Old Yeller (Perennial Classics)

New Price: $9.59
Used Price: $0.95

Mentioned in:

Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

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

Beware the End of Art: The Millions Interviews Mark Slouka

- | 4
Mark Slouka is an American writer who has published eight books, fiction and nonfiction, that have appeared in 16 languages. The son of Czech immigrants, Mark has two stories in Best American Short Stories, and three pieces in Best American Essays. Further credentials include Harpers, Ploughshares, the Paris Review, Granta, Guggenheim, the NEA, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. You get the idea. The part you don’t yet get but will is that when a writer with this CV exchanges the security of the academy for the unfathomability of east-central Europe, it’s incumbent that the rest of us give serious consideration as to why. Mark recently gave me two solid days on Skype—Prague to Kyiv—making a strong case for the necessity of book learnin’ and more. The Millions: So now that you’re retired from the MFA business and living in Prague, where is the good writing going to come from? Mark Slouka: Thanks for that, but my guess is, pretty much where it’s always come from, which is to say, probably not an MFA program.  Honestly, the MFA industry in America is a wonder to me: The less people read, the more they seem to want to write, and a whole lot of them think that dropping the big bucks on an MFA is the only way to do it.  It can work for some.  For others not so much. TM: How so? MS: Okay, for example, when I taught at Columbia, the bill for an MFA came to around 70,000 bucks and we offered precious little financial aid. There was one student sleeping in her car with her kid until I found out about it. What’s worse, I was on the acceptance committee—one of the people who had to call students to give them the good news. So, I make the call and somebody’s mom out in Ohio picks up and I can hear her whispering, “Oh, my God, it’s Columbia University!”  Then the student gets on, her voice shaking, and I say “Congratulations, you’ve been accepted to the Columbia MFA program,” which is followed by much rejoicing. Then she musters up the courage to ask if there’s any financial aid and I say, “absolutely, we’re awarding you a $3,000 scholarship,” or whatever.  To offset the blow—or sucker them in, in my opinion—we were supposed to tell prospective students that they could apply for a teaching fellowship in their second year, omitting the fact that only a small percentage of applicants actually got one.  I felt like I was hustling sub-prime mortgages. To my credit, I always told them the odds of hitting the teaching jackpot were low, so if money was a concern and they had better offers, they should consider taking them. TM: Okay, but for those who could afford it, the workshops were worth it, right? MS: I don’t know, maybe.  I had some amazing students, but the sad truth is that all too often the culture of the workshop can lead to a kind of “blind leading the blind” situation: As an instructor, you’re not really allowed to just lay out the problem and suggest solutions. TM: Not allowed? MS: Let’s say, “discouraged.” After my first class at Columbia—I’d never taught writing before—‚a student came up to me and said, “Um, professor, I’m not sure you understand how it works around here.” And I said, “Probably not, what am I doing wrong?” And she explained that I wasn’t giving students enough time to frame the conversation themselves and I realized I was expected to step back and let them lead each other.  Results were mixed. Sometimes a good student would take it in the right direction.  Other times, someone would write, “Her tears fell like pebbles on an iron grate,” and I’d try to say something about what metaphors are supposed to accomplish only to get a chorus of, “But I loved that pebble thing!”  But hey, lately I read a review by Dwight Garner of The New York Times, who singled out for praise the line, “The moon is a huge sanitary pad,” so what the fuck do I know? Bottom line is that writing is not done by committee.  If you try to please everyone in your workshop you end up with this sad, neutered thing that any agent or editor worth her salt can smell from a mile away. TM: Russians say, “not fish, not meat.” MS: Exactly.  If you want to write, make reading your MFA.  Find the writers who move you and try to figure out what they’re doing on the page.  If I’m honest, my teaching at Columbia, and later at the University of Chicago, really just came down to disarticulating the written page. TM: Meaning . . .? MS: Meaning teaching students how to read like writers, showing them what their options are in terms of voice, silence, time, dialogue, and so on.  How certain moves on the page—a period in the right place, to recall Isaak Babel—can break your heart.  