Mentioned in:
Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview
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
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The Exuberant Diversity of Ukrainian Literature
When Russia invaded Ukraine one year ago, the region of Sumy, just northeast of Kyiv, came under intense bombardment, endangering the house where Anton Chekhov spent two halcyon summers working on his play The Wood Demon, as well as several short stories. The house had been turned into a museum in 1960 and contained many irreplaceable artifacts, including Chekhov’s medical instruments and a portrait of Chekhov painted by his brother Nikolay.
Chekhov was born in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, just across the border from Ukraine. His paternal grandmother was Ukrainian, and—according to Chekhov—he spoke Ukrainian as a child. His first major literary breakthrough, the long short story “The Steppe,” was based on his boyhood journeys across the vast Ukrainian steppe to visit his grandparents. It is suffused with the bucolic, unspoiled charm of this fabled land. The story delighted readers and critics in Moscow and St. Petersburg, who seemed to be always dazzled by tales of this land that the Russian Empire was eternally bent on subjugating.
In later years, Chekhov often jokingly referred to himself as a khokhol, a derogatory Russian term for a Ukrainian. His letters from Sumy describe lazy days fishing on Psyol River and exploring the countryside. His enchantment with Ukraine is abundantly clear in his letter to Nikolai Leikin describing his travels through Ukraine in 1888:
I received your second letter, dearest Nikolai Alexandrovich, yesterday, upon returning from Poltava province…. I have been in Lebedyn, Hadyach, Sorochintsy and many places extolled by Gogol. What places they are! I am completely enchanted. I had the good luck to have wonderfully warm weather the whole time, travelled in a comfortable sprung carriage and arrived in Poltava province just when they had started haymaking.
Chekhov was so taken by the region that he eventually began searching for a small estate, planning on permanently relocating there. As he explained to Leikin:
Everything I saw and heard was so new, good and wholesome that throughout the journey I could not dispel the bewitching idea of abandoning literature, which I’m fed up with, settling in some village or other on the banks of the River Psyol and practicing medicine. If I lived on my own, I would stay in Poltava province, as I don't feel any attachment to Moscow. I would spend my summers in Ukraine and come to lovely St. Petersburg in the winter. Apart from nature, nothing about Ukraine astonishes me more than the feeling of general contentment, people's good health, and the high level of development of the peasants here, who are clever, devout, musical, sober, morally upright, and always jolly and well-fed.
Chekhov’s strong ties with Ukraine are usually dismissed by Russian critics—and he is not alone. There are many other world-famous writers who rose from the fertile soil of Ukraine, though “official” narratives often obscure these origins.
Joseph Conrad is remembered as a Polish writer who he went on to become one of the great masters of the English language. But the author of Heart of Darkness was actually born in a small village near Kyiv, and Ukraine was his home throughout his early years. As an ethnic Pole from Ukraine, Conrad has been exhaustively viewed by critics through his Polish roots, but his Ukrainian heritage and upbringing have gone relatively unnoticed.
Then there is Nicolai Gogol, one of the founding fathers of Russian literature—except that Gogol was actually Ukrainian through and through. He grew up in the Poltava Province in central Ukraine, a native speaker of Ukrainian. His first book, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, was set in the “exotic” locale of the Ukrainian countryside and was hugely successful in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where Russian literary circles were hungry for folk tales with colorful settings. Gogol wrote in Russian at a time when the Ukrainian language was suppressed by Tsarist Russia, and the teaching of Ukrainian in most schools was banned.
And, of course, Isaac Babel and Sholem Aleichem were natives of Ukraine who wrote about the Jewish experience in the thriving, polyglot, multiethnic world of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ukraine. Both Babel’s Odessa Stories and Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman (which became the basis for Fiddler on the Roof) are thoroughly infused with a uniquely Ukrainian ethos.
The list of other great writers from Ukraine goes on and on. Mikhail Bulgakov, whose novel The Master and Margarita is a classic of modern fiction, was born in Kyiv in 1891 and graduated from the University of Kyiv in 1916. Vasily Grossman was also born and bred in Ukraine; his novel Life and Fate is one of the greatest war novels ever written. Yet because they are ethnically Russian, Bulgakov and Grossman are usually referred to as Russian writers. (This would be like calling Jack Kerouac a Canadian writer because his ancestry is French-Canadian.) In things literary—as with so many things—Ukraine is the locus of many heated arguments.
