Graceland (2011 Remaster)

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

On Memory and Literature

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My grandmother's older sister Pauline Stoops, a one-room school teacher born in 1903, had lived in a homestead filled with poetry, which sat on a bluff overlooking the wide and brown Mississippi, as it meandered southward through Hannibal, Missouri. Pauline's task was to teach children aged six to seventeen in history, math, geography, and science; her students learned about the infernal compromise which admitted Missouri into the union as a slave state and they imagined when the Great Plains were a shallow and warm inland sea millions of years ago; they were taught the strange hieroglyphics of the quadratic equation and the correct whoosh of each cursive letter (and she prepared them oatmeal for lunch every day as well). Most of all, she loved teaching poetry — the gothic morbidities of Edgar Allen Poe and the sober patriotism of John Greenleaf Whittier, the aesthetic purple of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the mathematical perfection of Shakespeare. A woman whom when I knew her was given to extemporaneous recitations of memorized Walt Whitman. She lived in the Midwest for decades, until she followed the rest of her mother's family eastward to Pennsylvania, her siblings having moved to Reading en masse during the Depression, tracing backwards a trail that had begun with distant relations. Still, Hannibal remained one of Pauline's favorite places, in part because of its mythic role, this town where Mark Twain had imagined Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer playing as pirates along the riverbank. "I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little," recounts the titular protagonist in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, "and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway." Huck's estimation of poetry is slightly higher, even if he doesn't read much. He recalls coming across some books while visiting the wealthy Grangerfords, including John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress that was filled with statements that "was interesting, but tough" and another entitled Friendship's Offering that was "full of beautiful stuff and poetry; but I didn't read the poetry." Had Huck been enrolled in in Mrs. Stoops' classroom he would have learned verse from a slender book simply entitled One Hundred and One Poems with a Prose Supplement, compiled by anthologizer Roy Cook in 1916. When clearing out Pauline's possessions with my grandma, we came across a 1920 edition of Cook's volume, with favorite lines underlined and pages dog-eared, scraps of paper now a century old used as bookmarks. Cook's anthology was incongruously printed by the Cable Piano Company of Chicago (conveniently located at the corner of Wabash and Jackson), and included advertisements for their Kingsbury and Conover models, to which they promise student progress even for those with only "a feeble trace of musical ability," proving that in the United States Mammon can take pilgrimage to Parnassus. The flyleaf announced that it was "no ordinary collection," being both "convenient," "authoritative," and most humbly "adequate," while emphasizing that at fifteen cents its purchase would "Save many a trip to the Public Library, or the purchase of a volume ten to twenty times its cost." Some of the names are familiar — William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Rudyard Kipling (even if many are less than critically fashionable today). Others are decidedly less canonical — Francis William Bourdillon, Alexander Anderson, Edgar A. Guest (the last of whom wrote pablum like "You may fail, but you may conquer – / See it through!"). It goes without saying that One Hundred and One Poems with a Prose Supplement is overwhelmingly male and completely white. Regardless, there's a charm to the book, from the antiquated Victorian sensibility to the huckster commercialism. Even more strange and moving was my grandmother's reaction to this book bound with a brown hardcover made crooked by ten decades of heat and moisture, cold and entropy, the pages inside turned the texture of fall sweetgum and ash leaves as they drop into the Mississippi. When I mentioned Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, my grandmother (twenty years Pauline's junior) began to perfectly recite from memory "By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, /By the shining Big-Sea-Water," going on for several stanzas of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's distinctive percussive trochaic tetrameter. No doubt she hadn't read "The Song of Hiawatha" in decades, perhaps half-a-century, and yet the rhythm and meter came back to my grandmother as if she was the one looking at the book and not me. My grandmother's formal education ended at Centerville High School in Mystic, Iowa in 1938; I've been fortunate enough to go through graduate school and receive an advanced degree in literature. Of the two of us, only she had large portions of poetry memorized; I on the other hand have a head that's full of references from The Simpsons. If I'm able to recall more than a quarter of a single Holy Sonnet by John Donne I'd be amazed, yet I have the entirety of the Steve Miller Band's "The Joker" memorized for some reason. Certainly, I have bits and pieces here and there, "Death be not proud" or "Batter my heart three-personed God" and so on, but when it comes to making such verse part of my bones and marrow, I find that I'm rather dehydrated. Memorization was once central to pedagogy, when it was argued that committing verse to instantaneous recall was a way of preserving cultural legacies, that it trained students in rhetoric, and that it was a means of building character. Something can seem pedantic about such poetry recitation; the provenance of fussy antiquarians, apt to start unspooling long reams of Robert Burns or Edward Lear in an unthinking cadence, readers who properly hit the scansion, but where the meaning comes out with the wrong emphasis. Still, such an estimation can't help but leave the flavor of sour grapes on my tongue where poetry should be, and so the romanticism of the practice must be acknowledged.  