Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (Vintage)

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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]

Word Counts and Body Counts: On Video Games and the Writing Life

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1. In 2009, a few weeks before the start of my last semester in college, I began living a double life as familiar as it was embarrassing. By day, I wrote fiction in the library, relegating myself to a windowless office to work on a thesis-cum-novel. By night, homework permitting, I played Grand Theft Auto IV. I blew through an average of three hours a day wreaking havoc in a virtual city. Whenever my classmates prodded me with questions about my work, I cited my latest word count as evidence of a Puritan industry. I failed to mention -- I couldn't mention -- how closely it tracked with my body count. Technology evolves, the culture changes, but gamers keep the mantle of delinquents. Even those few of us who profit off our hobby contend with a debilitating stigma. In his book Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, the writer Tom Bissell recounts how a girlfriend of his, upon witnessing a particularly egregious example of video game dialogue, immediately “revoked all vagina privileges until further notice.” As part of a 10-minute bit about the oddities of virtual avatars, the Irish comic Dara O'Briain, wringing his hands like a schoolboy caught stealing fruit snacks, jokes that video games rank on the Shame Scale up there with hardcore porn. In a piece for Kotaku, the blogger Mike Fahey tells how his ex-wife, shortly after claiming to accept his love of games, waited for him to leave for a conference and promptly moved out of the house. In spite of the fact that the games industry is now larger than Hollywood (and despite the critical apparatus being formed by new sites like Kill Screen), the medium and its constituents retain an adolescent air. For this reason above all others, playing games -- even now -- means losing a portion of your dignity. I knew all this on that January day when I picked up Grand Theft Auto. I knew I was dooming myself to months of stagnant development. As I went back to my apartment, I thought of my father, circa 1997, rattling off a list of things I could learn if I stopped playing Mario. I could learn to play baseball, he said. I could learn to speak German or French. I did none of those things, and because of that I came to believe, as my father did, that games were a waste of my time. I came to regard them as relics of a self-hating era. If I were to pick them up again -- especially with a thesis to finish -- all it would do is negate my own better instincts. But then, as the weeks wore on, I began to notice something strange. The more time I spent in Liberty City, the better I seemed to write. My antics in the game were helping me write my novel. 2. Growing up, I knew that my father saw the rise of the games industry as a sign of cultural decay. To him, the cartridge was an emblem of sloth and crassness, incapable of providing the kind of enlightenment sought after by right-living adults. For much of my childhood, he forbade me from owning a console, on the grounds that letting me keep one in the house would “turn my brain into mush.” After two years of begging, he relented, but only on the condition that I limit my playtime each day. He drew up a tally -- stuck via magnet to the fridge -- that let him see at a glance how worrisome my habit was becoming. Eventually, as one hour a day became two, and then three, our schedule fell by the wayside. Unhappy with the seeming collapse of my self-discipline, my father resigned himself to a state of perma-disapproval. For their part, my friends' parents echoed my father's discomfort, albeit with fewer barnburning lectures and warnings. Even during sleepovers -- when diplomacy blunted the edge of familial conflicts -- it was clear that gaming was a matter of household debate. On many weekends, the dynamic between the kids and the parents played out as a generational standoff: the kids play a game, the parents urge the kids to go outside, the kids make a promise to get some fresh air upon reaching some goalpost in the game. When the kids reach the goalpost, they decide to reach another one, which leads to them reneging on their vow to enjoy the nice weather. Unwilling to enforce harsh discipline, the parents crack a joke, the most common one being that their kids were the victims of alien bodysnatchers. Beneath the levity of that joke was an important belief. Our parents thought video games were essentially complex toys. In classing them alongside comic books, Legos and action figures in the roll call of juvenilia, they managed to convince themselves our fervor had a sell-by date. In general, the culture supported them  -- the top place to buy games in my hometown was the local Toys "R" Us. For used games, the number one choice was Funcoland, a chain that resembled a cross between Best Buy and KB Toys. The marketing in these places conveyed a distinct message: that games, like violent cartoons, were meant for 