Moll Flanders: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (Penguin Classics)

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

What Kind of Angel: On Percy Shelley

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Two hundred years ago this summer, the maddeningly reckless poet Percy Bysshe Shelley rode a double masted sailboat straight into the maw of a storm off the coast of Italy. He drowned, as did the two other men on board when the ship went down 10 miles from shore in the Gulf of La Spezia. This was the definitive end to Percy’s life, but, as often happens in literature, only the beginning of his story. For days after he disappeared, Percy’s family and friends held out hope that perhaps he was alive and convalescing somewhere along the coastline. Eventually, his body washed ashore near the town of Viareggio, dashing all hopes. According to one account, he was only identifiable because of a book of Keats poems in his jacket. Percy had wanted to be buried in Rome, but the manner of his death made this wish difficult to fulfill. Italian law dictated that anything washed ashore by the sea must be burned to prevent the spread of plague. Percy’s body was buried in the sand for weeks until a small group could perform a beachside cremation. The party entrusted to this gruesome duty included Lord Byron, Europe’s most famous poet and one of Percy’s closest friends. Byron later wrote of Percy, “He was the best and least selfish man I knew.” In his 29 years, Percy published a smattering of poems, a play, and a pair of pretty bad novels; gentlefolk and members of the establishment knew him in life more for his godless behavior than the lilting cadence of his lines. From the vantage of the gatekeepers of literature, on the day his ashes were interred in a cemetery in Rome, Percy Bysshe Shelley seemed destined to be forgotten. Lucky for us, they were very wrong. In the decades after his death, Percy gained a literary reputation as “a sweet angel,” beautiful in art if ineffectual in life. This view is a misreading on two fronts, of the nature of angels (who are bearers of havoc) and of the particular man in question. * Percy Shelley was born into a family with a hereditary title that was destined to be his as firstborn son; this, plus the wealth of his paternal grandfather, should have guaranteed him an easy stride through life. But young Percy didn’t make anything easy on himself. He was 18 when he got himself kicked out of Oxford for being an atheist and an anarchist. He was hardly the only unbeliever on campus, but he was the kind that went so far as to write and distribute a hard-to-ignore pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism.” After Oxford, he married a tavern owner’s daughter and together they traveled to Dublin. Percy wanted to find a printer to distribute a tract that he wrote urging the Irish to agitate for better rights. He paid for the printing of 1,500 copies of a diatribe that urged a nonviolent rebellion (but rebellion nonetheless) against British rule. Distribution of his seditious tract proved a challenge so he tied copies to balloons and tucked them into toy boats and sent them down the Liffey. His words failed to stir Irish hearts, which was perhaps to his advantage as it meant he escaped the rebuke of the crown, and after two months he pulled up stakes and returned to England. As the son of a baronet, Percy had none of the bourgeoisie’s how-will-I-pay-my-bills motivation to curtail his provocative behavior—that is, until his father Sir Timothy cut him off in 1814. His father had put up with all manner of antics but he could no longer look the other way after Percy abandoned his wife and children and ran away to France with 16-year-old Mary Godwin, the daughter of one of Percy’s nonconformist heroes. (Let the record show, this wasn’t the first time that Percy had run away with a 16-year-old, as he’d eloped with his first wife Harriet when she was the same age. He’d been 18 then; he was 22 now—old enough to know better and to realize he was breaking a vow, albeit one he’d never really believed in.) In his letters Percy often sounds quite mystified by Harriet’s sustained shock at his desertion. From Percy’s point of view, the question was not whether he was loyal to a father or a wife or fellow subjects of the crown. He had to follow the starry commands of Love, Justice, Truth. Marriage was a mere human invention, and his allegiance was to a higher power. His love for Mary Godwin was furious, primal, transcendent; he did not, would not resist. None of this was proper behavior then—and, to be fair, it would be considered poor form now. You can make excuses because of his genius—and he was a lyrical genius—but Percy the truthsayer was likely rather hard to bear as a person. In all areas of life, large and small, petty and consequential, profane and sacred, Percy was annoyingly insistent on acting in opposition to what was expected or accepted. He would not adhere to rules if he believed the rules were wrong. He repeatedly elevated ideas over emotions. He saw himself as a conduit for the electricity of the universe. On subjects that mattered he could brook no compromise. Allegedly he was gentle and shy in person, but in correspondence he sounds like someone dangerously convinced of the total redeeming power of his own good intentions. I don’t think he thought himself as a man out of step with the world—he saw the world as out of step with its own ideal self. * Unmarried but inseparable, Percy and Mary lived in open defiance of social propriety for more than a year in London. Percy never divorced Harriet, but he also almost never visited her, barely acknowledged her in writing, and likely rarely thought of her. Before long Mary became pregnant with his child. A