“Ukraine” literally translated means “borderland,” and that accurately describes the history of this troubled, war-torn terrain whose borders have shifted with dizzying rapidity, especially in the twentieth century. From its heyday 1,000 years ago, when Kievan Rus extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Ukraine has been occupied, annexed, and chopped up by neighboring countries so often that its cities are a palimpsest of ethnicities, cultures, and languages. In the twentieth century alone, western Ukraine has changed hands between Poland, Romania, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Its main city, Lviv, was Lwow when it was part of Poland, Lemberg when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Lvov when it was taken over by the Soviet Union.
As a result, modern Ukrainian literature today is a thriving, heterodox, polyglot scene, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration of Ukrainian independence 30 years ago. But the gnawing question of Ukrainian statehood—so elusive for most of its history—combined with the systematic repression of the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture has made some Ukrainians ambivalent about fully embracing the many writers from Ukraine who are not ethnic Ukrainians.
Now, at a time when Russia’s brazen and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine threatens not only Ukraine’s independence but also its cultural inheritance and language, there is a new urgency to protect and promote Ukraine’s rich cultural and literary heritage, which is in fact a multilingual and multiethnic tapestry.
*
Three recently translated novels from Ukraine—each one celebrated for revealing the “true” Ukraine—nicely demonstrate the astonishing breadth and depth of contemporary Ukrainian literature: Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees (Kurkov lives in Kyiv, is ethnically Russian, and writes in Russian), Żanna Słoniowska’s The House with the Stained-Glass Window (Słoniowska is from Lviv, is ethnically Polish, and writes in Polish), and Maria Matios’s Sweet Darusya (Matios is from Bukovina in southwestern Ukraine, is ethnically Ukrainian, and writes in Ukrainian).
Kurkov is no doubt the best known of the three. When his tragicomic masterpiece Death and the Penguin burst on the scene in 1996, it was widely translated, received glowing reviews, and put post-Soviet Ukrainian literature on the map. In 2002, Kurkov followed up with an equally compelling sequel, Penguin Lost, which firmly established his beloved penguin, Misha, as an unlikely symbol of the new Ukraine, occupying a space that seemed made of equal parts of absurdity and compassion.
The serio-comic vein of Kurkov’s early work, as well as his madcap Rabelaisian streak, has greatly mellowed over the years, no doubt due to the many upheavals and conflicts that Ukraine has endured over the past 20 years. In his most recent novel Grey Bees, translated by Boris Dralyuk, the style and tone are much more grounded and introspective. Long, wistful reminiscences and scenes of domestic housekeeping are interspersed with tense battle scenes and confrontations with the military. The acidic, amused sarcasm and irony of Kurkov’s early narrative voice has given way to a deeply humane and sympathetic narrator. The rampant political corruption and bureaucratic dysfunction that once was a topic for bemused laughter and satire have now become elements of a tragedy.
Grey Bees is set in the years immediately after Russia annexed Crimea and instigated the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, but before the current full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The “grey” in Grey Bees refers to the gray zone in the east between the Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian defenders—front lines that were virtually frozen for eight years, resulting in thousands of casualties. Between these front lines, most people evacuated from towns and cities, but some stayed, like Kurkov’s gruff but loveable protagonist, Sergeyich, a beekeeper completely devoted to his bees.
The novel traces Sergeyich’s peripatetic odyssey across war-torn Ukraine to find a peaceful meadow where his bees can thrive unmolested by mortars or artillery fire. About half the novel recounts his adventures and mishaps on the road. When Sergeyich finally arrives in Crimea searching for his fellow beekeeper, a Crimean Tatar, the full ugliness and horror of the Russian occupation become clear. Through it all, the health and welfare of his bees is Sergeyich’s main concern, and gradually this worry soon becomes the reader’s own. We feel for those bees, root for those bees, feel joy for those bees when they are finally liberated to fly free among wildflowers. In a sense, the bees give Sergeyich’s life a purpose and bring out his best qualities:
If it weren’t for the bees, he wouldn’t have gone anywhere…. But bees don’t understand what war is. Bees can’t switch from peace to war and back again, as people do. They must be allowed to perform their main task—the only task in their power—to which they were appointed by nature and by God: collecting and spreading pollen. That’s why he had to go, to drive them out to where it was quiet, where the air was gradually filling with the sweetness of blossoming herbs, where the choir of these herbs would soon be supported by the choir of flowering cherry, apple, apricot and acacia trees.
The bees become an easily transportable microcosm representing all innocent creatures (including humans) whose lives are affected by the violence of war. Sergeyich—gruff, hard-drinking, and disheveled—is rendered almost saintly by his devotion to his bees and to his fellow beekeeper, a Crimean Tatar who was “disappeared” by the Russian occupiers. To put it another way, the bees are Kurkov’s symbolic “penguin” in this novel—a stand-in for Misha the lost penguin now transformed into a colony of tireless workers that humans depend on. And, just as the main task of the penguin novels was rescuing and returning Misha to his native habitat, so, too, with these bees. There is always, it seems, a penguin in Kurkov’s novels even when it’s not a penguin.