Writing exists so that we don't have to memorize, and yet there is something tremendously moving about recalling words decades after you first encountered them. Memorization's consequence, writes Catherine Robson in Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, was that "these verses carried the potential to touch and alter the worlds of the huge numbers of people who took them to heart." Books can burn, but as long as a poem endures in the consciousness of a person, they are in possession of a treasure.  "When the topic of verse memorization is raised today," writes Robson, "the invocation is often couched within a lament." Now we're all possessors of personal supercomputers that can instantly connect us to whole libraries — there can seem little sense to make iambs and trochees part of one's soul. Now the soul has been outsourced to our smartphones, and we've all become cyborgs, carrying our memories in our pockets rather than our brains. But such melancholy over forgetfulness has an incredibly long history. Socrates formulated the most trenchant of those critiques, with Plato noting in the Phaedrus that his teacher had once warned that people will "cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." Important to consider where Socrates places literature, for if it is "within" — like heart, brain, or spleen — rather than some dead thing discarded on inked reeds. According to Socrates, writing is idolatrous; the difference between memorization and actual literature is the equivalent to a painting and reality. Though it must be observed that the only reason we care who Socrates happens to be is because Plato wrote his words down. Poetry most evokes literature's first role as a vehicle of memory, because the tricks of prosody – alliteration and assonance; consonance and rhyme – endured because they're amenable to quick recall. Not only do such attributes make it possible to memorize poetry, they facilitate its composition as well. For literature wasn't first written on papyrus but rather in the mind, and that was the medium through which it was recorded for most of its immeasurably long history. Since the invention of writing, we've tended to think of composition as an issue of a solitary figure committing their ideas to the eternity of paper, but the works of antiquity were a collaborative affair. Albert Lord explains in his 1960 classic The Singer of Tales that "oral epic song is narrative poetry composed in a manner evolved over many generations by singers of tales who did not know how to write; it consists of the building of metrical lines and half lines by means of formulas and formulaic expressions and of the buildings of songs by the use of themes." Lord had accompanied his adviser, the folklorist and classicist Milman Parry, to the Balkans in 1933 and then again in 1935, where they recorded the oral poetry of the largely illiterate Serbo-Croatian bards. They discovered that recitations were based in "formulas" that made remembering epics not only easier, but also made their performances largely improvisational, even if the contours of a narrative remained consistent. From their observations, Parry and Lord developed the "Oral-Formulaic Theory of Composition," arguing the pre-literate epics could be mixed and matched in a live telling, by using only a relatively small number of rhetorical tropes, the atoms of spoken literature. Some of these formulas — phrases like "wine-dark sea" and "rosy-fingered dawn" for example — are familiar to any reader of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the two discovered that such utterances had a history in Balkans and the Peloponnesus that goes back millennia. There's an important difference between relatively recent works like Virgil's The Aeneid (albeit composed two millennia ago) and the epics of Homer that predate the former by at least eight centuries. When Virgil sat down to pen "I sing of arms and man," he wasn't actually singing. He was probably writing, while whoever it was — whether woman or man, women or men — that invoked "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns" most likely did utter those words accompanied by a lyre. The Aeneid is a work of literacy, while those of Homer are of orality, which is to say it was composed through memory. Evocatively, there is some evidence that the name "Homer" isn't a proper noun. It may be an archaic Greek verb, a rough translation being "to speak," or better yet "to remember." There were many homers, each of them remembering their own unique version of such tales, until they were forgotten into the inert volumes of written literature.   Socrates' fears aren't without merit. Just as the ability to Google anything at any moment has made contemporary minds atrophied with relaxation, so too does literacy have an effect on recall. With no need to be skilled in remembering massive amounts of information, reading and writing made our minds surprisingly porous. From the Celtic fringe of Britain to the Indus Valley, from the Australian Outback to the Great Plains of North America, ethnographers recount the massive amounts of information which pre-literate peoples were capable of. Poets, priests, and shamans were able to memorize (and adapt when needed) long passages by deft manipulation of rhetorical trope and mnemonic device. When literacy was introduced in places, there was a marked cognitive decline in peoples' ability to memorize things. For example, writing in the journal Australian Geography, linguist Nick Reid explains that