Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (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]

On Obscenity and Literature

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“But implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.” —Associate Justice William J. Brennan Jr., Roth v. United States (1957) Interviewer: Speaking of blue, you’ve been accused of vulgarity. Mel Brooks: Bullshit! —Playboy (February, 1975) On a spring evening in 1964 at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, several undercover officers from the NYPD’s vice squad arrested Lenny Bruce for public obscenity. Both Bruce and the club’s owner Howard Solomon were shouldered out through the crowded club to waiting squad cars, their red and blue lights reflected off of the dirty puddles pooled on the pavement of Bleecker Street. For six months the two men would stand trial, with Bruce’s defense attorney calling on luminaries from James Baldwin to Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer to Bob Dylan, to attest to the stand-up’s right to say whatever he wanted in front of a paying audience. “He was a man with an unsettling sense of humor,” write Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover in The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon. “Uncompromising, uncanny, unforgettable, and unapologetic…His words crossed the law and those in it is. He became intolerable to people too powerful to ignore. When it was over, not even the First Amendment saved him.” The three-judge tribunal sentenced Bruce to four months punishment in a workhouse. Released on bail, he never served a day of his conviction, overdosing on morphine in his Hollywood Hills bungalow two years later. He wouldn’t receive a posthumous pardon until 2003. “Perhaps at this point I ought to say a little something about my vocabulary,” Bruce wrote in his (still very funny) How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography. “My conversation, spoken and written, is usually flavored with the jargon of the hipster, the argot of the underworld, and Yiddish.” Alongside jazz, Jewish-American comedy is one of the few uniquely American contributions to world culture, and if that comparison can be drawn further, then Bruce was the equivalent of Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis—he was the one who broke it wide open. Moving comedy away from the realm of the Borscht Belt one-liner, Bruce exemplified the emerging paradigm of stand-up as spoken word riff of personal reflections and social commentary, while often being incredibly obscene. The Catskills comedian Henry Youngman may have been inescapably Jewish, but Bruce was unabashedly so. And, as he makes clear, his diction proudly drew from the margins, hearing more truth in the dialect of the ethnic Other than in mainstream politeness, more honesty in the junky’s language than in the platitudes of the square, more righteous confrontation in the bohemian’s obscenity than in the pieties of the status quo. Among the comics of that golden age of stand-up, only Richard Pryor was his equal in bravery and genius, and despite the fact that some of his humor is dated today, books like How to Talk Dirty and Influence People still radiate an excitement that a mere burlesque performer could challenge the hypocrisy and puritanism of a state that would just as soon see James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover banned and their publisher’s hauled to jail as they would actually confront any of the social ills that infected the body politic. What separates Bruce from any number of subsequent comics is that within his performances there was a fully articulated theory of language. “Take away the right to say the word ‘fuck’ and you take away the right say ‘fuck the government,’” he is reported to have said, and this is clearly and crucially true. That’s one model of obscenity’s utility: its power to lower the high and to raise the low, with vulgarity afforded an almost apocalyptic power of resistance. There is a naivety, however, that runs through the comedian's work, and that's that Bruce sometimes doesn't afford language enough power. In one incendiary performance from the early '60s, Bruce went through a litany of ethnic slurs for Black people, Jews, Italians, Hispanics, Poles, and the Irish, finally arguing that “it’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.” He imagines a scenario whereby the president would introduce members of his cabinet by using those particular words, and concludes that following such a moment those slurs wouldn’t “mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him” that word at school. Bruce’s idealism is almost touching—let it not be doubted that he genuinely believed language could work in this way—but it’s also empirically false. Dying a half-century ago he can’t be faulted for his ignorance on this score, but when we now have a president who basically does what Bruce imagined his hypothetical Commander-in-Chief doing, and I think we can emphatically state that the repetition of such ugliness does nothing to dispel its power.        