If it was up to me, I’d teach nothing but example-based craft seminars, which go straight to the issues writers encounter, then cut people loose to do their own work. TM: I have to say, it sounds like a sweet deal: guided looking, credentialed people shaping your study— MS: I’m not saying there aren’t some great programs out there. Just that sometimes the MFA program’s guiding principle seems to be “the shortest distance between two points is a cube.”  People will say there are good reasons for this, that students need time to write in a supportive environment, to develop relationships or whatever. Fair enough. But if somebody considering an MFA today were to ask my opinion, I’d tell them to at least consider saving the dough and doing what every writer in history had to do until a few decades ago: read their ass off, then take the leap. TM: You have a PhD in American literature. How much does that shape your views on this? MS: God, I don’t know.  Some, maybe.  I mean, if nothing else, a degree in literature introduces you to some great writing, right?  Virtually none of which was written by committee, by the way. TM: We’re a mimetic species, though.  Isn’t any act of writing somewhat of a collective function? If I look at the novel you’re writing now, do I hear Kent Haruf in there? Steinbeck? Who makes up your writing committee? MS: I see where you’re going: committee as influence.  In that sense you’re absolutely right—writers are sponges. We absorb everything—a metaphor here, a bit of dialogue there.  To some degree, we’re made up of the writers we loved, and for all I know, the ones we hated too.  So…yeah. As far as my committee goes, I wouldn’t know where to start.  I mean, I grew up falling asleep to my parents and their friends singing Czech and Slovak folk songs late into the night, my dad reading me those dark fairytales the Czechs love so much . . . TM: Like? MS: Oh, I don’t know—there’s one called “Otesanek” that I wrote about in The Visible World.  It’s about this couple who have a baby that can’t stop eating.  It devours everything—the chickens, the plow-horse, its own parents—until it makes the mistake of swallowing a little girl who’s sitting at her sewing and this little girl, finding herself in this community of the consumed, takes her scissors and delivers everybody out of the monster’s stomach by a kind of reverse caesarean.  I loved that story when I was a kid.  It’s a parable of fascism, of course, and how it always dies from within, having consumed too much—though I somehow doubt I got that when I was six. Anyway, mix all this Slavic stuff in with Shane and Old Yeller and “Coo-coo for Coco Puffs” and Daniel Boone and Man from Uncle and you’ve got . . . what?  Me, I guess. TM: Any particular writers who had an influence? MS: Melville, for sure, who, by the way, you strikingly resemble. TM: Young, rugged Melville, no doubt. MS: Absolutely.  I guess if you forced me to name names, I’d say I was most influenced by Melville and Kafka—which makes sense.  After those two, though, the floodgates are open: all the writers of the American Renaissance–Thoreau, Whitman, Poe–a mix of American voices from Cotton Mather to Frederick Douglass, Wharton, Ellison, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Fitzgerald, Richard Yates. European writers from Dante to George Eliot to Woolf and Musil, Hamsun and Hrabal. Essayists from Montaigne to E.B. White to Joan Didion to, I don’t know, more contemporary voices like Charles D’Ambrosio and Thomas Lynch.  Pro tip: never ask a writer what his or her influences were–they’ll never fucking shut up. TM: Perhaps some of those names help explain the aphoristic quality I pick up in your writing, particularly your fiction? Like, for me, the key line in Brewster: “Stay somewhere long enough, you don’t really see it at all.” MS: I hadn’t really thought about it.  But it’s true, don’t you think?–that a place begins to fade with time?  Maybe the biggest struggle in life—or the biggest prize, if you want to get all positive about it—is to just keep on seeing. TM: You hung around academia for 30-years plus, taught at half a dozen universities—did you stop seeing it? MS: No such luck. TM: So how do you see American higher education today? MS: Oh, Jesus. Ask me about daffodils and sunsets. TM: Any position on daffodils and sunsets? MS: I’m pro-daffodils.  And sunsets. TM: I can quote you? MS: Sure. Important to get that out there. TM: Absolutely, so . . . MS: I honestly think the state of higher education in America today—and I’m talking about only the humanities here and completely ignoring the huge, structural changes the pandemic has forced—is pretty well screwed. The humanities are an endangered ecosystem, just hanging on between the subdivisions.  Whether they’ve slipped below the threshold of genetic viability is anybody’s guess.  Extra credit. TM: What’s endangering them? MS: A dozen things.  