Nobodaddy's Children: Scenes from the Life of a Faun, Brand's Heath, Dark Mirrors (Collected Early Fiction, 1949-1964 / Arno Sch

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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]

A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

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I. For me the pandemic began in earnest on March 11--the same day I first made the acquaintance of my now old-frenemy Zoom. One of my graduate students had recommended it the night before, after a straw poll had found that most of her colleagues would rather the week’s class not be held in person. I’ll admit it’s a bit hard, so many months later, to explain why I myself wasn’t better prepared for this; had I not spent an entire session, back when I'd barely heard of Wuhan, lecturing from the classroom’s remotest corner and insisting between sneezes, “Don’t worry--hay fever!”? Hadn’t my mother-in-law (of doughty pioneer stock) left behind an entire closetful of toilet paper and canned beans at the end of her last visit, five days ago? And hadn’t the first documented case of community spread in New York walked into an ER a half mile from campus in the interim? Weren’t swaths of Westchester County already locking down? But denial is a mother, too, I guess, and cordons sanitaires and “airborne toxic events” still seemed possible only in novels. So when I called my department chair the next morning to check was I allowed to hold this week’s class online, my main feeling was a (perhaps prophetic) dubiousness about distance learning. His response? “Well, as of Friday, the college has suspended all in-person interactions for the rest of the semester, so you might as well get a jump on things.” Gulp. On the syllabus that day was Mrs. Dalloway. I should state for the record that I already vibrate at a sympathetic frequency with this novel, bursting into unaccountable tears every fifteen pages or so--and at different places each time. Indeed, my ideal reading of Mrs. Dalloway, a reading of perfect Buddhist attunement, entails crying continuously from the first sentence to the last and then dying immediately after. (Of joy. In the year 2072). Wikipedia informs me it’s Montherlant, not Chekhov, who said that happiness writes white--i.e., generates no contrast, leaves no mark on the page--and though exceptions range from the denouement of War & Peace to Updike’s short story “The Happiest I’ve Been,” the rule more or less holds…which is why Clarissa Dalloway is so singular in world literature. Through the whole of the novel that comprises her, she remains more or less happy, more or less lucky (privileged, we’d say). “What a lark! What a plunge!” Nor does much compensatory plot eventuate around her to stoke suspense. No, the mystery that haunts these pages--among the most vivid ever written--is one of pure consciousness: what makes Clarissa, on a June day in 1923, so particularly aware of her happiness, so exquisitely open in the face of the virile alternatives--the self-pity of Peter Walsh; the self-satisfaction of “admirable” Hugh Whitbread; the terrible auto-auto-da-fé of Septimus Smith? Every fiction must on some level address the Passover question, Why is this day different from all other days?…and a fortiori with Mrs. Dalloway, to whom, as in a Seinfeld episode, so little seems to happen. Reading in and around the book through the years, I’ve become more and more aware that any answer starts with World War I. Though Mrs. Dalloway is set a half-decade after the armistice, it very much--consciously, I think--sustains the illusion of the first summer of peacetime. Indeed, given the scale of the recent trauma, the 20 million dead, part of the wonder Clarissa feels walking through her city’s crowded streets may be that there's anyone left to crowd them. And look: that “violent explosion” over there turns out to be a motorcar backfiring. And the “airplane bor[ing] ominously into the ears of the crowd” is “actually” just “writing something! making letters in the sky!” Glaxo…no, Kreemo…no, toffee! The sweetness one feels here is, in part, relief: What she loved was this, here, now in front of her…or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived? How do you make happiness visible? Try darkening the page. Still, another question has nagged at me: why the three-year time lag? Why not set the thing in 1919? Then, going back through the text in the dwindling hours of my Zoom virginity, I was struck by something I’d forgotten or overlooked in previous readings: a note struck rather more softly, muffled by subclauses and parentheticals and oblique angles of vision. Look again, for example, at our first outward vision of Clarissa, a charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her…a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross. And there it is, for anyone reading amid a pandemic: Her illness. But which illness? A few lines later, we find Clarissa sensing, just before Big Ben strikes the hour, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza). This is all on the second page! I was almost reluctant to google “Woolf dalloway Spanish flu” (and reassured by the then-paucity of results; apparently others had missed the pianissimo, as Woolf’s contemporaries wouldn’t have been able to do.) But yes, Virginia Woolf herself had survived the Spanish flu (Cf. “On Being Ill”). It had killed a further 230,000 Britons, and nearly killed her, too. And so, I heard myself positing a few hours later in my “personal meeting room,” to a gallery view of tiny faces, this book we