Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries

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

This Isn’t the Essay’s Title

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"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." —F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Crack Up" (1936) "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you." —Carly Simon (1971) On a December morning in 1947 when three fellows at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study set out for the Third Circuit Court in Trenton, it was decided that the job of making sure that the brilliant but naively innocent logician Kurt Gödel didn't say something intemperate at his citizenship hearing would fall to Albert Einstein. Economist Oscar Morgenstern would drive, Einstein rode shotgun, and a nervous Gödel sat in the back. With squibs of low winter light, both wave and particle, dappled across the rattling windows of Morgenstern's car, Einstein turned back and asked, "Now, Gödel, are you really well prepared for this examination?" There had been no doubt that the philosopher had adequately studied, but as to whether it was proper to be fully honest was another issue. Less than two centuries before, and the signatories of the U.S. Constitution had supposedly crafted a document defined by separation of powers and coequal government, checks and balances, action and reaction. "The science of politics," wrote Alexander Hamilton in "Federalist Paper No. 9," "has received great improvement," though as Gödel discovered, clearly not perfection. With a completism that only a Teutonic logician was capable of, Gödel had carefully read the foundational documents of American political theory, he'd poured over the Federalist Papers and the Constitution, and he'd made an alarming discovery. It's believed that while studying Article V, the portion that details the process of amendment, Gödel realized that there was no safeguard against that article itself being amended. Theoretically, a sufficiently powerful political movement with legislative and executive authority could rapidly amend the articles of amendment so that a potential demagogue would be able to rule by fiat, all while such tyranny was perfectly constitutional. A paradox at the heart of the Constitution—something that supposedly guaranteed democracy having coiled within it rank authoritarianism. All three men driving to Trenton had a keen awareness of tyranny; all were refugees from Nazi Germany; all had found safe-haven on the pristine streets of suburban Princeton. After the Anschluss, Gödel was a stateless man, and though raised Protestant he was suspect by the Nazis and forced to emigrate. Gödel, with his wife, departed Vienna by the Trans-Siberian railroad, crossed from Japan to San Francisco, and then took the remainder of his sojourn by train to Princeton. His path had been arduous and he'd earned America, so when Gödel found a paradox at the heart of the Constitution, his desire to rectify it was born from patriotic duty. At the hearing, the judge asked Gödel how it felt to become a citizen of a nation where it was impossible for the government to fall into anti-democratic tyranny. But it could, Gödel told him, and "I can prove it." Apocryphally, Einstein kicked the logician's chair and ended that syllogism. Born in Austria-Hungary, citizen of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, and finally the United States, Gödel's very self-definition was mired in incompleteness, contradiction, and unknowability. From parsing logical positivism among luminaries such as Rudolph Carnap and Moritz Schlick, enjoying apfelstrudel and espresso at the Café Reichsrat on Rathausplatz while they discussed the philosophy of mathematics, Gödel now rather found himself eating apple pie and weak coffee in the Yankee Doodle Tap Room on Nassau Street—and he was grateful.  Gone were the elegant Viennese wedding-cake homes of the Ringstrasse, replaced with Jersey's clapboard colonials; no more would Gödel debate logic among the rococo resplendence of the University of Vienna, but at Princeton he was at least across the hall from Einstein. "The Institute was to be a new kind of research center," writes Ed Regis in Who Got Einstein's Office?: Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study. "It would have no students, no teachers, and no classes," the only responsibility being pure thought, so that its fellows could be purely devoted to theory. Its director J. Robert Oppenheimer (of Manhattan Project fame) called it an "intellectual hotel;" physicist Richard Feynman was less charitable, referring to it as a "lovely house by the woods" for "poor bastards" no longer capable of keeping up. Regardless, it was to be Gödel's final home, and there was something to that. Seventeen years before his trip to Trenton, and it was at the Café Reichsrat where he presented the discovery for which he'd forever be intractably connected—Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. In 1930 he had irrevocably altered mathematics when Gödel demonstrated that the dream of completism that had dogged deduction since antiquity was only a mirage. "Any consistent