10-year-old boys. For my friends and I, this kiddiness helped justify our obsession. We reasoned that, if it was true that games were made for our demographic, our parents should expect us to play them as much as we could. At the same time, however, the argument had a flip side: teenagers and adults looked down on gaming as beneath them by definition. In this way, we confirmed the existence of a nebulous sell-by date, an age when adolescence would force us to put down our controllers. Every so often, I ran into peers who claimed to have moved past games. I remember one night in sixth grade, a night I spent at the house of my oldest friend. A couple of his neighbors flanked us on his living-room couch. We tore through a match of Killer Instinct, during which one of these neighbors, a kid wearing basketball shorts and a loose-fitting gray T-shirt, munched on handfuls of Tostitos and watched us play without comment. He never joined in, and when I asked him why, my friend explained that his neighbor had stopped playing games. “John's pretty busy,” he said. John then delineated his schedule for the week, which included a fishing expedition, basketball practice, and working as a lifeguard at his pool. The subtext was obvious: John didn't play games anymore because John was growing up. [millions_email] 3. For months while writing my thesis, I hated the hours I spent every day in the library. To me, it seemed that no matter how hard I worked, no matter how long I stared at my gargantuan Word file, nothing I came up with evoked a palpable setting, at least not well enough to belong in a decent novel. To friends, I groused that my syntax was clunky, my imagery lifeless, my similes dead in the water. At times I wondered exactly where I stood on the spectrum of functional literacy. In part, these thoughts explain why, after years of disinterest, I went back to my original sin. Like Netflix marathons, beer can towers, and drawers full of unwashed sweatpants, video games told the world loud and clear that a college kid was Giving Up Hope. Like cash left in front of a junkie, they stood for a fatal temptation. The story in which I was playing the main character is cliched but always tragic: the ne'er-do-well, given one last chance to work hard, gives in to his laziest impulse and blows his shot at success. In the context of that year, my choice was a form of self-sabotage. Some have argued that in GTA IV, the star of the game is not the protagonist, Niko Bellic, but the fictional Liberty City. I grew to agree with this argument in the course of my defeatist campaign. Early on, Niko completes missions in Broker, Dukes, and Bohan, respective facsimiles of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The missions vary -- one involves taking a local girl out on a date -- but most of them force Niko to venture to unknown neighborhoods. Pinging from locale to locale, stealing cars and Hummers and trucks, Niko (which is to say the player) comes to know the geography of the city. In my case, it got to the point where, without consulting a map, I could drive from the South Bronx equivalent to the beach in pseudo-Bay Ridge. It might not seem useful to memorize a virtual city. As pointless activities go, it ranks near learning Klingon. Yet I couldn't help but notice that, as my faculties developed, they bled into the rest of my life. On campus, I paid more attention to byways, shortcuts, and alleys, enough so that my travel time from class to class went down. My body felt more dextrous, less likely to drop or spill things. Persnickety facts and statistics gradually became easier to recall. And back in my carrel, I found a new confidence. I didn't dread my work as I had before I picked up the game. At first I chalked this up to the fact that the game relaxed me. Few things help relieve pressure like indulging in a childhood passion. But then my adviser, a man who didn't know what I did in my spare time, made clear he was seeing improvements in my drafts. In meetings, he said my dialogue was tighter, my sentences leaner, my character portrayals more accurate. He congratulated me on ridding my drafts of tiny grammatical snafus. Apart from the easy explanation -- that months of practice were finally paying off -- I never said a word about where this improvement came from. I figured it wasn't possible, no matter the weight of the evidence. Later on, some years after I graduated, I stumbled upon a few writers who'd noted similar connections. In Extra Lives, Tom Bissell describes the typical platformer in explicitly literary terms, labeling the modern-day heir of Donkey Kong a “strange, nonverbal poem” -- one that, like a poem, “does not disguise the fact that it is designed, contains things you cannot immediately see, and rewards those willing to return to them again and again.” Junot Diaz, in a review of GTA IV, shed light on the storytelling failures that kept it from being a masterpiece, implying that a competent story might have raised it to the level of a good novel. Nathan Englander, in conversation with Rivka Galchen, praises Gears of War as a “magnificent” accomplishment that creates “new narrative