Mentioned in:
Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2025 Preview
It's cold, it's grey, its bleak—but winter, at the very least, brings with it a glut of anticipation-inducing books. Here you’ll find nearly 100 titles that we’re excited to cozy up with this season. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to devour based on their authors, subjects, or blurbs. We'd love for you to find your next great read among them.
The Millions will be taking a hiatus for the next few months, but we hope to see you soon.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
January
The Legend of Kumai by Shirato Sanpei, tr. Richard Rubinger (Drawn & Quarterly)
The epic 10-volume series, a touchstone of longform storytelling in manga now published in English for the first time, follows outsider Kamui in 17th-century Japan as he fights his way up from peasantry to the prized role of ninja. —Michael J. Seidlinger
The Life of Herod the Great by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad)
In the years before her death in 1960, Hurston was at work on what she envisioned as a continuation of her 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain. Incomplete, nearly lost to fire, and now published for the first time alongside scholarship from editor Deborah G. Plant, Hurston’s final manuscript reimagines Herod, villain of the New Testament Gospel accounts, as a magnanimous and beloved leader of First Century Judea. —Jonathan Frey
Mood Machine by Liz Pelly (Atria)
When you eagerly posted your Spotify Wrapped last year, did you notice how much of what you listened to tended to sound... the same? Have you seen all those links to Bandcamp pages your musician friends keep desperately posting in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, you might give them money for their art? If so, this book is for you. —John H. Maher
My Country, Africa by Andrée Blouin (Verso)
African revolutionary Blouin recounts a radical life steeped in activism in this vital autobiography, from her beginnings in a colonial orphanage to her essential role in the continent's midcentury struggles for decolonization. —Sophia M. Stewart
The First and Last King of Haiti by Marlene L. Daut (Knopf)
Donald Trump repeatedly directs extraordinary animus towards Haiti and Haitians. This biography of Henry Christophe—the man who played a pivotal role in the Haitian Revolution—might help Americans understand why. —Claire Kirch
The Bewitched Bourgeois by Dino Buzzati, tr. Lawrence Venuti (NYRB)
This is the second story collection, and fifth book, by the absurdist-leaning midcentury Italian writer—whose primary preoccupation was war novels that blend the brutal with the fantastical—to get the NYRB treatment. May it not be the last. —JHM
Y2K by Colette Shade (Dey Street)
The recent Y2K revival mostly makes me feel old, but Shade's essay collection deftly illuminates how we got here, connecting the era's social and political upheavals to today. —SMS
Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay (Penguin)
In a vast dystopian reimagining of Nepal, Upadhyay braids narratives of resistance (political, personal) and identity (individual, societal) against a backdrop of natural disaster and state violence. The first book in nearly a decade from the Whiting Award–winning author of Arresting God in Kathmandu, this is Upadhyay’s most ambitious yet. —JF
Metamorphosis by Ross Jeffery (Truborn)
From the author of I Died Too, But They Haven’t Buried Me Yet, a woman leads a double life as she loses her grip on reality by choice, wearing a mask that reflects her inner demons, as she descends into a hell designed to reveal the innermost depths of her grief-stricken psyche. —MJS
The Containment by Michelle Adams (FSG)
Legal scholar Adams charts the failure of desegregation in the American North through the story of the struggle to integrate suburban schools in Detroit, which remained almost completely segregated nearly two decades after Brown v. Board. —SMS
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow)
African Futurist Okorafor’s book-within-a-book offers interchangeable cover images, one for the story of a disabled, Black visionary in a near-present day and the other for the lead character’s speculative posthuman novel, Rusted Robots. Okorafor deftly keeps the alternating chapters and timelines in conversation with one another. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Open Socrates by Agnes Callard (Norton)
Practically everything Agnes Callard says or writes ushers in a capital-D Discourse. (Remember that profile?) If she can do the same with a study of the philosophical world’s original gadfly, culture will be better off for it. —JHM
Aflame by Pico Iyer (Riverhead)
Presumably he finds time to eat and sleep in there somewhere, but it certainly appears as if Iyer does nothing but travel and write. His latest, following 2023’s The Half Known Life, makes a case for the sublimity, and necessity, of silent reflection. —JHM
The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill (Avon)
A local bookstore becomes a literal portal to the past for a trans man who returns to his hometown in search of a fresh start in Underhill's tender debut. —SMS
Good Girl by Aria Aber (Hogarth)
Aber, an accomplished poet, turns to prose with a debut novel set in the electric excess of Berlin’s bohemian nightlife scene, where a young German-born Afghan woman finds herself enthralled by an expat American novelist as her country—and, soon, her community—is enflamed by xenophobia. —JHM
The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich (Two Dollar Radio)
Krilanovich’s 2010 cult classic, about a runaway teen with drug-fueled ESP who searches for her missing sister across surreal highways while being chased by a killer named Dactyl, gets a much-deserved reissue. —MJS
Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski (Liveright)
In the latest novel from the National Book Award finalist, a 50-something actress reevaluates her life and career when #MeToo allegations roil the off-off-Broadway Shakespearean company that has cast her in the role of Cleopatra. —SMS
Something Rotten by Andrew Lipstein (FSG)
A burnt-out couple leave New York City for what they hope will be a blissful summer in Denmark when their vacation derails after a close friend is diagnosed with a rare illness and their marriage is tested by toxic influences. —MJS
The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow by Kristen Martin (Bold Type)
Martin's debut is a cultural history of orphanhood in America, from the 1800s to today, interweaving personal narrative and archival research to upend the traditional "orphan narrative," from Oliver Twist to Annie. —SMS
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, tr. E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth)
Kang’s Nobel win last year surprised many, but the consistency of her talent certainly shouldn't now. The latest from the author of The Vegetarian—the haunting tale of a Korean woman who sets off to save her injured friend’s pet at her home in Jeju Island during a deadly snowstorm—will likely once again confront the horrors of history with clear eyes and clarion prose. —JHM
We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard (Milkweed)
As the conversation around emerging technology skews increasingly to apocalyptic and utopian extremes, Béchard’s latest novel adopts the heterodox-to-everyone approach of embracing complexity. Here, a cadre of characters is isolated by a rogue but benevolent AI into controlled environments engineered to achieve their individual flourishing. The AI may have taken over, but it only wants to best for us. —JF
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case (Grand Central)
Singer-songwriter Case, a country- and folk-inflected indie rocker and sometime vocalist for the New Pornographers, takes her memoir’s title from her 2013 solo album. Followers of PNW music scene chronicles like Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl and drummer Steve Moriarty’s Mia Zapata and the Gits will consider Case’s backstory a must-read. —NodB
The Loves of My Life by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)
The 85-year-old White recounts six decades of love and sex in this candid and erotic memoir, crafting a landmark work of queer history in the process. Seminal indeed. —SMS
Blob by Maggie Su (Harper)
In Su’s hilarious debut, Vi Liu is a college dropout working a job she hates, nothing really working out in her life, when she stumbles across a sentient blob that she begins to transform as her ideal, perfect man that just might resemble actor Ryan Gosling. —MJS
Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids by Leyna Krow (Penguin)