Discussions about obscenity often devolve into this bad-faith dichotomy—the prudish schoolmarms with their red-pens painting over anything blue and the brave defenders of free speech pushing the boundaries of acceptable discourse. The former hold that there is a certain power to words that must be tamed, while the later champion the individual right to say what they want to say. When the issue is phrased in such a stark manner, it occludes a more discomforting reality—maybe words are never simply utterances, maybe words can be dangerous, maybe words can enact evil things, and maybe every person has an ultimate freedom to use those words as they see fit (notably a different claim than people should be able to use them without repercussion). Bruce’s theory of language is respectably semiotic, a contention about the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, whereby that chain of connection can be severed by simple repetition, as when sense flees from a word said over and over again, whether it’s “potato” or “xylophone.” But he was ultimately wrong (as is all of structural and post-structural linguistics)—language is never exactly arbitrary, it’s not really semiotic. We need theurgy to explain how words work, because in an ineffable and numinous way, words are magic. When it comes to obscenity in particular, whether the sexual or the scatological, the racial or the blasphemous, we’re considering a very specific form of that magic, and while Bruce is correct that a prohibition on slurs would render resistance to oppression all the more difficult, he’s disingenuous in not also admitting that it can provide a means of cruelty in its own right. If you couldn’t say obscenities then a certain prominent tweeter of almost inconceivable power and authority couldn’t deploy them almost hourly against whatever target he sees fit. This is not an argument for censorship, mind you, but it is a plea to be honest in our accounting. Obscenity as social resistance doesn’t have the same cache it once did, nor is it always interpreted as unassailably progressive (as it was for Bruce and his supporters). In our current season of a supposed Jacobin “cancel culture,” words have been ironically re-enchanted with the spark of danger that was once associated with them. Whether or not those who claim that there is some sort of left McCarthyism policing language are correct, it’s relatively anodyne to acknowledge that right now words are endowed with a significance not seen since Bruce appeared in a Manhattan courtroom. Whatever your own stance on the role that offensiveness plays in civilized society, obscenity can only be theorized through multiple perspectives. Four-letter words inhabit a nexus of society, culture, faith, linguistics, and morality (and the law). A “fuck” is never just a “fuck,” and a shit by any other name wouldn’t smell as pungent. Grammatically, obscenities are often classified as “intensifiers,” that is placeholders that exist to emphasize the emotionality of a given declaration—think of them as oral exclamation marks. Writing in Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, Melissa Mohr explains vulgarity is frequently “important for the connotation it carries and not for its literal meaning.” Such a distinction came into play in 2003 after the Irish singer Bono of U2 was cited by the Federal Communications Commission when upon winning a Golden Globe he exclaimed “fucking brilliant.” The Enforcement Commission of the bureau initially decided that Bono’s f-bomb wasn’t indecent since its use clearly wasn’t in keeping with the sexual definition of the word, a verdict that was later rescinded higher up within the FCC. “Historically,” Mohr writes, “swearwords have been thought to possess a deeper, more intimate connection to the things they represent than do other words,” and in that regard the pencil-necked nerds at the FCC ironically showed more respect to the dangerous power of fucking then did Bono. If vigor of emotion is all one was looking for in language, any number of milquetoast words would work as well as a vulgarity, and yet obscenity (even if uttered due to a stubbed toe) is clearly doing something a bit more transcendent than more PG terms—for both good and bad. Swearing can’t help but have an incantatory aspect to it; we swear oaths, and we’re specifically forbidden by the Decalogue from taking the Lord’s name in vain. Magnus Ljung includes religious themes in his typology of profanity, offered in Swearing: A Cross-Cultural Linguistic Study, as one of “five major themes that recur in the swearing of the majority of the languages discussed and which are in all likelihood also used in most other languages featuring swearing.” Alongside religious profanity, Ljung recognizes themes according to scatology, sex organs, sexual activities, and family insults. To this, inevitably, must also be offered ethnic slurs. Profanity is by definition profane, dealing with the bloody, pussy, jizzy reality of what it means to be alive (and thus the lowering of the sacred into that oozy realm is part of what blasphemously shocks). Obscenity has a quality of the theological about it, even while religious profanities have declined in their ability to shock an increasingly secular society. [millions_email] Today a word like “bloody” sounds archaic or Anglophilic, and almost wholly inoffensive, even while it’s (now forgotten) reference to Christ’s wounds would have been scandalous to an audience reared on the