were all holding in our various hotspots was not just suggesting what life might feel like after wartime, but showing us what it was going to feel like--underneath the contingencies of our different circumstances, and notwithstanding the horror, and the suffering, and the death--to step outside on the first spring day after the pandemic ended. “Because the pandemic will end,” I said, trying to will some optimism out into the ether. “And for a brief while we’ll all get a chance to become Virginia Woolf. Everything will be illuminated-- for about two weeks, until it becomes habitual again--in the light of the possibility of there being nothing at all.” As many of us have learned, there’s no digital equivalent of “room dynamics”--no "Zoom feel"--but I sensed, or hallucinated, a change in the digitized listening. Then the tiny heads began to bob. For a moment, this century-old work of experimental fiction was letting them, and me, see past the catastrophe flooding our screens. And I’d have been happy to leave things there, to go away and cry more Micawberish tears, but then one of my students spoke up. We’d been looking earlier at the novel’s point-of-view movements--the flit to Scrope Purvis, for example--and she’d noted a rough principle: the characters had to be in physical proximity (passing on a street corner, say) for the perspective to jump from one to another. Now she ventured, tentatively, “Is it possible there’s a formal side to the pandemic thing, too? It’s like the point-of-view in the novel moves as a contagion, an airborne virus.” “That’s exactly what it goddamn does,” I fired off almost instantly, like a neuron in some larger brain. “And that’s exactly what the novel as a form can do. Woolf has just watched this mode of transmission kill 50 million people worldwide, and however consciously, this is her response, her deep wish. She’s trying to re-engineer the mechanisms of death to create an epidemic of life.” II. For a long time, that exchange with my students, connection building on connection, would remain the high point of my year in reading. I recount it at length not to suggest that March and April weren’t among the worst reading months of my life; they were. Back in the halcyon days of January, I’d agreed to review a 300,000-word novel, expecting it to take three weeks, and now I was managing to get through about 2,500 words a day--which hardly even seemed to matter, against the fact that equally many people were dying, millions more being thrown out of work as the economy went dark. Even if this novel was worthwhile, which it was, who was going to rush out and buy it, and where? As I mushed my school-age children (figuratively) through the arctic wastes of Google Classroom, I was having a vocational crisis of sorts, thinking often of the old Philip Roth line about reality outstripping our capacity for invention. I’d once dismissed it as “promoting a competition that doesn’t really exist,” but maybe reality was outstripping that, too. Still, I kept thinking about Mrs. Dalloway. It stood for me, even then, as an object lesson in what fiction could make happen, if I could make myself equal to it: an anti-quarantine, an unsheltering, a positive contamination where we blow right through the six-foot gap with our neighbors and spend weeks afflicting their apartments, years inhabiting their minds. And I continued on some level to suspect that Roth was wrong, and “reality hunger” a category error. The shared subjectivity of literature wasn’t an illusion or an escape so much as something you first had to be able to imagine yourself halfway toward if it was ever to become real. Imaginative literature, it should be said, doesn’t begin and end with fiction, and I did manage during this period to find some consolation in works of journalism. Because the public library was closed--a loss almost as significant as that of the schools--I found myself trolling the little free ones suddenly popping up like mushrooms all around my neighborhood, and in one of these I found a book called Complexity, by M. Mitchell Waldrop. My fascination with systems theory and its cousin chaos theory dates back to Jurassic Park, but I’ve never had the technical grounding to do much but poetically misunderstand them, so I was edified and then engrossed by the clarity of Waldrop’s reporting on the scientific work of the Santa Fe Institute, in the early 1980s…even as his account of “organized complexity,” all those entangled variables and feedback loops, stoked some concerns about putting Jared Fucking Kushner--the Chauncey Gardiner of legacy admissions, New Jersey’s answer to Candide--in charge of the fucking supply chains. I was less surprised to find myself loving Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and the Power; he’s among my favorite of the New Journalists. Still, given the seeming desiccation of its subject matter (a game of thrones played out on the New York Times masthead in the 1950s and ’60s), I’d put off reading this one, and now was struck by the sheer chutzpah of Talese’s 40-page dives into the heads and lives of his characters--real people, all. And on the subject of chutzpah, or moxie, or elan, or brio, I should recommend The Brown Album, an essay collection by my old friend Porochista Khakpour, which happened to be published at the height of the first COVID wave. Though its pieces were written over a decade and for a range of magazines, the through-line is fearless self-examination, delivered in the same antic voice that drives Khakpour’s excellent novels. Oddly enough, it would be Anthony Trollope