Krow’s debut novel, Fire Season, traced the combustible destinies of three Northwest tricksters in the aftermath of an 1889 wildfire. In her second collection of short fiction, Krow amplifies surreal elements as she tells stories of ordinary lives. Her characters grapple with deadly viruses, climate change, and disasters of the Anthropocene’s wilderness. —NodB
Black in Blues by Imani Perry (Ecco)
The National Book Award winner—and one of today's most important thinkers—returns with a masterful meditation on the color blue and its role in Black history and culture. —SMS
Too Soon by Betty Shamieh (Avid)
The timely debut novel by Shamieh, a playwright, follows three generations of Palestinian American women as they navigate war, migration, motherhood, and creative ambition. —SMS
How to Talk About Love by Plato, tr. Armand D'Angour (Princeton UP)
With modern romance on its last legs, D'Angour revisits Plato's Symposium, mining the philosopher's masterwork for timeless, indispensable insights into love, sex, and attraction. —SMS
At Dark, I Become Loathsome by Eric LaRocca (Blackstone)
After Ashley Lutin’s wife dies, he takes the grieving process in a peculiar way, posting online, “If you're reading this, you've likely thought that the world would be a better place without you,” and proceeds to offer a strange ritual for those that respond to the line, equally grieving and lost, in need of transcendence. —MJS
February
No One Knows by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy (New Directions)
A selection of stories translated in English for the first time, from across Dazai’s career, demonstrates his penchant for exploring conformity and society’s often impossible expectations of its members. —MJS
Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (Bloomsbury)
This queer love story set in post–Gilded Age New York, from the author of Glassworks (and one of my favorite Millions essays to date), explores on sex, power, and capitalism through the lives of three queer misfits. —SMS
Pure, Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III (Random House)
This podcaster and pop culture critic spoke to indie booksellers at a fall trade show I attended, regaling us with key cultural moments in the 1990s that shaped his youth in Milwaukee and being Black and gay. If the book is as clever and witty as Madison is, it's going to be a winner. —CK
Gliff by Ali Smith (Pantheon)
The Scottish author has been on the scene since 1997 but is best known today for a seasonal quartet from the late twenty-teens that began in 2016 with Autumn and ended in 2020 with Summer. Here, she takes the genre turn, setting two children and a horse loose in an authoritarian near future. —JHM
Land of Mirrors by Maria Medem, tr. Aleshia Jensen and Daniela Ortiz (D&Q)
This hypnotic graphic novel from one of Spain's most celebrated illustrators follows Antonia, the sole inhabitant of a deserted town, on a color-drenched quest to preserve the dying flower that gives her purpose. —SMS
Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya (Random House)
As odes to the "lifesaving power of books" proliferate amid growing literary censorship, Chihaya—a brilliant critic and writer—complicates this platitude in her revelatory memoir about living through books and the power of reading to, in the words of blurber Namwali Serpell, "wreck and redeem our lives." —SMS
Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch (Riverhead)
Yuknavitch continues the personal story she began in her 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water. More than a decade after that book, and nearly undone by a history of trauma and the death of her daughter, Yuknavitch revisits the solace she finds in swimming (she was once an Olympic hopeful) and in her literary community. —NodB
The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha (Graywolf)
A son reevaluates the life of his Egyptian mother after her death in Rakha's novel. Recounting her sprawling life story—from her youth in 1960s Cairo to her experience of the 2011 Tahrir Square protests—a vivid portrait of faith, feminism, and contemporary Egypt emerges. —SMS
Tetra Nova by Sophia Terazawa (Deep Vellum)
Deep Vellum has a particularly keen eye for fiction in translation that borders on the unclassifiable. This debut from a poet the press has published twice, billed as the story of “an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century,” seems right up that alley. —JHM
David Lynch's American Dreamscape by Mike Miley (Bloomsbury)
Miley puts David Lynch's films in conversation with literature and music, forging thrilling and unexpected connections—between Eraserhead and "The Yellow Wallpaper," Inland Empire and "mixtape aesthetics," Lynch and the work of Cormac McCarthy. Lynch devotees should run, not walk. —SMS
There's No Turning Back by Alba de Céspedes, tr. Ann Goldstein (Washington Square)
Goldstein is an indomitable translator. Without her, how would you read Ferrante? Here, she takes her pen to a work by the great Cuban-Italian writer de Céspedes, banned in the fascist Italy of the 1930s, that follows a group of female literature students living together in a Roman boarding house. —JHM
Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield (Norton)
Named for the humble beet plant and meaning, in a rough translation from the Latin, "vulgar second," Sarsfield’s surreal debut finds a seasonal harvest worker watching her boyfriend and other colleagues vanish amid “the menacing but enticing siren song of the beets.” —JHM
People From Oetimu by Felix Nesi, tr. Lara Norgaard (Archipelago)
The center of Nesi’s wide-ranging debut novel is a police station on the border between East and West Timor, where a group of men have gathered to watch the final of the 1998 World Cup while a political insurgency stirs without. Nesi, in English translation here for the first time, circles this moment broadly, reaching back to the various colonialist projects that have shaped Timor and the lives of his characters. —JF
Brother Brontë by Fernando A. Flores (MCD)
This surreal tale, set in a 2038 dystopian Texas is a celebration of resistance to authoritarianism, a mash-up of Olivia Butler, Ray Bradbury, and John Steinbeck. —CK
Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez (Crown)
The High-Risk Homosexual author returns with a comic memoir-in-essays about fighting for survival in the Sunshine State, exploring his struggle with poverty through the lens of his queer, Latinx identity. —SMS
Theory & Practice by Michelle De Kretser (Catapult)
This lightly autofictional novel—De Krester's best yet, and one of my favorite books of this year—centers on a grad student's intellectual awakening, messy romantic entanglements, and fraught relationship with her mother as she minds the gap between studying feminist theory and living a feminist life. —SMS
The Lamb by Lucy Rose (Harper)
Rose’s cautionary and caustic folk tale is about a mother and daughter who live alone in the forest, quiet and tranquil except for the visitors the mother brings home, whom she calls “strays,” wining and dining them until they feast upon the bodies. —MJS
Disposable by Sarah Jones (Avid)
Jones, a senior writer for New York magazine, gives a voice to America's most vulnerable citizens, who were deeply and disproportionately harmed by the pandemic—a catastrophe that exposed the nation's disregard, if not outright contempt, for its underclass. —SMS
No Fault by Haley Mlotek (Viking)
Written in the aftermath of the author's divorce from the man she had been with for 12 years, this "Memoir of Romance and Divorce," per its subtitle, is a wise and distinctly modern accounting of the end of a marriage, and what it means on a personal, social, and literary level. —SMS
Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis (Haymarket)
Lewis, one of the most interesting and provocative scholars working today, looks at certain malignant strains of feminism that have done more harm than good in her latest book. In the process, she probes the complexities of gender equality and offers an alternative vision of a feminist future. —SMS
Lion by Sonya Walger (NYRB)
Walger—an successful actor perhaps best known for her turn as Penny Widmore on Lost—debuts with a remarkably deft autobiographical novel (published by NYRB no less!) about her relationship with her complicated, charismatic Argentinian father. —SMS
The Voices of Adriana by Elvira Navarro, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines)
A Spanish writer and philosophy scholar grieves her mother and cares for her sick father in Navarro's innovative, metafictional novel. —SMS
Autotheories ed. Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan (MIT)
Theory wonks will love this rigorous and surprisingly playful survey of the genre of autotheory—which straddles autobiography and critical theory—with contributions from Judith Butler, Jamieson Webster, and more.
Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein (Doubleday)
I enjoy retellings of classic novels by writers who turn the spotlight on interesting minor characters. This is an excursion into the world of Charles Dickens, told from the perspective iconic thief from Oliver Twist. —CK
Crush by Ada Calhoun (Viking)
Calhoun—the masterful memoirist behind the excellent Also A Poet—makes her first foray into fiction with a debut novel about marriage, sex, heartbreak, all-consuming desire. —SMS
Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House)
Sittenfeld's observations in her writing are always clever, and this second collection of short fiction includes a tale about the main character in Prep, who visits her boarding school decades later for an alumni reunion. —CK
Right-Wing Woman by Andrea Dworkin (Picador)
One in a trio of Dworkin titles being reissued by Picador, this 1983 meditation on women and American conservatism strikes a troublingly resonant chord in the shadow of the recent election, which saw 45% of women vote for Trump. —SMS
The Talent by Daniel D'Addario (Scout)
If your favorite season is awards, the debut novel from D'Addario, chief correspondent at Variety, weaves an awards-season yarn centering on five stars competing for the Best Actress statue at the Oscars. If you know who Paloma Diamond is, you'll love this. —SMS
Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Sarah Booker and Robin Myers (Hogarth)
The Pulitzer winner’s latest is about an eponymously named professor who discovers the body of a mutilated man with a bizarre poem left with the body, becoming entwined in the subsequent investigation as more bodies are found. —MJS
The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker (Random House)
Jane goes missing after a sudden a debilitating and dreadful wave of symptoms that include hallucinations, amnesia, and premonitions, calling into question the foundations of her life and reality, motherhood and buried trauma. —MJS
Song So Wild and Blue by Paul Lisicky (HarperOne)
If it weren’t Joni Mitchell’s world with all of us just living in it, one might be tempted to say the octagenarian master songstress is having a moment: this memoir of falling for the blue beauty of Mitchell’s work follows two other inventive books about her life and legacy: Ann Powers's Traveling and Henry Alford's I Dream of Joni. —JHM
Mornings Without Mii by Mayumi Inaba, tr. Ginny Tapley (FSG)
A woman writer meditates on solitude, art, and independence alongside her beloved cat in Inaba's modern classic—a book so squarely up my alley I'm somehow embarrassed. —SMS
True Failure by Alex Higley (Coffee House)
When Ben loses his job, he decides to pretend to go to work while instead auditioning for Big Shot, a popular reality TV show that he believes might be a launchpad for his future successes. —MJS
March
Woodworking by Emily St. James (Crooked Reads)
Those of us who have been reading St. James since the A.V. Club days may be surprised to see this marvelous critic's first novel—in this case, about a trans high school teacher befriending one of her students, the only fellow trans woman she’s ever met—but all the more excited for it. —JHM
Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder (Graywolf)
Told as a series of conversations, Sunder’s debut novel follows its recently graduated Indian protagonist in 2006 Cambridge, Mass., as she sees out her student visa teaching in a private high school and contriving to find her way between worlds that cannot seem to comprehend her. Quietly subversive, this is an immigration narrative to undermine the various reductionist immigration narratives of our moment. —JF
Love, Queenie by Mayukh Sen (Norton)
Merle Oberon, one of Hollywood's first South Asian movie stars, gets her due in this engrossing biography, which masterfully explores Oberon's painful upbringing, complicated racial identity, and much more. —SMS
The Age of Choice by Sophia Rosenfeld (Princeton UP)
At a time when we are awash with options—indeed, drowning in them—Rosenfeld's analysis of how our modingn idea of "freedom" became bound up in the idea of personal choice feels especially timely, touching on everything from politics to romance. —SMS
Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul (St. Martin's)
One of the internet's funniest writers follows up One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter with a sharp and candid collection of essays that sees her life go into a tailspin during the pandemic, forcing her to reevaluate her beliefs about love, marriage, and what's really worth fighting for. —SMS
The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria by José Donoso, tr. Megan McDowell (New Directions)
The ever-excellent McDowell translates yet another work by the influential Chilean author for New Directions, proving once again that Donoso had a knack for titles: this one follows up 2024’s behemoth The Obscene Bird of Night. —JHM
Remember This by Anthony Giardina (FSG)
On its face, it’s another book about a writer living in Brooklyn. A layer deeper, it’s a book about fathers and daughters, occupations and vocations, ethos and pathos, failure and success. —JHM
Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro (Deep Vellum)
In this metaphysical and lyrical tale, a captain known for sticking to protocol begins losing control not only of her crew and ship but also her own mind. —MJS
We Tell Ourselves Stories by Alissa Wilkinson (Liveright)
Amid a spate of new books about Joan Didion published since her death in 2021, this entry by Wilkinson (one of my favorite critics working today) stands out for its approach, which centers Hollywood—and its meaning-making apparatus—as an essential key to understanding Didion's life and work. —SMS
Seven Social Movements that Changed America by Linda Gordon (Norton)
This book—by a truly renowned historian—about the power that ordinary citizens can wield when they organize to make their community a better place for all could not come at a better time. —CK
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson (Chronicle Prism)
Lipson reconsiders the narratives of womanhood that constrain our lives and imaginations, mining the canon for alternative visions of desire, motherhood, and more—from Kate Chopin and Gwendolyn Brooks to Philip Roth and Shakespeare—to forge a new story for her life. —SMS
Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian (Penguin)
Doppelgängers have been done to death, but Sathian's examination of Millennial womanhood—part biting satire, part twisty thriller—breathes new life into the trope while probing the modern realities of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting. —SMS
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters (Random House)
The author of Detransition, Baby offers four tales for the price of one: a novel and three stories that promise to put gender in the crosshairs with as sharp a style and swagger as Peters’ beloved latest. The novel even has crossdressing lumberjacks. —JHM
On Breathing by Jamieson Webster (Catapult)
Webster, a practicing psychoanalyst and a brilliant writer to boot, explores that most basic human function—breathing—to address questions of care and interdependence in an age of catastrophe. —SMS
Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories (Two Lines)
The stories of Unusual Fragments, including work by Yoshida Tomoko, Nobuko Takai, and other seldom translated writers from the same ranks as Abe and Dazai, comb through themes like alienation and loneliness, from a storm chaser entering the eye of a storm to a medical student observing a body as it is contorted into increasingly violent positions. —MJS
The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf)
Russell has quipped that this Dust Bowl story of uncanny happenings in Nebraska is the “drylandia” to her 2011 Florida novel, Swamplandia! In this suspenseful account, a woman working as a so-called prairie witch serves as a storage vault for her townspeople’s most troubled memories of migration and Indigenous genocide. With a murderer on the loose, a corrupt sheriff handling the investigation, and a Black New Deal photographer passing through to document Americana, the witch loses her memory and supernatural events parallel the area’s lethal dust storms. —NodB
On the Clock by Claire Baglin, tr. Jordan Stump (New Directions)
Baglin's bildungsroman, translated from the French, probes the indignities of poverty and service work from the vantage point of its 20-year-old narrator, who works at a fast-food joint and recalls memories of her working-class upbringing. —SMS
Motherdom by Alex Bollen (Verso)