spaces.” Like the journalists now forming a critical discourse around games, these novelists recognize the birth of a serious art form. I'd be lying if I said these appraisals weren't gratifying. On occasion, I wished I could go back in time, to 1997, and tell my 10-year-old self there was no good reason to feel ashamed. I'd tell that miserable, guilt-ridden kid that huge numbers of people, successful adults with mortgages and publications and families, loved playing video games just as much as he did. Above all, I'd tell him to please sit tight and wait. 4. In high school, I went through a long stretch when I rarely (if ever) played games, though not because I got sick of butting heads with my father. I gave up because, in the way of teenagers everywhere, I discovered other things to do. I diverted my free time from upcoming games to follow music and culture on sites like Pitchfork and Slate. At the same time, I met gamers who were drug addicts, dropouts, and poor students, whose lives did more to convince me to quit than years of disdainful lectures. The more I read, the more effort I devoted to writing, schoolwork, and music. From this my parents concluded that games had been part of a phase. Then, one week in my first semester of college, I got in an accident that forced me to stay in my dorm. I was taking a Kung Fu class as part of a phys ed requirement (really). My flying jump kick went all right, but I botched the landing, cracking my ankle upon contact with the ground. Incapacitated, I asked my sister to send up my PS2.  For the next two months, I played through Final Fantasy X, working through its puzzles while my cohort went off to parties. What's interesting is how many hallmates came in to watch me play. Crowds of eight or 10 guys (and they were always guys) stopped by on weekday nights, elbowing each other for space on the carpet of my unkempt dorm room. I looked over this crowd of my peers and saw that good kids -- the kinds of kids you expect to chase after their loftiest goals -- enjoyed immersing themselves in this world as much as I did. I didn't know for certain if their parents disapproved like mine had, but I guessed, judging from the number of bashful faces in the room, that many if not most of us were part of a quiet solidarity. Come look, our actions told our stern-faced elders. Come look at us wasting away. 5. To graduate college in 2009 was to hear how unlucky you were. It meant watching as friends moved home and fought to land part-time gigs. It meant finding, the moment you finished the gauntlet of the American college experience, that now your days were composed of endless, unstructured free time. At that point your choice became to live as an autodidact -- a path we might call the Way of the Ambitious -- or else to give in to a long-dormant penchant for apathy. For most people I knew, seesawing between the two options proved to be the way to get by. Three- and four-day weekends curled up with Office reruns gave way to nine-day-periods of frenzied job-hunting and study. Upon signing the lease for my first apartment in New York, I vowed to spend whatever time I wasn't looking for jobs reading classic fiction and crafting a series of short stories. I did read more, and I did write often, but somehow -- predictably -- I got addicted to retro games. It was shameful, or so I thought. The guilt that haunted me as a college senior (that here I was wasting time allotted for study) transmogrified into fears that I was a bad adult. My enjoyment of Super Metroid, interpreted through the lens of these fears, had nothing to do with the game's eerie world or brilliant, exploratory mechanics. It represented a need to be unproductive, to refuse to work on myself in a measurable, dignified way. To combat these fears, I told myself -- as new graduates have since the beginning of time -- that everything would sort itself out once my career finally took off in earnest. In September, I landed an internship, which then led to a part-time job, which then led to a full-time job on the 10th floor of a SoHo skyscraper. Like many New Yorkers, I suspect, adulthood crept up on me in increments, rearing its head first as residence in a decent neighborhood, then as a working knowledge of the city, then as a nine-to-five job at a company whose name strangers would recognize. Yet throughout it all, I kept playing games -- sometimes for an hour a week, sometimes for two hours a day, but always enough that some part of me could hide out in a game when I chose. Last year I left New York to get a Master's degree in Dublin. I packed my PS3 in a storage container the week before I lit out. As I did, I told myself this was really the end, a sign to the universe that I was now ready to cast off childish things. It marked the last time I've played a game since then. Right now I can't say whether my life has improved, nor can I say that I feel more secure in my maturity. Wherever the truth lies, I know that if the need ever strikes me -- if the urge that first struck me at six years old returns in full force -- my downfall and my joy is in a Brooklyn warehouse, waiting. Image Credit: Unsplash/Sigmund.

