Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England

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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]

Coffee, the Great Literary Stimulant

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"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." –T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) Maronite priest Antonio Fausto Naironi once claimed that the greatest of miracles happened in ninth-century Ethiopia. It was then and there, in the province of Oromia, that a young shepherd named Kaldi noticed that his goats were prone to running, leaping, and dancing after they had eaten blood-red berries from a mysterious bush. Kaldi chewed on a few beans himself, and suddenly he was awake. Gathering handfuls of them, he brought them to a local abbot. Disgusted with the very idea of such a shortcut to enlightenment, the monk threw the beans into a fire, but the other brothers smelled the delicious fragrance and gathered. Naironi is a bit scant on the details, but for some reason the grounds were filtered into water, and the first cup of coffee was brewed. Such a perfect creation myth. Coffee, from the highlands of Ethiopia (still one of the largest producers), that ancient land which was home to the Queen of Sheba, the Ark of the Covenant, and where humanity first walked. The youthful innocence of Kaldi. And of course, the dancing goats, so perfectly Dionysian, so exquisitely demonic. Regarding Naironi's apocryphal legend, William Henry Ukers writes in All About Coffee that there may even be "some truth in the story of the discovery of coffee by the Abyssinian goats." Regardless of the original prohibition, even the abbot came around to the medicinal, not to speak of the intellectual, emotional, psychological, and spiritual benefits of caffeine. Born Mehrej Ibn Nimrum in Lebanon, Naironi moved to Rome around 1635 where he latter Italianized his name and wrote his most important work: the 1671 book The Art of Drinking Coffee. Naironi tutored Italians—who were not yet the people of the latte, the cappuccino, the espresso—in the sublimity of caffeine. Before coffee reached Venice, or Milan, or Florence, the flowering berries of the coffea plant had been roasted in Jerusalem, Cairo, and Aleppo; ground in Constantinople, Baghdad, and Damascus; and the result—which looks nothing so much like rich, black soil—had been filtered into boiling water in Mecca, Medina, and before them all, Addis Ababa. Naironi bemoaned that many in Christendom were "unaware of [coffee's] qualities and good effects," which he enumerated. Then as it is now, coffee allowed for meditation and exuberance, conviviality and alertness, endurance and brilliance. Coffee's early history is inextricably linked to religion, first the Ethiopian Orthodox and Copts who discovered it, and then the mystical Sufi Muslims who made it central to their devotions. Mark Pendergast writes in Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed the World that they "adopted coffee as a drink that would allow them to stay awake for midnight prayers more easily," seemingly a gift from Allah, who had forbidden alcohol. From Ethiopia, coffee took several hundred years to make its way across the Bab-el-Mandeh to Yemen, imported by the Sufi Imam Muhammad Ibn Said Al Dhobhani, the experience of the first sip of dark roast not unlike what Attar of Nishapur describes in his twelfth-century epic The Conference of the Birds whereby "lost atoms to your Centre draw… Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide/Return and back into your Sun." It's hard to wake up without coffee, is what I'm saying. A confession: I love coffee. The ritual of counting out scoops as if repeating the rosary, the brewing's percolation which sounds like a prayer wheel, the first sip which feels like Nirvana. The rich, dark flavor—that if made correctly—tastes like punishment. I've heard it said, though it might be something that I made up, that the chemical trinity of all writers is caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine. My last cigarette was in 2015, and I've been sober nearly as long, but God as my witness I will still be drinking black, burnt coffee until the consistency of my stomach is that of a colander, acid reflux scaring the long tunnel of my esophagus. Since I was 12 I've loved it, my gateway drug some Starbucks coffee-flavored ice cream, then into the juvenile delights of the Frappuccino, then the affected sophistication of the cappuccino, followed by the latte, and finally drip coffee, first with copious sugar and milk, then just the latter, and finally as dark and bitter as life itself, the beverage consumed the way it's supposed to be. If I hadn't started drinking coffee when I did, I'd probably now be 6'10''. My average amount of coffee is around eight cups a day, though often I'll put on another pot by early afternoon. Sometimes I'm asked how I write the amount that I do; the answer is to be a recovering alcoholic with a caffeine addiction. When your natural nervous energy is supplemented with the psychoactive properties of methyltheobromine, you become a mechanism for transforming Arabica into words. "O Coffee!" reads a poem from 1511 by Abd-al-Kâdir in response to the objections of Mecca's mullahs, for "thou are the object of desire to the scholar. This is the beverage of the friends of God." Yes. Coffee's first recorded mention precedes Naironi by almost a century, printed in Rauwulf's Travels in 1583, written by German botanist