The Best American Essays 2007

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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]

The Story in the Storm: An Accomplished Author on How to Write Journalistic Nonfiction

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In his introduction to The Best American Essays of 2007 David Foster Wallace described the challenge of writing non-fiction like this: "Writing-wise, fiction is scarier but non-fiction is harder—because non-fiction's based in reality, and today's felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex." This spring I reviewed a work of non-fiction for The Christian Science Monitor called The Beekeeper's Lament by Hannah Nordhaus that I thought met Wallace's challenge better than most books I've read. It is about migratory beekeeping (and one curmudgeony migratory beekeeper in particular) and the role that factory farmed bees play in the maintenance of American agribusiness. Over the course of the book Nordhaus uses a somber, lyrical writing style to make bees into just about the most fascinating subject you've ever encountered while at the same time crafting an elegiac metaphor for the contingency of modern American life. After I'd finished writing the review I decided to contact Hannah to ask her how she'd produced such a remarkable book. I was curious about everything: how she'd chosen this esoteric vein to mine; what it had been like spending weeks in the field with oddball beekeepers and their stinging swarms; how, exactly, she'd transformed reams of field notes and a mountain of bee trivia into a graceful volume that feels as effortless as a spring breeze. Still, my abundant curiosity aside, I doubted that she'd write back. A day later, she did. What follows, then, is a veritable how-to for writing a book of journalistic non-fiction in which Hannah talks about everything from selling her manuscript to courting her sources to settling into the one and only position on her couch in which she can actually get any writing done. The Millions: As a freelance writer you can write about just about anything and everything, and you pretty much have: bees, dildo-art thieves, nuclear weapons, litigious prostitutes. Choosing a topic is a significant commitment (what sounds like several years of your life in the case of The Beekeeper's Lament). Given that, out of all the ways you might spend your professional time, how do you decide what to write about? Hannah Nordhaus: First, the subject has to interest me. I’m not terribly successful at doing things that I find boring, which is, I guess, why I’ve chosen to be a freelance journalist who hops from story to story. That said, I am interested in all manner of subjects, including many that would seem boring to most everyone else. Dildo art thieves and litigious prostitutes are easy; but I’ve also dedicated months of my life to documenting the lives of lawyers who draft bills for Congress. And that subject interested me too: What I find most absorbing to write about are the little hidden corners of the human experience, the people who do weird things or scary things or difficult things by choice, and who persist in doing those things even when it’s clear they’d be much better off choosing another path through life. So that’s how I have chosen magazine subjects, and it’s a formula that’s worked for me—but often, when I’m done with the article, I’m also done with the topic, and I really don’t want anything else to do with it. I don’t want to read about it; I don’t want to hear about it; I certainly don’t want to write about it. In the case of The Beekeeper’s Lament, though, I found that even after I had published a 4,500-word feature on the crisis in modern beekeeping, I still had more to say. Luckily, so did my protagonist, John Miller, who is a wonderfully eloquent, funny, thoughtful, sometimes petulant but always entertaining subject to follow. John Miller’s life was so rich with narrative possibility, and honey bees, the creatures he tends, are so rich with metaphor, that it never even occurred to me that I might get sick of the subject two or three years down the line. And I never did. TM: Before we get into the specifics of what went into writing The Beekeeper's Lament, could you give readers an overview of the stages of the book's creation from conception to publication? HN: I first interviewed John Miller in 2004 while researching an article for a natural foods magazine about a honey-based energy gel company in which he is a partner. He told me about his work as a migratory bee guy with thousands of hives, pollinating huge crops all over the West. I was intrigued, so I called him back, and I ended up paying my own way to visit him twice—once in California, once in North Dakota—to learn more about his life and his work. My timing was propitious (for a writer of non-fiction, that is; for a beekeeper, it was not good at all): about a year after I first met John Miller, his outfit suffered a catastrophic collapse, and he lost about 40% of his bees because of diseases vectored by a nasty little parasite called the varroa mite. I sold the story to High Country News, a small environmental magazine in Colorado, and just as the article was about to go to press in early 2007, the national bee herd began suffering from a mysterious new problem named “Colony Collapse Disorder,” or CCD. I was seven months pregnant with my first child when the magazine story ran, and thus in no condition to dash off a quick topical book that would address the CCD mystery. Instead, I took my time, had my kid, got an agent, and took a leisurely year to put together a proposal and write a sample chapter to submit to publishers. In