving in a cab driving underneath the iconic steel girders of the Manhattan Bridge, or being ferried into the Parthenon that is Grand Central, or even disembarking from a Peter Pan Bus in the grody cavern of Port Authority. Walking is a "means of dissolving the mechanized matrix which compresses the space-time continuum" Self writes, with the walker acting as "an insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveler." For the psychogeographers, how we move is how we think, so that if we wish to change the later, we must first alter the former. So it would seem. Writing in the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarked in The Confessions that "I can only meditate when I'm walking… my mind only works with my legs." In his autobiography Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche injuncted, "Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement.... All prejudices emanate from the bowels." Meanwhile, his contemporary Søren Kierkegaard wrote that "I have walked myself into my best thoughts." Most celebrated of the walking philosophers, Immanuel Kant, had daily constitutionals across Konigsberg's bridges that merchants set their watches by him. Wallace Stevens famously used to write his poems as he stomped off across the antiseptic landscape of Hartford, Conn. He walked as scansion, his wingtips pounding out iambs and trochees with the wisdom that understands verse is as much of the body as it is of the mind, so that "Perhaps/The truth depends on a walk." Walking is a type of consciousness, a type of thinking. Walking is a variety of reading, the landscape unspooling as the most shining of verse, so that every green leaf framed against a church's gothic tower in a dying steel town, both glowing with an inner light out of the luminescence of the golden hour, is the most perfect of poems, only to be seen by she who gives it the time to be considered. Image Credit: SnappyGoat