King James Bible. This was the problem that confronted television director David Milch, who created the classic HBO western Deadwood. The resultant drama (with dialogue largely composed in iambic pentameter) was noted as having the most per capita profanity of any show to ever air, but in 1870s Dakota most of those swears would have been religious in nature. Since having Al Swearengen (a perfect name if ever there was one) sound like Yosemite Sam would have dulled the shock of his speech, Milch elected to transform his characters’ language into scatological and ethnic slurs, the latter of which still has the ability to upset an audience in a way that “by Christ’s wounds!” simply doesn’t. When Swearengen offers up his own theory of language to A.W. Merrick, who edits Deadwood’s newspaper, he argues that “Just as you owning a print press proves only an interest in the truth, meaning up to a fucking point, slightly more than us others maybe, but short of a fucking anointing or the shouldering of a sacred burden—unless of course the print press was gift of an angel,” he provides a nice synthesis of the blasphemous and the sexual. The majority of copious swears in Deadwood are of the scatological, sexual, or racial sort, and they hit the ear-drum with far more force than denying the divinity of Christ does. When Milch updated the profanity of the 19th century, he knew what would disturb contemporary audiences, and it wasn’t tin-pot sacrilege.   All of which is to say that while obscenity has a social context, with what’s offensive being beholden to the mores of a particular century, the form itself universally involves the transgression of propriety, with the details merely altered to the conventions of a time and place. As an example, watch the 2005 documentary The Aristocrats directed by magician Penn Jillette, which features dozens of tellings of the almost unspeakably taboo joke of the same name. Long an after-hours joke told by comedians who would try to one-up each other in the degree of profanity offered, Jillette’s film presents several iconic performers giving variations on the sketch. When I saw the film after it came out, the audience was largely primed for the oftentimes extreme sexual and scatological permutations of the joke, but it was the tellings that involved racial slurs and ethnic stereotypes that stunned the other theater goers. It’s the pushing of boundaries in and of itself, rather than the subject in question, that designates something as an obscenity. According to Sigmund Freud in his (weirdly funny) The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, vulgar humor serves a potent psychological purpose, allowing people “to enjoy undisguised obscenity” that is normally repressed so as to keep “whole complexes of impulses, together with their derivatives, away from consciousness.” Obscenity thus acts as a civilizational pressure valve for humanity’s chthonic impulses. That words which are considered obscene are often found in the vocabulary of the marginalized isn’t incidental, and it recommends spicey language as a site of resistance. English swearing draws directly from one such point of contact between our “higher” and our “lower” language. The majority of English swears have a Germanic origin, as opposed to a more genteel Romance origin (whether from French or Latin). In keeping with their Teutonic genesis, they tend to have an abrasive, guttural, jagged quality to their sounds, the better to convey an onomatopoeic quality. Take a look at the list which comprises comedian George Carlin’s 1972 bit “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” Four of them definitely have an Old English etymology, traceable back to the West Germanic dialect of the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes who occupied Britain in the later centuries of the first millennium. Three of them – the one that rudely refers to female genitalia, the one that tells you to rudely do something sexual, and the one that tells you to do that thing to your mother – may have Latin or Norman origins, though linguists think they’re just as likely to come from what Medievalists used to call “Anglo-Saxon.” Most of these words had no obscene connotations in their original context; in Old English the word for urine is simply “piss,” and the word for feces is “shit.” Nothing dirty about either word until the eleventh-century Norman invasion of Britain privileged the French over the English. That stratification, however, gives a certain gutter enchantment to those old prosaic terms, endowing them with the force of a swear. Geoffrey Hughes writes in Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths, and Profanities in English that the “Anglo-Saxon element… provides much more emotional force than does the Normal French of the Latin. Copulating pandemonium! conveys none of the emotion charge of the native equivalent fucking hell!”  