The Big Lebowski (Widescreen Collector's Edition)

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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]

Stories in Formaldehyde: The Strange Pleasures of Taxonomizing Plot

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Somewhere within the storerooms of London’s staid, gray-faced Tate Gallery (for it’s currently no longer on exhibit) is an 1834 painting by J.M.W. Turner entitled "The Golden Bough." Rendered in that painter’s characteristic sfumato of smeared light and smoky color, Turner’s composition depicts a scene from Virgil’s epic Aeneid wherein the hero is commanded by that seventh-century-old prophetic crone, the Sibyl of Cumae, to make an offering of a golden bough from a sacred tree growing upon the shores of crystalline blue Lake Avernus to the goddess Prosperina, if he wishes to descend to Hades and see the shadow of his departed father. “Obscure they went through dreary shades, that led/Along the waste dominions of the dead,” translated John Dryden in 1697, using his favored totemistic Augustinian rhyming couplets, as Aeneas descends further into the Underworld, its entrance a few miles west of Naples. As imagined by Turner, the area around the volcanic lake is pleasant, if sinister; bucolic, if eerie; pastoral, if unsettling. A dapple of light marks the portal whereby pilgrims journey into perdition; in the distance tall, slender trees topped with a cap of branches jut up throughout the landscape. A columned temple is nestled within the scrubby hills overlooking the field. The Sibyl stands with a scythe so that the vegetable sacrifice can be harvested, postlapsarian snakes slither throughout, and the Fates revel in mummery near hell’s doorway. Rather than severe tones of blood red and sulfurous black, earthy red and cadaverous green: Turner opted to depict Avernus in soft blues and greys, and the result is all the more disquieting. Here, the viewer might think, is what the passage between life and death must look like—muted, temperate, serene, barely even noticeable from one transition to the next. As with the best of Turner’s paintings, with his eye to color the visual equivalent of perfect pitch, it is the texture of hues that renders, if not some didactic message about his subject, a general emotional sense, a sentiment hard to describe and registering at a pitch that can be barely heard and yet alters one’s feelings in the moment. Such was the sense conveyed by the Scottish folklorist James George Frazer who borrowed the artist’s title for his landmark 1890 study The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, describing on his first page how the painting is “suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape.” This scene, Frazer enthuses, “is a dream-like vision of the little woodland...[where] Dian herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild.” An influential remnant of a supremely Victorian enthusiasm for providing quasi-scientific gloss to the categorization of mythology, Frazer’s study provided taxonomy of classical myth so as to find certain similarities, the better to provide a grand, unified theory of ancient religion (or what Edward Casaubon in George Elliot’s Middlemarch, written two decades before, might call The Key to All Mythologies). First viewing Turner’s canvas, and the rationalist Frazer was moved by the painting’s mysteriousness, the way in which the pool blue sky and the shining hellmouth trade in nothing as literal as mere symbolism, but wherein the textured physicality—the roughness of the hill and the ominous haze of the clouds, dusk’s implied screaming cicadas and the cool of the evening—conveys an ineffable feeling. Despite pretensions to an analysis more logical, Frazer intimates the numinous (for, how couldn’t he?). “Who does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough?” he writes. His argument in The Golden Bough was that religions originated as primitive fertility cults, dedicated to the idea of sacrifice and resurrection, and that from this fundamentally magical worldview would evolve more sophisticated religions, to finally be supplanted by secular science. The other argument from The Golden Baugh is implicit in the book’s very existence—that structure can be ascertained within the messy morass of disparate myths. To make this argument he drew from sources as diverse as Virgil to the Nootka people of British Columbia, classifying, categorizing, and organizing data as surely as a biologist preserving specimens in a jar of formaldehyde. And like Charles Darwin measuring finch beaks, or Thomas Huxley pinning butterflies to wood blocks, Frazer believed that diversity was a mask for similarity. As reductionist as his arguments are, and as disputed as his conclusions may be, Frazer’s influence was outsize among anthropologists, folklorists, writers, and especially literary critics, who thrilled to the idea that some sort of unity could be found in the chaotic variety of narratives that constitute world mythology. “I am a plain practical man,” Frazer writes, “not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic,” and while it’s true that The Golden Bough evidences a more imaginative disposition, it still takes part in that old quixotic desire to find some Grand Unified Theory of Narrative. While Frazer’s beat was myth, he was still a reporter in stories, and percolating like a counter-rhythm within discussion of narrative is