formal system," argues Gödel in his first theorem, "is incomplete… there are statements of the language… which can neither be proved nor disproved." In other words, it's an impossibility that any set of axioms can be demonstrated to be true as part of a self-contained system—the rationalist dream of a unified, self-evidently provable system is only so much fantasy. Math, it turns out, will never be depleted, since there can never be a solution to all mathematical problems. In Gödel's formulation, a system must either sometimes produce falsehoods, or it must sometimes generate unprovable truths, but it can never consistently render only completely provable truths. As the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter explained in his countercultural classic Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, "Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truth, but… a formal system, no matter how powerful—cannot lead to all truths." In retrospect, the smug certainties of American exceptionalism should have been no match for Gödel, whose scalpel-like mind had already eviscerated mathematics, philosophy, and logic, to say nothing of some dusty parchment once argued over in Philadelphia. His theorems rest on a variation of what's known as the "Liar's Paradox," which asks what the logical status of a proposition such as "This statement is false" might be. If that sentence is telling the truth, then it must be false, but if it's false, then it must be true, ad infinitum, in an endless loop. For Gödel, that proposition is amended to "This sentence is not provable," with his reasoning demonstrating that a sufficiently formal system of logic can't demonstrate that proposition, regardless of its truth value, since to prove the statement is to make it unprovable, but if unprovable, then it's proved, again ad infinitum in yet another grueling loop. As with the Constitution and its paeans to democracy, so must mathematics be rendered perennially useful while still falling short of perfection. The elusiveness of certainty bedeviled Gödel throughout his life; a famously paranoid man, the assassination of his friend Schlick by a Nazi student in 1936 pushed the logician into a scrupulous anxiety. After the death of his best friend Einstein in 1955 he became increasingly isolated. "Gödel's sense of intellectual exile deepened," explains Rebecca Goldstein in Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. "The young man in the dapper white suit shriveled into an emaciated man, entombed in a heavy overcoat and scarf even in New Jersey's hot humid summers, seeing plots everywhere… His profound isolation, even alienation, from his peers provided fertile soil for that rationality run amuck which is paranoia." When his beloved wife fell ill in 1977, Gödel quit eating since she could no longer prepare his meals. The ever-logical man whose entire career had demonstrated the fallibility of rationality had concluded that only his wife could be trusted not to poison his food, and so when she was unable to cook, he properly reasoned (by the axioms that were defined) that it made more sense to simply quit eating. When he died, Gödel weighed only 50 pounds. Gödel's thought was enmeshed in that orphan of logic that we call paradox. As was Einstein's, that man who converted time into space and space into time, who explained how energy and mass were the same thing so that (much to his horror) the apocalyptic false dawn of Hiroshima was the result. Physics in the 20th century had cast off the intuitive coolness of classical mechanics, discovering that contradiction studded the foundation of reality. There was Werner Heisenberg with his uncertainty over the location of individual subatomic particles, Louis de Broglie and the strange combination of wave and particle that explained the behavior of light, Niels Bohr who understood atomic nuclei as if they were smeared across space, and the collapsing wave functions of Erwin Schrödinger for whom it could be imagined that a hypothetical feline was capable of being simultaneously alive and dead. Science journalist John Gribbin explains in Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries that contemporary physics is defined by "paradoxical phenomena as photons (particles of light) that can be in two places at the same time, atoms that go two ways at once… [and how] time stands still for a particle moving at light speed." Western thought has long prized logical consistency, but physics in the 20th century abolished all of that in glorious absurdity, and from those contradictions emerged modernity—the digital revolution, semiconductors, nuclear power, all built on paradox. The keystone of classical logic is the so-called "Law of Non-Contradiction." Simply put, something cannot both be and not be what it happens to be simultaneously, or if symbolic logic is your jam:  ¬(p ∧ ¬p), and I promise you that's the only formula you will see in this essay. Aristotle said that between two contradictory statements one must be correct and the other false—"it will not be possible to be and not to be the same thing" he writes in The Metaphysics—but the anarchic potential of the paradox greedily