Video Games Are a Metaphor for Life: Austin Grossman’s You

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On the evening of Christmas 1992 I lay on the floor sobbing and screaming “HE KILLED ME!” repeatedly. I was referring to a game of Mario Brothers that my brothers were playing, having received it that morning. (I do maintain that my brother killed me in an underhanded manner -- that being pausing the game when I was mid-jump, resulting in my inevitable fall into the chasm when the game was unpaused -- and he did it was because I was winning.) That’s the last time I played a video game. Nevertheless, I like listening to people talk about video games. Not those conversations about who scored a sick no-scope head shot, or which character's passive ability allows them to farm the most efficiently, mind you, but about why video games can be meaningful and why they matter. That is exactly why I read Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell, who has an interesting grasp on both the purposeful and the harmful side of habitual gaming. I went to a party where my friend gave a presentation on video games, how they’ve shaped his relationship with his brothers and how the hours he spends playing them make him feel content. Then I read Reamde by Neal Stephenson, which blurred the line between what happens in-game and what happens in the real world in a fascinating way, before it abruptly stopped and did less fascinating things. I like observing the way video games give their players epic purpose on a manageable scale. When I came across You by Austin Grossman, the newest addition to video game literature, I was intrigued. Grossman is the author of 2007’s Soon I Will Be Invincible, and an experienced game developer. You is the story of four friends - Darren, Simon, Lisa, and Russell - who begin designing games in high school and start Black Arts Studios together. Darren is the charismatic leader, Simon is the aloof genius, Lisa is socially awkward but brilliant, and Russell is the one who thought he was above it all. When the rest of them went to UMass together he went to Dartmouth and then law school. At the beginning of the book, he has dropped out of law school and been hired as a game designer at the company that made his high school buddies rich and famous. You is not subtle about the fact that video games are a metaphor for life, and this is what I liked best about it. During his job interview at Black Arts, they ask Russell to describe his ultimate game, and he is flummoxed. What is the ultimate game? A game that is both immersive and fulfilling? What will make him happy? What kind of man does he want to be? With the high-stakes hero’s journey laid out on the table in the first chapter, Grossman has 400 pages to explore every possible way the video game production process parallels Russell’s life. What it lacks in nuance it makes up for in genuine energy. You get the feeling Grossman has been wanting to talk about video games in this way for a long, long time. As Grossman has firsthand experience of producing a game from concept to shipping, he’s usually in one of two modes: explaining the logistics of video game production or showing how deeply you can read into them. Sometimes he just sounds like he’s bragging about how hard and awesome his job is, such as: “It was like we had all the problems of shooting a movie while simultaneously inventing a completely new kind of movie camera and writing the story for a bunch of actors who weren’t even going to follow the script.” The book is at its best when the two modes work for each other, when the logistics of playing a video game dovetail into what he’s saying about the vagaries of adult life. As Russell plays his way through the Black Arts catalogue, he observes the following: “It’s only when you finish the entire damned Realms of Gold III and start on the next one that you see one of the deep truths of the WAFFLE engine. Because when you type rogiv.exe, you get the prompt Import rogiii.dat?” Those two sentences express something vital to Russell’s journey, the way he has moved from one path to another in life without ever really starting over, and they also unlock the plot mystery brewing at Black Ats, and they do it in language I wouldn’t have understood when I started the book. It’s video game language, and Grossman wrote a terrific book with it.