that old desire, the yearning to find the exact number of plots that it is possible to tell. Frazer, for all that was innovative about his thought, was neither the first nor the last to treat stories like animals in a genus, narratives as if creatures in a phylum. That grand tradition claims there are only 36 stories that can be told, or seven, or four. Maybe there is really only one tale, the story of wanting something and not getting it, which is after all the contour of this story itself—the strange endurance of the sentiment that all narrative can be easily classifiable into a circumscribed, finite, and relatively small number of possibilities. While I’ve got my skepticism about such an endeavor—seeing those suggested systems as erasing the particularity of stories, of occluding what makes them unique in favor of mutilating them into some Procrustean Bed—I’d be remiss not to confess that I also find these theories immensely pleasing. There is something to be said about the cool rectilinear logic that claims any story, from Middlemarch to Fifty Shades of Grey, Citizen Kane to Gremlins 2, can be stripped down to its raw schematics and analyzed as fundamental, universal, eternal plots that have existed before Gilgamesh’s cuneiform was wedged into wet clay. Christopher Booker claims in The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories that “wherever men and women have told stories, all over the world, the stories emerging to their imaginations have tended to take shape in remarkably similar ways,” differences in culture, language, or faith be damned. With some shading, Booker uses the archetypal psychoanalysis of Carl Jung to claim that every single narrative, whether in epic or novel, film or comic, can be slotted into 1) overcoming the monster (Beowulf, George Lucas’s Star Wars), 2) rags to riches (Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Horatio Alger stories), 3) the quest (Homer’s The Odyssey, Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark), 4) voyage and return (The Ramayana, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit), 5) comedy (William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski), 6) tragedy (Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde) or 7) rebirth (Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day). That all of these parenthetically referenced works are, of course, astoundingly different from each other in character, setting, and most of all language, is irrelevant to Booker’s theory. While allowing for more subtlety than my potted overview would allow, Booker still concludes that “there are indeed a small number of plots which are so fundamental to the way we tell stories that it is virtually impossible for any storyteller ever entirely to break away from them.” Such a claim is necessary to Booker’s contention that these narratives are deeply nestled in our collective unconscious, a repository of themes, symbols, and archetypes that are “our basic genetic inheritance,” which he then proffers as an explanation for why humans tell stories at all. The Seven Basic Plots, published in 2004 after 34 years of labor, is the sort of critical work that doesn’t appear much anymore. Audacious to the point of impudence, ambitious to the level of crack-pottery, Booker’s theory seems more at home in a seminar held by Frazer than in contemporary English departments more apt to discuss gender, race, and class in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice than they are the Orphic themes of rebirth as manifested in that same novel. Being the sort of writer who both denied anthropogenic climate change and defended asbestos (for real), Booker had the conservative’s permanent sense of paranoid aggrievement concerning the treatment of his perspectives. So, let me be clear—contra Booker’s own sentiments, I don’t think that the theories in The Seven Basic Plots are ignored by literary critics because of some sort of politically correct conspiracy of silence; I think that they’re ignored because they’re not actually terribly correct or useful. When figuring out the genealogical lineage of several different species of Galapagos Island finches, similarity becomes a coherent arbiter; however, difference is more important when thinking through what makes exemplary literature exemplary. Genre, and by proxy plot, is frequently more an issue of marketing than anything. That’s not to say that questions of genre have no place in literary criticism, but they are normally the least interesting (“What makes this gothic novel gothic?”). No stranger to such thinking himself, author Kurt Vonnegut may have solved the enigma with the most basic of monomyths elucidated—“man falls into hole, man gets out of hole.” Booker isn’t after marketing, however, he’s after the key to all mythologies. Like Frazer before him, he won’t be the last critic enraptured by the idea of a Periodic Table of Plots, capable of explaining both Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as well as Weekend at Bernie’s, and he won’t be the last. If you wish to blame somebody for this line of thinking, as with most disciplines of human endeavor from ethics to dentistry, look to Aristotle as the culprit. The philosopher’s “four conflicts,” man against himself, man against man, man against nature, and man against the gods, have long been a convenient means of categorizing plots. The allure of there being a limited number of plots is that it