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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Silent All These Years: On Annie Dillard
1.
Some years ago, I attended a conference featuring boldface names and their thoughts on the topic of the essay as art. At 39, I’d written three failed novels, and essays felt like the last form left to me. I was desperate for tips, tricks, and whatever writerly chum they throw to audiences at events like these.
“An essay,” said Philip Lopate on the day of the conference, “is an invitation to think alongside me.”
I jotted his words in a Moleskine notebook and have been turning them over in my head and on the page ever since. The best essays are trips to terra nova, yes; but at heart, all essays depend on a simple sense of camaraderie. From the first word to the last, the writer of an essay is a guide, even if the piece never gets out of first gear. Each essay is a fellowship.
By Lopate’s definition, there’s no better essayist than Annie Dillard. Her thoughts go places no one else can see. Following in her path, you can sip the cold fire of eternity, cheat death in a stunt plane, or trace God’s name in sand, salt, or cloud. She didn’t invent the essay. Her most famous work isn’t classified as an essay. But in the cosmos of essayists, there’s Annie Dillard, and there’s everyone else.
2.
It doesn’t cost more than a couple clicks to get the complete text for Dillard’s piece on witnessing a solar eclipse. If you haven’t read it, you should; if you’ve read it before, reread it. “Total Eclipse” was published 40 years ago, but it’s still wild. I read it for the first time one winter night. I had a good hunch the moon would slip between sun and Earth in the narrative. But I wasn’t prepared for a lunatic opera. By the end of the piece I was like, wait, wait, who is this woman?
Despite being a septuagenarian who cut her teeth on theodicy, Annie Dillard’s name is practically a Twitter hashtag. She gets regular hat tip tweets, often quotations from her first prose book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or from The Writing Life, her slim but wise book on craft. Writers admire her sleek writing and crisp turns of phrase, but plenty of her fans just love love love her without knowing how to explain why. I’m not sure I can explain why, either; there are too many good reasons.
For one thing, her prose is sharp as a chert blade. Don’t know what an ancient Solutrean chert blade is? Neither did I, until I read For the Time Being, her last book of nonfiction. “Hold one of these chert blades to the sky,” she writes, describing an ancient knife made of chiseled stone so fine that “it passes light.” She continues:
At its very edge the blade dissolves into the universe at large. It ends imperceptibly at an atom. Each one of these delicate, absurd objects takes hundreds of separate blows to fashion. At each stroke and each pressure flake, the brittle chert might – and, by the record, very often did – snap.
Here’s another reason to love her. She teaches you things. Not showy facts to prove her smarts. Not cheap trivia any sixth grader with a library card could tell you. She delivers the goods for questions you didn’t or wouldn’t have the tenacity to resolve. In a retrospective on her career, The New York Times cited her understanding that “the mundane itself — snails, fireplaces, shrubs, pebbles, socks, minor witticisms — is secretly amazing.”
This March, my nine-year-old asked how the frogs in the park could survive if their pond froze over. I don’t really know, I said. But Dillard knows. She did the work and put the answer right there on page 47 of the 2013 reissue of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She’s not showing off when she tells you about how frogs survive the winter by burrowing in mud and breathing through their skin. She’s just demonstrating that it’s possible to unriddle an unknown, if you put in the work.
Despite all the love you can find for Annie Dillard, despite her perch in the pantheon of great writers, there’s something off-kilter in the way people talk about her.
On its face, this is absurd. She’s part of the canon. She received a National Humanities Medal. She has written books that will outlive her. So what then is it that bothers me about how we talk about Annie Dillard? Why do I feel like there is something we’ve already begun to lose with respect to her?
A few years ago, no less a writer than Geoff Dyer attempted to position Dillard as a single star in the firmament of writers. He surveys her career in search of an answer to the question of what kind of writer she is exactly. He is uniquely gifted at indirectly saying what can’t be said about geniuses and grand artists (as his book on D.H. Lawrence demonstrates). Near the end of his Dillard piece, Dyer triangulates her position with respect to other writers he admires. Then he stops. I don’t want to say he fails. But the final product feels incomplete, as if he saw the summit but didn’t quite reach its seat.
Such difficulty in classifying Dillard is not unusual. You see it in casual profiles but also in scholarly essays and surveys of her work. Pick an article or two at random and you’ll likely see what I mean. In a CrossCurrents piece on ecotheology from 1995, Dillard is called a mystic, a contemplative, an exegete, a theologian, an ecological guru—and that’s literally just the first page.