Play It Again: Neal Stephenson’s Reamde

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Neal Stephenson by Bill Morris. email Bill. In his book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, Tom Bissell writes, “More than any other form of entertainment, video games tend to divide rooms into Us and Them. We are, in effect, admitting that we like to spend our time shooting monsters, and They are, not unreasonably, failing to find the value in that.” Bissell is an avid gamer whose collection of essays on the industry attempts to illuminate — and partially, he admits, to justify — the vast amounts of time he and his peers spend shooting monsters and saving the pixelated world. Bissell wrote an engaging, beginner-friendly book that I turned to with unanswered questions — questions that had been raised, and then ignored, by Neal Stephenson. Stephenson’s latest novel, Reamde, centers around T’Rain, a massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) that has (fictionally) surpassed World of Warcraft in innovation and popularity. MMORPGs differ from other video games in that thousands of players all exist in the same virtual world. If you’re playing Grand Theft Auto, you’re up against the game as it was designed. But in a MMORPG like T’Rain, the details of the world you’re playing in are being determined by the other players online. It’s easy to see why this kind of game is even more addicting than its more confined peers. Grand Theft Auto lies dormant without you when turned off, but T’Rain is always changing. Richard Forthrast, the founder of T’Rain, describes it thus: This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies, yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing. The main objective of T’Rain players is wealth, both virtual and actual. T’Rain characters can earn money in the game’s feudal system or steal it from those they vanquish. It’s designed to appeal both to casual players who want to log on and battle something periodically and to Chinese teenagers who make a living from playing it incessantly. Forthrast was a big gamer before he founded T’Rain, and from the beginning the game was designed with massive worldwide popularity in mind. He hired a geology expert to create the planet T’Rain's geography and climate. He hired two science-fiction writers—one a Cantabridgian Tolkien-like figure and the other a prolific producer of pulp—to write the history of T’Rain—it’s species, nations, ancient feuds, and continuing mythology. They spent years creating T’Rain, so that it was a complete universe and set of cultures before they invited the players in. Fast forward a few years, T’Rain is ubiquitous and Richard Forthrast is a multi-millionaire. I liked Reamde right away. It begins at the Forthrast family reunion in Iowa, where we learn Richard’s backstory, how he came up with the idea for T’Rain and assembled its hodge-podge team of designers and writers. He talks about MMORPGs, their particularly enticing qualities and how the game company continues to shape the world the players play in without exerting obvious influence. Bissell writes that every video game has a guiding story. “PLUMBER’S GIRLFRIEND CAPTURED BY APE!”, as he says, was the original game story, and they have evolved from that into worlds of moral quandary. In T’Rain, characters are either good or evil. T’Rains writers created a history of wars between the two, which new players take up as they join the game. However, as the players become more personally invested in the game’s world, the battle lines started to shift. T’Rain’s two writers — the Tolkien guy and the pulp guy — are public rivals, and the game’s players start taking sides, in what Richard calls the War of Realignmnet (Wor). “So the Wor is our customers calling bullshit on our ‘Good/Evil’ branding strategy,” Richard says to one of his writers, who replies, “Not so much that as finding something that feels more real to them, more visceral.” T’Rain’s players are so plugged in that they’re taking over the story. Meanwhile, a Chinese hacker creates a T’Rain virus, Reamde, that encrypts the infected computer’s files and holds the encryption key ransom. The ransom, of course, is to be paid within T’Rain. As Stephenson describes it, the world of T’Rain and the real world stop feeling distinct. T’Rain isn’t so much a hobby to its players, as a second way to live out their life. That distinction between the Us and Them that Bissell describes, and what makes the Us so crazy about gaming, is one I thought Stephenson was going to keep exploring. And then, how do I say this, enter a pack of jihadists. Richard’s niece and her boyfriend, helping to track down the Chinese hacker, literally stumble upon an Islamic terrorist’s bomb factory. For the rest of the book, there are many many gunfights. Stephenson, known for his supernatural themes, says he wanted to try something different by writing a thriller. This he did, and the final two-thirds of the book is a lively thriller, with Richard’s niece assigned the Kim Bauer role of the constantly handcuffed and espionage agents from Russia, England, and the U.S. all getting involved as the action hops from continent to continent. The problem is, Stephenson showed his hand too much at the beginning. He teased me with a thriller that took place within T’Rain, among its players and runners, visited upon by the limitations and consequences of two simultaneous worlds—real and virtual. I so wanted to read that book. But it was pushed to the background to make way for a shoot-em-up. This is the first Stephenson I’ve read, and I now gather it was a bad place to start. From Reamde, I know him to be a thoughtful, meticulous, and very funny writer (of an MI6 agent going dark in British Columbia, “How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?”), but his talents were misplaced here. He continued to bring T’Rain into the plot. The characters use it to communicate with each other, and the Reamde virus scenario still plays out, although with nothing like the significance the title suggests. The T’Rain novel and the thriller feel like two separate books, the lesser of which gets more attention, sending me running for Tom Bissell to satisfy my new-found interest in gaming. If Stephenson ever decides to finish the T’Rain novel, I’m interested.