desires truth and its antecedents. And again, in the 17th century the philosopher Wilhelm Gottfried Leibnitz tried to succinctly ward off contradiction in his New Essays on Human Understanding when he declared, "Every judgement is either true or false," and yet paradoxes fill the history of metaphysics like landmines studded across the Western Front. Paradox is the great counter-melody of logic—it is the question of whether an omnipotent God could will Himself unable to do something, and it's the eye-straining M.C. Escher lithograph "Waterfall" with its intersecting Penrose triangles showing a stream cascading from an impossible trough. Paradox is the White Queen's declaration in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass that "sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast," and the Church Father Tertullian’s creedal statement that "I believe it because it is absurd." The cracked shadow logic of our intellectual tradition, paradox is confident though denounced by philosophers as sham-faced; it is troublesome and not going anywhere. When a statement is made synonymous with its opposite, then traditional notions of propriety are dispelled and the fun can begin. "But one must not think ill of the paradox," writes Søren Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments, "for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow." As a concept, it may have found its intellectual origin on the sunbaked, dusty, scrubby, hilly countryside of Crete. The mythic homeland of the Minotaur, who is man and beast, human and bull, a walking, thinking, raging horned paradox covered in cowhide and imprisoned within the labyrinth. Epimenides, an itinerant philosopher some seven centuries before Christ, supposedly said that "All Cretans are liars" (St. Paul actually quotes this assertion in his epistle to Titus). A version of the aforementioned Liar's Paradox thus ensues. If Epimenides is telling the truth then he is lying, and if he is lying then he is telling the truth. This class of paradoxes has multiple variations (in the Middle Ages they were known as "insolubles"—the unsolvable). For example, consider two sentences vertically arranged; the upper one is written "The statement below is true" and the lower says "The statement above is false," and again the reader is caught in a maddening feedback loop. Martin Gardner, who for several decades penned the delightful "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American, asks in Aha! Gotcha: Paradoxes to Puzzle and Delight, "Why does this form of the paradox, in which a sentence talks about itself, make the paradox clearer? Because it eliminates all ambiguity over whether a liar always lies and a truth-teller always tells the truth." The paradox is a function of language, and in that way is the cousin to tautology, save for the former describing propositions that are always necessarily both true and false. Some intrinsic meaning is elusive in all of this this, so that it would be easy to reject all of it as rank stupidity, but paradoxes provide a crucial service. In paradox, we experience the breakdown of language and of literalism. Whether or not paradoxes are glitches in how we arrange our words or due to something more intrinsic, they signify a null-space where the regular ways of thinking, of understanding, of writing, no longer hold. Few crafters of the form are as synonymous with paradox as the fifth-century BCE philosopher Zeno of Elea. Consider his famed dichotomy paradox, wherein Zeno concludes that motion itself must be impossible, since the movement from point A to point B always necessitates a halving of distance, forever (and so the destination itself can never be reached). Or his celebrated arrow paradox, wherein Aristotle explains in Physics that "If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest at that instant of time, and if that which is in location is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless at that instant of time and at the next instant of time." And yet the arrow still moves. Roy Sorenson explains in A Brief History of the Paradox that the form "developed from the riddles of Greek folklore" (as with the Sphinx's famous query in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex), so that words have always mediated these conundrums, while Anthony Gottlieb writes in The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance that "ingenious paradoxes… try to discredit commonsense views by demonstrating that they lead to unacceptable consequences," in a gambit as rhetorical as it is analytical. Often connected primarily with mathematics and philosophy, paradox is fundamentally a literary genre, and one ironically (or paradoxically?) associated with the failure of language itself. All of the great authors of paradox—the pre-Socratics, Zen masters, Jesus Christ—were at their core storytellers, they were writers. Words stretched to incomprehension and narrative unspooling is their fundamental medium. Epimenides’s utterance triggers a collapse of meaning, but where the literal perishes there is room made for the figurative. Paradox is the mother of poetry. I'd venture that the contradictions of life are