who, in early May, led me back into fiction. I can think of at least a dozen Victorian novelists whose prose I find more compelling, but costume drama and home repair are my cinematic mac and cheese, and after we’d exhausted the This Old House archives, my wife and I had been tranquilizing ourselves at night with the pretty-good Amazon Prime version of Dr. Thorne. On a whim, I ordered the book, fetched it from the depopulated loading dock back of the bookstore took it to the park, and there it was, returned as it had vanished: the infectiousness of life. I felt like I was learning to read again, curling up with Madeleine L’Engle. I had only to pick up Dr. Thorne to be whisked away to the planet Barsetshire, with its vast deposits of meaningful choices. Now if only I could find a way to smuggle them back to 2020… III. But around me, the weather was warming up, whatever force driving the green fuse through the flowers…and fewer people were getting sick, fewer dying, the abnormal becoming the new normal. I found myself sitting in the backyard (what a lark! What a plunge!) amid the companionable silence of the non-traffic and the distant squalling of my daycareless three-year-old’s non-nap, and relaxing my deflector shields enough to be transported. I visited midcentury Paris via A Fairly Good Time, Mavis Gallant’s sublime one-upping of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Dipped into Chicago’s Bronzeville with my teen idol Gwendolyn Brooks in her mini-bildungsroman Maud Martha, as authentic a work of American modernism as I’ve encountered. Hit the New Orleans-South Texas-Mountain West stations of the cross in Katherine Anne Porter’s novella trilogy Pale Horse, Pale Rider--the one bit of pandemic reading I allowed myself. I wondered: Why don’t more people read Katherine Anne Porter? The genius Mavis Gallant? And why on earth is a standalone Maud Martha out of print? It hasn’t been quite as often in recent years that a new novel struck me as similarly imperishable, but this summer brought two that did. One was Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, the latest and purportedly last novel by László Krasznahorkai. It had been one of the first books in my entire life to intimidate me with its size, not because the page count (550ish) was so high, but because the length and intensity and compositing of Krasznahorkai’s sentences can resemble a lava slide of black type. I was similarly slow years ago to pick up The Melancholy of Resistance, at half the length. But aside from being one of the greatest living writers, Krasznahorkai is funny, too--like Kafka is funny--and Baron Wenckheim is his funniest book, so wild and savage and subtle and depressingly true (its thoroughly corrupted Hungary a mirror for what increasingly seems a rusted-out America) that I had literal difficulty putting it down. I’d allotted something like a month; I finished it in a week. And immediately I grabbed Krasznahorkai’s volume of stories, The World Goes On, because I wanted him to go on, too. (“A Drop of Water” and “That Gagarin” are perfect places, by the way, for the László-curious to toe the magma.) The other best new novel I read in 2020 was Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and The Light. It was the last book I’d bought before the lockdown, and it, too, came to seem intimidatingly large, back when I was making it through a few pages a day. But I couldn’t just let it glower at me from the shelf like that, accusing me of abandoning Thomas Cromwell halfway to the chopping block. I picked it up and was pretty much knocked over. For one thing, I hadn’t remembered the richness of Mantel’s sentences. Great prose replenishes the language it’s written in, and for me, the alchemical care with which Mantel handles the Latinate and the Anglo-Saxon does just that; here she is, for example, hovering around some of the very mysteries I’d been thinking about: Don’t look back, he had told the king: yet he too is guilty of retrospection as the light fades, in that hour of winter or summer before they bring in the candles, when earth and sky melt, when the fluttering heart of the bird on the bough calms and slows, and the night-walking animals stir and stretch and rouse, and the eyes of cats shine in the dark, when colour bleeds from sleeve and gown into the darkening air; when the page grows dim and letter forms elide and slip into other conformations, so that as the page is turned the old story slides from sight and a strange and slippery confluence of ink begins to flow. You look back into your past and say, is this story mine; this land? Is that flitting figure mine, that shape easing itself through alleys, evader of the curfew, fugitive from the day? I have always sort of dreaded historical fiction, apart from the novels of Robert Graves and Marguerite Yourcenar, but finishing the Cromwell trilogy made me want to read more, if only to try to figure out how Mantel had evaded the typical problem, gotten fact and speculation back into living alignment. Then I recalled that I had yet to read the less famous of Yourcenar’s masterworks, The Abyss, about an alchemist in the Low Countries at the start of the Reformation. And once Maine’s travel ban had softened and we could go there for a while in August, I took the book with me. I’d be reading it on the same small island where Mme. Yourcenar was buried. It’s not entirely a compliment when people call Yourcenar’s writing “marmoreal”--the connotation is of willed majesty, but also airlessness and weight--but nor is it wholly unfair. Yourcenar’s dialogue is marmoreal. So is