Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South

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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]

The Miracle of Photography

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More shadows than men, really; just silhouettes, might as well be smudges on the lens. Hard to notice at first, the two undifferentiated figures in the lower left-hand of the picture, at the corner of the Boulevard du Temple. A bootblack squats down and shines the shoes of a man contrapasso above him; impossible to tell what they're wearing or what they look like. Obviously no way to ascertain their names or professions. At first they're hard to recognize as people, these whispers of a figure joined together, eternally preserved by silver-plated copper and mercury vapor; they're insignificant next to the buildings, elegant Beaux-Arts shops and theaters, wrought iron railings along the streets and chimneys on their mansard roofs. Based on an analysis of the light, Louis Daguerre set up his camera around eight in the morning; leaves are still on trees, so it's not winter, but otherwise it's hard to tell what season it is that Paris day in 1838. Whatever their names, it was by accident that they became the first two humans to be photographed. "I have seized the light," Daguerre supposedly said. "I have arrested its flight!" About six by five inches of metal were polished to a sheen, all traces of detritus burned away with nitric acid, placed into the plate holder opposite from a lens placed into a wooden box, treated with iodine fumes, and exposed to heated mercury until an alchemical miasma reproduced a Paris morning. The boulevard should have been filled with people, busy rushing to work or purchasing groceries, perhaps stopping for pan de chocolate, and yet the street is silent, everything quiet except for these two men unified in anonymity. Such quietude is illusory, for when Daguerre set up his mechanism, no doubt the boulevard was filled with people. Yet their existence was too wispy to ever be recorded, the exposure being at least eight minutes long. Unknown to the photographer, only the bootblack and his customer stood still long enough to be observed by eternity. There are some who claim they see a child looking out of a window, or a horse standing stationary on the boulevard. Like most of us, just ghosts in a vacuum. In the beginning there may have been the Word, but several millennia later there was the Image. The two most revolutionary technological advances in human consciousness are the invention of writing and then the ability to record life as-it-is in the form of photography and sound recording. Neither Guttenberg's printing press or Alan Turing's computer come close in importance. At best they extended those earlier revolutions, but ultimately print and digital were just means of disseminating words and images more efficiently. When Daguerre unveiled Boulevard du Temple at the Academy of Fine Arts and Academy of Sciences in 1839, it was as if delivered by angels. Reflecting in 1859 on how surprising the invention was, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed in The Atlantic Monthly that "in all the prophecies of dreaming enthusiasts, in all the random guesses of the future conquests over matter, we do not remember any prediction of such inconceivable wonder." As a statement there are aspects of this that are both true and false—Daguerre drew on several different technical innovations, some which went back centuries, and other methods were simultaneously developed. Yet by the time Boulevard du Temple was exhibited it must have seemed like a miraculous surprise, for as Mary Warner Marien writes in Photography: A Cultural History, "Unlike other transformational technologies such as air travel and automobile, photography was not foreseen in the centuries before it was invented." While unforeseen, the technical reasons for why the annus mirabilis for photography was 1838 are befuddling, because theoretically it's conceivable that it could have been invented far earlier. Daguerre combined two different processes. The first was the optical effect known as "camera obscura," whereby a lens can focus an upside down image onto a wall, and the second was the fact that there are certain chemicals which are sensitive to light. Camera obscuras were first written about by the Chinese philosopher Mozi four centuries before the Common Era, and explored by dozens of others, including Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci, with the latter having noted in the Codex Atlanticus that "If the façade of a building, or a place, or a landscape is illuminated by the sun and a small hole is drilled in the wall of a room [...] which is not directly lighted by the sun, then all objects illuminated […] will send their images through this aperture and will appear, upside down, on the wall facing the hole." Renaissance painters would avail themselves of the effect to more accurately trace pictures onto canvases. Regarding light-sensitive substances, as early as 1717 the German chemist Johann Heinrich Schulze used a combination of exposed silver, nitric acid, and chalk to make outlines of letters that could be considered the first "photographs," even while their life-span was