the meantime, a number of other books came out about the honeybee crisis. This didn’t improve my odds for generating a bidding war (there wasn’t one) and netting a big advance (ditto), but I think in the end the more relaxed timeline actually did me a favor. I couldn’t write another newsy, topical book about bees—there were enough of those already. So instead, I pitched a more character-oriented work about humans and bees that would follow one particular human, John Miller, through the seasons and the years of the recent honey bee crisis, and in so doing also explain this weird institution of modern beekeeping. I sold the book in Dec 2008, took a trip to attend a beekeeping conference with Miller that winter, signed a contract in March; and three days later, while in California doing research on queen breeders, I found out I was pregnant again—with a baby due date that fell about seven months before the book due date. This complicated matters for me majorly, and after running around in circles for a few days wondering how I was going to get it done, I decided that the most important thing was to get something—anything—down on paper while I still had a few powers of concentration left. So I set the goal of writing a terrible draft before the baby came. And that’s what I did. I put my head down and wrote a terrible chapter every three weeks, had the baby, took three months off, and then embarked on the hard but rewarding work of turning a bad draft into a serviceable one. I turned the book in in June 2010. There were a couple of months of relatively painless back-and-forth editing with my excellent editor, Michael Signorelli at Harper Perennial, and then it was off to production. TM: Of those stages- (i.e. interviewing and field work, research, writing)- what parts do you enjoy the most? Any that you look forward to less than the others? HN: My favorite part of the writing process is always editing. I love taking this raw mass that is a first draft and then shaping it into something I might actually enjoy reading. I do like the research, though I sometimes dread calling random people on the phone, and I find that research trips can be lonely. And writing a first draft—well, I hate it. The act of corralling information and making it into a cohesive narrative is not a pretty one, and I tend to beat myself up for how bad my writing is. But in the last few years, I have made it a point of pride to write my first draft as quickly and poorly as possible, without consulting my notes or laboring over it. It makes the editing work a little harder, but by writing from memory and not belaboring all the minutiae in my notes, I tend to remember only those facts and points that are most salient to the narrative. And then I can always flesh out the things I missed later, though often I decide the things I forgot in the first draft really weren’t all that important. So now I do much of the heavy-lifting in the editing process, once I have gotten the bones of the story down. That’s when I spend the time agonizing over word choice and rhythm and flow and what information needs to stay or go, over what’s missing and whether it all makes sense. And that is the fun part for me—I love tinkering, and I love finding connections I never saw the first time through. TM: The main character in your book is a gregarious migratory beekeeper named John Miller. I got the impression that you two spent a lot of time together, and I'm always curious how those types of relationships work- how would you describe the dynamic between the two of you? HN: John has been an incredibly gracious guide into his life and world. He likes to talk, and to write, and he’s passionate about what he does, which made him a wonderful subject for this book. He’s also very conscious of his failings—as a Mormon, as a husband, and especially as a beekeeper—which adds a sense of poignancy to his story that isn’t always easy for a journalist to find. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner in creating this book. But of course, he’s still human, and I don’t think any human wants another human, especially one they barely know, following him around for months on end. So I was pretty careful with my visits, trying not to stay too long or hang around too much. I didn’t want to wear out his (quite limited) patience. Fortunately, John is a prolific emailer—he writes these wonderful, lengthy free-verse odes about his life and his work and anything else that pops into his head. So I asked him, once this project got started, if he could email me regular updates about what he was doing between visits. He did, and if I didn’t hear from him for a while I’d send a quick note asking him what was new or plying him with questions about queens or honey or his new truck, and he always obliged me with a long, detailed, oddball explanation of the current goings-on in the bee industry and the life of John Miller. And those emails formed the backbone of the book, and really helped bring him to life. After I’d finished a polished second draft but before I turned it in to the publisher, I asked John to read the book. And nothing was scarier—not submitting the proposals to publishers; not giving the draft to my editor; not even showing it to my mother. But he really seemed to love it—though he did take exception to me calling him “peevish” (for a month or so afterwards signed all his emails, “Mr. Peev”). This was my first book, and I’m not sure how other people handle that long-term and intense connection between journalist and subject that book-length projects require. But I guess in the end I felt that we—like bees and flowers, like beekeepers and farmers—were engaged in a