the subject of all great literature, but paradoxes appear in more obvious forms, too. "There was only one catch and that was Catch-22," writes Joseph Heller. The titular regulation of Heller's Catch-22 concerned the mental state of American pilots fighting in the Mediterranean during the Second World War, with the policy such that if somebody requests that they don't want to fly a mission because of mental infirmity, they've only demonstrated their own sanity, since anyone who would want to fly must clearly be insane, so that it's impossible to avoid fighting. The captain was "moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle." Because politics is often the collective social function of reducto ad absurdum, political novels make particularly adept use of paradox. George Orwell did something similar in his celebrated (and oft-misinterpreted) novel of dystopian horror 1984, wherein the state apparatus trumpets certain commandments, such as "War is peace. /Freedom is slavery. /Ignorance is strength." Perhaps such dialectics are the (non-Marxist) socialist Orwell's parody of Hegelian double-speak, a mockery of that supposed engine of human progress that goes through thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Within paradox there is a certain freedom, the ability to understand that contradiction is an attribute of our complex experience, but when statements are also defined as their opposite, meaning itself can be the casualty. Paradox understood as a means to enlightenment bestows anarchic freedom; paradox understood as a means unto itself is nihilism. Political absurdities are born out of the inanity of rhetoric and the severity of regulation, but paradox can entangle not just society, but the fabric of reality as well. Science fiction is naturally adept at examining the snarls of existential paradox, with time travel a favored theme. Paul Nahin explains in Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction that temporal paradoxes are derived from the simple question of "What might happen if a time traveler changed the past?" This might seem an issue entirely of hermetic concern, save for in contemporary physics neither general relativity nor quantum mechanics preclude time travel (indeed certain interpretations of those theories downright necessitate it). So even the idea of being able to move freely through past, present, and future has implications for how reality is constituted, whether or not we happen to be the ones stepping out of the tesseract. "The classic change-the-past paradox is, of course, the so-called grandfather paradox," writes Nahin, explaining that it "poses the question of what happens if an assassin goes back in time and murders his grandfather before his (the time-travelling murderer's) own father is born." The grandfather's murder requires a murderer, but for the murderer in question to be born there is also the requirement that the grandfather not be murdered, so that the murderer is able to travel back in time and kill his ancestor, and again we're in a strange loop. Variations exist as far back as the golden age of the pulps, appearing in magazines like Amazing Stories as early as 1929. More recently, Ray Bradbury explored the paradox in "A Sound of Thunder," where he is explicit about the paradoxical implications that any travel to the past will alter the future in baroque ways, with a 21st century tourist accidentally killing a butterfly in the Cretaceous, leading to the election of an openly fascistic U.S. president millions of years into the future (though the divergence of parallel universes is often proffered as a means of avoiding such implications). In Bradbury's estimation, every single thing in history, every event, every incident, is "an exquisite thing," so that a "small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes all down the years across Time." This conundrum need not only be phrased in patricidal terms, for what all temporal paradoxes have at their core is an issue of causality—if we imagine that time progresses from past through future, then what happens when those terms get all mixed up? How can we possibly understand a past that's influenced by a future that in turn has been affected by the past? Again, no issue of scholastic quibbling, for though we experience time as moving forward like one of Zeno's arrows, the physics itself tells us that past, present, and future are constituted in entirely stranger ways. One version of the grandfather paradox involves, rather than grisly murder, the transfer of information from the future to the past; for example, in Tim Powers’s novel The Anubis Gates, a time traveler is stranded in the early 19th century. The character realizes that "I could invent things—the light bulb, the internal combustion engine… flush toilets." But he abandons this hubris, for "any such tampering might cancel the trip I got here by, or even the circumstances under which my mother and father met." Many readers will perhaps be aware of temporal paradoxes from the Robert Zemeckis Back to the Future film trilogy (which for what they lack in patricide they make up for in Oedipal sentiments), notably a scene in which Marty McFly