but a few minutes. Nor was Daguerre the only person working on the problem; notably, there was Edward Fox Talbot's almost simultaneously developed method of reproducing images on paper, which would eventually supplant the metal plates of the daguerreotype. Also invaluable to Daguerre's work was Nicéphore Niépce, whom the former readily credited, and who took the first photograph of anything in 1826, View from the Window of Le Gras, which required an exposure of several days. Examining View from the Window of Le Gras, it's difficult to see what's significant; it looks like nothing. As Robert Hirsch writes in Seizing the Light: A Social and Aesthetic History of Photography, the "camera was not designed as a radical device to unleash a new way of seeing," but as "with most inventions, unforeseen side effects create unintentional changes." At the very least Daguerre understood what he was offering—not just representation, or artifice, or even mimesis. His invention, he wrote, was "not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the contrary it is a physical and chemical process which gives her the power to reproduce herself." Photography gave reality itself the ability to self-generate. Audio preservation was accomplished by Daguerre's fellow countryman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (exactly two decades before Thomas Edison) with his invention of the phonautograph, meant to visually transcribe sound waves onto a bit of sooty paper. By 1877, the phonograph cylinder as produced by Edison would actually allow for playable recordings, and by 1894 the inventor would open one of the first film studios that produced sequential celluloid photographs that would be rapidly projected to simulate the effect of motion. By the time director Alan Crosland had effectively merged moving image and sound with the first full-length "talkie" movie, The Jazz Singer, in 1927, the revolution in consciousness had reached its culmination. Now humanity had the ability to present reality in a way that we never had before. Everything that has happened since has merely been an adaptation of that idea, even if in the technical particulars have immeasurably improved. It was the most radical change in how we viewed existence since Mesopotamian scribes first pushed wedged letters into baked tablets made of clay from the Euphrates. Four years before Boulevard du Temple, Paul-Louis Robert wrote in The Journal of Artists that Daguerre was working on a procedure whereby "a portrait, a landscape, or any view […] leaves an imprint in light and shade, and thus presents the most perfect of all drawings [preserved] for an indefinite time." Enthusiasts for the new medium, once it became widespread after the French government bought the patent in exchange for Daguerre's life-time pension and then released the technology for free into the world, wrongly claimed that it would make painting redundant. But where photography does do something unique is in collapsing distance and time so as to present the immediacy of a present that has since moved on; it gives the appearance of reality. Susan Sontag writes in On Photography that the form "is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown." As soon as photography was invented, trick photography followed, but such hoaxing is only so successful because the original form was so powerful. You're only apt to believe the lie because photography appears so trustworthy. By contrast, painting offered something different and irreplaceable, where the artifice was always embedded in the experience, even while photography gifted something novel. When Caravaggio depicts Judith's sword garroting into the sinews of Holofernes's neck, the picture is more sublime than reality; Rembrandt's black-bedecked gentleman present a gauzy tableau that feels like midnight as much as it looks like it. What Boulevard du Temple offers is exactly what somebody would see if looking out that window in Paris. That's why they're both sublime. Daguerre's method was supplanted by quicker, simpler, and more accurate ways of preserving an image. What Daguerre gifted us was a significant development in consciousness, which allowed anyone to record themselves or what they seen or who they love and to transmit that experience to others. At an 1861 address, Frederick Douglass—among the most photographed men in America at the time—said that "Daguerre, by simply but all abounding sunlight has converted the planet into a picture gallery[.…] Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, Photographs and Electrotypes, good and bad, now adorn or disfigure all our dwellings[.