the oral literature of the aboriginal Narrangga people contains narrative details which demonstrate an accurate understanding of the geography of York Peninsula some 12,500 years ago, before melting glaciers irrevocably altered the coastline. Three hundred generations of Narrangga have memorized and told tale of marshy lagoons which no longer exist, an uninterrupted chain of recitation going back an astounding thirteen millennia. Today, if every single copy of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest were to simultaneously vanish, who among us would be able to recreate those books? It turns out that some folks have been able to train their minds to store massive amounts of language. Among pious Muslims, people designated as Hafiz have long been revered for their ability to memorize the 114 surahs of the holy Quran. Allah's words are thus written into the heart of the reverential soul, so that language becomes as much a part of a person as the air which fills lungs or the blood which flows in veins. "One does not have to read long in Muslim texts," writes William Graham in Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion, "to discover how the ring of the qur'anic text cadences the thinking, writing, and speaking of those who live with and by the Qur'an." Still relatively common in the Islamic world, the process of memorizing not just Longfellow or a few fragments of T.S. Eliot, but rather an entire book, is still accomplished to a surprising degree. Then there are those who through some mysterious cognitive gift (or curse depending on perspective) possess eidetic memory, and have the ability to commit entire swaths of text to retrieval without the need for mnemonic devices or formulas. C.S. Lewis could supposedly quote from memory any particular line of John Milton's Paradise Lost that he was asked about; similar claims have been made about critic Harold Bloom. Prodigious recall need not only be the purview of otherworldly savants, as people have used similar methods as a Hafiz or a Narrangga to consume a book. Evangelical minister Tom Meyer, also known as the "Bible Memory Man," has memorized twenty books of scripture, while actor John Bassinger used his stage-skills to memorize all six thousand lines of Paradise Lost, with an analysis some two decades later demonstrating that he was still able to recite the epic with some 88% accuracy. As elaborated on by Lois Parshley in Nautilus, Bassinger used personal associations of physical movement and spatial location to "deep encode" the poem, quoting him as saying that Milton is a "cathedral I carry around in my mind… a place that I can enter and walk around at will." No other type of art is like this — you can remember what a painting looks like, you can envision a sculpture, but only music and literature can be preserved and carried with you, and the former requires skills beyond memorization. As a scholar I've been published in Milton Studies, but if Bassinger and I marooned on an island somewhere, or trapped in the unforgiving desert, only he would be in actual possession of Paradise Lost, while I sadly sputtered half-remembered epigrams about justifying the ways of God to man. Bassinger, who claims that he still loses his car keys all the time, was able to memorize twelve books of Milton by associating certain lines with particular movements, so that the thrust of an elbow may be man's first disobedience, the kick of a leg being better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. There is a commonsensical wisdom in understanding that memory has always been encoded in the body, so that our legs and arms think as surely as our brains do. Walter Ong explains in Orality and Literacy that "Bodily activity beyond mere vocalization is not… contrived in oral communication, but is natural and even inevitable." Right now, I'm composing while stooped over, in the servile position of desk siting, with pain in my back and crick in my neck, but for the ancient bards of oral cultures the unspooling of literature would have been done through a sweep of the arms or the trot of a leg. Motion and memory being connected in a walk. Paradise Lost as committed by Bassinger was also a "cathedral," a place that he could go to, and this is one of the most venerable means of being able to memorize massive amounts of writing. During the Renaissance, itinerant humanists used to teach the ars memoriae, a set of practical skills designed to hone memory. Chief among these tutors was the sixteenth-century Italian occultist, defrocked Dominican, and heretic Giordano Bruno, who took as students King Henry III of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (later he'd be burnt at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori, though for unrelated reasons). Bruno used many different methodologies, including mnemonics, associations, and repetitions, but his preferred approach was something called the method of loci. "The first step was to imprint on the memory a series of loci or places," writes Dame Frances Yates in The Art of Memory. "In order to form a series of places in memory… a building is to be remembered, as spacious and varied a one as possible, the forecourt, the living room, bedrooms, and parlors, not omitting statues and other ornaments with which the rooms are decorated." In a strategy dating back to Cicero and Quintilian, Bruno taught that the "images by which the speech is to be remembered… are then placed in imagination on the memorial places which have been memorized in the building," so that "as soon as the memory… requires to be revived, all these places are visited in turn and the various deposits demanded of their custodians." Bruno had his students build in their minds what are called "memory palaces," architectural imaginings whereby a line of prose may be associated with an opulent oriental rug, a stanza of poetry with a blue Venetian vase upon a