For starters, the humanities are being forced to justify their existence on economic grounds—What kind of job will this Shakespeare class get my Jimmy?—even though their real value is civic; they form human beings, citizens, not workers.  Asking the humanities to justify themselves in economic terms is like asking a tomato to hammer a nail: It’s a fucking tomato—it serves a different purpose.  But that’s a tough case to make to parents shelling out a king’s ransom for their daughter’s college education. TM: Sounds like a feedback loop: As the price of education goes up, market forces come into the classroom, forcing it to become more vocational. MS: Exactly, one standard of value comes to dominate everything.  Of course, the marketplace bias is hard-wired into our culture. Consider Marco Rubio, that paragon of American statesmanship, who once memorably said that what America needs is more welders, not philosophers. Really, it was probably only a matter of time before the universities morphed into the corporations they now are. Of course, I’d love to ask the good senator from Florida why a philosopher can’t also be a welder, or whether he realizes that “manly labor” vs. “effete book-larnin” is a cliché as old as time. Maybe he could write me a five-page essay on why the Founding Fathers would have found his statement ridiculous, while Herr Goebbels would have applauded it.  Of course, to write that essay would require something resembling a humanities education, so . . . TM: So where does this leave students? MS: Equal parts entitled and ripped off. The story of higher education these past two generations is that as tuition costs skyrocketed, students morphed into customers.  It makes sense: if you’re paying a quarter mil for a four-year BA, it’s not unreasonable to want to have some say.  But just because something makes sense doesn’t automatically make it a good idea. TM: I’m going to need something more concrete… MS: Sure. At the end of every semester, college professors all over America hand out evaluation forms so the students can evaluate their teaching, the class, whether they found it a rewarding experience—stuff like that. These forms factor into promotions, tenure decisions, and so on.  Which sounds fine except that it doesn’t take professor X very long to figure out that he’s handing out customer satisfaction surveys, and that Ted will be a happier customer, and rate professor X as a genius, if professor X gives him an A instead of a B and doesn’t bust his ass with demanding exams and 15-page papers.  The incentive, clearly, is to inflate grades while depressing requirements. What it boils down to is diminished rigor and party favors all around.  My so-called career basically tracked this paradigm shift. When I was a student, a 15-pager due on Monday was a 15-pager due on Monday. It never occurred to me to argue or to feel aggrieved if I missed the deadline.  By the time I quit my professorship at the U. of Chicago 30 years later—and we’re talking about a place that fetishizes rigor—things had changed. Obviously, there were exceptions—professors who struggled to maintain standards and students who appreciated a rigorous class—but these were the exceptions. I had students in my office at Chicago in tears because I’d given them an A-. They’d never had an A- before. TM: An A-? That’s pretty heartless. MS: Oh, there’s more!  All this stuff I’m describing—the corporatization of the university, the transformation of students into customers—has had the unintended side-effect of turning the classroom into the perfect petri dish for grievance. How many stories have I heard lately about some professor being taken to the woodshed for assigning a book that caused a student offence? It’s gotten to where some students don’t even bother discussing it with the prof—they just show up during office hours with the administration’s legal representative.  Thank God I split when I did because I’d last about 20 minutes in today’s environment. TM: I’m guessing you’re not a “safe space” kind of guy. MS: How could you tell? TM: Melvillian intuition. MS: Let me put it this way: I think “safe spaces,” where a student can opt out of a discussion that might upset them, are well-intentioned.  But I also think that, with rare exceptions, that option makes about as much sense as having science labs in which students can opt out of undesirable results from an experiment. This whole movement toward customizing our education, making it more about us—above all protecting our tender sensibilities from anything that might upset us or, God forbid, force us to defend our position—is anathema to the humanities. The entire purpose of the humanities is to do the exact opposite: to force us out of ourselves, to challenge us, to flay our pieties. I wrote as much in a piece for Harper’s. The humanities are supposed to make us question our givens, disturb us, unsettle us. A safe space?  The humanities are life itself.  