…] What was once the exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now within reach of all." Working class people flocked to studios to have their images preserved, seeing in the process the equivalent of an affordable portrait; abolitionists used it to record the horrors of slavery and to capture the dignity of Black Americans; war correspondents conveyed the barbarity of battle. Paul Valery writes in Alan Trachtenberg's anthology Classic Essays on Photography that "man's way of seeing began to change, and even his way of living felt the repercussions of the novelty [...] creating new needs and hitherto unimagined customs." Improvement was swift. Talbot introduced paper photographs; by 1884 George Eastman patented dry gel paper or film, and four years later his Kodak Corporation camera allowed for amateurs to take pictures that would be developed by others. Color photography, Polaroid photography, digital photography, social media all followed. Ours is a post-Daguerre world. Our vision is in photographs, our perspective is in photographs, our memories are in photographs. In the last two minutes the cumulative number of pictures taken—uploaded to Facebook and Instagram, sent in emails and texts—surpasses the number of photographs from the entirety of the nineteenth-century. Since that anonymous bootblack and his customer had their portraits shot, there have been an astounding 3.5 trillion photographs taken. [caption id="attachment_149881" align="aligncenter" width="725"] Boulevard du Temple by Louis Daguerre (1838)[/caption] The invention of photography, less than 200 years old, seems both strangely recent and perilously distant. 1839 is an impenetrable barrier, as the entirety of human history before then was filtered through the descriptions of writers or the imaginations of artists, but in the exact particulars of what somebody looked like, the experience of an event, the sense of a place, the details themselves are forever hidden behind a veil. So new is photography that there are the figures whom we almost could have seen rendered in metal and chemical—Benjamin Franklin, Jane Austen, Napoleon Bonaparte—all just slightly beyond that horizon. Sontag writes that if given the choice between Hans Holbein having lived long enough to paint Shakespeare, or the camera having been invented early enough to capture an image, most of those who worship the playwright would opt for the latter, for even if the "photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it[.…] Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross." Photographs can be artful and they can be amateurish, they can be accurate and they can be misleading, they can be redemptive and they can be demeaning, but what they supply is an unmediated present. This is not an insignificant thing. "Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks," writes poet Hart Crane about Brooklyn Bridge, describing how "A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene; / All afternoon the cloud flown derricks turn[…] / Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still." Crane is doing many things, all of them masterful. He is conjuring a deeper understanding, incanting a mystic sense of the Brooklyn Bridge. He is perhaps obliquely describing it. But if you can imagine what the Brooklyn Bridge looks like while reading Crane, it's undoubtedly because you've seen a photo before. If all you had to go on was Crane's description, you'd never get it right. Albert Camus in his American Diaries wrote of the Manhattan skyline that "Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across thousands of high walls, the fearful cry of a too-well-known voice finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island of un-reality." It's evocative, it's beautiful, it's certainly true, but Camus writes in poetry, not in images (as anyone working with words must). When he describes New York as a "desert of iron and cement," it's a spiritually true assertion, and you can probably see in your mind the art deco golem of the Chrysler Building, the behemoth of the Empire State, the leviathan of Rockefeller Center, but you've first seen them as photographs. If you can envision Manhattan, and you've never been there, then it's because of a picture, not because of anything Camus wrote. Those aren't dings on Crane or Camus—far from it. No writer could provide the complete and utter texture of description which a photograph accomplishes, at least not without gruelingly slow exposition, which fortunately isn't the purpose of writing. Chaucer can't drop you into Canterbury nor can Cervantes into Andalusia—that was never their intent. But photography can—the form democratized experience because it collapses those distinctions of space and time. The medium would never replace writing or painting because it did something new. At the same time, and precisely because of that "something new," writing and painting are irrevocably altered, our experience can't be the same as those who read before Daguerre. Chaucer and Cervantes might not bring to mind an exact image of Canterbury and Andalusia, but they do for us, and that difference is technological. "Photography mirrored the external world automatically, yielding an exactly repeatable visual image," writes Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. "It was this all important quality of uniformity and repeatability that had made the Gutenberg break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance"—and then again between what came before Daguerre and afterwards. McLuhan underscores that it's more than just verisimilitude that makes photography different (though it is that). It's also replicability. Any argument that photography wasn't so radical because painting was already capable of conveying reality ignores that most people weren't privy to Caravaggios or Rembrandts (at least not until they could see photographs of them), and though there were means of producing images (woodcuts, lithographs, engravings, mezzotint) the realism of the medium differentiates it. Unequivocally this would alter perspective, would shift consciousness, and it's obvious in both art and literature. Walter Benjamin writes in his 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" that the "amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision that have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending the ancient craft of the Beautiful […] neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial." The result of photography and sound recording was that we became new, post-Daguerre humans. Painters reacted to the rise of the photograph by embracing abstraction. Impressionism, with its consideration of color and light, proceeds from photography. For all of the stereotypical carping about how modern art lacks technique, the ability to produce paintings that are indistinguishable from reality awaited artists like Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Ron Kleeman, John Baeder, Tom Blackwell, and Chuck Close, who are conveniently labeled "photorealists." Meanwhile literary modernism, with its attraction towards fragmentation, bricolage, and multiple perspectives, resembled an assemblage of photographs hanging on a gallery wall, with the poetic embrace towards lyric an acknowledgement that each picture is as if a poem. Because Western chauvinism has largely resisted the integration of word and image, canonical novels which integrate photography is surprisingly slim. Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando included a photograph of her lover Vita Sackville-West as the gender bending titular character. W.G. Sebald included pictures in his novels The Emigrants, Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz, writing in that last title that "It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space," a succinct description of the post-Daguerre world. Poets, perhaps because they already worked in a form that is episodic and crystalline, embraced the new technology more fully. Dadaist artist Man Ray and poet Paul Eluard produced a volume that combined both in Facile, while more current titles include Lisa Scalapino's Crowd and Not Evening or Light and poet Ian Thomas's and photographer Jon Ellis's I Wrote This for You. Then there are photography books, which are not just adornment for coffee tables but literature. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans travelled Depression-era United States, recording stoicism and poverty, resolve and degradation. Alabama sharecroppers with faces as ragged as the red soil, determined laborers with tired eyes staring at the camera as if Medieval icons, families with bare feet and dirty fingernails huddled in front of dilapidated wooden shacks, all marshaled to demonstrate that "next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness," the camera is the "central instrument of our time." Nan Goldin used the camera on a different subject, if based in similar principles, in her 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Chronicling her own experiences in New York with transients and junkies, queers and sex workers, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is an honest and unabashed account of existence among the marginalized, as true as anything in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. "There is a popular notion, that the photography is by nature a voyeur," Goldin writes, "but I'm not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history." From the very beginning photographers were drawn to celebrity, glamor, and elegance, a natural manifestation of aristocratic portraiture, and Annie Leibovitz has both embodied and subverted that purpose. A radiant, pregnant Demi Moore cradling her belly in the nude on the cover of Vanity Fair and appearing as if the Virgin Mary; Yoko Ono in jeans and a black turtleneck, embraced by a naked John Lennon clutching to her in a fetal position; a beautiful, young Leonardo DiCaprio in black with a white swan cradled around his neck. Flipping through Annie Leibovitz Portraits: 2005-2016, we're apt to agree with the artist's lover Sontag who wrote, "So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful." A perfect photograph is a lyric poem. It gestures towards narrative, but does not spell it out; it relishes in detail, but is not didactic; it's as in love with the granularity of beach wood or the smoothness of a mirror as much as it is with any abstraction. How much more incomplete would our love of Abraham Lincoln be if the camera had been invented later? Only 130 photographs of Lincoln exist—there are many more pictures of my dog in existence than there are of the sixteenth president. He sat for any number of photographers, including several times for the nineteenth century's greatest master of the daguerreotype, Matthew Brady, and yet it's Alexander Gardner’s 1863 picture that most fully exemplifies Lincoln. Walt Whitman described Lincoln, whom he loved to the point of idolatry, as "crooked-legged, stoop-shouldered" and with "anything but a handsome face," a visage so distinctive and "so awful ugly it becomes beautiful." When painted, Lincoln appears at best homely. But Gardner's photograph conveys the awesome weight of Whitman's observation. The granitoid