Parenting is difficult enough without dealing with myths of what it means to be a good mother. I who often felt like a failure as a mother appreciate Bollen's focus on a more realistic approach to parenting. —CK
The Magic Books by Anne Lawrence-Mathers (Yale UP)
For that friend who wants to concoct the alchemical elixir of life, or the person who cannot quit Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Lawrence-Mathers collects 20 illuminated medieval manuscripts devoted to magical enterprise. Her compendium includes European volumes on astronomy, magical training, and the imagined intersection between science and the supernatural. —NodB
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Riverhead)
The first novel by the Tanzanian-British Nobel laureate since his surprise win in 2021 is a story of class, seismic cultural change, and three young people in a small Tanzania town, caught up in both as their lives dramatically intertwine. —JHM
Twelve Stories by American Women, ed. Arielle Zibrak (Penguin Classics)
Zibrak, author of a delicious volume on guilty pleasures (and a great essay here at The Millions), curates a dozen short stories by women writers who have long been left out of American literary canon—most of them women of color—from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Zitkala-Ša. —SMS
I'll Love You Forever by Giaae Kwon (Holt)
K-pop’s sky-high place in the fandom landscape made a serious critical assessment inevitable. This one blends cultural criticism with memoir, using major artists and their careers as a lens through which to view the contemporary Korean sociocultural landscape writ large. —JHM
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga)
Jones, the acclaimed author of The Only Good Indians and the Indian Lake Trilogy, offers a unique tale of historical horror, a revenge tale about a vampire descending upon the Blackfeet reservation and the manifold of carnage in their midst. —MJS
True Mistakes by Lena Moses-Schmitt (University of Arkansas Press)
Full disclosure: Lena is my friend. But part of why I wanted to be her friend in the first place is because she is a brilliant poet. Selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and blurbed by the great Heather Christle and Elisa Gabbert, this debut collection seeks to turn "mistakes" into sites of possibility. —SMS
Perfection by Vicenzo Latronico, tr. Sophie Hughes (NYRB)
Anna and Tom are expats living in Berlin enjoying their freedom as digital nomads, cultivating their passion for capturing perfect images, but after both friends and time itself moves on, their own pocket of creative freedom turns boredom, their life trajectories cast in doubt. —MJS
Guatemalan Rhapsody by Jared Lemus (Ecco)
Jemus's debut story collection paint a composite portrait of the people who call Guatemala home—and those who have left it behind—with a cast of characters that includes a medicine man, a custodian at an underfunded college, wannabe tattoo artists, four orphaned brothers, and many more.
Pacific Circuit by Alexis Madrigal (MCD)
The Oakland, Calif.–based contributing writer for the Atlantic digs deep into the recent history of a city long under-appreciated and under-served that has undergone head-turning changes throughout the rise of Silicon Valley. —JHM
Barbara by Joni Murphy (Astra)
Described as "Oppenheimer by way of Lucia Berlin," Murphy's character study follows the titular starlet as she navigates the twinned convulsions of Hollywood and history in the Atomic Age.
Sister Sinner by Claire Hoffman (FSG)
This biography of the fascinating Aimee Semple McPherson, America's most famous evangelist, takes religion, fame, and power as its subjects alongside McPherson, whose life was suffused with mystery and scandal. —SMS
Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood (Pantheon)
In this bold and layered memoir, Hood confronts three decades of sexual violence and searches for truth among the wreckage. Kate Zambreno calls Trauma Plot the work of "an American Annie Ernaux." —SMS
Hey You Assholes by Kyle Seibel (Clash)
Seibel’s debut story collection ranges widely from the down-and-out to the downright bizarre as he examines with heart and empathy the strife and struggle of his characters. —MJS
James Baldwin by Magdalena J. Zaborowska (Yale UP)
Zaborowska examines Baldwin's unpublished papers and his material legacy (e.g. his home in France) to probe about the great writer's life and work, as well as the emergence of the "Black queer humanism" that Baldwin espoused. —CK
Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett (Riverhead)
Arnett is always brilliant and this novel about the relationship between Cherry, a professional clown, and her magician mentor, "Margot the Magnificent," provides a fascinating glimpse of the unconventional lives of performance artists. —CK
Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp (S&S)
The deal announcement describes the ever-punchy writer’s debut novel with an infinitely appealing appellation: “debauched picaresque.” If that’s not enough to draw you in, the truly unhinged cover should be. —JHM
[millions_email]
A Year in Reading: 2024
Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose.
In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it.
Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.)
The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger.
Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small
Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love
Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor
Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Zachary Issenberg, writer
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves
Nicholas Russell, writer and critic
Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
Deborah Ghim, editor
Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety
Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship
John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things
Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
May Books: A Reading List for the Month of Love
Tom Nissley’s column A Reader's Book of Days is adapted from his book of the same name.
May is blooming and fertile, spring in its full flower. Unlike the storms of March and the "uncertain glory" of April, Shakespeare's May, with its "darling buds," is always sweet, and ever the month for love. Traditionally -- before the international labor movement claimed May 1st in honor of the Haymarket riot -- May Days in England were holidays of love too, white-gowned fertility celebrations. It's on a May Day that Thomas Hardy, always attuned to ancient rites, introduces Tess Durbeyfield, whose "bouncing handsome womanliness" among her fellow country girls still reveals flashes of the child she recently was.
May has long been the month for mothers as well as maidens, even before Anna Jarvis chose the second Sunday in May in 1908 for Mother's Day to honor the death of her own mom. The mother of them all, the Virgin Mary, was celebrated for centuries as the Queen of May, and in "The May Magnificat" Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us that "May is Mary's month," and asks why. "All things rising," he answers, "all things sizing / Mary sees, sympathizing / with that world of good, / Nature's motherhood."
The many meanings of a simple word like "May" can get to be too much, though. When the mother in The Furies, Janet Hobhouse's fictional memoir of a life caught up in isolated family dependence, chooses Memorial Day to end her own life, her daughter mournfully riffs on May in an overdetermined frenzy: "month of mothers, month of Mary, month of heroes, the beginning of heat and abandonment, of the rich leaving the poor to the cities, May as in Maybe Maybe not, as in yes, finally you may, as in Mayday, the call for help and the sound of the bailout, and also, now that I think of it, as in her middle name, Maida."
Here is a selection of recommended May reading, including love, friendship, underground adventure, and a very bad prom:
Memoirs by Lord Byron (unpublished)
You might wish to read Byron's Memoirs (who wouldn't?), but you can't, thanks to a decision made by six men in the drawing room of the publisher John Murray in May 1824, a month after their dangerous friend had died of fever in Greece. Fearing the effect of its publication on "Lord Byron's honor & fame" (and perhaps on their own reputations), they instead fed the pages of the manuscript, unread, into the fire.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
She may have met a March Hare that was mad as a hatter, but it was in the month of May -- the birthday month of Alice Liddell, Charles Dodgson's model for his heroine -- that Alice followed a rabbit with a watch in his waistcoat pocket down a hole and began her adventures underground.