makes both reading and writing theoretically easier. The denizens of high culture literary criticism have embraced the concept periodically, as surely as those producing paperbacks promising that a hit book can be easily plotted out from a limited tool kit. Georges Polti, of Providence Rhode Island and later Paris France, wrote The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations in 1895, claiming that all stories could be categorized in that number of scenarios, including plots of “Crime pursued by vengeance” and “Murderous adultery.” “Thirty-six situations only!” Polti enthuses. “There is to me, something tantalizing about the assertion.” Polti’s book has long been popular as a sort of lo-fi randomizer for generating stories, and its legacy lives on in works like Ronald B. Tobias’s 20 Master Plots and How to Build Them and Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s A Writer’s Guide to Characterization: Archetypes, Heroic Journeys, and Other Elements of Dynamic Character Development. There is also a less pulpy, tonier history surrounding the thinking that everything can be brewed down to a handful of elemental plots. My attitude concerning such thinking was a bit glib earlier, as there is something to be said about the utility in this thinking, and indeed entire academic disciplines have grown from that assumption. Folklorists use a classification system called the “Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index,” where a multitude of plot-types are given numbers ("Cinderella" is 510A, for example), which can be useful to trace the ways in which stories have evolved and altered over both distance and time. Unlike Polti’s 36 plots, Tobias’s 20, or Booker’s seven, Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature goes to six volumes of folk tales, fairy tales, legends, and myths, but the basic idea is the same: plots exist in a finite number (including “Transformation: man to animal” and “Magic strength resides in hair”). As with the system of classification invented by Francis James Child in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, or the Roud Folk Song Index, the Aarne-Thompson Uther Index is more than just a bit of shell collecting, but rather a system of categorization that helps folklorists make sense of the diversity of oral literature, with scholar Alan Dundes enthusing that the system was among the “most valuable tools in the professional folklorist’s arsenal of aids for analysis.” Morphological approaches define the discipline known as “narrative theory,” which draws from a similar theoretical inclination as that of the ATU Index. All of these methodologies share a commitment to understanding literature less through issues of grammar, syntax, and diction, and more in terms of plot and story. For those who read with an eye towards narrative, there is frequently an inclination, sentiment, or hunch that all stories and novels, films and television shows, epics and lyrics, comics and plays, can have their fat, gristle, and tallow boiled away to leave just the broth and a plot that’s as clean as a bone. A faith that was popular among the Russian Formalists, sometimes incongruously known as the Prague School (after where many of them, as Soviet exiles, happened to settle), including Roman Jacobson, Viktor Shklovsky, and Vladimir Propp, the last of whom wrote Morphology of the Folktale, reducing those stories to a narrative abstraction that literally looks like mathematics. A similar movement was that of French structuralism, as exemplified by its founder the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and as later practiced by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the literary critic Roland Barth. In the Anglophone world, with the exception of some departments that are enraptured to narratology, literary criticism has often focused on the evisceration of a text with the scalpel of close reading rather than the measurement of plot with the calipers of taxonomy. Arguably that’s led to the American critical predilection towards “literary” fiction over genre fiction, the rejection of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance as being unserious in favor of all of those beautifully crafted stories in The New Yorker where the climax is the main character looking out the window, sighing, and taking a sip of coffee, while realizing that she was never happy, not really. There are exceptions to the critical valorization in language over plot, however, none more so than in the once mighty but now passé writings of Canadian theorist Northrop Frye. Few scholars in the English-speaking world were more responsible for that once enthusiastic embrace of taxonomic criticism than this United Church of Christ minister and professor at Toronto’s Victoria College. Frye was enraptured to the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s theories of how fundamental archetypes structure our collective unconscious, and he believed that a similar approach could be applied to narrative, that a limited number of plots structured our way of thinking and approaching stories. In works like Fearful Symmetry on William Blake, and his all-encompassing Anatomy of Criticism, Frye elucidated a complex, baroque, and elegant system of categorizing stories, the better to interpret them properly. “What if criticism is a science as well as an art?” Frye asked, wishing to approach literature like a taxonomist, as if novels