Invasion, oppression, and brutality mark those words which we consider to be profane, but they also give them their filthy enchantments. What’s clear is that the class connotations of what Bruce called an “argot” can’t be ignored. Swearing is the purview of criminals and travelers, pirates and rebels, highwaymen and drunks. For those lexicographers who assembled lists of English words in the early modern era, swearing, or “canting,” provided an invaluable window into the counter-cultural consciousness. The Irish playwright Richard Head compiled The Canting Academy, or Devil’s Cabinet Opened in 1673, arguably the first full-length English “dictionary,” complied decades before Dr. Johnson’s staider 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language. Decades before Head’s book, and short pamphlets by respectable playwrights from Thomas Dekker to Thomas Middleton similarly illuminated people on the criminal element’s language—other examples that were included as appendices within books, such as Thomas Harman’s A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, go back well into the 16th century. Such “canting guides,” exploring the seamy underbelly of the cockney capital, were prurient pamphlets that illustrated the salty diction of thieves and rogues for the entertainment of the respectable classes. One of the most popular examples was the anonymously edited A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, first printed in 1698.  Within, readers could learn the definitions of insults from “blobber-lipped” to “jobber-not.” Such dictionaries (that included words like “swindler” and “phony,” which still survive today) drew from the English underclass, with a motley vocabulary made up of words from rough-hewn English, Romani, and ultimately Yiddish, among other origins. A direct line runs between the vibrant, colorful, and earthy diction of canting to cockney rhyming slang, or the endangered dialect of Polari used for decades by gay men in Great Britain, who lived under the constant threat of state punishment. All of these tongues are “obscene,” but that’s a function of their oppositional status to received language. Nothing is “dirty” about them; they are, rather, rebellions against “proper” speech, “dignified” language, “correct” talking, and they challenge that codified violence implied by the mere existence of the King’s Speech. Their differing purposes, and respective class connotations and authenticity, are illustrated by a joke wherein a hobo asks a nattily dressed businessman for some change. “’Neither a borrower nor a lender be’—that’s William Shakespeare,” says the businessman. “’Fuck you’—that’s David Mamet,” responds the panhandler. A bit of a disservice to the Bard, however, who along with Dekker and Middleton could cant with the best of them. For example, within the folio one will find “bawling, blasphemous, incharitible dog,” “paper fac’d villain,” and “embossed carbuncle,” among such other similarly colorful examples. An entire history could be written about early instances of noted slurs, which of course necessitates trawling the Oxford English Dictionary for examples of dirty words that appear particularly early. For “shit,” there is a 1585 instance of the word in a Scottish “flyting,” an extemporaneous poetic rhyme-battle held in Middle Scotts, which took place between Patrick Hume and Alexander Montgomerie. The greatest example of the form is the 15th-century Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, containing the first printed instance of the word “fuck.” In the OED, our good friend the dirty lexicographer Richard Head has the earliest example given in the entry for the word “fuck,” the profanity appearing as a noun in his play Hic et Ubique: or, The Humors of Dublin ,wherein a character says “I did creep in…and there I did see [him] putting the great fuck upon my wife.” And the dictionary reflects the etymological ambiguity concerning the faux-francophone/faux-Virgilian word “dildo,” giving earliest attribution to the playwright Robert Greene in 1590 who in his comedy Never Too Late wrote “Dildido dildido, Oh love, oh love, I feel thy rage rumble below and above.” Swearing might be a radical alternative to received language, but it pulses through literature like a counter-history, a shadow realm of the English tongue’s full capabilities. It is a secret language, the twinned-double of more respectable letters, and it’s unthinkable to understand Geoffrey Chaucer without his scatological jokes or Shakespeare minus his bawdy insults. After all, literature is just as much Charles Bukowski as T.S. Eliot; it’s William S. Burroughs and not just Ezra Pound. Sometimes those dichotomies about what language is capable of are reconciled within the greatest of literature. A syllabus of the immaculate obscene would include the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Joyce’s Ulysses, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (smuggled out of a Barnes & Noble by yours truly when I was 16), and Irving Welsh’s Trainspotting. Along with his fellow Scotsman James Kelman, Welsh shows the full potential of obscenity to present an assault on the pieties of the bourgeois, mocking Madison Avenue sophistry when he famously implores the reader to “Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life.” Within the English language, looming above all as the primogeniture of literary smut, is the great British author John Cleland, who in 1748 published our first pornographic novel in Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, wherein he promised “Truth! stark naked truth, is the word, and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze-wrapper on it.” Cleland purposefully wrote Fanny Hill entirely in euphemisms and double entendres, but the lack of dirty words couldn’t conceal the fact that the orgiastic bildungsroman about a middle-age nymphomaniac was seen as unspeakably filthy. The novel has the distinction of being the longest banned work in U.S. history, first prohibited by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1821, only to be sold legally after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that its censorship was unconstitutional in 1966. The same year that Bruce was found face-down, naked and dead, in his California bathroom.      