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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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A Year in Reading: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Last year my mother died. Often, my habit and love for reading felt unbearable and foreign. Other weeks it was reading alone that comforted me. It was all I wanted to do, all I was capable of doing, because all I wanted was to live inside of sentences, stanzas, stories. I didn't and couldn't go out there, the world was glaring in its surface of sameness, but books were ultimately part of the company that drew me out of a space that was dangerous, expanding in its withdrawal and silence.
In 2015, I also had a book of my own published. And, honestly, it was difficult to navigate a space that suddenly felt inarticulate to me. Kind friends and kind strangers alike sent me specific titles regarding grief. I also consumed books where grief, loss, rebirth, and death were implicit, distilled, expanded into unbelievable landscapes I hadn't seen or understood as clearly before, in the surreal afterlife of my mother's absence.
One of the best books I read last year and have returned to more than once is Elizabeth Alexander's The Light of the World. The book left me speechless in its love, grace, and dignity. Reading that book gave me hope that I too could survive and celebrate life itself. Alexander's book gave me hope and I picked up Tracy K. Smith's Ordinary Light and Lacy M. Johnson's The Other Side. I also returned to Toi Derricotte's The Undertaker's Daughter.
Being on the road on tour for my own book, I often filled my suitcase with more books than clothing. Everything I wore was mostly black so I didn't think or care about clothes at all. But I cared about books and knew there were certain books I needed to have with me should I wake up, inconsolable, in a hotel room on the other side of the country. And so, many books crossed state lines, their spines shifting in mile-high altitudes and time zones. I wrangled slim volumes of poetry into my camera bag, which was stuffed with lenses, notebooks, and a watercolor set.
I began thinking of books and geography, literally and psychically. I considered how landscapes affected my mood and how, of course, a voracious grief devoured everything. Sometimes I'd get frustrated because I couldn't remember names of favorites characters or the way those characters in those books had once made me feel, so I'd go back and reread them. And, in my travels, I often looked out for marvelous independent bookstores where I would then pick up more books, often shipping them back to Brooklyn when I realized I'd be charged at the airport for being over the weight restrictions.
While working on a photography project in Oxford, Miss., last summer I reread William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Eudora Welty's On Writing. I'd also carried around Lucille Clifton's Collected Poems, edited by Kevin Young, because I was working on photographs about black women's bodies, identities, and the presence and interruption of landscape in terms of blackness.
This journey made me pick up a second or third copy of Roger Reeves's King Me because I ended up driving down to Money, Miss., and further into the Delta. King Me made me go searching for Jean Toomer's Cane and Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road. Hurston's grace and excellence sent me back, gratefully, into the words of Henry Dumas, Langston Hughes, and Robert Hayden.
While I was in Portland, I caught up with Matthew Dickman but was so shy about meeting him I forgot to ask him to sign the hardcover of Mayakovsky's Revolver I'd stashed in my rental car. And when I traveled down to Santa Fe to teach at IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts), I dove again into Sherwin Bitsui's Flood Song and read Jessica Jacobs's Pelvis with Distance because I was in Georgia O'Keeffe country. I'm still working through O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz's letters, My Faraway One, and made some serious dents in it this year.
I've opened up Vladimir Nabokov's Letters to Véra and placed those two near each other, like constellations, in my reading stack. Speaking of women artists, I reread the Diary of Frida Kahlo and Hayden Herrera's biography of Frida Kahlo because I curated the Poetry Society of America's Poetry Walk for the New York Botanical Garden's astonishing exhibition "Frida Kahlo: Art Garden Life." Lucky for me, I got to spend lots and lots of time with the poetry of Octavio Paz, one of my favorites!
A dear friend just sent me a copy of Larry Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze. Literally, I've been hiding out in my house to devour it in one sitting, which obviously led to a second sitting so I could read the entire book aloud. But I had to leave my house eventually, so Levis has been riding the subways with me. We're great company for each other.