the opening of The Abyss, a kind of false front. But then Yourcenar’s obsessiveness takes over, along with her fantastic imagination and her astonishingly syncretic erudition. The novel is as dense and rich and dark as a sachertorte, but also deeply nourishing. And as with any number of her essays (collected in The Dark Brain of Piranesi or That Mighty Sculptor, Time) or the companion piece “Nathanaël” (with its lapidary umlaut) it’s hard to emerge looking at modernity in quite the same way. IV. And now comes the part when I realize I, too, have gotten caught up in my enthusiasms, and indulged them at too great a length - though out of solicitude, reader! The holidays are upon us, and you deserve some of the old normal! And because these look to be dark months ahead, let me blaze through a few more recommendations that might keep you going, as they did me. From post-Yourcenar forays into Europe: Lord of All the Dead, in which the Spanish master Javier Cercas brings to a haunting conclusion his three-book exhumation of his country’s Civil War and its memory…also, the tragicomic palaver of Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, a novel written in a single sentence…and Magda Szabó’s wonderful Abigail, which enfolds the historical irruptions of her own youth in the forgiving rhythms of a young-adult boarding-school novel…and, executing a similar strategy, but along much darker lines, Scenes from The Life of a Faun, by Arno Schmidt, a late German writer of Joycean proclivities about whom I expect to have more to say a year from now. And then some gems of English prose: Gerald Murnane’s collected stories, from Down Under (which I got onto via an excerpt in Music & Literature)…Dr. Jeckyll & Mister Hyde (which I got onto via Andrew O’Hagan)…and Thomas More’s Utopia (which I got onto via Thomas Cromwell, yet whose depiction of certain existing societal arrangements as at heart insane seems to resonate urgently with the protest--the insistence--that Black Lives Matter). And then some other new novels I loved: Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, a piercing documentary collage slash tone poem about Israeli human beings and Palestinian human beings…Rachel Cusk’s Outline, as good as everyone says, but for different reasons--and with the added appeal, if “lava flow of black type” doesn't appeal, of cutting as swiftly and cleanly as a knife through butter…and Inside Story, whose formal and conceptual overload allows Martin Amis to abandon all hope of Nabokovian perfection and write more loosely and candidly than he has since the first part of The Pregnant Widow--just too-clever-by-half enough. And finally, my other allergy: the memoirs. I can’t remember ever having read more than one of these in a year, and then only by aging rock stars, but apparently my imperviousness to memoir has weak spots. One is for material so unlikely that no writing at all is required to make it interesting (Keith Richards, I’m looking at you.) The other is for writing so lively that even an account of watching hotel-room cable becomes indelible (as with Patti Smith’s M Train.) I happened to read three memoirs this year that fulfilled both briefs at once. The first was Tara Westover’s Educated. Not only does she go from home-schooling with her survivalist sectarian family in Idaho to a year at Oxford (that’s before Dad becomes the King Lear of essential oils); Westover is obviously a born storyteller, writing with tremendous pace, honesty, emotion, and detail. Jack Goldsmith--the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush--writes a somewhat drier prose line; you may remember him blowing the whistle on warrantless surveillance. But he’s also, weirdly, the stepson of the longtime prime suspect in the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance (played in The Irishman by Landry from Friday Night Lights), and his book about it, In Hoffa’s Shadow, never puts a foot down wrong. And then there’s Patricia Lockwood. If, as Greil Marcus had it, mid-'70s Springsteen was a ’57 Chevy running on melted-down Crystals records, then Lockwood is Gerard Manley Hopkins and Big Maybelle reprising Thelma and Louise in a T-Top Trans Am--her Updike piece in the LRB is for my money the best piece of literary criticism written this decade. So it seems almost cosmically unfair (but a lark! and a plunge!) that she is also the daughter of a Catholic priest whose thing for whammy bars and Fox News is matched only by his antipathy toward pants. Or maybe it makes perfect sense, I don’t know. In any case, I’d happily spend 2021 reading Priestdaddy over and over (though my wife, whom I kept awakening with my cackles, might dissent). And as with any star, Lockwood’s light is indistinguishable from her burning. At graver moments, like the chapter called “Voice,” I had the experience Mantel describes so well: Is this my life, or my neighbor’s conflated with mine, or a life I have dreamed and prayed for; is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or have I slipped the limit of myself—slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon? In short: Priestdaddy and books more generally got me to the far side of this year's pain not by distraction, but by guiding me into and then through it. It’s going to be a long winter, people, and we’re going to need that wherever we can find it: stars and more stars, candles upon candles...figurations of brightness, however dark the ground. More from A Year in Reading 2020 Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. 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