were a multitude of plants and animals just awaiting Linnaean classification. For those who read individual poems or novels as exemplary texts, explaining what makes them work, Frye would say that they’re missing the totality of what literature is. “Criticism seems to be badly in need of a coordinating principle,” he writes, “a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as part of a whole.” Frye argued that this was to be accomplished by identifying that which was universal in narrative, where works could be rendered of their unique flesh down into their skeletons, which we would then find to be myths and archetypes. From this anodyne observation, Frye spun out a complex classification system for all Western literature, one where he identifies the exact archetypes that define poetry and prose, where he flings about terms like “centripidal” and “centrifugal” to interpret individual texts, and where phrases like the “kerygmatic mode” are casually used.  Anatomy of Criticism is true to its title; Frye carves up the cadaver of literature and arrives at an admittedly intoxicating theory of everything. “Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature,” Frye writes. “Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.” In Frye’s physics, there are five “modes” of literature, including the mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic; these are then cross listed with tragic, comic, and thematic forms; what are then derived are genres with names like the dionysian, the elegiac, the aristophanic, and so on. Later in the book he supplies a complex theory of symbolism, a methodology concerning imagery based on the Platonic Great Chain of Being, and a thorough taxonomy of genre. In what’s always struck me as one of the odder (if ingenious) parts of Anatomy of Criticism, Frye ties genres specifically to certain seasons, so that comedy is a spring form, romance belongs to the summer, autumn is a time of tragedy, and winter births irony. How one reads books from those tropical places where seasons neatly divide between rainy or not speaks to a particular chauvinism on the Canadian’s part. For most viewers of public television, however, their introduction to the “There-are-only-so-many-stories” conceit wasn’t Frye, but rather a Sarah Lawrence College professor who was the titular subject of journalist Bill Moyers’s 1988 PBS documentary Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. Drawing largely from his 1949 study The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell became the unlikely star of the series that promulgated his theory of the “monomyth,” the idea that a single-story threads through world mythology and is often focused on what he termed “the hero’s journey.” Viewers were drawn to Campbell’s airy insights about the relationship between Akkadian mythology and Star Wars (a film which George Lucas admitted was heavily influenced by the folklorist’s ideas), and his vaguely countercultural pronouncement that one should “Follow your bliss!,” despite his own right-wing politics (which according to some critics could run the gamut between polite Reaganism to fascist sympathizing). Both Frye and Campbell exhibited a wide learning, but arguably only the former’s was particularly deep. With an aura of crunchy tweediness, Campbell seemed like the sort of professor who would talk to students about the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in an office which smells of patchouli, a threadbare oriental rug on the dusty floor, knick-knacks assembled while studying in India and Japan, and a collapsing bookshelf jammed with underlined paperback copies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer above his desk. Campbell, in short, looked like what we expect a liberal arts teacher to look like, and for some of his critics (like Dundes who called him an “non-expert” and an “amateur”) that gave him an unearned authority. But what an authority he constructed, the hero with only one theory to explain everything! Drawing from Jung, Frazer, and all the rest of the usual suspects, Campbell argued in his most famous book that broad archetypes structure all narrative, wherein a “hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Whether Luke Skywalker venturing out from Tatooine or Gilgamesh leaving Ur, the song remains the same, Campbell says. Gathering material from the ancient near east and Bronze Age Ireland, the India of the Mahabharata and Hollywood screen plays, Campbell claimed that his monomyth was the skeleton key to all narrative, a story whose parsing could furthermore lead to understanding, wisdom, and self-fulfillment among those who are hip to its intricacies. The Hero with a Thousand Faces naturally flattered the pretensions of some artists and writers, what with its implications that they were conduits connected directly to the collective unconsciousness. Much as with Freud and the legions of literary critics who applied his theories to novels and film, if Campbell works well in interpreting lots of movies, it’s because those directors (from Lucas to Stanley Kubrick) happened to be reading him. The monomyth can begin to feel like the critical equivalent of the intelligent design advocate who knows God exists, because why else would we have been given noses on which to so conveniently hold our glasses? Campbell’s politics, and indeed that of his theory, are ambivalent. His comparative approach superficially seems like