girl was born early and lived only long enough to leave them both stricken with grief when she died. Within months, Mary was pregnant again. A boy, this time. She would have four children with Percy over the course of their life together; all but one of them died before Percy did. In addition to his insistence on living with a woman who was not his wife, Percy harbored many scandalous ideals for the time: freethinking, polyamory, women’s suffrage, vegetarianism. He remained politically motivated but he was no longer sending tracts aloft on hot air balloons. Activism was one more thing that he had tried and failed, along with being a novelist. He labored over a long, nameless poem about the dark, relentless forces of creativity, a poem that eventually found publication as “Alastor,” which showed some promise as a poem but failed to strike fire with readers. He was a particular kind of failure: the wow-you-are-so-talented-it-hurts-to-say-no, the oh-this-would-be-great-from-someone-else kind of failed writer. Talent isn’t the sine non qua of success in publishing. Sometime near the start of 1816, Percy became convinced that he was dying of tuberculosis. He is often characterized in Mary’s journals as “unwell” or “very unwell,” “feverish and fatigued” or taking to bed. He had always presented a fragile constitution, but he seemed worse than usual that spring. The decision to flee England with Mary and their baby boy William was in part a gamble to see if fairer climates would reinvigorate his health. It also, rather obviously, got them away from the judging eyes of almost everyone they knew. Once again with Percy, a step forward occurs only in response to some adversity; he cannot go out into the world unless his house has burst into flames, or he has become certain that some pox is upon it. Convinced he was dying, pledged into deep debts, shunned by proper society, and now in foreign exile—not the moment, by most lights, to produce a life altering masterpiece. But that’s what happened in the weeks and months Percy spent abroad. All the adversity of his life to date had led to this. * In Geneva, Percy’s and Mary’s daily routine narrowed to their books, their child, and each other. They even found a partial relief from Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who relied on them emotionally and financially. Claire was obsessed with Lord Byron, who was also renting (far more palatial) rooms on the lake, too. She was the one to introduce Percy to Lord Byron, in fact, and therefore deserves at least some of the credit for the deeply consequential friendship that formed between the two poets. All through their stay in Geneva, they wrote—all of them, not just Percy but also Mary, Lord Byron, even Lord Byron’s personal physician. They wrote letters, diary entries, short stories, poems, novel drafts. And Percy wrote his first real masterpiece. “Mont Blanc” is, of all Percy’s poems, the one that best balances tone and topic, concrete images and abstract ideas, universal setting and personal import, and it sticks the landing with beautiful turns of phrase. Straight out of the opening gate the poem thunders with words as forceful in their flow as the Alpine mountain they evoke: The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Percy had written lovely lines before, and wrote lovely lines many times over in the years after he wrote “Mont Blanc.” But I am given pause when reading this poem because in addition to sibilance and beauty it also offers a dialogue between views, like separate factions of a single, fascinating mind. In the third section of the poem, Percy offers lyrical awe about the steeps and caverns of Mont Blanc and then with little more than a literal dash he vaults into a new, equally dramatic dialogue about himself and the nature of reality, the truth or untruth of all he sees: Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.—I look on high; Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl’d The veil of life and death? or do I lie In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep Spread far around and inaccessibly Its circles? In the span of a few dozen lines of blank verse, the voice of the poet traverses from “Look at this amazing mountain!” to “Is this mountain even real?” to “Am I real?” and “Are any of us really real?” For the reader, all this fancy footwork can be hard to see at first. It’s even harder to point out as an essayist sampling a few lines. This is because “Mont Blanc” accumulates more than it presents at any moment. I can pick and choose from the stanzas and offer great lines, but the real force is one that you get by ascending from start to finish, like, well, a mountain climber. In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, In the lone glare of day, the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart through them. Where does it all come from? How did Percy pour out this new work over the course of a few weeks in and around Geneva? Such heady writing is only possible for a person who has developed a practiced ease with abstractions, who sees the real world and the world of forms as interchangeable. For Percy, this deliberative skill took shape over all his adult life, but it advanced in an important, dramatic way during the time he spent that summer in constant dialogue with his new friend, Lord Byron. Byron had a quickening effect on Percy’s imagination. Years before the two men met in person, Percy noted in a journal: “Mary read to me some passages from Lord Byron’s poems. I was not before so clearly aware how much of the colouring our own feelings throw upon the liveliest delineations of other minds; our own perceptions are the world to us.” Now, in Geneva, the pair traded back and forth ideas on galvanism, animal