The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (1899)
In January he had written to her, "I love your verses with all my heart, Miss Barrett," but it wasn't until May 20 (from 3:00 to 4:30 pm) that Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett met in person for the first time, in her invalid's bedroom in the house of her domineering father. They eloped the following year.
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)
What better cure for end-of-term blues than the campus novel that launched the whole genre (along with Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, published the same year)? You may never want to go back to class at all, especially if you're lecturing, miserably, on medieval history at a provincial English university.
"The Whitsun Weddings" by Philip Larkin (1964)
Amis based Lucky Jim on, and dedicated it to, his good friend Larkin, who made his own mark on postwar British culture with this ambivalent ode to the hopeful mass pairing-up of springtime, three years before the Kinks captured the same lonely-in-the-city melancholy in "Waterloo Sunset."
"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" by Hunter S. Thompson (1970)
A son of Louisville returned home for the ninety-sixth running of the local horse race in the company of the bearded British illustrator Ralph Steadman and emerged with his first piece of journalism that earned the adjective "gonzo."
Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel (1970)
The lesson of "Spring," the opening tale in Lobel's thrillingly calm series for early readers, is, apparently, that there is honor in deception, as Frog fools hibernating Toad into joining him on a fine April day by tearing an extra page off the calendar to prove it is, in fact, May.
Carrie by Stephen King (1974)
"Remember, it's YOUR prom; make it one to remember always!" With over 400 dead in the town and the school gymnasium a charred and blood-soaked ruin, it's not likely that anyone -- assuming they survived it -- will forget the climactic late May event of King's debut.
Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks (1982)
An early May visit to the Eastman film archives in Rochester and then to the nearby apartment of the forgotten elderly woman who had starred so thrillingly in the silent films he screened there led first to Kenneth Tynan's classic New Yorker profile of Louise Brooks, "The Girl in the Black Helmet" and then, following her rediscovery, to the publication of this collection of Brooks's own sharp-witted memoirs and film criticism.
Small Island by Andrea Levy (2004)
All within the month of May 1948, Hortense Roberts and Gilbert Joseph meet, become engaged, and are wed, and Gilbert sets off from Jamaica for the larger island of Great Britain, to be followed six months later by Hortense, who had funded both their journeys in an immigrants' alliance that's as much a business partnership as a marriage in Levy's subtle, sympathetic novel.
Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag (2008)
"I AM REBORN IN THE TIME RETOLD IN THIS NOTEBOOK," sixteen-year-old Sontag scribbled on the inside cover of her journal for May 1949, marking a moment when she was colossally precocious -- rereading Mann, Hopkins, and Dante -- and falling in love for the first time, with a young woman in San Francisco.
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)
In late May 1943, just a few days after Memorial Day, Second Lieutenant Louis Zamperini, former Olympian runner and holder of the NCAA mile record, crashed in the Pacific with two fellow airmen, beginning a record forty-seven days drifting on a raft, which proved to be just the beginning of his ordeal.
Image via Leland Francisco/Flickr
Wedding Wind: A Commonplace Book of Unsuitable Readings
A Word on Weddings
Like many people whose marriage impends, I have been initiated into the strange, febrile world of weddings — a world whose population is varied and ever-changing, a time-lapse version of the actual world. The wedding world is headquartered at sites like The Knot or Weddingbee, where the affianced and the "waiting" (for someone to put a ring on it) alike convene to commune in questionable spelling and reverent platitudes of surpassing banality: "marrying my best friend," and "it's not the wedding, it's the marriage," uttered in the course of a discussion about five-dollar chair covers.
Making fun of The Knot or Weddingbee is like shooting fish in a barrel, and most of the womens' interest blogs of the sort I favor have taken aim. But Jezebel cannot tell me anything about tipping the caterer, while Weddingbee bristles with opinions on the subject. Moreover, long after I harvested the helpful hints I needed from Weddingbee, I return frequently to view the forums, which I have found absorbing to an almost debilitating degree.
It began with the unkind voyeuristic impulse behind something like The Hairpin's Today's Top Ten Wedding Bee Discussion Board Thread Titles. The Internet, more than travel, more than almost any other thing, gives you a glimpse of how other people live and what they care about. And with weddings being a widespread but mostly un-ideological phenomenon, a wedding website attracts a real slice of life. On Weddingbee there are the expected Marxian differences, as well as significant regional and hemispheric variations.
In spite of this, these boards are a friendly place. Women are frequently reminded by the world at large that they are catty and shrewish, but I am often struck by the fierce generosity demonstrated by groups of women unknown to one another (also by the speed with which a group of female strangers will turn to topics of contraception under the right circumstances). As in any community, some members are just assholes. But someone asks if she is too fat to see daylight, and everyone tells her no, no, no. Someone loses her job a week before her wedding, and the hive gathers round her in an online embrace.
Disdain for these sites is often of a parcel with another phenomenon the wedding-haver encounters — a sort of race-to-the-bottom humblebrag about the minimal expense of the interlocutor's wedding, sometimes phrased so that the implication is that the success of a marriage is inversely proportionate to the cost of the shindig. "Had it in the backyard," they say, and the Lord rained down gratis BBQ and compostable cutlery to reward their lack of pretension. Then there is Caitlin Flanagan, who characteristically manages to be right about a lot of things while sucking the joy right out of the world, reminding us that weddings are a colossal, farcical, tasteless, and needless expense representing a hollowed-out institution — just another example of our sick culture.
Everyone has their own line for what constitutes folly. I am not without my own strain of Flanaganism. But one thing I really like about weddings is that though they are a folly, they are to the best of my knowledge a relatively universal folly (and one of the few driven by some ostensibly joyful and optimistic instinct). Even in less libertine cultures than my own, they often represent a union in which not a shred of virginity, financial health, or, sometimes, likelihood of enduring love remains. Even so, we are going to get spruced up, create a festive atmosphere of one sort or another, and take photographs. In a thousand languages, people spend money, fight about the guest list, and try not to get any unsightly hives on the big day. Then, they try to stay married. We are unlikely to make ourselves less stupid than we collectively are, so we should have parties.
My own experience of wedding planning has been a very traditional cocktail shared with my beloved, composed of anxiety, guilt, and joyful anticipation. Like many people, I made a lot of lists of things and fretted too much about some things and not enough about others. I did things that were called "wedding planning" which were actually just mindless Internet trawling, looking at pictures of things that have no bearing on my life, and patting myself on the back for at least not being as x as the people who say y on Weddingbee.
What the wedding sites made clear to me about weddings generally and ours in particular is that they are inevitably one iteration of a thousand other weddings — a melange of logistical and aesthetic decisions dictated by social forces largely imperceptible to you. You find that choices you believed you had arrived at quite on your own are some current staple of Pinterest, totally characteristic of your particular station in life. My demographic, evidently, is very fond of the "rustic" and the "vintage." And while I have grown to shudder at these terms (one wedding theme I read about: "vintage books"), part of it is the pain of realizing that you are part of a vast, rushing current, and your tastes are not your own.