and physician Leonhard Rauwulf, who had availed himself of the beverage in the Levant. Of an unusual custom practiced in Aleppo, Rauwulf notes that in that ancient city "they have a very good drink, by them called coffee that is almost as black as ink, and very good." Tolling off of the printing presses of Frankfurt and Lauingen was the first Western record of somebody enjoying the drink in the "morning early in open places… as hot as they can." Johann Vesling, yet another German botanist and physician, in a 1640 edition of the Venetian traveler Prospero Alpini's The Plants of Egypt, opines that while coffee is common in Egypt, Arabia, and the Ottoman Empire, it is "scarce among the Europeans, who by that means are deprived of a very wholesome liquor." Ukers, in his 1935 history on the subject, even claims that by the time coffee was introduced to Italy, Pope Clement VIII himself desired to pass judgement, concluding that "Satan's drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it, and making it a truly Christian beverage." (Though it must be said that the author falls short in tracing the authenticity of this papal pronouncement.) For all of these cloudy travelogues mentioning ink-black Saracen liquor which heats the brain and excites the limbs, by the late seventeenth century the drink had become a mainstay in that most seditious of institutions—the coffeehouse. "To Italy, then, belongs the honor of having given to the world the first real coffee house," writes Ukers, "although the French and Austrians greatly improved upon it." According to the official story, when the retreating Ottomans left bags of fresh coffee beans outside Vienna's gates during their failed siege of 1683, the Austrians dragged the contraband back inside, and roasted, ground, and brewed the dark spoils of war, first adding steamed milk to a drink that the Turks believed should be served as dark, bitter, and sweet as love. Habsburg Vienna perfected café society, an urbane, elegant, and cosmopolitan milieu where writers would write, composers would compose, and agitators would agitate. The Blue Bottle Café, with its low, dark, arched ceiling and its servers dressed in pasha vests, opened in 1685, the first coffeehouse in Vienna. Café Landtmann on Ringstraße 22, founded in 1873, was favored by Gustav Mahler. Freud, Trotsky, and Theodor Herzl usually opted for Café Central on Herringrasse 14, which opened in 1876. Café Museum in the Inner Stadt, established in 1899 and designed by Adolf Loos, was the preferred establishment of Gustav Klimt. Over Linzer torte and Apfelstrudel, Punschkrapfen and Dobostorte, and of course endless cups of coffee would come psychoanalysis and dadaism, special relativity and logical positivism, modernist literature and atonal music. Novelist Stefan Zweig—perhaps the most European man who ever lived—once said that such institutions are a "sort of democratic club, open to everyone for the price of a cheap cup of coffee." Caffé Florian, Café de Flore, Prague's Municipal House, New York Café—for nearly a century Venice's canals had been lined with coffee houses before the custom would find its way into Austria, France, Bohemia, Hungary, Holland, and even the cold shores of England. Difficult to envision now, especially if you've ever tried to get a decent cup in London, but the English were perhaps Europe's most maniacal quaffers of coffee. The oldest continuous operating café in the world, established in 1654, still sells mugs of the stuff at Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, along with kofte kabobs and tabouleh, in keeping with the national cuisine of its seventeenth-century founder, a Syrian known as "Cirques Jobson, the Jew." If Viennese coffeeshops produced Austro-Hungarian culture, then an argument could be made that they also birthed the British Empire. Fevered thoughts excited by prodigious caffeine consumption led to the establishment of the London Stock Exchange at Jonathan's Coffee-House in 1698. They are where the Tories and Whigs first organized themselves as political parties, and where Jonathan Dryden and William Wycherley crafted Restoration literature (both men partial to Will's Coffee House in Westminster). Scientists founded the Royal Society at the Grecian Coffeeshop. Isaac Newton once dissected a dolphin right on the table at that establishment. On the eve of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when for the second time in the century the British deposed a king (though this time without the decapitation), and the capital is estimated to have had an astounding three thousand coffee houses. Not incidental. During the Middle Ages, the average Englishmen drank around seventy gallons of alcohol a year; ale was available at all meals, including breakfast. Taverns were wholesome dens of patriotism for merry old England, where heavy food and warm ale anesthetized. No wonder that drinking coffee felt like waking up for the first time: one pamphlet writer in 1665 enthused that "Coffee and Commonwealth begin/Both with one letter, both came in/Together for a Reformation/To make's a free and sober nation." Coffeehouses were called "penny universities" and were marked by what they weren't—pubs. Suddenly, taverns were replaced with fevered dens of iniquity, with coffee as hot as the tempers and as bitter as the sentiments. Sedition, insurrection, and revolution were all feared. Now steady on their feet with clear eye and sharp mind, those gathered within coffeehouses—no longer pickled in ale—had some ideas. "Alehouses