Where’s the safe space from that? TM: You’re not concerned about blowback? MS: I’ve stuck my foot in it, so let me earn my hate mail for real.  To my mind, the whole notion that education, or art, should match the consumer’s background, that Latino students need to read more Latino authors and Black students more Black authors makes about as much sense to me as saying that privileged, white, male students need to read more privileged, white, male authors to the exclusion of everything else. What we need is to read good writers—Black, white, Latino, you-name-it.  Whatever hue, whatever cultural background. Especially those who confound us, or piss us off, or tell us something that goes against what we believed to be true.  Kafka still says it best: a book should be like the axe for the frozen sea within. TM: So how would your ideal classroom be run? MS: Openly, dangerously, fearlessly.  Against the grain.  Everything on the table, nothing exempt from discussion, debate, argument.  You say James Baldwin’s use of the “n-word” offends you?  Good—it should.  Now let’s discuss whether it’s the word itself, Baldwin’s use of it, or my having assigned Baldwin’s essay in the first place that offends you, and why.  Let’s talk about Baldwin’s reason for deploying that word in the context of his time, and how that particular slur’s payload has changed over the years, how it’s been weaponized by some and co-opted by others…That would be my ideal classroom. I actually had something like it back in the 1990s when I led discussion groups for a course called “The Making of the Modern World” at the University of California, San Diego.  An amazing time in my life—I’ll remember those students, and some of the conversations we had, till senility do us part. TM: And that’s no longer possible today? Only 30 years on? MS: Honestly, I don’t know that it is. Between the orthodoxies of the right and the orthodoxies of the left—in academia, definitely more the left—professors have to walk between the raindrops. TM: Orthodoxy is something we’re both familiar with, considering where we both live.  MS: Sure. I mean, during the Soviet era, whether in Kyiv or Prague, certain expressions were sanctioned and others condemned, certain works deemed correct, others criminalized. Which is more or less what’s happening in the U.S. now, with the right and the left both clawing for the right to decide what’s “acceptable.”  It’s just a matter of degree, but given our criminal ex-president’s interest in criminalizing dissent, who knows how long that gap will hold? TM: There’s something else at work here, though, isn’t there?  Tech. What part does it play? Twitter’s an easy target. A vital tool of free speech, but also a cesspool of tendentiousness and impulsivity when it’s called on to address an important cultural stress-point. Though it’s not entirely the fault of the tool, rather, what techies call “an IBM error”—the Idiot Behind the Machine. User error. MS: Sure.  What’s happening in academia is obviously just a subset of what’s happening in the culture as a whole. The decline of rigor in education—and, again, I’m only talking about the humanities here because I’m not competent to discuss the sciences—is part of the general dumbing down of society. TM: Okay, Boomer. MS: Careful, comrade—I might be offended. Some professor has argued that “boomer” is a slur, right? Seriously, though, this stuff is real. I’ve watched student attention spans atrophying over 30 years. Slowly breaking up—fracturing might be a better word.  And it’s not just students—we’re all under attack.  My honest opinion is that the assault on the silence of the inner world will be the biggest story of our time.  I see it as a form of colonization, masked by convenience and speed. The new gadgets are extraordinary—and extraordinarily addictive—but each new thing plants a flag on a bit more of our inner space. That stillness we need in order to figure out who we are and what we believe. TM: Your first book was about this, wasn’t it? MS: Yeah, it was. I was yelling about this back when having any reservations about the digital revolution at all made you kin to the Unabomber. At least he seemed to think so. TM: Hold on. You know the Unabomber? THE Unabomber? MS: I wouldn’t say “know,” exactly. We corresponded a bit in 2012 because I wanted to write an essay comparing Ted Kaczynski and John Brown—basically exploring the connection between fanaticism and prophesy—and I thought it might be interesting to get his view. TM: How’d that go? MS: The essay? Never wrote it. Harper’s wasn’t interested and they were my go-to guys back then. I let it slide. TM: And your correspondence with the Unabomber? MS: Not so good.  For starters, ADX-Florence is a supermax, so all correspondence has to be handwritten.  I was fine with that—I still write letters by hand now and then—but the list of things you couldn’t send—no seeds, no body hair, etc.