I eventually resigned myself to rusticity and sameness, but one place where I thought I could assert my personality (without leaving my fiance totally by the wayside, or course), was the wedding reading. I was confident that Weddingbee could tell me nothing that I did not already know about a pithy piece of writing.
How Literature Failed Me in my Hour of Need
It is now customary in many weddings to write one's own vows, tailored to fit the bride and groom's individual quirks. Faced with this prospect, some dour inner Protestant stirred and grumbled. I could not picture us telling the assembled that we enjoy fattening food, Breaking Bad, and architectural boat tours. That when I mop the floor, I like to get drunk and listen to Groove Armada. When you sneeze, you sneeze five times. That I promise to always like the Redskins even when they are dismal. No, I am partial to "death do us part." And brevity, ironically.
Thus the reading became the one place in the ceremony for a little customization and flair. My beloved also likes books, but I am bossier, and I took the reigns on this project. And since I find literature sufficient for expressing most of what there is to express about human life, the bar for this particular passage was very high.
As a bookish person, it felt like cheating to be searching for beautiful passages from the Internet. I preferred for it to happen more organically (so precious, so mistaken). I read books all the time, I thought to myself; surely I should have some interior commonplace book chock-full of beauty and inspiration to consult. But the only two poems I can recite in their entirety — Philip Larkin's "High Windows" and "This be the Verse" — are so far from wedding-worthy it's hard to imagine anything worse: "When I see a couple of kids/ And guess he's fucking her and she's/ Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,/ I know this is paradise." (Or "They fuck you up, your mum and dad," obviously.)
I love "The Whitsun Weddings," which is technically a poem about weddings. But while, contra Christopher Hitchens, I think its last line is romantic, the romance is that of life, not of individual human relationships: "A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain." "Broadcast" is love poem, but a more sneering and cringing love poem there never was: "...Then begins/ A snivel on the violins:/ I think of your face among all those faces,/ Beautiful and devout before/ Cascades of monumental slithering." Most unsuitable for a wedding. And anyhow, Larkin — more on him later.
My favorite poem is probably T.S. Eliot's "Preludes," the last lines of which reveal the haunting ordered chaos of the universe, but hardly warm the cockles: "The worlds revolve like ancient women/ gathering fuel in vacant lots." In a book shop pawing through the poetry, I sensed this was a theme, in poetry in general, and especially in the poetry I like. Tomas Tranströmer seemed promising for a minute in "The Couple," if a touch erotic: "The movements of love have settled, and they sleep/but their most secret thoughts meet as when/ two colours meet and flow into each other/ on the wet paper of a schoolboy’s painting." But that ending: "They stand packed and waiting very near,/ a mob of people with blank faces." It leaves an impression of a lonely echo in a hallway, a little like "Preludes."
Googling had seemed like cheating, but I started to Google, and found, predictably, that I was hardly the first person to have had this problem. Book snobs abound. I went to the library and took out several anthologies, including a book of readings specifically for weddings. There are things I have seen before — sonnets, for example — but I like free verse. There were many things I hadn't seen. Margaret Atwood has a poem about marriage called "Habitation," evidently used in some weddings. I liked it, stupidly, because it mentions eating popcorn, which happens to be something that my beloved and I do together on a shockingly regular basis. But it seemed a little fraught for a wedding. The last line, "We are learning to make fire," hangs at the bottom of the page, lonely as early man: I pictured us shivering in our damp cave.
I liked an excerpt from Toni Morrison's "Jazz" — "It's nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers" — but that's so private, and then the poem invokes an off-stage "chippie" and "stud." I checked out Love Letters of Great Men, but the problem, aside from the sort of ethical weirdness of reading someone's mail, is that great men tended to write romantic letters to a number of different women, which is not really on-message for our marriage (this was not in the collection, but I remember Malcolm Lowry once wrote one of his wives that he wanted to use her toothbrush instead of his own). I looked to the eminently quotable Flaubert in the pages of Julian Barnes' wonderful Flaubert's Parrot. Here's a good one: “You ask for love, you complain that I don't send you flowers? Flowers, indeed! If that's what you want, find yourself some wet-eared boy stuffed with fine manners and all the right ideas. I'm like the tiger, which has bristles of hair at the end of its cock, with which it lacerates the female.”
Rumi figures in anthologies of love poetry. I like Rumi, but for a wedding I feel that the Sufis are off-limits. As far as I know, which is not very much, the beloved of whom they speak is likely to be God, or the young man who brings you your wine. Context matters. Also, my favorite line from Rumi is fiercely individualistic: "I drip out of a spout drop by drop — But like the deluge I crush myriad palaces." (Rappers have nothing on Rumi). I toyed with finding something in Turkish — but it seemed to me that this was a moment for my mother tongue. And my knowledge is limited, and my favorite Turkish poetry is in any case a line written by the twelfth century poet Yunus Emre, too defiant for a wedding unless it was one disapproved of by all relatives: "What should the ignorant know of us?/ Greetings to the ones who know."
Context matters, and that's really what takes Philip Larkin out of the question: he loved Monica Jones so much he helped Kingsley Amis turn her into one of literature's great hysterics, a caricature of a pain-in-the-ass female (Lucky Jim's Margaret Peel). When I think about literature I don't typically dwell on the private life of the author, because it's a slippery slope. But I found when looking for a wedding reading that I became more interested in whether the writer him or herself had been married and gave at least the appearance of contentment.
On love, Emily Dickinson basically sums it up: "That Love is all there is/ Is all we know of Love;/ It is enough, the freight should be/ Proportioned to the groove." But love and marriage are not the same thing. Most unkindly, I wondered what the virginal shut-in would know of the long intimacy, the vaunted tedium of marriage. Bizarrely, I veered into some exclusionary policy regarding Auden and Forster, whose circumscribed personal lives were in the broad sense casualties of a bigoted and ignorant society. Nabokov was promising; he is known to have loved Vera, and wrote her poems. But the 1974 poem "To Vera" is just that, a poem to Vera, and seemed to have nothing to do with us. "How I Love You" is Nabokovian in a way that confounds a ceremonial reading: "...gnats:/ hanging up in an evening sunbeam, / their swarmlet ceaselessly jiggles..."
There is the religious angle — a friends' wedding featured Isaiah 43:1-7, which I believe is a particularly badass selection from the Old Testament: "When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned." But novels are my sacred texts, and we are in any case rather unclear in our feelings about the Lord. His brief invocation in Robert Louis Stevenson's cheerful "Wedding Prayer" is enough: "Lord, behold our family here assembled" (which one could also read: "Oh Lord, they're all here.")
Poetry letting me down, I turned to the novels that I love. No passage suggested itself to me — unless you have a very certain kind of mind, you can't survey the text of every book you've ever read all at the same time. And if it's not cricket to go looking for a previously unencountered reading that somehow has meaning to you, it's equally uncricket to read everything with an eye to appropriating some piece of it for your marriage ceremony. But I began to see that's how I should have been reading for the entirety of the preceding year.
What had I read most recently? We Need to Talk About Kevin, for chrissakes, and a book about rabies. I reread Goodbye to All That, which Graves closes with "...marriage wore thin. New characters appeared on the stage. Nancy and I said unforgivable things to each other. We parted on May 6th, 1929. She, of course, insisted on keeping the children. And I went abroad, resolved never to make England my home again..." My fiance had most recently read Travels With Charley, and suggested I look there. But Travels With Charley is about a man and a poodle, and the poodle goes "ffft."
