Field Work (CultureWork: A Book Series from the Center for Literacy and Cultural Studies at Harvard)

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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]

Nothing Outside the Text

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Let's pretend that you work in a windowless office on Madison, or Lex, or Park in the spring of 1954, and you're hurrying to Grand Central to avoid the rush back to New Rochelle, or Hempstead, or Weehawken. Walking through the Main Concourse with its Beaux Arts arches and its bronzed clock atop the ticketing booth, its cosmic green ceiling fresco depicting the constellations slowly stained by the accumulated cigarette smoke, you decide to purchase an egg-salad sandwich from a vendor near the display with its ticking symphony of arrivals and departures. You glance down at a stack of slender magazines held together with thick twine. The cover illustration is of a buxom brunette wearing a yellow pa'u skirt and hauling an unconscious astronaut in a silver spacesuit through a tropical forest while fur-covered extraterrestrials look on between the palm trees. It's entitled Universe Science Fiction. And if you were the sort of Manhattan worker who, after clocking in eight hours at the Seagram Building or the Pan Am Building, settles into the commuter train's seat—after loosening his black-knit tie and lighting a Lucky Strike while watching Long Island go by—ready to be immersed in tales of space explorers and time travelers, then perhaps you parted with a quarter so that Universe Science Fiction's cheap print would smudge your gray flannel suit. The sort of reading you'd want to cocoon yourself in with nothing outside the text. As advertised, you find a story of just a few hundred words entitled "The Immortal Bard," by a writer named Isaac Asimov. Reprinted three years later in Earth Is Room Enough, "The Immortal Bard" is set among sherry-quaffing, tweedy university faculty at their Christmas party, where a boozed-up physicist named Phineas Welch corners the English professor Scott Robertson, and explains how he's invented a method of "temporal transference" able to propel historical figures into the present. Welch resurrects Archimedes, Galileo, and Isaac Newton, but "They couldn't get used to our way of life… They got terribly lonely and frightened. I had to send them back." Despite their genius, their thought wasn't universal, and so Welch conjures William Shakespeare, believing him to be "someone who knew people well enough to be able to live with them centuries away from his own time." Robertson humors the physicist, treating such claims with a humanist's disdain, true to C.P. Snow’s observation in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution that "at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists… Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension." Welch explains that the Bard was surprised that he was still taught and studied, after all, he wrote Hamlet in a few weeks, just polishing up an old plot. But when introduced to literary criticism, Shakespeare can't comprehend anything. "God ha' mercy! What cannot be racked from words in five centuries? One could wring, methinks, a flood from a damp clout!" So, Welch enrolls him in a Shakespeare course, and suddenly Robertson begins to fear that this story isn't just a delusion, for he remembers the bald man with a strange brogue who had been his student. "I had to send him back," Welch declares, because our most flexible and universal of minds had been humiliated. The physicist downed his cocktail and mutters "you poor simpleton, you flunked him." "The Immortal Bard" doesn't contain several of the details that I include—no sherry, no tweed (though there are cocktails). We have no sense of the characters' appearances; Welch's clothes are briefly described, but Robertson is a total blank. A prolific author, penning over 1,000 words a day, by Asimov's death in 1992 he had published more than 500 books across all categories of the Dewey Decimal System (including Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare). Skeletal parsimony was Asimov's idiom; in his essay "On Style" from Who Done It?, coedited with Alice Laurence, he described his prose as "short words and simple sentence structure," bemoaning that this characteristic "grates on people who like things that are poetic, weighty, complex, and, above all, obscure." Had his magisterial Foundation been about driving an ambulance in the First World War rather than a galactic empire spanning billions of light years, it'd be the subject of hundreds of dissertations. If his short story "The Nine Billion Names of God" had been written in Spanish, then he'd be Jorge Luis Borges; had Asimov's "The Last Question" originally been in Italian, then he'd be Italo Calvino (American critics respect fantasy in an accent, but then they call it "magical realism"). As it was, critical evaluation was more lackluster, with the editors of 1981's Dictionary of Literary Biography claiming that since Asimov's stories "clearly state what they mean in unambiguous language [they] are… difficult for a scholar to deal with because there is little to be interpreted." Asimov's dig comes into sharper focus having admitted that "The Immortal Bard" was revenge on those professors who'd rankled him by misinterpreting stories—his and other's. A castigation of the discipline as practiced in 1954, which meant a group that had dominated the study of literature for three decades—the New Critics. With their rather uninspired name, the New Critics—including I.A. Richards, John Crow Ransome, Cleanth Brooks, Allen K. Tate, Robert Penn Warren, William Empson, and a poet of some renown named T.S. Eliot (among others)—so thoroughly revolutionized how literature is studied that explaining why they're important is like explaining air to a bird. From Yale, Cambridge, and Kenyon, the New Criticism would disseminate, and then it trickled down through the rest of the educational system. If an English teacher asked you to analyze