Reading Levis, of course, made me pick up Philip Levine’s What Work Is again and that somehow made me pull out W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and Jack Gilbert. When I journeyed to Vermont for the Brattleboro Festival, I cried at a moving tribute for Galway Kinnell and that made me buy another copy of The Book of Nightmares, which made me stay up all night in my hotel room reading aloud, remembering once how I'd been fortunate enough to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with Kinnell and so many other poets like Cornelius Eady and Marilyn Nelson and Martín Espada. And I think it was over 90 degrees out and Bill Murray walked across that day with us too. Anyway, Kinnell pushed me toward Seamus Heaney and Czesław Miłosz. Throw in Tomas Tranströmer and Amiri Baraka's SOS: 1961 - 2013, and somehow eventually I'm holding Federico García Lorca, who is always near, and whose words also travel with me on trains, planes, and dreams.
When I read poetry I’ll sometimes take down several poets who may or may not be speaking clearly to one another in some tone or mood or style. It helps me hear each of them even more clearly.
Finally, I think, if there’s time, the last two things I hope to read (again) before 2016 arrives will be Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and the letters of Vincent Van Gogh.
As I sit here looking at the bookshelves crammed with new books, I simply sigh in joy and think, too, of the stacks of books at my visual art studio nearby. This year I'm a reader for something for PEN, which means in the last months I've read over 50 books by writers of color, including poetry, fiction, and non fiction. Thinking just of that list alone, there are far too many books this year for me to include here. How wonderful! We're all better for it!
So, here, quickly, are some more titles, both old and new, that changed me, whether by their grief, their beauty, their joy, their violence, their ambition, their desire, their imagination, their history, or future, but always, by their truth and courage:
Ross Gay, Unabashed Catalogues of Gratitude
Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn; Lighthead
Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things
Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus
Jack Gilbert, Collected
Carl Phillips, Reconnaissance
Nicholas Wong, Crevasse
Vievee Francis, Forest Primeval
Kyle Dargan, Honest Engine
Nick Flynn, My Feelings
Tonya M. Foster, A Swarm of Bees in High Court
Rickey Laurentiis, Boy with Thorn
Jonathan Moody, Olympic Butter Gold
Margo Jefferson, Negroland
Chris Abani, Song for Night
Rick Barot, Chord
Major Jackson, Roll Deep
Yesenia Montilla, The Pink Box
Randall Horton, Hook
Parneshia Jones, Vessel
Ellen Hagan, Hemisphere
Yusef Komunyakaa, The Emperor of Water Clocks
Audrey Niffenegger, Raven Girl
Michael Klein, When I Was a Twin
Patti Smith, M Train
Marie Cardinal, The Words to Say It
Dawn Lundy Martin, Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life
Michel Archimbaud, Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud
Paul Beatty, The Sellout
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping; Lila
Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees
Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite, War of the Encyclopaedists
Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
Marie Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye
Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel
Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill
Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
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God-born Devil’s S**t: Unleashing the Essence of Self-Help Books in Three Simple Steps
1. Step One: Admit You Have a Problem
Last month, New York Times critic Dwight Garner wrote a lukewarm review of two “philosophical” self-help books, the first installments in a series edited by Alain de Botton called The School of Life. Towards the beginning of the review we are cautioned that self-help books can be “fraught with peril,” attended by the risk “of leading millions of your innocent brain cells into the killing fields.” (The books under consideration appear to have been only mildly perilous.)
Garner’s disdain for the genre is nothing new. Disgust with self-help has been around since Dr. Samuel Smiles wrote his lucrative 1859 classic Self-Help, followed by a popular series of sequels: Character, Thrift, Duty, and Life and Labour. A laudatory 1893 review of this oeuvre begins with a telling disclaimer: “It is the fashion these days to speak in anything but complementary terms of Dr. Smiles and his different books...” Apparently hating on self-help was common practice by the turn of the century. The preface to the Oxford Classics edition of Self-Help cites a particularly blunt example, written by Irish author Robert Tressell in 1906: “[Self-Help] is suitable for perusal by persons suffering from almost complete obliteration of the mental faculties.”
Yet, in one of his many legacies to modern self-help, Smiles was both widely reviled and fantastically successful. He quickly became a household name in the English-speaking world — early printings of Self-Help sold out instantly, one of them reportedly purchased by Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species was published in the same year. Success was equally explosive abroad. Nakamura Masanao’s somewhat liberal 1871 Japanese translation Saigoku risshihen ("Success Stories of the West") eventually sold a million copies, serving as an exotic Western repackaging of stale Neo-Confucian values. (Scholars also credit Saigoku risshihen with introducing Hamlet to Japan: three lines from Polonius’s “Neither a borrower nor a lender be...” are the epigram for Chapter 10, “Money, It’s Use and Abuse.”)