spirits, witchcraft, the cult of Bonaparte, if ghosts are real, alchemy, the divine right of kings, the keep of dreams: Percy and Lord Byron were opposites in temperament but they shared a relentless interest in the fringe of the ordinary world. Each day they talked and talked till late into the night, pickaxing at the hill of human interests. If weather permitted, they spent their days sailing on the lake. Indeed, for a man who could not swim, Percy Shelley spent a remarkable amount of time on boats. During a three week period, Mary notes nine separate times that Shelley (as she calls him in her diary) “goes out on the boat” on Lake Geneva, usually with Lord Byron. Eventually, the poets circumnavigated the lake on a long trip. They spent much of the time rereading Rousseau’s novel Julie. They were morbidly elated by the parallels to art when they almost drowned in a gale in the same waters where Rousseau’s characters had brushes with death. According to Byron’s letters and journals, in the course of the trip, he drafted a new canto for “Childe Harold,” the poem that made him world-famous, and Percy sketched out material that he would later turn into another long poem, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” This idyllic Geneven interlude lasted only four months. But it altered Percy’s life, and as a result his poetry and English poetry as a whole. The friendship with Lord Byron would last for years, although it would never thrive as it did this summer, and never elicit this kind of compact, concise mastery (although, to be sure, there were many more great poems to flow from Percy’s pen). Byron, Percy, and Mary spent time together again in Italy a few years later, but much had changed by then. In his letters at the time Percy spoke with far more apprehension about his more famous friend. Percy sometimes made mention of what he saw as Lord Byron’s wasted potential. Byron in his poetry did not engage with grand ideals as Percy did. To be fair, not many people anywhere did or could engage with their ideals like Percy did. Byron mostly wanted to have fun. In the end, after Percy drowned, it was Lord Byron who led the party to cremate his old friend’s body. Although even in that Lord Byron was never quite as dedicated as one might have wished. The funeral pyre on the beach that burned Percy’s body took hours to do its work, likely due to the saturation by seawater, and Byron became more and more agitated as they waited. He was acutely bothered by the spectators who gathered nearby on the beach to watch him. Byron was a celebrity in a very modern sense, and like many modern celebrities, he was agitated by the constant surveillance. Eventually he walked into the sea and swam away, paddling far out to where his valet waited in a boat. The rest of Percy’s small group of friends would finish the job without him. * In a Google contest, Mary Shelley beats Percy Shelley by a country mile: a search query for her right now produces 12 million results; Percy gets around 2.5 million. It wasn’t always this way. For over more than a century, the results were even more lopsided but in the other direction: if there were a steam-powered Google in the Victorian era, its results pages would favor Percy by perhaps 100 to one. But seeing these two as either a winner or a runner-up is to miss the truth of their entangled lives. In the daily journal that she kept while they lodged at Lake Geneva, Mary writes about sharing a story she has written with Percy. It’s a short thing, only a few pages; from our vantage we know it is the first glimmerings of what will eventually become Frankenstein. But she had no idea at the time. Later, she will admit that she might have given up on this strange little idea except for Percy’s reaction: Keep writing, he told her. She continued, writing her own words but with his steady encouragement. Two years later, Frankenstein was published anonymously with a foreword by Percy. As word spread that its author was Percy’s companion, his not-actually-wife-but-she-acts-like-it, a mere girl of 18 (Byron’s words), let’s just say there were skeptics. Percy must have actually written it, some people theorized. That would explain the godlessness behind the book’s central idea: mortal men playing God, making life. Percy’s denials of authorship weren’t very helpful. He had already played peekaboo with the reading public more than once: his 1810 gothic novel St. Irvyne was published anonymously, and that same year he also published a poetry collection that he claimed came from the pen of a woman who attempted to assassinate George III. His and Mary’s decision to keep coy about her authorship of Frankenstein was also in keeping with literary tradition. Daniel DeFoe a century earlier had claimed Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe were real figures, and another 100 years before that, Jonathan Swift published the travels of one Lemuel Gulliver as if they were true. In each case, the authors were attempting to give their fictions the respectability of the truth. Were they lying? Sort of. But also sort of no. In this earlier era before photographs, recorded audio, or captured video, you were what you claimed you were; you were what you presented yourself as, unless someone objected; and if someone claimed you were someone different, well, what proof could they have other than their own word or someone else’s? Four years after the publication of Frankenstein’s first edition, Percy’s sailboat went under the waves off the coast of Italy. Mary spent the rest of her life extolling him as a sweet and gentle soul. In a letter written just months after his drowning she casts him in the metaphor that would define him for ages: “an angel whom imprisoned in flesh could not adapt himself to his clay shrine.” Much