metaphors in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 12"—that was because of the New Critics. If an AP instructor asked you to examine symbolism in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—that was because of the New Critics. If a college professor made you perform a rhetorical analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—that was because of the New Critics. Most of all, if anyone ever made you conduct a "close reading," it is the New Critics who are to blame. According to the New Critics, their job wasn't an aesthetic one, parsing what was beautiful about literature or how it moved people (the de facto approach in Victorian classrooms, and still is in popular criticism), but an analytical one. The task of the critic was scientific—to understand how literature worked, and to be as rigorous, objective, and meticulous as possible. That meant bringing nothing to the text but the text. Neither the critic's concerns—or the author's—mattered more than the placement of a comma, the connotation of a particular word, the length of a sentence. True that they often unfairly denigrated worthy writing because their detailed explications only lent themselves to certain texts. Poetry was elevated above prose; the metaphysical over the Romantic; the "literary" over genre. But if the New Critics were snobbish in their preferences, they also weren't wrong that there was utility in the text's authority. W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argued in a 1946 issue of The Sewanee Review that the "design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." In a more introspective interview, Asimov admitted that what inspired "The Immortal Bard" was his inadequacy at answering audience questions about his own writing. Asimov was right that he deserved more attention from academics, but wrong in assuming that he'd know more than them. The real kicker of the story might be that Shakespeare actually earned his failing grade.      When New Critics are alluded to in popular culture, it's as anal-retentive killjoys. Maybe the most salient (and unfair) drumming the New Critics received was in the 1989 (mis)beloved Peter Weir film Dead Poets Society, featuring Robin Williams’s excellent portrayal of John Keating, an English teacher at elite Welton Academy in 1959. Keating arrives at the rarefied school urging the boys towards carpe diem, confidently telling them that the "powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse." With vitality and passion, Keating introduces the students to Tennyson, Whitman, and Thoreau, and the audience comprehends that this abundantly conservative curriculum is actually an act of daring, at least when contrasted to the New Critical orthodoxy that had previously stultified the children of millionaires. On his first day, wearing corduroy with leather arm patches, Keating asks a student to recite from their approved textbook by Professor J. Evans Pritchard. In a monotone, the student reads "If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness." We are to understand that after the cold scalpel of analysis cuts the warm flesh of the poem—that if it wasn't already dead—then it certainly perished thereafter. Keating pronounces the argument to be "Excrement," and demands his students rip the page out, so that a film that defends the humanities depicts the destruction of books. "But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for," Keating tells his charges, and how could dusty Dr. Pritchard compete with a Cartesian coordinate plane ? The fictional Pritchard's essay is an allusion to Brook and Warren's influential 1938 Understanding Poetry, where they write that "Poetry gives us knowledge… of ourselves in relation to the world of experience, and to that world considered… in terms of human purposes and values." Not soaring in its rhetoric, but not the cartoon from Dead Poets Society either, though also notably not what Keating advocated. He finds room for poetry, beauty, romance, and love, but neglects truth. What Keating champions isn't criticism, but appreciation, and while the former requires rigor and objectivity, the latter only needs enjoyment. Appreciation in and of itself is fine—but it doesn't necessarily ask anything of us either. Kevin Detmar in his defenestration of the movie from The Atlantic writes that "passion alone, divorced from the thrilling intellectual work of real analysis, is empty, even dangerous." Pontificating in front of his captive audience, Keating recites (and misinterprets) poems from Robert Frost and Percy Shelley, demanding that "When you read, don't just consider what the author thinks, consider what you think." Estimably sensible, for on the surface an enjoinder towards critical thought and independence seems reasonable, certainly when reading an editorial, or a column, or policy proposal—but this is poetry. His invocation is diametrically opposed to another New Critical principle, also defined by Wimsatt and Beardsley in The Sewanee Review in 1946, and further explicated in their book The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, published the same year as Asimov's story. Wimsatt and Beardsley say that genuine criticism doesn't "talk of tears; prickles or other physiological symptoms, of feeling angry, joyful, hot, cold, or intense, or of vaguer states of emotional disturbance, but of shades of distinction and relation between objects of emotion." In other words, it's not all about you. Being concerned with the poem's effect tells us everything about the reader but little about the poem. Such a declaration might seem arid, sterile, and inert—especially compared to Keating's energy—and yet there is paradoxically more life in The Verbal Icon. "Boys, you must strive to find your own voice," Keating tells a room full of the children of wealth, power, and privilege, who will spend the whole 20th century ensuring that nobody has the option not to hear them. Rather than sounding the triumphant horn of independence, this is mere farting on the bugle of egoism. Poetry's actual power