For the Time Being

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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]

Silent All These Years: On Annie Dillard

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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 [millions_email]