[caption id="attachment_148298" align="aligncenter" width="578"] "Chuguev Landscape" by Ilya Repin (1867)[/caption]
Unlike Kurkov’s earlier novels, Grey Bees carries an overt political message, made even clearer by Kurkov’s new foreword to the book written after Russia’s full-scale invasion, in which he excoriates Russia and Vladimir Putin. Żanna Słoniowska’s The House with the Stained-Glass Window, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, couldn’t be more different. It is set in Lviv, on the opposite side of the country from Grey Bees. Unlike Kurkov, Słoniowska does not try to uncover the soul of Ukraine by delving deeply into the hearts of its people. Rather, she focuses on the human-built environment—specifically the city of Lviv—whose streets, architecture, cemeteries, and public spaces tell the story of the manifold peoples and cultures who have made this storied metropolis their home. To do this, she moves backward and forward in time, tracing the lives of four generations of an ethnic Polish family as they endure the privations and horrors of the region’s modern history.
Słoniowska’s unnamed narrator remains an enigma. She’s the daughter of Marianna, a famous opera singer killed during an anti-Soviet demonstration. Her quest to understand not only her mother, but her grandmother and great-grandmother, becomes an attempt to recover the lost or suppressed history of the family, the city, and of Ukraine as a whole. She learns to “read the city like a great book,” uncovering hidden inscriptions in Yiddish, visiting cemeteries, and venturing deep underground to find the Poltva River, buried beneath the opera house.
Her guide throughout is the city itself. Every building, every street, and every monument—even her family’s own house—has its story to tell. The house’s magnificent stained-glass window becomes a central symbol of the novel. Three stories tall and made of 72 colors of glass, the window depicts a magnificent tree from its subterranean roots up to its lush canopy in a cerulean sky. It is described as “an allegory of life’s upward climb,” but it is also a potent symbol for the nation of Ukraine itself—an assemblage of multicolored shards and fragments that somehow has been welded into a whole, perfect in itself, a thing of rare beauty. As one character says of the stained-glass window, “It’s the house that was made to fit the window, not the other way around,” which could also be a comment on the nation of Ukraine.
In both Kurkov and Słoniowska’s novels, there is an intermingling of many languages—Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Crimean Tatar—and characters are partly defined by what languages they speak or choose to speak in various circumstances. Code-switching abounds, and what one says is often not as important as the language used to say it. Though she is ethnically Polish, Marianna declares one day that she will speak only Ukrainian as a form of protest against the Soviet regime, and both her daughter and grandmother are confused. As Marianna later explains, “Blood ties are of no significance here. I am Ukrainian by choice.”
In a recent essay for the New York Times, Słoniowska writes that “Ukrainian identity is porous, inclusive, multilayered and, crucially, a work in progress.” This is also how she has structured her novel—and how she views the city of Lviv in particular. The novel leaps backward and forward in time, just as a walk through Lviv simultaneously demonstrates how lost times and peoples persist in the living anatomy of the city—the cobblestone streets and Hapsburg-era townhouses, the old cemeteries, the grand Opera House.
The House with the Stained Glass Window, Słoniowska’s first novel, is ambitious and original, plunging you into the marrow of Lviv where time is fluid and palpable. She has a poet’s flair for rendering scenes and descriptions incisively so that the aftertaste of the novel is distinctly cinematic. You feel you have been in the city and walked its streets, not just read about it.
[caption id="attachment_148300" align="aligncenter" width="427"] "Landscape in Crimea" by Arkhip Kuindzhi (1896)[/caption]
Venturing just a bit south of Lviv, we’d find ourselves in the storied Carpathian Mountains of Galicia, which is where Maria Matios’s Sweet Darusya is set. After Kurkov and Słoniowska, reading Sweet Darusya feels like entering a different universe entirely. It is a haunting book, poetic and disturbing, that manages to capture the violent and tragic history of modern Ukraine through the story of one woman and her family in a remote village deep in the mountains.
Sweet Darusya, translated by Michael Naydan and Olha Tytarenko, unfolds over three generations in the twentieth century, though the timeframe is not immediately apparent. This narrative of the local Hutsul people in the village of Cheremoshne deep in the Carpathians might just as well have been set in the twelfth century as the twentieth. It’s not until the middle of the book that a date—1940—jolts the reader into the realization that the book is describing relatively modern events, not something from the Middle Ages.