is that it demands we shut up and listen. Wimsatt and Beardsley aren't asking the reader not to be changed by a poem—it's the opposite. They're demanding that we don't make an idol from our relative, contingent, arbitrary reactions. A poem is a profoundly alien place, a foreign place, a strange place. We do not go there to meet ourselves; we go there to meet something that doesn't even have a face. Keating treats poems like mirrors, but they're windows. With austerity and sternness, New Criticism is an approach that with sola Scriptura exactitude understood nothing above, below, behind, or beyond the text. Equal parts mathematician and mystic, the New Critic deigns objectivity the preeminent goal, for in the novel, or poem, or play properly interpreted she has entered a room separate, an empire of pure alterity. An emphasis on objectivity doesn't entail singularity of interpretation, for though the New Critics believed in right and wrong readings, good and bad interpretations, they reveled in nothing as much as ambiguity and paradox. But works aren't infinite. If a text can be many things, it also can't mean everything. What is broken are the tyrannies of relativism, the cult of "I feel" that defined conservative Victorian criticism and ironically some contemporary therapeutic manifestations as well. New Criticism drew from the French tradition of explication de texte, the rigorous parsing of grammar, syntax, diction, punctuation, imagery, and narrative. Not only did they supplant Victorian aesthetic criticism's woolliness, their method was estimably democratic (despite their sometimes-conservative political inclinations, especially among the movement known as the Southern Agrarians). Democratic because none of the habituated knowledge of the upper-class—the mores of Eton or Philips Exeter, summering at Bath or Newport, proper dress from Harrod's or Brooks Brothers—now made a difference in appreciating Tennyson or Byron. Upper class codes were replaced with the severe, rigorous, logical skill of being able to understand Tennyson or Byron, with no recourse to where you came from or who you were, but only the words themselves. Appreciation is about taste, discernment, and breeding—it's about acculturation. Analysis? That's about poetry. From that flurry of early talent came Richards's 1924 Principles of Literary Criticism and 1929 Practical Criticism, Empson's 1930 Seven Types of Ambiguity, Brook and Warren's 1938 Understanding Poetry, Brooks's classic 1947 The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, and Wimsatt and Beardsley's 1954 The Verbal Icon, as well as several essays of Ransome and Eliot. The New Critics did nothing less than upend literature's study by focusing on words, words, words (as Hamlet would say). "A book is a machine to think with," Richards wrote in Principles of Literary Criticism, and disdain that as chilly, but machines do for us that which we can't do for ourselves. Reading yourself into a poem is as fallacious as sitting in a parked car and thinking that will get you to Stop & Shop. Lest you think that Richards is sterile, he also affirmed that "Poetry is capable of saving us," and that's not in spite of it being a machine, but because of it. They sanctified literature by cordoning it off and making it a universe unto itself, while understanding that its ideal rigidity is like absolute zero, an abstraction of readerly investment that by necessity always lets a little heat in. In practice, the job of the critic is profound in its prosaicness. Vivian Bearing, a fictional English professor in Margaret Edson's harrowing and beautiful play W;t, which contains the most engaging dramatization of close reading ever committed to stage or screen, describes the purpose of criticism as not to reaffirm whatever people want to believe, but that rather by reading in an "uncompromising way, one learns something from [the] poem, wouldn't you say?" There have been assaults upon this bastion over the last several decades, yet even while that mélange of neo-orthodoxies that became ascendant in the '70s and '80s when English professor was still a paying job are sometimes interpreted as dethroning the New Critics—the structuralists and post-structuralists, the New Historicists and the Marxists, the Queer Theorists and the post-colonial theorists—their success was an ironic confirmation of the staying power of Wimsatt, Beardsley, Brooks, Warren, Richards, Empson, and so on. "Like all schools of criticism, the New Critics have been derided by their successors," writes William Logan in his forward to Garrick Davis’s Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, "but they retain an extraordinary influence on the daily practice of criticism." After all, when a post-structuralist writes about binary oppositions, there are shades of Empson's paradox and ambiguity; when Roland Barthes wrote in 1967 that "the reader is without history, biography, psychology" there is a restatement about effect, and that he was writing in a book called The Death of the Author is the ultimate confirmation against intention. And Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, that much maligned and misinterpreted word, bane to conservative and balm to radical? It's nothing more than a different type of close reading—a hyper attenuated and pure form of it—where pages could be produced on a single comma in James Joyce’s Ulysses. We are still their children. Though far from an unequivocal celebrant of the New Critics, Terry Eagleton writes in Literary Theory: An Introduction that close reading provided "a valuable antidote to aestheticist chit-chat," explaining that the method does "more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to… the 'words on the page.'" Close reading is sometimes slandered as brutal vivisection, but it's really a manner of possession. In the sifting through of diction and syntax, grammar and punctuation, image and figuration, there are pearls. Take a sterling master—Helen Vendler. Here she is examining Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, where