face, the hawkish nose, the warm and exhausted eyes, the ring of prophetic beard and the springy, parted hair, the lined forehead and high cheekbones, the deep fissures and wrinkles that appear as if the landscape of the fractured country itself. Very different commitments are on display in a photograph from Leni Riefenstahl's 1973 book The Last of the Nuba, commensurate with Benjamin's observation that the "logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life." Without biographical context, such an observation could at first seem surprising when applied to Riefenstahl's consummately well-done photograph. A Sudanese warrior stands shirtless, toned, muscular, and powerful, two geometrical scarification tattoos about his pectorals; he stares away at the camera, not disturbed by it so much as indifferent. In another picture, a warrior with white face paint sits staring down, a wooden staff in his hand. In a third photograph, Riefenstahl captures two nude fighters in the midst of a ritual wrestling match, expressions hardened in rage, muscles tense and arms poised to strike. The figures in Riefenstahl's lens are gorgeous, women and men who are physically perfect, with the photographer purposefully contrasting the darkness of their skin against the brightness of the Sudanese sun. Riefenstahl also neglects to capture any of the inner life of these people, treating them as props, an assemblage of mechanisms that demonstrate the human body's athleticism. "Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl's portrait of them is consistent with some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology," argued Sontag in a controversial essay in The New York Review of Books. Analyzing how Riefenstahl reduced the Nuba into "Noble Savages," Sontag also observes the way in which the photographer enshrines strength over weakness, purity over corruption, power over infirmity, beauty over ugliness, simplicity over complexity. Perhaps all of this would have been interpreted as over-interpretation were it not that Riefenstahl had been the most celebrated of Nazi propaganda filmmakers, depicting Adolf Hitler as a messianic figure in movies like Olympia and Triumph of the Will, technical masterpieces completely devoid of anything that could be called basic human feeling. At the same time that Riefenstahl was filming Hitler emerging in a prop plane like a conquering Valkyrie, the photojournalist Dorothea Lange was traversing the United States with funding from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Farm Security Administration. Traveling through rural California, Lange chronicled the effects of the Dust Bowl, particularly among those internal refugees disparagingly called "Okies." By far her most recognizable picture is Migrant Mother, a portrait of the itinerant farmer Florence Owens Thompson shot in 1936. Of partial Cherokee ancestry, the Oklahoma-born Thompson had migrated to Bakersfield, California, to work, picking upwards of 500 pounds of cotton a day, and later laboring in the beet fields near Imperial Valley. Lang recalled in Popular Photography, "I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet…[she] seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it." Thompson is exhausted, dust-caked, weary-eyed. Her children crowd around behind her, faces away from the camera, like angels whom it's impossible to look directly towards. The woman looks worried, the only emotion that perhaps competes with her exhaustion. In their brief exchange, Thompson told Lang that the family was surviving on vegetables frozen in the field and dead birds her children found. Unlike Riefenstahl's subjects, Lang preserves the core of humanity in Thompson. A sadness not dissimilar to Gardner's conjuration of Lincoln, a deep and abiding sense of embodied pain. [caption id="attachment_149883" align="aligncenter" width="543"] Migrant Mother by Dorthea Lange (1936)[/caption] A few decades later, Diane Arbus would capture a less divine picture of childhood in her faintly disturbing Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park. Taken in 1962, Arbus's photograph is of a skinny, tow-headed young boy in overalls who would be the prototypical example of all-American wholesomeness were it not for the toy weapon he holds with a claw-like grip, and the maniacal, vacant, slightly-demonic expression on his face. The boy's figure seems dark, even while he stands in a light speckled bit of pavement, benches in the background, a canopy of trees overhead. Drawn to the seamier side of American mid-century life—circus geeks and strippers, weight lifters and drag performers—Arbus highlighted degenerate enchantment. Like Goldin after her, she was attracted to that which normative society discarded. Nominally, the child in this photograph is perhaps not as extreme as some of Arbus' other subjects, and yet his expression, his posture, his slightly nefarious goofiness – the boy is obviously a misfit, an odd-ball, an outsider, a weirdo. Colin Wood, the boy in the picture, recalled years later to The Washington Post that Arbus had caught "me in a moment of exasperation. It's true, I was exasperated […] there was a general feeling of loneliness, a sense of being abandoned. I was just exploding. She saw that and it's like […] commiseration. She captured the loneliness of everyone." Another misfit was the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who like Arbus would find in New York his great arcade of human experience, millions of human poems. Most notoriously identified with the BDSM images he produced, which merited attacks by Republican congressmen over his receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mapplethorpe was also an exporter of downtown effortless cool. Associated with sadomasochistic and homoerotic images—gigantic exposed cocks, bullwhips in anuses—Mapplethorpe also turned his lens to celebrity, producing iconic images of Iggy Pop, Andy Warhol, Philip Glass, and Patti Smith. The latter had been his former lover and lifelong friend, and Mapplethorpe enshrined Smith on the cover of her debut album Horses. As rendered by Mapplethorpe, the punk-poet is an apotheosis of androgynous beauty. In black jeans and white button up with a jacket confidently slung over her shoulder, strangely evoking a young Frank Sinatra, Smith reverses the scopophilia that marks Western depictions of femininity —she looks back at you. As Smith writes in Just Kids, a memoir of her and Mapplethorpe's life together, "Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art [.…] Without affectation, he created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace." By being able to bottle an impromptu second, photography is able to do something which only automatic writing or jazz improvisation did before. Such an art can show Truth—or a truth—in a manner unforeseen. Aesthetician John Berger writes in Understanding a Photograph that "most photographs taken of people are about suffering, and most of that suffering is manmade." Gardner's pile of bodies near a wooden fence in Antietam, Maryland, impossible to tell the color of their uniforms, in 1863. David Jackson's 1955 photograph of Emmett Till in his open casket, his face beaten to something inhuman, while his parents look at the camera with sadness inconceivable. Eddie Adams in Saigon, 1968, preserving the terrified look on Viet Cong captain Nguyen Van Lem's face in the seconds before South Vietnamese Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan fired his pistol into Lem's head. John Paul Filo's shot of a Kent State University student at a protest, face down and dead, a friend next to the body screaming in 1970. Nick Ut's 1972 photo of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked outside of Trang Bang village after the South Vietnamese Airforce had dropped napalm on the civilian settlement. Jeff Widener's picture of a solitary, still anonymous man stopping a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Therese Frare's picture from 1990 of an emaciated, Christ-like David Kirby dying from AIDS, cradled as if a pieta by his grieving father. Richard Drew's 2001 image of a man falling from the collapsing World Trade Center, legs contrapasso just like the anonymous bootjack from Daguerre's first photograph. U.S. Army Sergeant Ivan Frederick, both observer and perpetrator, snapping an anonymous Iraqi man in conical hood with arms outstretched during a torture session at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. What each of these photographs capture is invaluable; they show the moment of grief, of tragedy, or desperation, of horror. They do something that millions of words in the Pentagon Papers or the 9/11 Report could never do. They speak the ineffable, they depict the inexplicable. Barger writes that photography derives not from "form, but […] time," for the medium "bears witness to a human choice being exercised." By collapsing space and time, photography made horror, sadness, hatred, despair present. But it could also capture love, it could transmit intimacy, joy, ecstasy across those same fathoms. For just as the instantaneous display of cruelty or anger or fear could be recorded, so too was it now possible for unmediated bliss to be preserved. Not shadows at all, really; but a couple. Hard not to notice, the woman and the man—she's in a smart jacket and navy skirt, he's dapper in a vest and suit—leaning against the 1940 Cadillac of photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris. Sometimes known as "One Shot" for his ability to capture the perfect photograph almost instantly, Harris was employed by The Pittsburgh Courier, the nation's largest Black newspaper, where he chronicled life in the Hill District. The couple are young, beautiful, and in love, for the look that they give each other could be replicated by only the most talented of painters, her leaning against the shiny black steel of Harris's car parked on Centre Avenue, a line of brick storefronts with canvas awnings behind them, the twinkle of a Coca Cola sign in one shop's window. Imagine Harris returning with film back to his studio, setting up the baths of water, dimezone, sodium hydroxide, acetic acid, ammonium thiosulfate, shrouded in the uncanny red light of the darkroom. Moving photo paper back and forth from pools of liquid, and there as emerging from the firmament, like reality from chaos, coalesces the Cadillac, and the storefronts, and the shop's sign, and the handsome couple from outside, their smiles coming from a nothing into an everything, as if light itself had been seized. [millions_email]