Matios’s prose can be as spare and lapidary as Elmore Leonard, then break out into rhapsodic interludes, but these moments are short-lived, inevitably giving way to grief, tragedy, and scenes of horrific violence. It is a powerful book, high-octane and combustible, that details the successive occupations of this otherwise peaceful mountain country by Romania, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union.
The titular “Sweet Darusya” is a woman who the villagers take for crazy—something between a holy fool and a witch. She never speaks and often partakes of strange rituals, such as burying herself in her garden so that the living soil can leach out the pains wracking her body. Gradually, the question of why Darusya will not speak grows larger in the reader’s mind, with many tantalizing hints and allusions to past events. As the novel travels further back in time, excavating the past like an archeologist uncovering ancient bones, the eventual revelation of the reason for Darusya’s silence comes as a shock, shattering in its intensity.
Darusya lives alone, isolated and shunned, and initially there is no explanation for her solitary existence. When she meets and falls in love with Ivan Tsvychok, her whole world is uplifted, and the novel is momentarily suffused with beauty and peace. Ivan is an itinerant maker of drymbas. “Drymba” is the Ukrainian word for a jaw harp (or “Jew’s harp”), an instrument of almost occult significance for the Hutsul people. Ivan fashions drymbas from scrap metal and beguiles everyone, including Darusya, with his playing. Women are especially drawn to the drymba, as Matios’s often chatty narrator explains:
A Hutsul girl sits herself down in the grass flooded by the sun on a hill or somewhere under a silver fir—and the world doesn’t trouble her: she fingers the drymba, and she doesn’t need Buckingham Palace, or a husband, or a lover on the side, or firewater.
The music of the drymba can rescue a miserable day or even make a tragic life bearable. Listening to the drymba, “your heart becomes overwhelmed with tears and song at the same time.” Throughout this chronicle of violent and troubled times, it is the drymba that becomes the central symbol of the novel: It is a device by which people can instill harmony in themselves while charming listeners—one of the few things in this tumultuous world that can deliver people from pain, suffering, and misfortune.
Whereas Kurkov’s iterative symbols of Misha the penguin and the grey bees foreground our ties to our fellow creatures, and Słoniowska’s symbol of the stained-glass window keys on human artifacts and the human-built environment, Matois’s symbol of the drymba focuses on the intersection where music fuses with the human body—where art and anatomy intersect.
The drymba, or jaw harp, is an instrument that makes music by literally turning the human body into a musical instrument. The thin metal spur provides the vibration, but it is the hollow human mouth that amplifies and shapes the sound while the body as a whole—nasal cavities, throat, lungs, teeth, bones, and tongue—provides the resonance. In Matios’s novel—so disturbing and tragic—this is the enduring symbol that emerges from the suffering and violence—the potential within our souls to become music, even if just for a little while, despite the overwhelming odds against us.
These three novels, originally written in three different languages, demonstrate the vast range of contemporary Ukrainian literature. Kurkov’s Ukraine is full of engaging and complex characters negotiating an often-confounding bureaucracy mired in a war that nobody seems to want or understand. Słoniowska’s Ukraine is a palimpsest of manifold peoples and cultures where history lies layered beneath the thin surface of the present. And in Matios’s Ukraine, humans are eternally caught in a desperate and doomed struggle for love and happiness in a universe where death and mortality always prevail, through war or simply through the passage of time.
So which is the real Ukraine? The answer, of course, is all of them, together.
*
Back in Sumy, during those terrible early days of the war, the relentless bombardment luckily did not damage the Chekhov Museum. Elsewhere in the country, cultural institutions have not been so lucky. All across Ukraine, museums, monuments, universities, and cultural sites have been destroyed, damaged, or looted. In October, rocket attacks on Kyiv damaged the Bulgakov Museum and the Taras Shevchenko National University. Russian forces seem to go out of their way to target monuments to Shevchenko, the revered nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet who denounced the Russian Empire and tirelessly advocated for Ukrainian independence.
So perhaps it is fitting to let Shevchenko have the last word. In an uncannily prescient way, Shevchenko’s poems often look ahead to a time when Ukraine will at last win its freedom and its fields will be soaked with the blood of its foes, as in his most famous poem, “Testament,” translated by Clarence Manning:
When I die, O lay my body
In a lofty tomb
Out upon the steppes unbounded
In my own dear Ukraine;
So that I can see before me
The wide stretching meadows
And Dnipro, its banks so lofty,
And can hear it roaring,
As it carries far from Ukraine
Unto the blue sea
All our foemen’s blood