symbiotic relationship that seemed to be beneficial to both of us—I got to write a book about a really cool topic; he had a venue through which to get the word out about the importance of bees and beekeepers in these trying times. Like all symbiotic relationships, ours depended on a delicate balance, which I was very careful to nurture: I gave him veto power on anything he felt was too personal, and I also tried to write the book in such a way that he wouldn’t have to exercise that veto. I wanted the book to explore his nature and his character, but not at the expense of his good name. And that seemed to be okay with him. In the end, he asked that I change nothing. TM: In his introduction to The Best American Essays of 2007 David Foster Wallace wrote, "Writing-wise, fiction is scarier but non-fiction is harder—because non-fiction's based in reality, and today's felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex." How does his description of the challenge of writing non-fiction strike you? HN: To write strong, journalistic non-fiction, you have to do a lot of research. You have to make a lot of phone calls, do a lot of reading, visit as many people and locations as you can, and then try to somehow combine all that undigested information into something that a reader can stomach. But honestly, while reporting is hard and requires a lot of effort and elbow grease and legwork and chutzpah, I think the most challenging thing about writing non-fiction is turning that information into a story. Because if the narrative isn’t unfolding the way you want it, you can’t just change the details to make it better, the way you would when writing fiction. You have to represent the truth. It’s very hard to be both a storyteller and a chronicler of reality. So to tell a true story that readers want to follow to the end, you’ve got to be very conscious of your craft—of your characters, chronology, pacing, setting, foreshadowing, backstory, detail—all those same elements that are so important in fiction writing. And then you’ve got to make double-sure you’re not making anything up. TM: Continuing on Wallace's point, The Beekeeper's Lament covers a lot of ground—almond farming, a history of the Miller family, the international honey trade, bee pests and contagions. How did you keep all that information organized and accessible as you wrote? HN: This was a tough book to organize, because there wasn’t an easy A to B to C chronological narrative of John Miller’s life as a beekeeper. There was no “man meets bee, man loses bee, man gets bee back” plot to rely on. His life is seasonal, and there are ups and downs, and though there were lots of good stories scattered throughout, there was not one particular thread that drove the story from start to finish. But I knew I needed to have some sense of time moving forward and to pique reader interest in a way that might appeal to those who aren’t bee fanatics as well as those who are. I needed to give those who looked at the first chapter a reason for moving on to the next one. So as I started thinking about chapter structure and the overall flow of the book, I tried to pose some questions so that readers would keep turning the page, and I returned to them regularly. Why did so many of John Miller’s bees die in 2005? What’s been killing everyone else’s bees in the years since? Is John Miller’s outfit going to survive? Why has he chosen to remain in such a difficult profession? And I used those questions to keep readers interested (I hope) and string them along from chapter to chapter. I also approached the individual chapters as more independent thematic units, organizing each one by subject. I [also] tried to touch on some larger themes, like migration, and risk, and symbiosis, and persistence—concepts that make people think on another level, and that, when you boil it down, are what make works of non-fiction “literary,” and not glorified long-form encyclopedia entries. TM: Writers are always interested in other writers' writing processes. Where do write? When do you write? Any rituals, tics, frustrations, moments of grace that attend the writing process for you? HN: Let’s see. Hmmm. Well I dally a lot before I get started on a first draft. I check a lot of email. And google myself. Facebook suddenly seems very pressing. Twitter, too. And then when I can’t find any other excuse, I sit down on the couch and just start spewing. I sit at my desk when I’m writing emails or paying bills, but when I’m composing—when I’m really concentrating—I have to sit on a couch with my legs up and my laptop perched on a cushion on my thighs. I must be semi-reclining, apparently, to get any real writing done. TM: Are there any non-fiction writers whose work has influenced your writing? And if so, what particular things have you taken from their writing? HN: There are two books that particularly influenced my approach to The Beekeeper’s Lament: The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean and Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. Both have in common their singular focus on one character, who then opens up an entirely new world to the reader. The Orchid Thief isn’t about orchids; it tells the story of one man’s weird obsession with the plants, and in so doing teaches the reader more about orchids, and Seminoles, and Florida, than they ever realized they wanted to know. I love the playfulness of Orlean’s language. Mountains Beyond Mountains also uses character to open narrative and thematic doors—by examining the life and work of Dr. Paul Farmer, we learn about Haiti, and health care in the developing world, and the medical profession, and the philanthropic world, and human decency. What