In the Chicago Tribune’s 1999 review of For the Time Being, the reviewer rhapsodizes over the book’s sestina-like structure, calling it a “new form.” And it really is sui generis (for my money, it is her finest work), as she weaves a narrative that goes seven times around a weft of eight concepts: birth, sand, China, clouds, numbers, thinker, evil, and now. The Tribune’s reviewer marvels over Dillard’s deft ability to evoke the existential paradox that while each of us “matter not a whit, we also matter profoundly.” A rave review for a masterpiece by a phenom. But the newcomer to Dillard who reads this could be forgiven for thinking: what kind of person could or would dare to take up such a God’s eye view?
All Dillard’s high praise is well deserved; but it’s all also a problem, a significant one. In all these appreciations, all these assessments, each commentator, no matter how gifted or thoughtful—not a single one of them speaks of Dillard as if she belongs. She is a strange katydid, a demon flower. I do not excuse myself from this diagnosis, either. After all, didn’t I begin this piece by putting Dillard into a definitive category of one?
The way we talk about Annie Dillard makes me both sad and afraid. Sad because we are unable to appreciate in full the words she has written if we cannot see how she is, in the final analysis, just one of us. And afraid because affixing someone with otherness is the first stage in allowing that someone to be forgotten, and I am afraid of a world where writing such as hers could surface and then vanish.
3.
As Dillard herself writes, “The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.” Consider a few of hers, then.
Her very first book, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, was a poetry collection pieced together six years after she graduated from college. She found a publisher to bring it out in 1974. But she wasn’t destined to be a poet. Or, at least, not just a poet. Her next move was to do something that poets aren’t supposed to do: she published a book of prose. And she did it before dust could even collect on the first remaindered stacks of her poetry.
I’m calling it her first book of prose, but I could just as well call it the book of prose, as far as literary gatekeepers are concerned. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (like the earlier book of poetry) came out when Dillard was 28 years old, and it’s the book that catapulted her from young writer to splashy, important transcendentalist almost overnight–or at least that’s what her publishers would have you believe. The edition that I bought earlier this year has a four page About Annie Dillard section and not one but two Afterwords, just in case I lose one, I suppose.
Upon its initial release, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was praised by many critics, but there were more than a few notable voices with reservations. Eudora Welty famously grumped about not quite understanding some of the book’s lyrical asides. She also wanted more voices. A critic at Kirkus Reviews was downright galling: a brief review claimed Dillard’s reach exceeded her grasp, but patted her head for trying like a good girl.
Real talk: for a failed novelist or wannabe writer, it’s quite soothing to learn that a book the Modern Library now calls a classic had a rather bumpy roll-out. According to a historical note on Dillard’s website, the hardcover copies of Pilgrim didn’t actually sell very well. Only in paperback did it catch on. For all its merits, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is not a page-turner. It’s a slow, steady, dark burn; the kind of conflagration that sightlessly devours oxygen, killing without the melodramatics of flame.
Is it a heresy to admit that of all Dillard’s nonfiction, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek moves me the least? The book is full of prose marvels, yes; it’s just that it feels like it’s written on spec. As if, full of youthful hubris, she said, Well, this fellow Thoreau wasn’t really doing anything so hard? I can do that. And then she did. I marvel far more at later books like the aforementioned For the Time Being or Teaching a Stone to Talk, her almost perfect essay collection. The structure of Pilgrim flags because it feels forced. Sort of the opposite of the impression given by her second book of prose, Holy the Firm.
Holy the Firm runs less than 15,000 words. Twice as long as a long personal essay. Shorter than a feature in a weekend magazine. Yet I suspect more people have read about how she wrote the book—shack, island, airplane, fire—than have read the book itself. It’s worthy of the flame of her reputation. The letters do not smolder on the page, but the ideas surely do. Kirkus called this outing “a difficult, restless rumination,” and they weren’t wrong. It is a book about learning to live in the afterglow of life’s casual cruelty, about accepting the lot of whatever this thing is, this universe. Basically the plot of all her noteworthy work, which is to say, all of her books from here on out. Once she caught her stride, there was no stopping her.
In her 40s, Dillard joined the Roman Catholic Church. She’d grown up a Protestant but left the church as a teenager. She told an interviewer that she converted in middle age to keep close to God, even though she did not always agree entirely with the people who worshipped around her. In her essay, “An Expedition to the Pole,” she writes:
It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
There is a way of reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that positions Dillard not as Thoreau’s heir but as a contemporary Christian writer and thinker. She employs the language of Christianity and speaks of creation and eternity and grace. But she's not a religious writer, not really; religious language is just her jumping off point. She’s proposing to meet readers at the village church not because it’s her destination, but because it’s a large landmark we all know. Dillard’s subsequent books push further afield. She continues to insist on questioning God, rather than seeking God’s grace. The disappointment this engendered in some readers is evident, as seen in “Annie Dillard: Mistaken Mystic?”, an article from the journal of an evangelical society. Here the judgment on Dillard is brief, swift, and stark. The writer uses the kind of language that I recognize from growing up in a church: “She does not point to the Bible often enough,” and: “She does not understand how Jesus fulfills all of God’s promises and love.”