A goddamn unequivocal fucking triumph of the human spirt that any fucking wanker can march up into a public library and check out a copy of Fanny Hill. That liberty is one that was hard fought for, and we should look askance on anyone who’d throw it away too cavalierly. But there is also something disingenuous as dismissing all those who suppressed works like Fanny Hill or Ulysses or Lady Chatterley’s Lover as mere prigs and prudes. A work is never censored because it isn’t powerful; it’s attacked precisely because of that coiled, latent energy that exists within words, none the more so than those that we’ve labeled as forbidden. If the debate over free speech and censorship is drenched in a sticky oil of bad faith, then that slick spills over into all corners. My fellow liberals will mock the conservative perspective that says film or comic books or video games or novels are capable of altering someone into action, sometimes very ugly action—but of course literature is capable of doing this. Why would we read literature otherwise? Why would we create it otherwise? The censor with his black marker in some ways does due service to literature, acknowledging its significance and its uncanny effect. To claim that literature shouldn’t be censored because all literature is safe is not just fallacious, it’s disrespectful. The far more difficult principle is that literature shouldn’t be censored despite the fact that it’s so often dangerous. Like any grimoire or incantation, obscenity can be used to liberate and to oppress, to free and to enslave, to bring down those in power but also to froth a crowd into the most hideous paroxysms of fascistic violence. So often the moralistic convention holds that “punching down” is never funny, but the dark truth is that it often is. What we do with that reality is the measure of us as people, because obscenity is neither good nor bad, but all power resides within the mouth of who wields it. What we think of as profanity is a rupture within language, a dialectic undermining conventional speech, what the Greeks called an aporia that constitutes the moment that rhetoric breaks down. Obscenity is when language declares war on itself, often with good cause. Writing in Rabelais and His World, the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin defined what he called the “carnivalesque,” that is the principle that structured much medieval and Renaissance performance and literature, whereby the “principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys...seriousness and all pretense.” Examining the Shrovetide carnivals that inaugurated pre-Reformation Lent, Bakhtin optimistically saw something liberatory in the ribald display of upended hierarchies, where the farting, shitting, pissing, vomiting hilarity of the display rendered authority foolish. “It frees human consciousness,” Bakhtin wrote, “and imagination for new potentialities.” An uneasy and ambivalent undercurrent threads through Bakhtin’s argument, though. If the carnival allowed for a taste of emancipation, there was also always the possibility that it was just more bread and circus, a way to safely “rebel” without actually challenging the status quo. How much of our fucks and shits are just that, simply the smearing of feces on our playpen walls? Even worse, what happens when the carnival isn’t organized by plucky peasants to mock the bishops and princes, but when the church and state organize those mocking pageants themselves? Bakhtin didn’t quite anticipate the troll, nor did Bruce for that matter. Gershon Legman writes in the standard text Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor that “Under the mask of humor, our society allows infinite aggressions, by everyone and against everyone. In the culminating laugh of the listener or observer…the teller of the joke betrays his hidden hostility.” Can’t you take a joke? Because I was just joking. Legman’s reading of obscenity is crucial—it’s never just innocent, it’s never just nothing, it’s never just words. And it depends on who is saying them, and to whom they’re being said. Because swearing is so intimately tied to the theological, the use of profanity literally takes on the aura of damnation. It’s not that words aren’t dangerous—they are. But that doesn’t mean we must suture our mouths, even as honesty compels us to admit that danger. What we do with this understanding is the process that we call civilization. Because if Lenny Bruce had one unassailable and self-evident observation, it was that “Life is a four-letter word.” How could it be fucking otherwise? Bonus Link:—Pussy Riot: One Woman's Vagina Takes on Japan's Obscenity Laws Image Credit: Flickr/Jeniffer Moo