I particularly love about Kidder’s book is the depth of feeling that he conveys through Farmer’s story. It’s not mawkish at all, but you feel so strongly Farmer’s own depth of feeling—and when all the details of that book have faded away, that feeling still remains. John Miller, like Paul Farmer, carries with him a profound sense of mission, though Miller’s involves bees, not humans, and you would never mistake Miller for a saint as you might Paul Farmer. Both books are so rich in detail, so effortless in their storytelling, so attentive to character, and so smart. TM: Any particular advice you'd relay to writers beginning to work on an extensive non-fiction project? HN: I guess my main piece of advice would be to give yourself the time to be deliberate when you craft the book. It’s not enough to organize it chronologically and then go; you need to think about how you’re going to keep readers interested, about the major themes that you want the sprinkle throughout the book, about how you are going to keep it tight. So many books lose their focus, and you’ve got to be really conscious throughout to keep the reader coming back to the reason you’re writing the book, the story you’re telling, and the questions you’re asking and that you plan, in due time, to answer. You’ve got to be ruthless with yourself. People don’t want to read every word that emerges from your brain just because you’re brilliant and you wrote it; there has to be a reason behind every chapter, every paragraph, every sentence. Every word you write should serve your overall narrative and thematic structure. That doesn’t mean you can’t go off on flights of whimsy—I certainly did, and I can’t say that I succeeded uniformly in keeping the book as tight as I am recommending that others do—but you do need to know, ultimately, where you’re going, and not lose sight of that. And then, at some point, when your deliberation has run its course, you’ve got to stop agonizing, stop doing research, stop aiming for perfection, and just sit down and write the damn thing.

Reading Wallace in Qatar

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I didn’t expect to see the green book in our library here at Northwestern University in Qatar, but there it was, the 2007 volume of The Best American Essays, guest edited by the late David Foster Wallace, a book I read in Chicago a few years ago and now again in Doha. I had been living in the Arabian Gulf for about six weeks when I learned of Wallace’s suicide in September 2008. The tragic event received a good amount of newspaper coverage and, later, expanded magazine pieces in such places as The New Yorker. Some have called Wallace a postmodern writer, and others, dropping the ideology, claimed that he had serious qualms with modern obsessions and with the complacency and low quality of thought they reward. If the latter is true, then Wallace was part of an undercounted demographic of people who have sustained dissatisfaction with the ways things are and who doubt that things can actually change anytime soon. A thoughtful writer of Wallace’s sensitivity and cynicism does not address the problem in a straight line; instead he makes it the bezel of the narrative and even style so that it’s never far from the reader’s indirect attention. As an essayist and novelist, Wallace had a skilled hand at shrewd deconstruction—someone who can take apart, for example, cultural staples of leisure, like a county fair or cruise trip, to reveal what he sees as stifling banality that distracts and sedates. I’m a regular reader of the Best American series, but I generally skip reading the guest editors’ introductory essays, doing my best to avoid the word “Montaigne” and explanations of how the essay defies a crisp definition. But this time in Doha I went directly to Wallace's introduction to see what I had missed, and there he mentioned Montaigne (Chesterton, too) and he remarked that “essay” is not his word of choice for what is really “literary non-fiction.” Still, Wallace’s piece turned out to be especially meaningful because he confronted some “bad news” about our times and supported it in his introduction with very clever meta-interpretation of the editor’s role, and he supported it more implicitly with his choice of essays. The 2007 green anthology has an urgency to it that goes beyond what is commonly said about thoughtful and well-written essays. The writers speaking in Wallace’s volume don’t do Disney. Rather, they confront the pathologies of our age that apparently won’t go away. I realize that three or four years isn’t a long time, but there’s something about this passage of time and its indolence (despite compelling promises of change) that speak about the collective lethargy that spooked Wallace and, actually, many others who live with their eyes open. In his introduction, Wallace writes almost cordially about his part in the “deciderization” process, but he then breaks character to rail against the American loss of mental free agency. Just as he is part of an outsourcing tradition of a venerable anthology, Wallace notes that “we are starting to become more aware of just how much subcontracting and outsourcing and submitting to other Deciders we’re all now forced to do, which is threatening (the inchoate awareness is) to our sense of ourselves as intelligent free agents.” True to his style, Wallace couldn’t help but see symbolism in an otherwise flattering role as guest editor. The impish shape he saw in the shadow of an editorial temp was the burden of human thought and moral resolve gladly surrendering to others because, in part, big issues are made to seem too complex and impossible to grasp, which, of course, suggests