In her memoir An American Childhood, Annie Dillard describes how as a teenager she felt estranged from the people in the church pews around her. I recognize the conflict. I was a Sunday-School kid. I stood for the role of Joseph in the Christmas play. I sang in Easter programs. The judgy tone of the aforementioned journal is the tone that many keepers of the flame would use to dismiss someone who is being difficult because he or she is questioning rather than blindly accepting. Rigidity about how to believe, what to believe, an emphasis on dogma, on prescribed process, on blind tradition: this part of religious education stuck in my craw. But I accepted it. I had to. What other way of looking at the world was available to me back then?
In her book Living by Fiction, Dillard writes: “Can we not loose the methods of literary criticism on the raw world? May we not analyze the breadth of our experience? We can and may – but only if we consider the raw world as a text … as a work of art.”
If someone had put this book, any book by Annie Dillard in my hands as a teenager, I would have turned the pages with quaking hands. She speaks in a register that anyone acquainted with religion can recognize. But she has the temerity to also point a finger at the heavens and say, You made this, now explain it.
By the time Dillard turned 50, she’d left the Catholic Church; she was striking out on her own again. No surprise. When it comes to God, Dillard is all about interrogation, not devotion; she wants an audience with the divine because she’s got questions, not because she wants to receive beatific truth. Again and again across her work, there’s a sense of inquiry, the inquiry of an alert human on the move through life. A life where God has gone silent, even if you believe he made this place where we all live.
In the end, she emulated that silence, intentionally or not. For decades she gave space to contemplate the mundane and overlooked aspects of life. She sought out and drew attention to silences, holy and profane, large and small, whatever caught her eye. She gave voice to details others would miss. Then, after a time, she found her own place in the silence and stepped into it.
4.
She wrote 11 original books over the course of 30 years and then, abruptly, she stopped. Suddenly, nothing. She has given a few interviews, sat with some journalists. A blurb here and there. But mostly, she’s gone silent; she has not published any form of nonfiction in two decades. Theories come and go as to why. But the only thing for certain is the totality of her withdrawal as a creator.
A prolonged silence can prompt questions that words or new texts cannot. Is she out of things to say? Is she angry? Is her message complete?
If Dillard were writing this essay, then I’m certain she would have found a way to note God’s famous periods of silence. After the Holocaust. After the earthquake at Lisbon. For the 400 years between the Book of Malachi and the Gospel of Matthew.
What does God’s silence mean? What is he doing? What is he thinking? What does Annie Dillard’s silence mean? What is she thinking? Does she have dementia? Does God have no heart? Does she have nothing left to say? Does God have nothing left to tell us?
Five years ago, the Atlantic ran a mean-spirited profile entitled “Where Have You Gone, Annie Dillard?” The piece begins with hearty praise for Dillard, but the meal turns sour long before the last course. The article annoys even as it explicates. The writer rightly criticizes people who class Dillard as nouveau Thoreau; but he botches the landing by veering into questions of intent, as if intentions were clear-cut as texts. Most cruelly, the article suggests that the very nature of Dillard’s inquiry is what has damned her to silence. That she was doomed to leave us hanging. Because she’s got the heartless eye of a distant god. Because she’s a cold fish. This is the scat of cheap iconoclasm. It doesn’t hang together as an argument. And it doesn’t match up with the Dillard who shows up in profiles, interviews, and the memoirs of former students.
One of Dillard’s best uncollected essays is titled, “How I Wrote the Moth Essay and Why.” In a few pages, she assesses both a previous piece of writing and her life at the time. She uses the critic’s scalpel in two directions at once. The resulting essay lays bare Dillard’s personal fears (childlessness, loneliness) and her preoccupations (what is the point of me? what am I trying to say?), and then she shows how all this motivated her to produce a piece of writing that was and wasn’t about those things. She also reveals her method of composition: She does not begin by looking down from an imperious height. She has no foreknowledge of what she is writing toward or about, at least not at first. She uses data from past journals and produces a “babbling” first draft and then a surgically altered revision. She is an artisan, working a chert blade.