Self-Help achieved a near-sacred status across the globe. It was translated into over a dozen languages (Dutch: Help u Zelfen) and did well in all of them. In his autobiography, Smiles recounts the following illustrative anecdote, related to him by a friend (and there is no reason to disbelieve it):
An English visitor to the Khedive’s palace in Egypt asked from what source the mottoes written on the walls were derived. “They are principally from Smeelis,” he was told, “you ought to know Smeelis! They are from his Self-Help; they are much better than the texts from the Koran!”
There are some for whom the very act of comparing “Smeelis’s” work with a foundational religious text will feel vaguely sacrilegious. The same kind of sacrilege is committed by Tom Butler-Bowdon in his meta-self-help bestseller, 50 Self-Help Classics, a Cliff’s Notes style alphabetical review in which Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star is followed by the Bhagavad-Gita, and Wayne Dyer’s Real Magic precedes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance.
Self-help detractors would want to accuse the Khedive palace architect of poor taste, and Butler-Bowdon of making a self-serving category mistake, elevating profitable trash by placing it in illustrious company. Others, like Alain de Botton, might call such accusations snobbish and unjustified, reflexive dismissals of recent work in the venerable tradition of wisdom literature, a tradition that traces its lineage back to the Dao-de-jing. Stoic philosophy, and the Bible.
No one expresses this tension better than Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle. Although Carlyle makes a cameo in Self-Help (as an exemplar of indefatigable industriousness), Smiles seems to have missed the appearance of his favorite concept in Carlyle’s satirical novel, Sartor Resartus. The novel purports to tell the true story of a German philosopher who develops a transcendentalist theory of clothing. In one of the earliest non-juridical uses of the term, this sartorial philosopher “acquires for himself” the virtue of Self-Help, which Carlyle’s narrator describes as “the highest of all possessions.”
But we cannot trust this description. Sartor Resartus is laced with irony (a rhetorical technique notably absent from most self-help, which is nothing if not earnest). Carlyle’s protagonist, for instance, is named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, which translates to God-born Devil’s Shit. In the ironizing shadow of Teufelsdröckh, everything in Sartor Resartus looks a little like divine truth and a little like incoherent platitude, from the self-helpish notion of the EVERLASTING YEA, “wherein all contradiction is solved,” to the very concept of self-help that Carlyle helps inaugurate. In other words, Teufelsdröckh makes me wonder: The EVERLASTING YEA, Self-Help, Samuel Smiles, The School of Life — are these essentially God-born or Devil’s Shit? That’s my problem. I don’t know how to feel about self-help. And like it says in the Bible, or the Bhagavad-Gita, or maybe it was Ben Franklin, 99% of solving a problem is identifying it, so I’m well on my way!
2. Step Two: Look Inside Yourself
It is always tempting to answer questions via a scholarly, objective route: are we more convinced by sociologist Micki McGee, whose analysis reveals self-help literature as a pernicious facilitator of American egoism and oppressive social norms, or by folklorist Sandra K. Dolby, who identifies in self-help the universal rhythms and patterns of parables and folk wisdom? While researching this essay, however, I learned from numerous self-help authors that answers to profound philosophical questions don’t come from other people, especially not scholars. I also learned the sad truth about “objectivity,” a pseudo-concept that Daoist sages, quantum physicists, and Deepak Chopra’s tweets have all shown to be objectively false.
What’s left? Where can we turn?
The only person you can depend on for answers is YOU, which means consulting your own, unmediated, subjective feelings, and then allowing them to speak the Truth.
Okay, here goes. When it comes to self-help, my unmediated, subjective feelings place me squarely in the Devil’s Shit camp. Just reading certain titles (Learning to Dance in the Rain, To a Child Love is Spelled T-I-M-E) prompts a deep and spontaneous revulsion. This revulsion is both aesthetic, a matter of taste, and intellectual, a matter of truth. And it is unique, reserved for a very small number of cultural products — off the top of my head I come up with Thomas Kinkade paintings, smooth jazz, and televangelism. (Olive Garden? Close, but not quite.)