mantle, an entire chapter with a stone finishing room in some chateau; the candle sticks, fireplace kindling, cutlery, and tapestries each hinged to their own fragment of language, so that recall can be accessed through a simple stroll in the castle of your mind. It all sounds very esoteric, but it actually works. Even today, competitive memorization enthusiasts (this is a real thing) use the same tricks that Bruno taught. Science journalist Joshua Foer recounts how these very same methods were instrumental in his winning the 2006 USA Memory Championship, storing poems in his mind by associating them with places as varied as Camden Yards and the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, so that he "carved each building up into loci that would serve as cubbyholes for my memories." The method of loci is older than Bruno, than even Cicero and Quintilian, and from Camden Yards and the National Gallery to Stonehenge and the Nazca Lines, spatial organization has been a powerful tool. Archeologist Lynne Kelly claims that many Neolithic structures actually functioned as means for oral cultures to remember text, arguing in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture that "Circles or lines of stones or posts, ditches or mounds enclosing open space… serve as memory theaters beautifully." Literature is simultaneously vehicle, medium, preserver, and occasionally betrayer of memory. Just as our own recollections are more mosaic than mirror (gathered from small pieces that we've assembled as a narrative with varying degrees of success), so too does writing impose order on one thing after another. Far more than memorized lines, or associating stanzas with rooms, or any mnemonic trick, memory is the ether of identity, but it is fickle, changing, indeterminate, and unreliable. Fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, drama and essay — all are built with bricks of memory, but with a foundation set on wet sand. Memory is the half-recalled melody of a Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood song played for your son while you last heard it decades ago; it's the way that a certain laundry detergent smells like Glasgow in the fall and a particular deodorant as Boston in the cool summer; how the crack of the bat at PNC Park brings you back to Three Rivers Stadium, and Jagged Little Pill always exists in 1995. And memory is also what we forget. Our identities are simply an accumulation of memories — some the defining moments of our lives, some of them half-present and only to be retrieved later, and some constructed after the fact. "And once again I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoration of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me," Marcel Proust writes in the most iconic scene of In Remembrance of Things Past, and "immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater." If novels are a means of excavating the foundations of memory, then Proust's magnum opus is possibly more associated with how the deep recesses of the mind operate than any other fiction. A Proustian madeleine, signifying all the ways in which sensory experiences trigger visceral, almost hallucinatory memories, has become a mainstay, even while most have never read In Remembrance of Things Past. So universal is the phenomenon, the way in which the taste of Dr. Pepper can propel you back to your grandmother's house, or Paul Simon's Graceland can place you on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, that Proust's madeleine has become the totem of how memories remain preserved in tastes, sounds, smells. Incidentally, the olfactory bulb of the brain, which processes odors, is close to the hippocampus where memories are stored, so that Proust's madeleine is a function of the cerebral cortex. Your madeleine need not be a delicately crumbed French cookie dissolving in tea, it could just as easily be a Gray's Papaya waterdog, a Pat's cheesesteak, or a Primanti Brother's sandwich (all of those work for me). Proust's understanding of memory is sophisticated, for while we may humor ourselves into thinking that our experiences are recalled with verisimilitude, the reality is that we shuffle and reshuffle the past, we embellish and delete, and what's happened to us can return as easily as its disappeared. "The uncomfortable reality is that we remember in the same way that Proust wrote," argues Jonah Lehrer in Proust was a Neuroscientist. "As long as we have memories to recall, the margins of those memories are being modified to fit what we know now." Memory is the natural subject of all novels, since the author composes from the detritus of her own experience, but also because the form is (primarily) a genre of nostalgia, of ruminating in the past (even an ostensibly invented one). Some works are more explicitly concerned with memory, their authors reflecting on the malleability, plasticity, and endurance of memory. Consider Tony Webster in Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, ruminating on the traumas of his school years, noting that we all live with the assumption that "memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent." Amnesia is the shadow version of memory, all remembrance haunted by that which we've forgotten. Kazuo Ishiguro's parable of collective amnesia The Buried Giant imagines a post-Arthurian Britannia wherein "this land had become cursed with a mist of forgetfulness," so that it's "queer the way the world's forgetting people and things from only yesterday and the day before that. Like a sickness come over us all." Jorge Luis Borges imagines the opposite scenario in his short story "Funes the Memorius," detailing his friendship with a fictional Uruguayan boy who after a horse-riding accident is incapable of forgetting a single detail of his life. He can remember "ever crevice and every molding of the various houses." What's clear, despite Funes being "as monumental as bronze," is that if remembering is the process of building a narrative for ourselves, then ironically it requires forgetting. Funes' consciousness is nothing but hyper-detail, and with no means to cull based on significance or meaning, it all comes to him as an inchoate mass, so that he was "almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort." Between the cursed amnesiacs of Ishiguro and the damned hyperthymiac of Borges are Barnes' aging characters, who like most of us remember some things, while finally forgetting most of what's happened. Tellingly, a character like Tony Webster does something which comes the closest to writing — he preserves the notable stuff and deletes the rest. Funes is like an author who can't bring himself to edit, and the Arthurian couple of Ishiguro's tale are those who never put pen to paper in the first place. Leher argues that Proust "believed that our recollections were phony. Although they felt real, they were actually elaborate fabrications," for we are always in the process of editing and reediting our pasts, making up new narratives in a process of revision that only ends with death. This is to say that memory is basically a type of composition — it's writing. From an assemblage of things which happen to us — anecdotes, occurrences, traumas, intimacies, dejections, ecstasies, and all the rest — we impose a certain order on the past; not that we necessarily invent memories (though that happens), but rather that we decide which memories are meaningful, we imbue them with significance, and then we structure them so that our lives take on the texture of a narrative. We're able to say that had we not been in the Starbucks near Union Square that March day, we might never have met our partner, or if we hadn't slept in and missed that job interview, we'd never have stayed in Chicago. "Nothing was more central to the formation of identity than the power of memory," writes Oliver Sachs in The River of Consciousness, "nothing more guaranteed one's continuity as an individual," even as "memories are continually worked over and revised and that their essence, indeed, is recategorization." We're all roman a clef in the picaresque of our own minds, but bit characters in the novels written by others. A century ago, the analytical philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in The Analysis of Mind that there is no "logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into existence five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that 'remembered' a wholly unreal past." Like most metaphysical speculation there' something a bit sophomoric about this, though Russell admits as such when he writes that "I am not here suggesting that the non-existence of the past should be entertained as hypothesis," only that speaking logically nobody can fully "disprove the hypothesis." This is a more sophisticated version of something known as the "Omphalos Argument" — a cagey bit of philosophical book-keeping that had been entertained since the eighteenth-century — whereby evidence of the world's "supposed" antiquity (fossils, geological strata, etc.) were seen as devilish hoaxes, and thus the relative youthfulness of the world's age could be preserved alongside biblical inerrancy (the multisyllabic Greek word means "naval," as in Eve and Adam's bellybutton). The five-minute hypothesis was entertained as a means of thinking about radical skepticism, where not only all that we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch are fictions, but our collective memories are a fantasy as well. Indeed, Russell is correct in a strictly logical sense; writing this at 4:52 P.M. on April 20th, 2021, and there is no way that I can rely on any outside evidence, or my own memories, or your memories, to deductively and conclusively prove with complete certainty that the universe wasn't created at 4:47 P.M. on April 20th, 2021 (or by whatever calendar our manipulative robot-alien overlords count the hours, I suppose). Where such a grotesque possibility errs is that it doesn't matter in the slightest. In some ways, it's already true; the past is no longer here and the future has yet to occur, we've always been just created in this eternal present (whatever time we might ascribe to it). To remember is to narrate, to re-remember is still to narrate, and to narrate is to create meaning. Memories are who we are — the fundamental particles of individuality. Literature then, is a type of cultural memory; a conscious thing whose neurons are words, and whose synapses are what authors do with those words. Writing is memory made manifest, a conduit for preserving our identity outside of the prison of our own skulls. A risk here, though. For memory fails all of us to varying degrees — some in a catastrophic way — but everyone is apt to forget most of what's happened to them. "Memory allows you to have a sense of who you are and who you've been," argues Lisa Genova in Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting. Those neurological conditions which "ravage the hippocampus" are particularly psychically painful, with Genova writing that "If you've witnessed someone stripped bare of his or her personal history by Alzheimer's disease, you know firsthand how essential memory is to the experience of being human." To argue that our memories are ourselves is dangerous, for what happens when our past slips away from view? Pauline didn't suffer from Alzheimer's, though in her last years she was afflicted by dementia. I no longer remember what she looked like, exactly, this woman alive for both Kitty Hawk and the Apollo mission. I can no longer recall what her voice sounded like. What exists once our memories are deleted from us, when our narratives have unraveled? What remains after that deletion is something called the soul. When I dream about Pauline, I see and hear her perfectly. Image: Pexels/Jordane Mathieu.