I began to comb through my favorite novels, but from the outset it was clear that most would never do. There's Burmese Days or Of Human Bondage, where goodish men are driven mad by worthless women, with differing outcomes. A Suitable Boy is a spectacularly romantic novel, weddings all over, but it portends falling in love with the man you can marry, in lieu of the one that you can't. The Tin Drum, full of obscenity. Wodehouse, too facetious. The aforementioned Lucky Jim closes with a romance, but it is a revenge story, against all Welches and Margarets, rather than a love story about the well-formed Christine. Iris Murdoch's novels are full of bizarre marriages and strange perversity. (The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, anyone?) Till We Have Faces, jealous sibling love and spinsters. I opened Possession, even Swann's Way — they presented unyielding blocks of text. The closest I came was from A Dance to the Music of Time, and in fact explained why I was having so much trouble:
A future marriage, or a past one, may be investigated and explained in terms of writing by one of its parties, but it is doubtful whether an existing marriage can ever be described directly in the first person and convey a sense of reality. Even those writers who suggest some of the substance of married life best, stylise heavily, losing the subtlety of the relationship at the price of a few accurately recorded, but isolated, aspects...Its forms are at once so varied, yet so constant, providing a kaleidoscope, the colours of which are always changing, always the same. The moods of a love affair, the contradictions of friendship, the jealousy of business partners, the fellow feeling of opposed commanders in total war, these are all in their way to be charted. Marriage, partaking of such — and a thousand more — dual antagonisms and participations, finally defies definition.
It defies definition, and yet I wanted something romantic, weighty but not melancholy, in English, about marriage. It was finally Louis C. K. who drove it all home, how hard this is to do:
...Or you’ll meet the perfect person who you love infinitely and you even argue well and you grow together and you have children and then you get old together and then SHE’S GONNA DIE. That’s the BEST CASE SCENARIO, is that you’re gonna lose your best friend and then just walk home from D’Agostino’s with heavy bags every day and wait for your turn to be nothing also.
That is indeed the best case scenario, the lost best friend, that friend so abstract on the Weddingbee message boards, so real in practice. I listened to Donald Hall reading about the death of Jane Kenyon on This American Life and bawled my eyes out.
In the end, I stood again in a book shop, rifling through every poetry book they had. (In the course of the hunt I was descended upon by the proprietor, and because the last thing I wanted was someone's advice on the matter, remained mute on the subject of the wedding and was thus compelled to read two suggested Bill Hickok poems while he stood watchfully at a remove.) Finally, I picked something, a poem by Billy Collins from his collection Nine Horses. I picked something, but what I thought was even better in that collection was something else, "Bermuda," which is basically a poetic version of the Louis bit. A husband and wife lie together on a beach: "and the two of us so calm/ it seems that this is not our only life,/ just one in a series, charms on a bracelet,/ as if every day we were not running/ like the solitary runners on the beach/ toward a darkness without shape/ or waves, crosses or clouds,/as if one of us is not likely to get there first/ leaving the other behind,/ castaway on an island..."
It turns out that it was hard for me to find a good wedding reading because I'm a gloomy old bastard.
There, it would seem, is the rub. But I wasn't going to put this foreboding stuff into the wedding ceremony. No, with several days remaining until the wedding I picked Collins's "Litany" ("You are the bread and the knife,/ the crystal goblet and the wine"), which I thought was lovely and romantic and yet also conveyed the promised prosaic qualities of long relationships. It's funny, but not too much. I find the long dashes of the last lines poignant: "You will always be the bread and the knife,/ not to mention the crystal goblet and — somehow —/ the wine." There is an element of the sacramental which appeals to me, something that begins to approach the reverence I feel for my own beloved.
After all this, after the fretting and gnashing of teeth and weeping over sad poems and vases in empty rooms, I learned I could have found my reading on the Internet. It's on a list of wedding readings compiled by Publisher's Weekly, for one. I could even have found it on Weddingbee, where some fiercely unique soul, someone just like me, recommended it in a thread five years ago, lauded as a "a quirky expression of love, perfect for an English major who likes playing with metaphors."
But I don't care, I've got my love to keep me warm.
Image: Pexels/Caio Resende.
Pass the Rémy Red Berry Infusion: John Wray Interviews Matt Dojny
[caption id="attachment_42407" align="aligncenter" width="570"] Wray and Dojny, 18 years ago in Texas.[/caption]
Like another bold book that's just hitting the shelves, Sheila Heti's How Should A Person Be?, Matt Dojny's The Festival of Earthly Delights is a novel from life, though the life that it's from -- to judge by the book that resulted -- must be radically, grotesquely different. Dojny's novel is high entertainment: a wildly heightened and distorted assembly of painfully funny, jaw-dropping misadventures that resolve themselves, in almost classical style, into a big old-fashioned technicolor ending. No less a literary funnyman than Gary Shteyngart called The Festival of Earthly Delights “A glorious novel” -- with exclamation marks! -- and I can't help but agree. This is a quintessential summer book, but not the kind that you'd want to take to the beach, if only because it would turn you into the kind of snorting, cackling deviant that people tend to move their towels away from. Also, it has funny pictures.
Boyd Darrow, the novel's epically star-crossed hero, has just landed in the tiny Southeast Asian country of Puchai ("The Kingdom of Winks!") with his grouchy and distinctly less-than-faithful girlfriend, Ulla. In a series of letters to a mysterious figure from his past known only as "Hap," Darrow narrates a string of cultural gaffes and psychosexual misadventures as his relationship and professional life and understanding of the world in general are radically and permanently Puchafied. But the country of Puchai itself is the real star of the novel, from the atomically smelly garong fruit everyone finds so delicious to its national fondness for the music of the mid-career Eagles and the Festival of Taang Lôke Kwaam Banterng Sumitchanani, the “Festival of Earthly Delights” of the title, the absurd and improbable celebration of which also serves as the rococo end of the novel itself.
In tribute to the novel's theme of cultural dislocation, and to its author's storied past on the Asian subcontinent, this interview was held in a Malaysian karaoke parlor in midtown Manhattan. Dojny, for reasons unclear to this writer, had smuggled in a bottle of Rémy Red Berry Infusion.
John Wray: You worked for a while as an actor in karaoke videos in Singapore, if I'm remembering rightly. I know that you drew on many experiences from your time in Southeast Asia when you were plotting out Boyd Darrow's misadventures in The Festival of Earthly Delights -- how come acting in karaoke videos didn't make it into the book?
Matt Dojny: I'd originally planned to have Boyd's journey more directly mirror my own -- the first half of the book was going to be set in "Puchai" (my fictionalized stand-in for Thailand), and the second half was going to recount Boyd’s travels around the continent, including a stint doing some karaoke-acting. However, if I'd stuck with that structure, the book would've been 1,000 pages long, which seemed kind of excessive for a first novel, so -- hey, do you want to perform "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" [Smashing Pumpkins], or can I?
JW: Wow, this interview is heading south in a hurry. Go ahead.