inadvertently introduces Chuck Berry to his own song "Johnny B. Goode." Ignoring the troubling implications that a suburban white teenager had to somehow teach the Black inventor of rock 'n' roll his own music, Back to the Future presents a classic temporal paradox—if McFly first heard "Johnny B. Goode" from Berry records, and Berry first heard the song from McFly, then from whence was the song actually composed? (Perhaps from God). St. Augustine asks in The City of God "What is time, then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one who should ask me, I plainly do not know." Paradox sprouts from the fertile soil of our own incomprehension, and to its benefit there is virtually nothing that humans really understand, at least not really. Time is the oddest thing of all, if we honestly confront the enormity of it. I'm continually surprised that I can't easily walk into 1992 as if it were a room in my house. No surprise then that time and space are so often explored in the literature of paradox. Oxymoron and irony are the milquetoast cousins of paradox, but poetry at its most polished, pristine, and adamantine elevates contradiction into an almost religious principle. Among the 17th-century poets who worked in the stead of John Donne, paradox was often a central aspect of what critics have called a "metaphysical conceit." These brilliant, crystalline, rhetorical turns are often like Zeno's paradoxes rendered into verse, expanding and compressing time and space with a dialectical glee. An example of this from the good Dr. Donne, master of both enigma and the erotic, who in his poem "The Good-Morrow" imagined two lovers for whom they have made "one little room an everywhere." The narrator and the beloved's bed-chamber—perhaps there is heavy wooden paneling on the wall and a canopy bed near a fireplace burning green wood, a full moon shining through the mottled crown glass window—are as if a singularity where north, south, east and west; past, present, and future; are all collapsed into a point. Even more obvious is Donne in "The Paradox," wherein he writes that "Once I loved and died; and am now become/Mine epitaph and tomb;/Here dead men speak their last, and so do I," the talking corpse its own absurdity made flesh. So taken were the 20th-century scholars known as the New Critics with the ingenuity of metaphysical conceits that Cleanth Brooks would argue in his classic The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry that the "language of poetry is the language of paradox." Donne and Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan used paradox as a theme and a subject—but to write poetry itself is paradoxical. To write fiction is paradoxical. Even to write nonfiction is paradoxical. To write at all is paradoxical. A similar sentiment concerning the representational arts is conveyed in the Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte’s much parodied 1929 work "The Treachery of Images." Magritte presents an almost absurdly recognizable smoking pipe, polished to a totemistic brown sheen with a shiny black mouth piece, so basically obvious that it might as well be from an advertisement, and beneath it he writes in cursive script "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"—"This is not a pipe." A seeming blatant contradiction, for what could the words possibly relate to other than the picture directly above them? But as Magritte told an interviewer, "if I had written on my picture 'This is a pipe,' I'd have been lying!" For you see, Magritte's image is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. Like Zeno's paradoxes, what may first initially seem to be simple-minded contrarianism, a type of existential trolling if you will, belies a more subtle observation. The philosopher Michel Foucault writes in his slender volume This Is Not a Pipe that "Contradiction could exist only between two statements," but that in the painting "there is clearly but one, and it cannot be contradictory because the subject of the propositions is a simple demonstrative." According to Foucault, the picture, though self-referential, is not a paradox in the logical sense of the word. And yet there is an obvious contradiction between the viewer's experience of the painting, and the reality that they've not looked upon some carefully carved and polished pipe, but rather only brown and black oil carefully applied to stretched canvas. This, then, is the "treachery" of which Magritte speaks, the paradox that is gestated within that gulf where meaning resides, a valley strung between the-thing-in-itself and the way in which we represent the-thing-in-itself. Writing is in some ways even more treacherous than painting, for at least Magritte's picture looks like a pipe—perhaps other than some calligraphic art, literature appears as nothing so much as abstract squiggles. Moby-Dick is not a whale and Jay Gatsby is not a man. They are less than a picture of a pipe, for we have not even images of them, only ink-stained books, and the abject abstraction of mere letters. And yet the paradox is that from that nothingness is generated the most sumptuous something; just as the illusion of painting can trick one into