he writes "In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire/That on the ashes of his youth doth lie." She notes that the narrator across the lyric "Defines himself not by contrast but by continuity with his earlier state. He is the glowing—a positive word, unlike ruin or fade—of a fire." Or Vendler on the line in Emily Dickinson’s poem 1779. The poet writes that "To make a prairie it takes a clover and a bee," and the critic writes "Why 'prairie' instead of 'garden' or 'meadow?' Because only 'prairie' rhymes with 'bee' and 'revery,' and because 'prairie' is a distinctly American word." Or, Vendler, once again, on Walt Whitman, in her book Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats. In Leaves of Grass he begins, "I celebrate myself, and sing myself," and she observes that "The smallest parallels… come two to a line… When the parallels grow more complex, each requires a whole line, and we come near to the psalmic parallel, so often imitated by [the poet], in which the second verse adds something to the substance of the first." And those are just examples from Helen Vendler. When I queried literary studies Twitter about their favorite close readings—to which they responded generously and enthusiastically—I was directed towards Erich Auerbach’s Dante: The Poet of the Secular (to which I'd add Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature); Marjorie Garber’s reading of Robert Lowell’s poem "For the Union Dead" in Field Work: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies; the interpretation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd in The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness; Shoshana Felman’s paper on Henry James titled "Turning the Screw of Interpretation" in Yale French Studies; Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson; Randall Jarry writing about Robert Frost's "Home Burial" in The Third Book of Criticism; Olga Springer’s Ambiguity in Charlotte Bronte's Villette; Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake; Vladimir Nabokov on Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert in Lectures on Literature; Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Nina Baym on Nathaniel Hawthorne in Novels, Readers, Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America; Minrose Gwin on The Sound and the Fury in The Feminine and Faulkner; Edward Said on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in Orientalism; Christopher Ricks’s Milton's Grand Study (to which I'd add Dylan's Vision of Sin, which refers not to Thomas but Bob), and so on, and so on, and so on. If looking to analyze my previous gargantuan sentence, just note that I organized said critics by no schema, save to observe how such a diversity includes the old and young, the dead and alive, the traditional and the radical, all speaking to the vitality of something with as stuffy a name as close reading. Risking sentimentality, I'd add another exemplary participant—all of those anonymous graduate students parsing the sentence, all of those undergraduates scanning the line, and every dedicated reader offering attentiveness to the words themselves. That's all close reading really is. Naïve to assume that such a practice offers a way out of our current imbroglio. However, when everyone has an opinion but nobody has done the reading, where an article title alone is enough to justify judgement, and criticism tells us more about the critic than the writing, then perhaps slow, methodical, humble close reading might provide more than just explication. Interpretations are multifaceted, but they are not relative, and for all of its otherworldliness, close reading is built on evidence. Poorly done close reading is merely fan fiction. Something profound in acknowledging that neither the reader—nor the author—are preeminent, but the text is rather the thing. It doesn't serve to affirm what you already know, but rather to instruct you in something new. To not read yourself into a poem, or a novel, or a play, but to truly encounter another mind—not that of the author—but of literature itself, is as close to religion as the modern age countenances. Close reading is the most demonstrative way to experience that writing and reading are their own dimension. Let's pretend that you’re a gig worker, and while waiting to drive for Uber or Seamless, you scroll through an article entitled "Nothing Outside the Text." It begins in the second-person, inserting the reader into the narrative. The author invents a mid-century office worker who is travelling home. Place names are used as signifiers; the author mentions "New Rochelle," "Hempstead," and "Weehawken," respectively in Westchester County, Long Island, and New Jersey, gesturing towards how the city's workers radiate outward. Sensory details are emphasized—the character buys an "egg-salad sandwich," and we're told that he stands near the "display with its ticking symphony," the last two words unifying the mechanical with the artistic—with the first having an explosive connotation—yet there is an emphasis on regularity, harmony, design. We are given a description of a science fiction magazine the man buys, and are told that he settles into his train seat where the magazine's "cheap print… smudge[s]" his "gray flannel suit," possibly an allusion to the 1955 Sloane Wilson novel of that name. This character is outwardly conformist, but his desire to be "immersed in tales of space explorers and time travelers" signals something far richer about his inner life. Finally, if you're this modern gig worker reading about that past office worker, you might note that the latter is engaging the "sort of reading you'd want to cocoon yourself in, a universe to yourself with nothing outside the text." And in close reading, whether you're you or me, the past reader or the present, the real or imagined, all that the text ever demands of us—no more and no less—is to enter into that universe on its own terms. For we have always been, if we're anything, citizens of this text.    Image Credit: Pixabay [millions_email]