and taverns had a reputation as royalist-friendly spaces" writes Joanna Picciotto in Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England, though "Coffeehouses, in contrast, bread 'Scandalous Reports.'" Taverns offered joviality, but coffeehouses presented solidarity; alehouses sold drowsy good-cheer, coffee roasters brewed fiery sedition. Ironically, long before coffee became the favored libation for teetotalers and prohibitionists, it was tarred with every bit the moral opprobrium that alcohol is targeted with. A 1663 broadsheet entitled A Cup of Coffee: or, Coffee in its Colours scurrilously opined that "For men and Christians to turn Turks, and think/T'excuse the Crime because 'tis in their drink,/Is more than Magick," while nine years later the author of A Broad-side Against Coffee, or the Marriage of the Turk slandered, "Coffee, a kind of Turkish Renegade,/Has late a match with Christian water made;/At first between them happen'd a Demur,/Yet joyn'd they were, but not without great stir." No wonder Charles II, fearful of losing his head like his father, wanted to stamp out this drink both heretical and rebellious. Two days before Christmas of 1675, and the king released A Proclamation for the Suppression of the Coffee Houses, establishments which "devised and spread abroad to the Defamation of his Majesty's government, and to the disturbance of the peace and quiet of the realm," fueled by an intoxicant which leaves the drinker not drunk but enervated, a quality which lends itself to "very evil and dangerous effects." Ironically, caffeine was an addictive drug that had proliferated throughout England alongside another foreign narcotic, the Dutch liquor gin being as strong and astringent as Holland's coffee, with English moralists sermonizing against both. Charles's ban lasted just 11 days, so enraged was the populace. Not even the divine rights of kings could compete against caffeine. Charles feared that the "monarchy might once again be overthrown," as Pendergast writes. His brother James was actually deposed shortly after his coronation, and this time by another Dutch import in the form of his brother-in-law William of Orange. Could the Glorious Revolution have been prevented if Charles' suppression had been successful? I'm not not saying that, only that anyone who requires that first gulp in the morning understands that the taste of coffee is the flavor of freedom. Soon, however, and the British occupation of India shifted English palates towards Darjeeling and Assam and away from Arabica and Robusta. Perhaps colonialism abroad prevents revolution at home, but it does seem like the importation of tea did something to the once rebellious English soul. Meanwhile, 100 years after Charles's proclamation, a group of Americans dumped those leaves intended for weak, tepid bilgewater into Boston Harbor, where they belong. The American Revolution followed. Though by the end of that century the London coffeehouse was nearly extinct, in Paris some 2,000 were still open on the eve of the French rightly putting their king's neck beneath the guillotine. What coffee allowed for was the brewing of anarchy, but as processed through a keen alertness. Dangerous for autocrats in any time or place. Coffee's flavor may be bold, but it's also dark. The drink was instrumental to this first globalized moment, the tumultuous, exploitative, and most of all violent period when modernity arrived. "Coffee has always marched hand in hand with colonialism through the pages of history," writes Anthony Wild in Coffee: A Dark History. As such, coffee can be included alongside every commodity brought into Europe during the eighteenth century—chocolate and sugar, potatoes and tomatoes, tobacco and tea—Africans and Indians. The sugar which sweetened that coffee and the tobacco smoked over those porcelain cups were purchased at tremendous cost: the blood and labor of those who harvested and tended coffee plants. Coffee plantations proliferated in Portuguese Africa, Spanish South America, Dutch Indonesia, and throughout a Caribbean cannibalized by the European powers. Often there is an evasion of the fact that so much of what colonialism and slavery provided were material goods based in pleasure, the better for us not to draw parallels between the past and what global capitalism does in the present; the better not to make the disquieting connection between something which brings us joy and the tortures that were used to procure it. Cotton's softness came from South Carolina and Georgia; sugar's sweetness came from plantations in Martinique or Saint-Dominque; coffee's richness from Jamaica or Brazil. The triangle trade brought humans from Africa and returned coffee to Europe; colonialism violently disposed the Mayans from their homelands in Guatemala and Oaxaca to cultivate the beans which fueled the European Enlightenment. No colony produced as much as French Saint-Dominique—60% of the coffee drank in Europe came from Hispaniola's verdant hills—where 500,000 enslaved Africans toiled in brutal conditions. In his 1798 guide The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo, written for the benefit of English slaveowners in Jamaica, Pierre Joseph Laborie describes the exact manner in which children should be whipped, while bemoaning that a decade before the "fatal French revolution [had] introduced principles, incompatible with the conditions of the country." A different revolution finally enacted those principles when the Haitians won their independence in 1804, the first