the experience of the concrete, so does the more bizarre phenomenon of the literary imagination make you hallucinate characters that are generated from the non-figurative alphabet. From this essay, if I've done even a somewhat adequate job, you've hopefully been able to envision Gödel and Einstein bundled into a car on the Jersey turnpike, windows frosted with nervous breath and laughter, the sun rising over the wooded Pine Barrens—or to imagine John and Anne Donne bundled together under an exquisite blanket of red and yellow and blue and green, the heavy oak door of their chamber closed tight against the English frost—but of course you've seen no such thing. You've only skimmed through your phone while sitting on the toilet, or toggled back and forth between open tabs on your laptop. Literature is paradoxical because it necessitates the invention of entire realities out of the basest nothing; the treachery of representation is that "This is not a pipe" is a principle that applies to absolutely all of the written word, and yet when we read a novel or a poem we can smell the burning tobacco. All of literature is a great enigma, a riddle, a paradox. What the Zen masters of Japanese Buddhism call a koan. Religion is too often maligned for being haunted by the hobgoblin straw-man of consistency, and yet the only real faith is one mired in contradiction, and few practices embrace paradox quite like Zen. Central to Zen is the breaking down of the dualities that separate all of us from absolute being, the distinction between the I and the not-I. As a means to do this, Zen masters deploy the enigmatic stories, puzzles, sayings, and paradoxes of koan, with the goal of forcing the initiate toward the para-logical, a catalyst for the instantaneous enlightenment known as satori. Sometimes reduced to the "What is the sound of one-hand clapping?" variety of puzzle (though that is indeed a venerable koan), the monk and master D.T. Suzuki explains in An Introduction to Zen Buddhism that these apparently "paradoxical statements are not artificialities contrived to hide themselves behind a screen of obscurity; but simply because the human tongue is not an adequate organ for expressing the deepest truth of Zen, the latter cannot be made the subject of logical exposition; they are to be experienced in the inmost soul when they become for the first time intelligible." A classic koan, attributed to the ninth-century Chinese monk Linji Yixuan, famously says "If you meet the Buddha, kill him." Linji's point is similar to Magritte's—"This is not the Buddha." It's a warning about falling into the trap of representation, of refusing to resist the treachery of images, and yet the paradox is that the only way we have of communicating is through the fallible, inexact, medium of words. Zen is the only religion whose purpose is to overcome religion, and everything else for that matter. It asks us to use its paradoxes as a ladder to which we can climb toward ultimate being—and then we're to kick that ladder over. In its own strange way, literature is the ultimate koan, all of these novels and plays, poems and essays, all words, words, words meaning nothing and signifying everything, gesturing towards a Truth beyond truth, and yet nothing but artfully arranged lies (and even less than that, simply arrayed squiggles on a screen). To read is to court its own type of enlightenment, of transcendence, and not just because of the questions literature raises, but because of literature's very existence in the first place. Humans are themselves the greatest of paradoxes: someone who is kind can harbor flashes of rage, the cruelest of people are capable of genuine empathy, our greatest pains often lead to salvation and we're sometimes condemned by that which we love. In a famous 1817 letter to his brothers, the English Romantic poet John Keats extolled the most sublime of literature's abilities that was to dwell in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason," a quality that he called "negative capability." An irony in our present's abandonment of nuance, for ours is a paradoxical epoch through and through—an era of unparalleled technological superiority and appalling barbarity, of instantaneous knowledge and virtually no wisdom. A Manichean age as well—which valorizes consistency above all other virtues, though it is that most suburban of values—yet Keats understood that if we're to give any credit to literature, and for that matter any credit to people, we must be comfortable with complexity and contradiction. Negative capability is what separates the moral from the merely didactic. In all of our baroque complexity, paradox is the operative mode of literature, the only rhetorical gambit commensurate with displaying the full spectrum of what it means to be a human. We are all such glorious enigmas—creatures of finite dimension and infinite worth. None of us deserve grace, and yet all of us are worthy of it, a moral paradox that makes us beautiful not in spite of its cankered reality, but because of it. The greatest of paradoxes is that within that contradictory form, there is the possibility of genuine freedom—of liberation. Image Credit: Wikipedia