if not all of the rehabilitation of his image and his poetry is due to her tireless craftwork and her decision to continue to publish posthumous poems and prose from his papers for years. Their life together lasted 2,903 days. Mary would live another 10,435, until 1851. About his writing, she was right to insist that scholars take a closer look. But what about his life, his nature, which she claims was so sensitive, so gentle? Is she to be believed? Taken from the vantage of modernity: Is Percy the man the equal of Percy the writer? Or do the flaws of the latter strike out the contribution of the former? Are these questions even worth asking? To understand Percy, you have to understand this as the context for his life and his art. Percy and Mary made Mary and Percy by fiat: their personas, their literary ghosts only exist because they struggled against all adversity to make them so with their lives and even their deaths. * So, what do we do with Percy? We’ve got his poems, and if you care to read them, you should.; But mostly, he’s forgotten now except as an inside joke. His name comes up mostly in connection with his famous broken sonnet, “Ozymandias.” The poem serves as the title for an episode of one of the greatest TV shows of our time (see Breaking Bad) and as the name of a key character in one of the greatest graphic novels of our time (Watchmen). Ironically, Percy published “Ozymandias” under a pseudonym. Think of it: a poem about how even mighty names lose their power over time is the best remembered poem by a poet who is mostly forgotten and who wrote the poem using a name other than his real name. Even among poets I find that I get some blank looks whenever I bring up his name. Then again, I had almost no interest in Percy Shelley’s life back when I was a 19-year old poet-in-training, too. Everything that I learned about Percy’s life in my survey class on English Poetry could be summed up in five words: He’s the Romantic that drowned. But then at the end of college, I read his play, The Cenci. Believe it or not I really liked it, I wrote in an email to a friend. Around the same time, I read Frankenstein for a class and learned more about Mary Shelley and her life and her doomed beloved. Suddenly, Percy and his poems got more interesting. Or maybe I got a little older, encountered my own adversities in life, and found something relatable in him. He never got more likable. He still struck me as unreasonable, even a bit galling. He was privileged in a way that is grotesque by modern standards. But in his best work he sank a hook into something that still has pull to it. Earlier this year, I visited the Butler library at Columbia University while on a mission to gather material for an essay on Mary Shelley. Alone in a long row of books I found myself confronted with the fact that critical writing about her and her famous novel is dwarfed by analysis devoted to Percy. A complete copy of all 19 volumes of Shelley and His Circle alone takes up significant space. Yet in the world of modern readers the exact opposite is true: it’s all Mary, almost no Percy. I pulled down books and tried to understand once and for all the appeal of the man. I read some of the letters from Percy during their famous stay at Geneva and my first thought was, My God, they were just kids, all of them, no older than I was when I moved to New York City after college. Younger, in Mary’s case. In his lifetime, Percy never had the fame that Lord Byron had, although he was no less good-looking, no less erudite, and far more formally innovative. (And Lord Byron was no moral beacon, either: divorced, famously unfaithful, and suspected of sleeping with his half sister.) Yet Byron was still so swarmed with admirers when he arrived in Geneva that he had to abandon his hotel rooms and rent a house outside of town. Meanwhile, Percy sat in his rooms downhill working on his great poem—perhaps the greatest poem of his era—in uninterrupted obscurity. Why? Why not him? Why not me? Percy’s failures, his fears and his foibles add depth and meaning to his poems, to his otherwise dated lyrical accomplishments. The fact that not too many people really read or cared for his writing while he was alive makes his life all the more compelling to me despite the distance of two centuries, as I am a writer who also sometimes feels like he’s writing into a void, too. There is in Percy’s voice a familiar melancholy, sometimes elusive, sometimes explicit, as when he wrote without self-pity near the end of his life in a short poem: “for I am one / whom men love not.” Laboring alone in a small rented house at the bottom of the hill on Lake Geneva is where I need him. Or in the boat beside the famous Lord Byron, lost in thoughts that almost no one in his lifetime will care about. Gathered around the fire listening to German ghost stories being read aloud. Percy is a great poet whose life might be more useful than his work is now: because there is in everything about him this desire to rise, and not because he likes the sound of his voice but because he longs to tell everyone what he sees from his vantage. The fact of his persistence—no, not just his persistence, his amplification in the face of adversity, it is a reminder that there is no obligation to quit, to give up, to be polite; you do not owe the world acquiescence, or acceptance, or allegiance; you owe it nothing but the singing of the song that you find in your own head. Percy’s life taught me that, teaches me that still now as his lantern fades into the night. Was he disruptive, profoundly flawed as a man, limited by shortcomings both conscious and unconscious? Yes, and probably more. But what kind of angel brings news only of the status quo? What kind of poet speaks only the words you want to hear?