It’s clear to me why televangelism makes the list. There’s obvious crossover between evangelism and self-help, their easy synthesis epitomized by Joel Osteen and Rick Warren. Christian self-help is a sub-genre so ubiquitous that when I entered a Christian bookstore and asked for the self-help section, one employee looked at me quizzically and said, “Well, that’s pretty much everything in here, unless you’re looking for a Bible.” Nominally secular self-help routinely borrows Christian terms and metaphors (calling, mission). Even science-y Tony Robbins is indebted to televangelism — sociologist McGee quotes Robbins’s infomercial co-producer Greg Renker: “The infomercial boomed because the televangelists ran into problems. We are the new televangelists.”
The link between self-help and televangelism helps make sense of my intellectual revulsion. Rick Warren may be a charismatic speaker, but he is a lousy interpreter of the Bible. Take, for example, his reading of Jeremiah 29:11, where God says, “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Warren takes the passage out of context and reads it as an uplifting message for everyone. But God’s words in Jeremiah 29:11 are actually meant specifically for the Israelites exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon. Contextualization is important, because without it one could appropriate Jeremiah 29:18 to show that God suffers from wild mood swings (“I will send the sword, famine and plague”), or Jeremiah 29:26 as justification for locking up people like Rick Warren: “You should put any maniac who acts like a prophet into the stocks and neck-irons.”
Many self-help books take similar liberties with science, history, and Eastern philosophy, my own area of expertise. I can only assume that quantum physicists are as frustrated by Deepak Chopra’s Quantum Healing as I am by the short biography of Laozi on the front flap of Dr. Wayne Dyer’s version of the Dao-de-jing: “Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Laozi in ancient China dictated 81 verses...” While I share Dyer’s admiration of the Dao-de-jing, it’s unclear to me why extolling its virtues entails willful ignorance (or duplicity) about its origins. Wikipedia helpfully points out that sinologists have serious doubts about Laozi’s historical existence, and a quick read of D.C. Lau’s preface to the Penguin edition explains the composite nature of the text. One thinks Dyer’s extensive research (mentioned repeatedly) would have turned up Lau’s influential analysis, but it is nowhere to be found.
So, unsurprisingly, my intellectual revulsion is a reaction to untruth, the result of either idiocy or mendacity, depending on the self-help author in question. In order to explain my aesthetic revulsion, then, I merely need to figure out what self-help shares with smooth jazz and Thomas Kinkade.
Hmm. What could the Painter of Light™ have in common with self-help authors? Famous for his religiously-themed art, yet fond of public urination, accused of ruthless business practices, dead at 54 from a valium and alcohol overdose, the subject of posthumous scandal when his wife placed a restraining order on his girlfriend. Surely famous self-help authors don’t have similarly sordid and profit-driven biographies…
No! Wait! This is just a distracting, ad hominem argument that can’t prove anything about the aesthetics of Kinkade’s work or self-help books. Block out the negative energy. Focus. Look through your inner eye (eyes?) at the glowing pink cottage. What do you see? Listen with your inner ear to Kenny G. What do you hear? Read Stephen Covey with your heart. What do you feel?
I see… I hear… I feel… nothing. Nothing! That’s it! Kinkade’s over-saturated pastels, Kenny G’s bland solos, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: they have no soul. And this, ultimately, is the source of my aesthetic revulsion. It’s not that self-help writers are unskilled, though many of them are. It’s that they exploit a formula: co-opt an established authority (religion, philosophy, science, historical hero, literary master), add uplifting anecdotes, mix with self-adulation and empty promises, season with acronyms or lucky numbers, and serve! (I’ll leave it to art critics and music critics to detail the formulas behind smooth jazz and Kinkade’s mass-produced schlock.)
But true soullessness goes beyond formula. After all, fairy tales and blues are as formulaic as it gets, and they are God-born through and through. No, Devil’s Shit only results when formulas are calculated to produce maximal ease and safety, and then used to manufacture religious insights, jazz, or the self, products that are by nature challenging, dangerous, and complicated. That’s why 18th century morality tales for children (The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, etc.) are so repugnant. Seven Easy Tricks for a Delicious Sandwich isn’t sacrilege — it’s a cookbook. But Seven Easy Tricks to Save Your Soul…
In short: Only Satan could enjoy reading The Purpose Driven® Life while listening to smooth jazz in a room filled with Kinkade landscapes. Actually, that’s not quite it. Only Satan could enjoy producing such a scene.
3. Step Three: Stand Up for What You Believe
Objection 1: Self-help books work for me/work for people, so why be nasty about them?
Answer: This objection rests on two flawed premises. The first is that self-help books work for people. While twelve-step programs (a noble relative of self-help books) enjoy some empirical validation, self-help books do not. This lack of validation will not deter self-help fans, fond as they are of anecdotal evidence. That’s fine. Victims of medical quackery are notoriously unwilling to admit the inefficacy of their favored panacea, even when it has obviously failed them. Why should it be any different for victims of spiritual quackery? Nevertheless, for the sake of explanation: as in those cases when astonishing cancer recoveries are misattributed to faith-healing or coffee-enemas, it’s likely that the perceived efficacy of self-help books is due to chance, the passage of time, or unsung orthodox treatment (therapy, exercise, friendship) undertaken in conjunction with the miracle cure.
The second flawed premise is that one shouldn’t be nasty about things that work. The geocentric model of the universe worked (Gee, our planet is super-special!). Propaganda works (Gee, our country is super-special!). Falsehoods and empty rhetoric deserve to be unmasked because people are entitled to think for themselves about important truths, even at the cost of happy complacency. And never fear, there’s all sorts of writing that can replace the crap I’m spoiling—just comb the epigrams of any self-help book and read whatever it is they came from.
Objection 2: But there’s lots of good self-help! Haven’t you heard of Aesop’s Fables?
Answer: Fair enough. A wildly broad definition of self-help ends up including everything from Aesop’s Fables to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet to Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation, books well-worth reading and re-reading. But the problem is not with offering life counsel. The problem is with counsel that promises quick fixes and simple solutions, promises that are definitive of self-help. Otherwise there would be no need for the term at all: we already have philosophy, religion, fiction, psychology, economics, biography. What distinguishes self-help from these other categories is how it markets the allure of certain success in an endeavor where success is never certain, an approach evident in less unholy forms of self-help like diet books. As with propaganda, the evil is built right into the meaning of the genre, poisoning anything so-classified (even decent stuff) simply by association.
In an essay defending self-help, Alain de Botton writes, “The ancient philosophers recognized we all need help navigating our lives – so what explains self-help books’ decline in prestige?” But he is conflating wise masterpieces, which haven’t declined in prestige (does anyone trash Letters to a Young Poet?), with self-help, which, as we have seen, was always immensely popular and never prestigious. Ancient and modern philosophy already have a section in the bookstore. Categorizing them as self-help is a straightforward move made to sell more books by lacquering them with false hope. (Which is why it’s no shock that de Botton’s spirited defense appeared in the Guardian just after his School of Life series debuted.)
Objection 3: You’re a cultural elitist.
Answer: Really? George Carlin, the same guy who hated parents that wear Baby-Bjorns, put “these people that read self-help books” first on his list of “people who ought to be killed.” The problem with this objection is that it confuses good judgment with elitism, a confusion that is itself elitist. In a recent New York Magazine article, Kathryn Schulz describes her vision of someone who looks down on self-help: “I know people who wouldn’t so much as walk through the self-help section of a bookstore without The Paris Review under one arm and a puzzled oh-I-thought-the-bathroom-was-over-here look on their face.” De Botton agrees: “The unstated assumption of the cultural elite is that really only stupid people read them.”
Actually, it is an unstated assumption of the cultural elite that only those with high-falutin’ humanities degrees have a nose for Devil’s Shit. This is manifestly false. All you need to loathe smooth jazz is an ear for music. Anyone equipped with a moral compass who has heard the Sermon on the Mount will be revolted by Osteen’s pearly-toothed prosperity gospel. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the paradox in self-help’s insipid affirmation of its readers’ inner strength. In Carlin’s words, “The part I really don’t understand, if you’re looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?! That’s not self-help, that’s help! There’s no such thing as self-help… if you did it yourself, you didn’t need help. You did it yourself! Try to pay attention to the language we’ve all agreed on!”
To be fair, Carlin might be trying to put his competition out of business, since he’s hawking his own brand of simple, formulaic wisdom: “Life is not that complicated. You get up, you go to work, you eat three meals, you take one good shit and you go back to bed. What’s the fucking mystery?”
Now there’s some good self-help, straight from the mouth of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh.
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