that we need specialists to delegate our minds to. He says, “And yet there is no clear alternative to this outsourcing and submission. It may possibly be that acuity and taste in choosing which Deciders one submits to is now the real measure of informed adulthood. Since I was raised with more traditional, enlightenment-era criteria, this possibility strikes me as consumerist and scary.” An intrepid literary voice associates scariness with the outsourcing of individual thought and decision making to others, which means that powerful people (fewer and more messianic than usual) become deciders for things far more serious than essays. But I think that Wallace’s fears are evinced more by the fact that these kinds of penetrating and honest essays (and others widespread for many years now, including many books) have shown little power to change minds, alter course, or even slow down the descent, which infers that the very conscience of society is badly wounded. Wallace says, “In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.” Wallace admitted important essays into the book, including lengthy pieces on the war in Iraq; torture; the right to offend; Mel Gibson’s inebriation and anti-Semitism; warfare of neo-absolutists; the sexualizing of youth and the modern marketing imagination; rifles and race; a gripping narrative that is non-fiction, but you wonder about the amazing details that you would expect in omniscient third-person fiction; an imaginary letter from a real Darwinist to a phantom pastor; and personal essays about pain, music, and other such things. There’s also a piece on earth when it shakes and a Cynthia Ozick short essay on mysticism that’s not really believable. Still, the weight-bearing essays of the book, its abs, are really those that examine the “issues” of the very modern era and its listlessness, with a subtext that raises the pounding question about how these things passed public approval in the first place. Malcolm Gladwell has a piece on the work of a pet psychologist, which interests me for some reason, a rather thoughtful narrative about a dog and sensitive family dynamics. Gladwell’s piece does not throw the reader off-scent to the pathos that Wallace’s choices bring to the fore. Gladwell’s essay, in a way, brings indoors those global matters that the other essays probe. Most anthologies make no requirements of order. You can start anywhere with no consideration to your place in a narrative, if there is one. Wallace’s anthology, organized alphabetically, has a quasi-narrative kept related by a number of contemplative accounts of recent human blunders and their etiology. When taken altogether there’s something like an indictment in the black box, especially when you allow into the reading experience those events and non-events of the recent past—winners of an anti-war platform making more war; a thriving fear-Islam industry as a pretext for many disagreeable decisions that touch upon core issues, like privacy; debilitating debt to rescue debilitating debt; the blurred line between happiness and appetite, between what is important and what is popular; and the defeat of shame. Mark Danner’s essay, “Iraq: War of Imagination” (originally published in the New York Review of Books and the longest piece in the green book), includes an anecdote of a policy believer who is filled with speaking-in-tongue certitude that the referendum of Iraq’s constitution will land in favor of the proposed constitution in unlikely Anbar province. Per Danner, “With all his contacts and commitment, with all his energy and brilliance, on the most basic and critical issue of politics on the ground [in Iraq] he had been entirely, catastrophically wrong.” Being wrong in itself is not worthy of a 12,000-word essay. But Danner’s devastating point is that the salvation narrative for Iraq was all wrong. And my point is that no matter how widespread the news has spread about the “wrong,” intentional or errant, no one has been taken to task over the years; in fact, a broader war has been waged elsewhere. And long before that, in 2004, the sitting president was rewarded with reelection, about which Wallace proffers, “There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place—not to mention extraordinary renditions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the passage of the Military Commissions Act—if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way.” It’s not the politics behind these scenarios that interests me at all but those forces of modern life that condition the soul to be either uncaring or unequipped to make a sacred stand for what is right. Read, then, the essay by Marilynne Robinson (“Onward, Christian Liberals”), who writes almost thematically about holiness and sacred tradition and still does well in the mainstream secular publishing. (Her remarkable book Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.) Robinson says in her essay, “Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘The abdication of Belief/ Makes the Behavior small.’ There is a powerful tendency also to make belief itself small, whether narrow and bitter or feckless and bland, with what effects on behavior we may perhaps infer from the present state of the Republic.” For many reasons, I recommend the volume, which, in my view, is the most relevant of the Best Essays series. There are no pieces about the death of a goldfish as a pretext to dive into tendentious discussions about the theories of life and consciousness. Nor is there a reverie about a childhood hideout or one’s first encounter with a private part. If you’re worried that product placement of good ideas is the modern hope for truth and transcendence and are even vaguely sure that there must be a better way—a better discourse—then the voices of this volume will resonate. The best line in the anthology goes to Jo Ann Beard in her essay “Werner,” a detailed piece about a man who works in a catering outfit. After work on a cold December evening, Werner goes home and calls his mom as usual. But it so happens that in the wall of his building an exposed electrical wire begins what will eventually become a full-blown fire. The essay moves like silk through the details of a 1991 fire; it’s a narrative that speaks of memory, survival, desperation, time, and human dignity. Werner at one point, a poignant and perhaps symbolic point, finds himself like this: “He was trapped, nearsighted and naked in a burning building.” Of course I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that Wallace stopped at that line and said, “This essay is in.” Postscript: Decades back, another author that I enjoy reading, John Gardner, died before he too was done with literature. In September 1982 he crashed his motorcycle at the age of 49. I have a vague, decades-old memory of standing before a glass case in the surprisingly elegant atrium of Morris Library of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, looking at the cover of an SIU Press book of Gardner’s. For a while, Gardner taught at SIU, which is just a couple of hours south of where Wallace once taught, Illinois State University in Bloomington. The early 1980’s was probably the start of the inertia that many writers now comment about. The overrated activism of the 1960’s slowly gave way to the underrated idealism and pop culture of the 1970’s, which itself surrendered (after John Lennon’s murder) to the ethos of such things as Reagan’s trickle down theories of economics, which overly and foolishly trusted the collective greed of a people to take care of the spread of prosperity and relief for the underprivileged—a notion that confronts thousands of years of sacred tradition and its obligations of charity. Trickle-down economics did not create self-adoration, as some claim, but it promoted it as a virtue, almost part of economic patriotism. This probably infected many other notions, including the realm of high ideas: this notion of a passive and undirected development of enlightenment and responsibility. Wallace says, “Part of our emergency is that it's so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it's continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion.”

A Year in Reading: Traver Kauffman

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Traver Kauffman is the proprietor of the blog Black Garterbelt.Oh the Things You Can Think, Dr. Seuss: Many of my reading choices are dictated to me by a extremely repetition-tolerant two year old, and I'm bloody well sick of most of her library. Try as I might, however, I never tire of this one, a book that exists for no reason other than a delight in invention and wordplay.Everyday Drinking, Kingsley Amis: Kingsley Amis is the Virgil of boozing. Of course, given Amis's long, alcohol-related decline, the whole charming bon vivant routine here comes with the queasy sepulchral undertone that you're burdened with when you have lived beyond the sad ending of someone else's story. Christopher Hitchens's Introduction gives this a nod, acknowledging that "the booze got to [Amis] in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm as well as of his health." But so it goes, shrugs Hitchens, who ends by quoting Churchill on the benefits of drinking. In some circles, this is known as the Gentleman's Godwin.Deciderization 2007 - a Special Report (David Foster Wallace's introduction to The Best American Essays 2007): Here again, I suffer a twinge of sadness as I read along, even if it's better to try and forget and simply enjoy DFW at his open-hearted best. On the other hand, with DFW so carefully dissecting what it's like to try to think and live in the face of Total Noise - his coinage describing "the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context" that's too much for a person to absorb and decipher in any meaningful way - how could I fail to extrapolate the author's desperate final act from the lament expressed here, in spite of myself?The Best of Leonard Cohen (Liner notes): I paged through the booklet to this CD this summer while at my horrific, short-lived corporate job, looking for any kind of relief. I was supposed to be working. Other than lyrics and song rights, you get notes penned by Cohen for each song, which typically amounts to a few sentences. Some of these are straightforward and utilitarian, some lyrical, and all of them are pretentious in one way or another. I guess I'm trying to say that Cohen's project here is demystification and the re-mystification at the same time. Several of the blurbs work as exquisite short fiction. My favorite is the entry for "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye": This song arises from an over-used bed in the Penn Terminal Hotel in 1966. The room is too hot. I am in the midst of a bitter quarrel with a blonde woman. The song is half-written in pencil but it protects us as we manoeuvre, each of us, for unconditional victory. I am in the wrong room. I am with the wrong woman.Philip Larkin, Collected Poems: Usually alone at night. Always for comfort.2666 (The first 250 pages), Roberto Bolaño: "She had a hoarse, nasal voice and she didn't talk like a New York secretary but like a country person who has just come from the cemetery. This woman has firsthand knowledge of the planet of the dead, thought Fate, and she doesn't know what she's saying anymore." Yep.More from A Year in Reading 2008