successful slave uprising in the Western Hemisphere. Laborie's plantation was torched. Slavery is the "price we pay for the sugar you eat in Europe," Voltaire writes in Candide. The price which was paid for coffee too. Voltaire supposedly drank forty cups a day, mixed with mocha, another product manufactured out of the blood and sweat of humans. "The continuing importance of the western hemisphere in the world of coffee today is derived from the former colonial plantation economies of the region, based on slavery," Wild writes, describing the troubled history of the second-most prevalent global commodity after oil. Today, every coffee-producing nation in Central America, much of the Caribbean, as well as Columbia, Venezuela, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Vietnam, are home to numerous coffee plantations in which workers toil in effective slavery, with the bulk of those beans sold in Western markets. Let's not pretend that your venti is any more innocent than Voltaire's mocha. That's always been the question with the Enlightenment, a movement that expressed the equality of humanity with one hand while overseeing a master's whip with the other—was it paradoxical or hypocritical? Which are we? Produced in the most appalling of circumstances, caffeine nonetheless fueled the very people who would write documents like The Declaration of the Rights of Man which acted as a revolutionary impetus throughout the world, including in the colonies. Coffee was an imperialist's commodity and a revolutionary's beverage. Allen, with a smidge of hyperbole, notes that "within two hundred years of Europe's first cup, famine and the plague were historical footnotes. Governments became more democratic, slavery vanished, and the standards of living and literacy went through the roof." The Enlightenment may have been birthed by coffee, but it had a complicated childhood. Nonetheless, caffeine was capable at generating self-encomiums, as writers found their muse within a cup. French poet Jacque Delille writes in a 1761 panegyric that a "liquid there is to the poet most dear, /'T was lacking to Virgil, adored by Voltaire, /'T is thou, divine coffee, for thine is the art, /Without turning the head yet to gladden the heart." Delille was the French translator of Paradise Lost, and apparently John Milton also enjoyed his coffee, writing in Comus how "One sip of this/Will bathe the drooping spirits in delight/Beyond the bliss of dreams." Renaissance wits had their wine and Romantic bards their opiates, but coffee is the fuel of the truly modern writer. The adage attributed to Ernest Hemingway might have it that you write drunk and edit sober, but better to write while drinking coffee and to edit while drinking still more coffee. Alcohol helps you romanticize being a writer; coffee is what transforms you into one. Booze exists to turn the mind off, but caffeine is that which can keep it going. If writing requires focus, discipline, and persistence, coffee can supply all those things—and then some. "This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion," writes Honoré de Balzac in Treatise on Modern Stimulants. "Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army… Things remembered arrive at full gallop…the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder." For all those martial metaphors, it's notable that in 1850, Balzac's was the rare death from caffeine overdose, succumbing after a bender of 50 cups. As a substance, only liquor is (rightly or wrongly) valorized more, so fundamental is the association of caffeine with writing. Dorothy Parker tempering her moods between espresso and martinis and telling a friend, "Don't look at me in that tone of voice" before she's had her morning cup; Gertrude Stein declaring that coffee is "more than just a drink; it's something happening"; Albert Camus apocryphally asking, "Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?" Then there is Jack Kerouac, producing On the Road in a jittery three weeks, his ecstasies about the "mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing" smelling of cheap diner coffee, though I'm sure the amphetamines helped too. Richard Brautigan describes the sacrament in a poem from his collection Revenge of the Lawn, how there "was a jar of instant coffee, the empty cup and the spoon/all laid out like a funeral service. These are the things that you need to make a cup of/coffee," that enjambment putting the focus on the subject, for "Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee/affords." Ron Padgett understands this liturgy well, hypothesizing in his Collected Poems that his attraction to coffee is the "ritual/of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of/brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the/day on." How many cups of coffee have I ever had? So many cups, I think. The dark burnt espresso in the Gotham Café on First Avenue and pots of weak brown hallucinogenic joe at Ritter's on Baum around 3 A.M.; the cappuccino with the perfect ratio of steamed milk at Phil's in Navy Yard near the Anacostia and a Grande cut with coconut milk on Waikiki; my first drip dark brew at Arabica on Forbes in 1996, the spoonfuls of terrible instant prepared in my microwave, and the cup I'm drinking right now. Through it all, one inviolate reality: even bad coffee is preferable to no coffee. In the meantime, as concerns writing, let us all hope that the caffeine muse helps us produce literature as strong, bold, dark, and rich as the best cup. [millions_email]