During the first decade of her silence, there were rumors that perhaps she was suffering from cognitive decline. In 2016, John Freeman, a former editor for Granta tracked Dillard to Cripple Creek, Va., where she lived with her husband, the biographer Bob Richardson. Freeman wrote a profile of her current life, the out-of-the-way cabin, the backwoods store, the books she keeps reading. The passages about Dillard and her husband are the best part of the piece. Freeman writes: “Watching Annie and Bob over breakfast, editing each other’s stories and officiating over the presentation of flatware, coffee, second and third helpings, it’s clear that whatever came before, this is the show.” Of his wife, Richardson says: “She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met.” It’s sweet, the kind of thing that you want to hear from people who are entering into old age together. By the end of Freeman’s profile, Dillard addresses her silence, albeit with a kind of shrug. “I switched to painting,” she says. You don’t get the sense that she regrets the change up, or that she did it because her project ran out of steam. She just moved on. Not deeper into loneliness or isolation: rather into a more private kind of fellowship, the journey of real companionship.
But what about the writing? Is there any more writing? There is, and there isn’t. In a 2016 interview with Melissa Block of National Public Radio, Dillard speaks like someone who is aware of how many pages are left in her text of the world and who has reconciled herself to the limits that are built into our time here. She talks about writing. She’s still writing. But not for us. Really, just for herself, mostly. She’s already put more than her fair share into the world of texts, more than enough to keep the rest of us going.
DILLARD: I write a lot of emails. I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.
BLOCK: You don't think about another book at this point.
DILLARD: No, I don't. I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
Annie Dillard seems to have almost no other choice but to prod life, poke it, search every place in it for hidden, buried meaning, and then produce her own text, or texts, for herself sometimes, sometimes for others, sometimes for purposes she’s not even sure of–one more link in the long textual chain of being. There is a word for this kind of writer, the kind that acts like a guide, the sort who enters into a fellowship with you and brings you with her wherever her thoughts lead, high or low, grand or lowly, who writes about the world without even knowing what to do with it: essayist.
To be an essayist is a fine purpose, but a purpose lasts only so long. As with lives. Socrates is a man. All men die. Socrates must, well, you know the line. Last summer, during the haphazard malaise of the coronavirus pandemic, Dillard’s husband Bob Richardson died. He said of her in an interview near the end of his life: “I learned from her that you have to go all out every day. Hold nothing back. The well will refill.”
So we go on, filling the silence. Or, perhaps, finding the silences and listening to what they will tell us.
The day that I began writing this essay, I went for a run. This is how most of my essays begin. At first, they’re word knots and phrases in my head. Thoughts and observations and quotes and ideas, a mute mess. I go for a run and the ideas begin to knock loose from one another and then back together again in a pattern that makes sense, that gathers into something far stronger.
I ran as I often do along the edge of Riverside Park, past pre-war buildings on the Upper West Side, past plaques that commemorate where J. Robert Oppenheimer lived or where Edgar Allen Poe wrote his poems. I thought about history. I thought about how we all end up swallowed by silence. Traffic had snarled the on and off ramps from the West Side Highway. I thought about how even before we’re lost in history, we’re lost in our daily lives. I also thought of the Annie Dillard quote I see more than any other in social media posts: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
I stopped for Gatorade near the Museum of Natural History. On Columbus Avenue, I noticed a new bookstore. One I’d never visited before. I wandered inside to have a look. An essay section near the rear offered two columns of books. I went straight to the D’s. But Dillard’s books weren’t there. I searched the Staff Recommendations table. I searched the display table for Our Favorite Reads. Nothing. This made me angry. I didn’t turn over the displays or drive out the cashiers, but I kind of wanted to. Someone needs to change this, I thought. More people need to know about Dillard. That’s when I realized what I needed to do. That’s when I understood where this essay needed to go.
One more thing happened. The important thing. Exiting the bookstore in a huff, tired, irritated, I noticed the wreckage of a black BMW at the curb. It had been there earlier. But I’d walked right past it. I hadn’t slowed enough to notice. It was a total ruin, wheels gone, windows shattered, hood crumpled, left side flat as if smashfisted by a giant. There was no explanatory sign, no one standing watch, no one paying mind. Just a casual profundity. Like a perfect monument to all we don’t see, can’t see, won’t see, the marvelous terrible strange that is here and will be gone soon and no one will believe us that it was there once but is now gone because how do you frame the unexpected? You can’t frame or explain: you can only point and try to make others see. Did you see the wreck? Did you read Holy the Firm? Did you look up in time for the eclipse? Do you know Annie Dillard? Did I hear you call my name, or was that the voice of God?
Bonus Link:
—Line, Run, Breath: On Annie Dillard and the Circuitous Work of Writing
Image Credit: Wikipedia
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