—was pretty weird. I mean, it’s not like I was dying to send Ted Kaczynski some tomato seeds and chest hair. Anyway, I just didn’t find him all that interesting.  Worse, he’s a terrible writer, but the thing that creeped me out was when he said he had some people on the outside researching me, hoping I’d be helpful for “the cause.” Which is not what I had in mind. TM: Ted’s People are looking you up. I’d move to Prague. But back to literature—what it did, what it does, what it’s supposed to do.  I mean, once upon a time, a liberal arts education, for all its lack of currency, provided an examination of classical literature that exposed a student to elements of anthropology, phenomenology, metaphysics, ethics, rhetoric—to the story of human progress, basically.  But contemporary fiction—and I say this as somebody who’s working pretty hard playing catch-up to contemporary literary thought—it strikes me that it so rarely goes for the bigger picture. We get a lot of unvarnished processing of personal experience, which, frankly, most of the time isn’t interesting enough to warrant a novel. MS: I heard a two-part question. TM: You’re generous that way. MS: Tell my publisher. Anyway, part one has to do with what’s being taught in the universities today—with the disappearance of what used to be called a classical education. Personally, I think there was a lot of value in the core curriculum at Columbia. It required us to read—or at least convince our professors we’d read—the so called “classics” of world literature, political philosophy, and so on. Of course, almost all the books were written by dead white men, since white men were the only ones empowered to write until a nanosecond ago, but they still had value.  My take would be: Absolutely, mess with the canon, challenge it, include more contemporary voices, female voices, non-Western voices. These have been neglected for far too long. But don’t throw out Aeschylus and Machiavelli because they happened to be privileged, white, and male. Part two has to do with what’s being written today, and that’s tougher to talk about. I do think that literature has been forced to respond to the changes wrought by the digital revolution.  We expect to be gratified instantly by what we’re looking at now—if we’re not, we swipe it away.  We’re more visual, more short-form. We’re increasingly impatient with complexity, nuance, indeterminacy—all the things that bend toward wisdom, all the things that literature once trafficked in.  The market has adjusted accordingly, as markets do, so that for most novels to succeed today—and, again, there are wonderful exceptions—they basically have to do the impossible and break through the noise, the distraction of the culture. About 80 years ago, reporting on this new gadget called the TV, E.B. White wrote that “the race today is between loud speaking and soft, between the things that are and the things that seem to be, between the chemist at RCA and the angel of God.” It’s a great sentence, but the point is that the angel of God has been taking it on the chin for a while now. A novel that whispers rather than shouts is going to have a tough time finding the light. TM: No room for the still, small voice. And this fits in with the corporatization of higher education and identity politics and– MS: God, you had to ask. TM: It’s why I get the big bucks. Swing away… MS: Why not? So, when I said that we expect to be gratified instantly now, I guess that in literary terms, that would mean either entertained or comforted. Still, there are so many exceptions to this that I’m not entirely comfortable with the generalization; I mean, Louise Erdrich just won the Pulitzer. But I have this sense that more and more people today are turning to books to get away from the complexity of the world, not to confront it.  And given the direction of things these days, from the climate crisis to the rise of a fascist political party in America, who can blame them? What I’m trying to say is that I think it’s possible that this need to be comforted has resulted in people wanting to read more about people like themselves—entrenching themselves in their tribal group or whatever—which in turn has led some to question whether writers have the right to imagine characters different from themselves. That’s a problem. The whole point of literature is to imagine another world, another consciousness. Taking this nonsense to its natural conclusion would imply that you shouldn’t read Huckleberry Finn because Twain wasn’t a runaway slave and neither are you. But read that book and for the duration of that reading to some extent you are Jim. And Huck. And the King and the Duke. You’re taking your ego out for a spin. That’s what defines imaginative fiction. Your genotype doesn’t determine your ability to write fictional characters, your imagination does. Of course, you might do a lousy job of writing a character who is “not you,” but you have the right to try. If the writing sucks, if your imagination can’t cut it, prepare to be criticized. But to incarcerate a creative spirit, to say, in effect, “you don’t have the right to imagine that”—that’s the end of art. TM: Does the critique of cultural appropriation misunderstand how fiction works? And is this the place to talk about the lingering effects of Soviet cultural policy? MS: The effects of Soviet cultural policy…? TM: I mean the way the rank and file were compelled to develop this uncanny bullshit detector, which produced the unforeseen consequence of spilling over into their ability to read fiction. MS: Well, as far as the cultural appropriation thing goes, like I said, I honestly think it’s another one of those well-intentioned absurdities. Art begs, borrows, and steals, and the rest it imagines. Force artists to stay on their racial or gender reservations or whatever, and you may as well forget about it. Again, you can argue with the accuracy of a writer’s depiction—its success, its spirit, what-have-you—but don’t forbid an artist, a priori, from imagining the other. That’s nuts. But you’re probably asking the wrong guy about this. My first novel, maybe still my best, was God’s Fool, in which I imagined the lives of the Siamese twins, the women they loved, the children they had, the slaves they owned, and yet I’m neither Siamese nor a black slave nor a woman nor born in the 19th century—though my kids would probably argue that last one. My point is that after the novel came out, I had people who’d lived in Thailand for decades asking me when I’d lived there. I’d never been there in my life.  So. But your second question, about the effects of Soviet cultural policy and how it’s led people to basically be suspicious of fiction, to see it as just an elaborate form of lying, is more complicated. Basically, as somebody who writes both fiction and nonfiction, I’m always amazed when people assume that fiction is “made up” and non-fiction is “real.” The genres bleed into each other all the time—there’s no fixed border between them.  Which is not to say that certain things didn’t happen at certain points in time–I have no patience with historical relativism–just that our retelling of what happened, no matter how objective, always borrows from fiction. TM: Examples? MS: Okay.  Let’s say you’re retelling an event in a personal essay. That retelling’s going to involve chronology, selection, memory—you’re basically lining up events in a certain sequence, stressing certain things while leaving others out, possibly misremembering what actually happened…All these things shape the remembered event in a certain way. There’s nothing wrong with this—you’re not consciously falsifying anything—but some degree of subjectivity is baked in. Again, I’m not saying there’s no difference between the genres, or that we shouldn’t have certain expectations when we read them; all I’m saying is that the most wildly imaginative fiction is rooted in empirical fact, and the most objective essay borrows from fiction. Sometimes I wish that some university out there would set up, I don’t know what you’d call it— a Reality Studies Program—basically a discipline that would map the territory between fiction and nonfiction in all forms of private and public discourse—histories, novels, diaries, political speech, legal opinions, journalism, you-name-it.  I mean, what could be more relevant in our shapeshifting, post-truth age, right? TM: Do I hear a desire to go back to academia? MS: Honestly, only if I felt I could be part of the conversation about what’s happening with the humanities—and part of the solution, hopefully. I wrote a piece on the humanities for Harper’s in which I interviewed a bunch of people—the president of Harvard at the time, the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities—who basically confirmed what I’d been seeing. That there’s less and less room at the table for the humanities. That no one’s making a very compelling argument for them.  That the sciences are gobbling up market share at an extraordinary rate because money talks. The reality today is that private capital and U.S. Department of Defense contracts flow into MIT, for example, the good folks at MIT cook up a product they can sell, and everyone splits the profits. If I’m teaching a course on Kafka, I’m not part of that show. There’s no product. I’ve got nothing the DOD might want.  Which would be fine except that I’m being asked to justify my existence according to criteria the sciences use, criteria that guarantee my eventual erasure. I care about the humanities too much—I think they matter too much—to want to be part of that charade. TM: So, it’s a marked deck?  No point in playing? MS: Not at all. If a group of people were to get together to try to articulate an argument for the humanities—an argument that played to our strengths—I’d love to be part of that. I’d love to try to figure out how best to explain to Senator X from Wyoming why he should fund the humanities. Maybe I’d ask him if he knows why it is that the authorities in Tehran, say, will happily let me teach chemistry, but not history. Or why the communist authorities in pre-revolution Czechoslovakia always planted a spy in my English classes. If I’d been teaching physics, I’d have been free to do as I pleased. TM: How much of the problem with the humanities has to do with what they’re producing?  Unreadable papers loaded with jargon; books that seem deliberately opaque? MS: A lot. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the average educated person could read academic literary critics like Lionel Trilling or Richard Poirier and understand what they were saying. Except for James Wood and a few others, try that today. Some of the most God-awful prose in the known world is being cranked out by university literature departments. TM: What created this? MS: You got me. The operating principle seems to be “obscurity equals genius.” TM: Is advancement, understood differently, undermining literature as well? Or changing it? I mean, are writers, tyrannized by the market, being forced to self-censor? MS: I think they are. TM: I gotta ask: censorship is something I know a little bit about.  MS: I know you do. TM: And self-censorship is what the Soviets were after. In the current context, who needs censors, enforcers of orthodoxy, if you can get people to censor themselves? MS: Censorship is a loaded word, of course, but I think the question is legitimate.  Basically, I see a market that rewards a certain kind of creative work and discourages a different kind. Fine. That’s how markets work. You could argue that it’s always been like this, but I also think that until fairly recently there was still this charmed space where writers whose books didn’t sell a lot of copies could at least hope to find shelter.  Survive. My sense is that this space is getting smaller. The market dominates everything now.  Agents, editors—good people, people who went into it for all the right reasons—are being squeezed.  A lot of them are fighting hard to resist the forces we’re talking about, but they need to survive too. The result is that books they admire sometimes have to be cut loose. TM: So, the writer adjusts to the market? MS: Or not, but it takes a lot of energy not to adjust, to ignore everything and just write your book, especially if you’re in the unhappy position of actually having to make a living. I don’t think there are many writers in America who haven’t struggled with this. You’re working on a novel for three, four years, all the while ignoring that voice in your head whispering, “Your last one sold 4,000 copies, you idiot. How’re you going to pay Billy’s tuition next year?” It’s not easy to ignore that voice saying, “Well, you could juice it up a little, bend it this way or that.” I’m guessing it gets even tricker if you’ve had some real success, because then you start thinking, “Hell, I’ll just give them a little more of that!”  Fortunately, that’s not something I’ve had to deal with. TM: I’m going to venture that tech—access—makes the situation worse? MS: Bet your ass. Writers today can look up their numbers on Amazon for example.  See the rankings of every book published in America, from #1—Stephen King or somebody—to some poor schmo at #12 million. This is like crack for writers. If my book jumps from 800,000 to 512,000, I feel great, I have some value in the world. If it goes the other way, hide the belt and the scissors. And then there’s the commentariat—people who think you’re Tolstoy and others who think you’re the antichrist of literature. TM: So, what do you do? MS: You go on saying what you need to say, bleeding market share, wondering how you’ll pay the bills.  And then somebody from Australia writes to tell you she’s reading your novel for the third time because she’s going through some difficult times and it helps her—and suddenly it all makes sense, somehow. TM: The bigger picture: are human beings losing interest in stories? MS: Not at all—I think they’re craving stories.  I mean, look at TV—it’s full of stories, and some of them are terrific. I’m repeating myself, and I’m sure there’s a lot more to it, but I do think a lot of what’s happening has to do with the marketplace.  Books have to compete with Netflix, so publishing houses are looking for what they can market—which by the way also means writers they can market. Writers who look like fashion models or have exotic life stories.  I can’t even blame them. Unfortunately, I don’t really check off those boxes. I don’t have a brand.  I’m interested what used to be called the human condition—that’s it. TM: But that should be enough, shouldn’t it?  I’ve just reread The Visible World, and there’s that heartbreaking story in there where the narrator is trapped on a tram with this old guy who tells him about the day his father was arrested during the German occupation. It’s so convincingly told—he could be the old guy who lives two floors above m—a guy who’s probably riding every tram that passes my building.  It strikes me that it’s not to the benefit of the culture when stories like that struggle to get published. MS: I’m glad that story spoke to you, but seriously, there’s no way to respond to that without sounding like an asshole who believes his stories are a gift to the culture. On top of which, though recent years have been harder, I haven’t really “struggled” all that much. I’ve written the books I wanted to write, I’ve had the good fortune—so far, anyway—of getting them published, the critics have generally been kind, and now and then I get a letter from a reader who actually took the trouble to write to me.  Not bad. If I take myself out of the equation, though, I couldn’t agree with you more: In some slow, sedimentary way, literature—and I use the L-word without apology—builds human beings, human beings capable of imagining lives other than their own, so to the extent that literature struggles, and I think it is struggling, we’re all the poorer for it. MT: What’s the way forward? For me, I’d say more of the same.  I’d like to think that as we get older some of the bullshit peels away and we’re able to see who we are and what we’re drawn to. I’m drawn to characters who have a history, who’ve taken some hits and have the scars to show for it. I’m interested, basically, in how well, or not, we’ve survived the life we’ve led. That’s my territory, and I’ll keep coming back to it, one way or another, for as long as I write. At the same time, I’d say it’s important to take your work more seriously than yourself.  Keep a sense of humor, if possible.  I mean, most of us have had the experience of walking into some venue to do a reading and there are two people in the audience and one of them is your wife and the other seems insane.  It’s not fun, but it’s okay.  It’s survivable.  You can rend your mantle and defile your horn in the dust, or you can figure, “Fuck it, I get to go to dinner an hour early.” But that’s just me.  On the larger, cultural level, I guess the way forward might involve something as simple as putting down our phones and picking up a book. TM: Good luck with that. MS: Yeah, I know.  You see it everywhere now, though it’s worse in the States. Groups of friends hanging out, each one on a device.  Couples having dinner or sitting on a bench, both on their phone. We’ve created a space that doesn’t exist and we’re migrating into it at extraordinary speed.  I can’t predict what the blowback will be, but it’s going to be considerable. I just don’t believe we can sever ourselves from everything that’s sustained us for millennia—in the blink of an eye, evolutionarily speaking—without suffering some kind of psychic kickback. But there I go again, bitching about tech. TM: A bit. Still, a couple more?  Tell me about your decision to give up tenure at the University of Chicago and move to Prague. You were Chair of Creative Writing there, right? MS: There were some years between the two moves, though I guess you could see them as related.  Basically, the U. of Chicago and I didn’t see eye to eye, let’s just put it that way.  It’s a strange place: An extraordinary university, and at the same time, I don’t know how else to put it, a kind of Mecca of depression—the pilgrims drag themselves to it from the four corners of the earth.  My family and I stuck it out for a while, then split.  For all I know, I’m the only person dumb enough to give up a gold-plated professorship like that without having something lined up to replace it with.  I’m blessed with family members as impractical as I am. TM: And so, Prague. MS: After a decade or so in Brewster, Canton, New York, and Winslow, Ariz., yeah.  What can I tell you?  I love this city, though it regularly drives me nuts. And, of course, our kids live here, which is huge for us.  But coming here was also an economic decision. Around the time writing became my sole source of income several my venues from the old days had dried up, Harper’s had gone in its own direction, a couple of books had gotten good reviews but didn’t sell well…you get the picture.  And so, it came down to either figuring out how to make more dough or moving to a place where the little we had would be enough.  We chose, “b,” and it was the right call. TM: It’s likely that some people assumed it was because of Trump. MS: Yeah, which was funny for two reasons. First, because the moon wouldn’t be far enough if that was our intention, and second, because the Czechs have their own corrupt leaders in Zeman and Babiš (the current president and prime minister of the Czech Republic) who they’re going to have to get rid of just like we got rid of Trump. TM: A positive note to end on… MS: Qualified. As the Czechs say: Pravda zvitezi, ale veme to fusku!—The truth will triumph, but it takes some sweat! [millions_email] Image Credit: Publicdomainpictures.net