MD: Here, try a sip of this of Remy Red. It tastes like a strawberry popsicle soaked in turpentine.
JW: Ugh. Okay.
Unlike a lot of novels that arise more or less directly out of the author's coming of age, yours seems unfettered by any particular desire to represent your own life accurately, or even fairly, which may be part of the reason it's so hilarious -- you've given yourself the freedom to shape the material for maximum kick. Was transforming Thailand into the fictional (and very weird) country of Puchai an important step in that direction? Did it liberate you to get especially freaky?
That version of "Bullet" made me just a little uncomfortable, by the way. The lyrics really seemed to speak to you on a fundamental level. Do you consider yourself an angry person?
MD: No, I don't think I'm particularly angry. But, I will admit that the lyrics "Despite all my rage/I am still just a rat in a cage" speak to my innermost being. Is that so wrong?
In answer to your first question: I mainly set the novel in Puchai because I’m lazy, and didn't want to have to do a lot of research about Thailand. I loved living there, but it was more interesting for me to make up a new culture rather than having to interrogate an existing one. If that allowed for maximum freakiness, then, bully for me. Does that answer make sense? I feel like I've gotten drunk too early in this interview. This Remy Red might’ve been a mistake. I’m switching to beer. You pick a song.
JW: I'm going to vote for something classy this time. Do you do women’s voices?
MD: Not in my daily life. But I'll do my best.
JW: Then I'm going to respectfully request "For The Good Times" by Al Green. Something tells me you have a soulful falsetto.
Did you have any particular models in mind when you were writing this novel? I've been trying to come up with some guesses, which hasn't been easy. Kingsley Amis keeps springing to mind for some reason -- especially his masterpiece of institutional satire, Lucky Jim. But maybe that's just because Kingsley Amis was an angry writer too.
MD: I like to think that I'm not as much of a misanthrope -- or a misogynist -- as Amis was, but, that being said, Lucky Jim was absolutely a reference point -- my book is basically half campus novel, and half epistolary novel. Oh, and half bildungsroman.
I’d like to reiterate that I do not think of myself as an angry writer -- I feel like you're still picking up on the powerful reverberations of that Smashing Pumpkins song.
And, with all due respect to Mr. Green, I'm going to pass on that song request. I feel like for a karaoke performance to be truly successful, you have to know the song inside and out, and my kinship with that track isn't deep enough. Can I do some Otis Redding instead? Maybe "Try a Little Tenderness?"
JW: I'd never discourage anyone from performing that number. It also resonates with my next question, which touches on the sensual side of your writing. To wit: there's a lot of sex in this book -- a lot more than one tends to encounter in contemporary fiction by polite and well-spoken young men. Katie Roiphe would never have had to write her polemic in the Atlantic Monthly (or wherever that was) if the culture had more novelists of your stripe. What purpose does sex play in the novel? Were you setting out to write our generation's version of Updike's Couples? And don't you worry what your mother will think?
MD: I absolutely worry what my mother might think; I'm even chagrined that she's likely reading this interview. Hopefully she doesn’t know about the Internet.
My natural inclination is to be shy and retiring, and yet I also felt obligated to explore the more cringe-inducing corners of my psyche while writing the book. I’m guessing that inclination is somehow related to my Catholic upbringing? Anyway, I guess the purpose of my acknowledgment of the existence of human sexuality in the novel was to make myself and my family (and probably the reader) as uncomfortable as possible...Speaking of which, instead of Otis Redding, I'm going to sing "My Humps." Hold my beer, please.
JW: Jesus. That was actually really, really good. I feel as if I've never truly heard that song before. And now I'll never be able to erase it fully from my mind.
MD: That was the effect I'd intended.
JW: I wanted ask about the drawings in the book. There are so many of them, and they're so illustrative, that the experience of reading it comes close, at certain points, to that of a graphic novel. Did you ever consider going in that direction with the story?
MD: My background is as a visual artist, and, when I first conceived of working on a book, I originally thought it'd be mostly art, with a little bit of text. I didn't really think of myself as a writer back then, so this approach allowed me to ease myself into the concept of being a novelist. Once I started writing, the text took over, and the illustrations became secondary, or, at least, subservient to the story. I'd love to do a graphic novel someday, but it seems like so much work. It took me four or five years to write this book -- if it had more art and fewer words, I'd probably still be working on it.
Can you do me a favor and do a rap song? I want to level the playing field after that Black Eyed Peas number. I feel unclean now.
JW: I'm not sure I have the sense of rhythm required for hip hop, but I'll do something in that general direction. How about "Work It" by Missy Elliott? That song has always spoken to me for some reason.
I'm now going to do something that I strongly disapprove of and get annoyed by in interviews, which is to bring up specific episodes from your novel and ask about the stories behind them, as though the whole point of writing fiction weren't the excitement and challenge of making things up. But I have to ask: did you, at any point in your time in Asia, have a job interview with an embittered Vietnam veteran gone native who asked you to smuggle a tiny bottle of his urine back to America, just so you could pour it out on to the ground when you arrived?
MD: The character of Sam is, in fact, based partially on the Vietnam vet who ran the language school where I taught English in Thailand. In reality, though, the man asked me to smuggle a bottle of urine into Vietnam and pour it onto the ground, not America. I'm sure he'd been through some terrible things there, and I fully understand why he might’ve had an adverse reaction to the young American backpackers such as myself who were now tourists in the country where he'd once fought. The image of the tiny vial of urine stuck with me, though, and seemed like it should be repurposed for the general reading public.
JW: How about the brothel in the novel -- "Meowy X-mas?" Did it exist, and did you go there, and did a buxom and well-intentioned bar girl actually swallow your wedding ring? Feel free to pass on this question if answering it will ruin your life.
MD: First of all, I want to go on record as saying that your flow is formidable. Don't sell your rap-skills short.
Regarding Meowy X-mas: I actually didn’t get around to visiting any brothels during my visit in Southeast Asia, and I have never had anyone eat my jewelry, so I had to rely on my fiction-making skills for that scene. I did, however, go to a bar in Singapore that was full of very ruddy and overweight middle-aged Englishmen and their incongruously beautiful 20-year-old Singaporean love interests. It had an unsavory vibe that makes me think that, in retrospect, it was basically a more evolved version of a brothel. I wasn’t actually propositioned there, but maybe I was too obviously poverty-stricken. Or maybe it was my lack of ruddiness.
Okay, I'm going to sing a Lionel Richie song now. You have a problem with that?
JW: Depends on the number. May I suggest "All Night Long?" Not sure I'm ready for a ballad from The Lion King right now.
I was impressed to see an ecstatic blurb from Kristen Schaal on the back of the book -- I've loved her ever since she played the stalker fan on Flight of the Conchords. How did you get a copy of the novel to her, and do you know if she's currently single?
MD: Kristen used to live upstairs from me and, back in the day, would walk my dog, before she went all Hollywood on me. She is very awesome, but I’m pretty sure she’s in a committed relationship -- maybe you could woo her with your rapping skills.
Now, what should we do next -- maybe a duet? What would you say to a little “Islands in the Steam?”
JW: Dear lord. If that's not a sign that this interview's over, I don't know what is.
Image courtesy of the author.
Related Books:
