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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Coffee, the Great Literary Stimulant
"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." –T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)
Maronite priest Antonio Fausto Naironi once claimed that the greatest of miracles happened in ninth-century Ethiopia. It was then and there, in the province of Oromia, that a young shepherd named Kaldi noticed that his goats were prone to running, leaping, and dancing after they had eaten blood-red berries from a mysterious bush. Kaldi chewed on a few beans himself, and suddenly he was awake. Gathering handfuls of them, he brought them to a local abbot. Disgusted with the very idea of such a shortcut to enlightenment, the monk threw the beans into a fire, but the other brothers smelled the delicious fragrance and gathered. Naironi is a bit scant on the details, but for some reason the grounds were filtered into water, and the first cup of coffee was brewed.
Such a perfect creation myth. Coffee, from the highlands of Ethiopia (still one of the largest producers), that ancient land which was home to the Queen of Sheba, the Ark of the Covenant, and where humanity first walked. The youthful innocence of Kaldi. And of course, the dancing goats, so perfectly Dionysian, so exquisitely demonic. Regarding Naironi's apocryphal legend, William Henry Ukers writes in All About Coffee that there may even be "some truth in the story of the discovery of coffee by the Abyssinian goats." Regardless of the original prohibition, even the abbot came around to the medicinal, not to speak of the intellectual, emotional, psychological, and spiritual benefits of caffeine.
Born Mehrej Ibn Nimrum in Lebanon, Naironi moved to Rome around 1635 where he latter Italianized his name and wrote his most important work: the 1671 book The Art of Drinking Coffee. Naironi tutored Italians—who were not yet the people of the latte, the cappuccino, the espresso—in the sublimity of caffeine. Before coffee reached Venice, or Milan, or Florence, the flowering berries of the coffea plant had been roasted in Jerusalem, Cairo, and Aleppo; ground in Constantinople, Baghdad, and Damascus; and the result—which looks nothing so much like rich, black soil—had been filtered into boiling water in Mecca, Medina, and before them all, Addis Ababa. Naironi bemoaned that many in Christendom were "unaware of [coffee's] qualities and good effects," which he enumerated. Then as it is now, coffee allowed for meditation and exuberance, conviviality and alertness, endurance and brilliance.
Coffee's early history is inextricably linked to religion, first the Ethiopian Orthodox and Copts who discovered it, and then the mystical Sufi Muslims who made it central to their devotions. Mark Pendergast writes in Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed the World that they "adopted coffee as a drink that would allow them to stay awake for midnight prayers more easily," seemingly a gift from Allah, who had forbidden alcohol. From Ethiopia, coffee took several hundred years to make its way across the Bab-el-Mandeh to Yemen, imported by the Sufi Imam Muhammad Ibn Said Al Dhobhani, the experience of the first sip of dark roast not unlike what Attar of Nishapur describes in his twelfth-century epic The Conference of the Birds whereby "lost atoms to your Centre draw… Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide/Return and back into your Sun." It's hard to wake up without coffee, is what I'm saying.
A confession: I love coffee. The ritual of counting out scoops as if repeating the rosary, the brewing's percolation which sounds like a prayer wheel, the first sip which feels like Nirvana. The rich, dark flavor—that if made correctly—tastes like punishment. I've heard it said, though it might be something that I made up, that the chemical trinity of all writers is caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine. My last cigarette was in 2015, and I've been sober nearly as long, but God as my witness I will still be drinking black, burnt coffee until the consistency of my stomach is that of a colander, acid reflux scaring the long tunnel of my esophagus. Since I was 12 I've loved it, my gateway drug some Starbucks coffee-flavored ice cream, then into the juvenile delights of the Frappuccino, then the affected sophistication of the cappuccino, followed by the latte, and finally drip coffee, first with copious sugar and milk, then just the latter, and finally as dark and bitter as life itself, the beverage consumed the way it's supposed to be. If I hadn't started drinking coffee when I did, I'd probably now be 6'10''. My average amount of coffee is around eight cups a day, though often I'll put on another pot by early afternoon. Sometimes I'm asked how I write the amount that I do; the answer is to be a recovering alcoholic with a caffeine addiction. When your natural nervous energy is supplemented with the psychoactive properties of methyltheobromine, you become a mechanism for transforming Arabica into words. "O Coffee!" reads a poem from 1511 by Abd-al-Kâdir in response to the objections of Mecca's mullahs, for "thou are the object of desire to the scholar. This is the beverage of the friends of God." Yes.
Coffee's first recorded mention precedes Naironi by almost a century, printed in Rauwulf's Travels in 1583, written by German botanist and physician Leonhard Rauwulf, who had availed himself of the beverage in the Levant. Of an unusual custom practiced in Aleppo, Rauwulf notes that in that ancient city "they have a very good drink, by them called coffee that is almost as black as ink, and very good." Tolling off of the printing presses of Frankfurt and Lauingen was the first Western record of somebody enjoying the drink in the "morning early in open places… as hot as they can." Johann Vesling, yet another German botanist and physician, in a 1640 edition of the Venetian traveler Prospero Alpini's The Plants of Egypt, opines that while coffee is common in Egypt, Arabia, and the Ottoman Empire, it is "scarce among the Europeans, who by that means are deprived of a very wholesome liquor." Ukers, in his 1935 history on the subject, even claims that by the time coffee was introduced to Italy, Pope Clement VIII himself desired to pass judgement, concluding that "Satan's drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it, and making it a truly Christian beverage." (Though it must be said that the author falls short in tracing the authenticity of this papal pronouncement.)
For all of these cloudy travelogues mentioning ink-black Saracen liquor which heats the brain and excites the limbs, by the late seventeenth century the drink had become a mainstay in that most seditious of institutions—the coffeehouse. "To Italy, then, belongs the honor of having given to the world the first real coffee house," writes Ukers, "although the French and Austrians greatly improved upon it." According to the official story, when the retreating Ottomans left bags of fresh coffee beans outside Vienna's gates during their failed siege of 1683, the Austrians dragged the contraband back inside, and roasted, ground, and brewed the dark spoils of war, first adding steamed milk to a drink that the Turks believed should be served as dark, bitter, and sweet as love. Habsburg Vienna perfected café society, an urbane, elegant, and cosmopolitan milieu where writers would write, composers would compose, and agitators would agitate. The Blue Bottle Café, with its low, dark, arched ceiling and its servers dressed in pasha vests, opened in 1685, the first coffeehouse in Vienna. Café Landtmann on Ringstraße 22, founded in 1873, was favored by Gustav Mahler. Freud, Trotsky, and Theodor Herzl usually opted for Café Central on Herringrasse 14, which opened in 1876. Café Museum in the Inner Stadt, established in 1899 and designed by Adolf Loos, was the preferred establishment of Gustav Klimt. Over Linzer torte and Apfelstrudel, Punschkrapfen and Dobostorte, and of course endless cups of coffee would come psychoanalysis and dadaism, special relativity and logical positivism, modernist literature and atonal music. Novelist Stefan Zweig—perhaps the most European man who ever lived—once said that such institutions are a "sort of democratic club, open to everyone for the price of a cheap cup of coffee."
Caffé Florian, Café de Flore, Prague's Municipal House, New York Café—for nearly a century Venice's canals had been lined with coffee houses before the custom would find its way into Austria, France, Bohemia, Hungary, Holland, and even the cold shores of England. Difficult to envision now, especially if you've ever tried to get a decent cup in London, but the English were perhaps Europe's most maniacal quaffers of coffee. The oldest continuous operating café in the world, established in 1654, still sells mugs of the stuff at Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, along with kofte kabobs and tabouleh, in keeping with the national cuisine of its seventeenth-century founder, a Syrian known as "Cirques Jobson, the Jew." If Viennese coffeeshops produced Austro-Hungarian culture, then an argument could be made that they also birthed the British Empire. Fevered thoughts excited by prodigious caffeine consumption led to the establishment of the London Stock Exchange at Jonathan's Coffee-House in 1698. They are where the Tories and Whigs first organized themselves as political parties, and where Jonathan Dryden and William Wycherley crafted Restoration literature (both men partial to Will's Coffee House in Westminster). Scientists founded the Royal Society at the Grecian Coffeeshop. Isaac Newton once dissected a dolphin right on the table at that establishment. On the eve of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when for the second time in the century the British deposed a king (though this time without the decapitation), and the capital is estimated to have had an astounding three thousand coffee houses. Not incidental.
During the Middle Ages, the average Englishmen drank around seventy gallons of alcohol a year; ale was available at all meals, including breakfast. Taverns were wholesome dens of patriotism for merry old England, where heavy food and warm ale anesthetized. No wonder that drinking coffee felt like waking up for the first time: one pamphlet writer in 1665 enthused that "Coffee and Commonwealth begin/Both with one letter, both came in/Together for a Reformation/To make's a free and sober nation." Coffeehouses were called "penny universities" and were marked by what they weren't—pubs. Suddenly, taverns were replaced with fevered dens of iniquity, with coffee as hot as the tempers and as bitter as the sentiments. Sedition, insurrection, and revolution were all feared. Now steady on their feet with clear eye and sharp mind, those gathered within coffeehouses—no longer pickled in ale—had some ideas. "Alehouses and taverns had a reputation as royalist-friendly spaces" writes Joanna Picciotto in Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England, though "Coffeehouses, in contrast, bread 'Scandalous Reports.'" Taverns offered joviality, but coffeehouses presented solidarity; alehouses sold drowsy good-cheer, coffee roasters brewed fiery sedition. Ironically, long before coffee became the favored libation for teetotalers and prohibitionists, it was tarred with every bit the moral opprobrium that alcohol is targeted with. A 1663 broadsheet entitled A Cup of Coffee: or, Coffee in its Colours scurrilously opined that "For men and Christians to turn Turks, and think/T'excuse the Crime because 'tis in their drink,/Is more than Magick," while nine years later the author of A Broad-side Against Coffee, or the Marriage of the Turk slandered, "Coffee, a kind of Turkish Renegade,/Has late a match with Christian water made;/At first between them happen'd a Demur,/Yet joyn'd they were, but not without great stir."
No wonder Charles II, fearful of losing his head like his father, wanted to stamp out this drink both heretical and rebellious. Two days before Christmas of 1675, and the king released A Proclamation for the Suppression of the Coffee Houses, establishments which "devised and spread abroad to the Defamation of his Majesty's government, and to the disturbance of the peace and quiet of the realm," fueled by an intoxicant which leaves the drinker not drunk but enervated, a quality which lends itself to "very evil and dangerous effects." Ironically, caffeine was an addictive drug that had proliferated throughout England alongside another foreign narcotic, the Dutch liquor gin being as strong and astringent as Holland's coffee, with English moralists sermonizing against both. Charles's ban lasted just 11 days, so enraged was the populace. Not even the divine rights of kings could compete against caffeine. Charles feared that the "monarchy might once again be overthrown," as Pendergast writes. His brother James was actually deposed shortly after his coronation, and this time by another Dutch import in the form of his brother-in-law William of Orange. Could the Glorious Revolution have been prevented if Charles' suppression had been successful? I'm not not saying that, only that anyone who requires that first gulp in the morning understands that the taste of coffee is the flavor of freedom. Soon, however, and the British occupation of India shifted English palates towards Darjeeling and Assam and away from Arabica and Robusta. Perhaps colonialism abroad prevents revolution at home, but it does seem like the importation of tea did something to the once rebellious English soul. Meanwhile, 100 years after Charles's proclamation, a group of Americans dumped those leaves intended for weak, tepid bilgewater into Boston Harbor, where they belong. The American Revolution followed. Though by the end of that century the London coffeehouse was nearly extinct, in Paris some 2,000 were still open on the eve of the French rightly putting their king's neck beneath the guillotine. What coffee allowed for was the brewing of anarchy, but as processed through a keen alertness. Dangerous for autocrats in any time or place.
Coffee's flavor may be bold, but it's also dark. The drink was instrumental to this first globalized moment, the tumultuous, exploitative, and most of all violent period when modernity arrived. "Coffee has always marched hand in hand with colonialism through the pages of history," writes Anthony Wild in Coffee: A Dark History. As such, coffee can be included alongside every commodity brought into Europe during the eighteenth century—chocolate and sugar, potatoes and tomatoes, tobacco and tea—Africans and Indians. The sugar which sweetened that coffee and the tobacco smoked over those porcelain cups were purchased at tremendous cost: the blood and labor of those who harvested and tended coffee plants. Coffee plantations proliferated in Portuguese Africa, Spanish South America, Dutch Indonesia, and throughout a Caribbean cannibalized by the European powers. Often there is an evasion of the fact that so much of what colonialism and slavery provided were material goods based in pleasure, the better for us not to draw parallels between the past and what global capitalism does in the present; the better not to make the disquieting connection between something which brings us joy and the tortures that were used to procure it. Cotton's softness came from South Carolina and Georgia; sugar's sweetness came from plantations in Martinique or Saint-Dominque; coffee's richness from Jamaica or Brazil. The triangle trade brought humans from Africa and returned coffee to Europe; colonialism violently disposed the Mayans from their homelands in Guatemala and Oaxaca to cultivate the beans which fueled the European Enlightenment. No colony produced as much as French Saint-Dominique—60% of the coffee drank in Europe came from Hispaniola's verdant hills—where 500,000 enslaved Africans toiled in brutal conditions. In his 1798 guide The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo, written for the benefit of English slaveowners in Jamaica, Pierre Joseph Laborie describes the exact manner in which children should be whipped, while bemoaning that a decade before the "fatal French revolution [had] introduced principles, incompatible with the conditions of the country." A different revolution finally enacted those principles when the Haitians won their independence in 1804, the first successful slave uprising in the Western Hemisphere. Laborie's plantation was torched.
Slavery is the "price we pay for the sugar you eat in Europe," Voltaire writes in Candide. The price which was paid for coffee too. Voltaire supposedly drank forty cups a day, mixed with mocha, another product manufactured out of the blood and sweat of humans. "The continuing importance of the western hemisphere in the world of coffee today is derived from the former colonial plantation economies of the region, based on slavery," Wild writes, describing the troubled history of the second-most prevalent global commodity after oil. Today, every coffee-producing nation in Central America, much of the Caribbean, as well as Columbia, Venezuela, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Vietnam, are home to numerous coffee plantations in which workers toil in effective slavery, with the bulk of those beans sold in Western markets. Let's not pretend that your venti is any more innocent than Voltaire's mocha. That's always been the question with the Enlightenment, a movement that expressed the equality of humanity with one hand while overseeing a master's whip with the other—was it paradoxical or hypocritical? Which are we? Produced in the most appalling of circumstances, caffeine nonetheless fueled the very people who would write documents like The Declaration of the Rights of Man which acted as a revolutionary impetus throughout the world, including in the colonies. Coffee was an imperialist's commodity and a revolutionary's beverage. Allen, with a smidge of hyperbole, notes that "within two hundred years of Europe's first cup, famine and the plague were historical footnotes. Governments became more democratic, slavery vanished, and the standards of living and literacy went through the roof." The Enlightenment may have been birthed by coffee, but it had a complicated childhood.
Nonetheless, caffeine was capable at generating self-encomiums, as writers found their muse within a cup. French poet Jacque Delille writes in a 1761 panegyric that a "liquid there is to the poet most dear, /'T was lacking to Virgil, adored by Voltaire, /'T is thou, divine coffee, for thine is the art, /Without turning the head yet to gladden the heart." Delille was the French translator of Paradise Lost, and apparently John Milton also enjoyed his coffee, writing in Comus how "One sip of this/Will bathe the drooping spirits in delight/Beyond the bliss of dreams." Renaissance wits had their wine and Romantic bards their opiates, but coffee is the fuel of the truly modern writer. The adage attributed to Ernest Hemingway might have it that you write drunk and edit sober, but better to write while drinking coffee and to edit while drinking still more coffee. Alcohol helps you romanticize being a writer; coffee is what transforms you into one. Booze exists to turn the mind off, but caffeine is that which can keep it going. If writing requires focus, discipline, and persistence, coffee can supply all those things—and then some. "This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion," writes Honoré de Balzac in Treatise on Modern Stimulants. "Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army… Things remembered arrive at full gallop…the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder." For all those martial metaphors, it's notable that in 1850, Balzac's was the rare death from caffeine overdose, succumbing after a bender of 50 cups.
As a substance, only liquor is (rightly or wrongly) valorized more, so fundamental is the association of caffeine with writing. Dorothy Parker tempering her moods between espresso and martinis and telling a friend, "Don't look at me in that tone of voice" before she's had her morning cup; Gertrude Stein declaring that coffee is "more than just a drink; it's something happening"; Albert Camus apocryphally asking, "Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?" Then there is Jack Kerouac, producing On the Road in a jittery three weeks, his ecstasies about the "mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing" smelling of cheap diner coffee, though I'm sure the amphetamines helped too. Richard Brautigan describes the sacrament in a poem from his collection Revenge of the Lawn, how there "was a jar of instant coffee, the empty cup and the spoon/all laid out like a funeral service. These are the things that you need to make a cup of/coffee," that enjambment putting the focus on the subject, for "Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee/affords." Ron Padgett understands this liturgy well, hypothesizing in his Collected Poems that his attraction to coffee is the "ritual/of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of/brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the/day on."
How many cups of coffee have I ever had? So many cups, I think. The dark burnt espresso in the Gotham Café on First Avenue and pots of weak brown hallucinogenic joe at Ritter's on Baum around 3 A.M.; the cappuccino with the perfect ratio of steamed milk at Phil's in Navy Yard near the Anacostia and a Grande cut with coconut milk on Waikiki; my first drip dark brew at Arabica on Forbes in 1996, the spoonfuls of terrible instant prepared in my microwave, and the cup I'm drinking right now. Through it all, one inviolate reality: even bad coffee is preferable to no coffee. In the meantime, as concerns writing, let us all hope that the caffeine muse helps us produce literature as strong, bold, dark, and rich as the best cup.
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