the pluralistic, multicultural, ecumenical perspective of the Sarah Lawrence professor that he was, but at the same time the flattening of all stories into this one monomyth does profound violence to the particularity of myths innumerable. There is a direct line between Campbell and the mythos-laden mantras of poet Robert Bly and his Iron John: A Book About Men, the tome that launched a thousand drum circles of suburban dads trying to engage their naturalistic masculinity in vaguely homoerotic forest rituals, or of Canadian psychotherapist/alt-right apologist Jordan Peterson who functions as basically a Dollar Store version of the earlier folklorist. Because myths are so seemingly elemental, mysterious telegrams from the ancient past, whose logic seems imprinted into our unconscious, it’s hard not to see the attraction of a Campbell. And yet whenever someone starts talking about “mythos” it inevitably can start to feel like you’re potentially in the presence of a weirdo who practices “rune magik,” unironically wonders if they’re an ubermensch, and has an uncomfortably racist Google search history. We think of the myth as the purview of the hippie, but it’s just as often the provenance of the jackbooted authoritarian, for Campbell’s writings fit comfortably with a particularly reactionary view of life, which should fit uncomfortably with the rest of us. “Marx teaches us to blame society for our frailties, Freud teaches us to blame our parents,” Campbell wrote in the posthumously published Pathways to Bliss, but the “only place to look for blame is within: you didn’t have the guts to bring up your full moon and live the life that was your potential.” Yeah, that’s exactly it. People can’t afford healthcare or get a job because they didn’t bring up their full moon… [millions_email] The problem is that if you take Campbell too seriously then everything begins to look like it was written by Campbell. To wit, the monomyth is supposed to go through successive stages, from the hero’s origin in an ordinary world where he receives a “call to adventure,” to being assisted by a mentor who leads him through a “guarded threshold” where he is tested on a “road of trials,” to finally facing his ultimate ordeal. After achieving success, the hero returns to the ordinary world wiser and better, improving the lives of others through the rewards that have been bestowed upon him. The itinerary is more complex than this in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but this should be enough to convey that Campbell’s schema is general enough that it can be applied to anything, but particular enough that it gives the illusion of rigor. Think of Jesus Christ, called to be the messiah and assisted by John the Baptist, tempted by Satan in the desert, and after coming into Jerusalem facing torture at the hands of the Romans, before his crucifixion and harrowing of hell, only to be resurrected with the promise of universal human salvation. Now, think of Jeff Lebowski, called to be the Dude and assisted by Walter Sobchak, tempted by Jackie Treehorn, battling the nihilists, only to return in time for the bowling finals. Other than speaking deep into the souls of millions of people, it should be uncontroversial to say that the gospels and the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski are only the same story in the most glaringly of superficial ways, and yet the quasi-conspiratorial theory of the monomyth promises secret knowledge that says that they are.     But here’s the thing—stories aren’t hydrogen, plots aren’t oxygen, narratives aren’t carbon. You can’t reduce the infinity of human experience into a Periodic Table, except in the most perfunctory of ways. To pretend that the tools of classification are the same as the insights of interpretation is to grind the Himalayas into Iowa, it’s to cut so much from the bone that the only meal you’re left with is that of a skeleton. When all things are reduced to monomyth, the enthusiast can’t recognize the exemplary, the unique, the individual, the subjective, the idiosyncratic, because some individual plot doesn’t have a magical wizard shepherding the hero to the underworld, or whatever. It’s to deny the possibility of some new story, of some innovation in narrative, its to spurn the Holy Grail of uniqueness. Still, some sympathy must be offered as to why these models appeal to us, of how archetypal literary criticism appeals to our inner stamp collectors. With apologies to Voltaire, if narrative didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent it—and everything else too. The reasons why archetypal criticism is so appealing are legion—they impose a unity on chaos, provides a useful measure of how narratives work, and give the initiate the sense that they have knowledge that is applicable to everything from The Odyssey to Transformers. But a type of critical madness lay in the idolatry of confusing methodological models for the particularity of actual stories. Booker writes of stories that are “Rags to Riches,” but that reductionism is an anemic replacement for inhabiting Pip’s mind when he pines for Estella in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations; he classifies Bram Stoker’s Dracula as being about “Overcoming the Monster,” but that simplification is at the expense of that purple masterpiece’s paranoia, its horror, its hunger, its sexiness. There are no stories except for in the details. To forget that narratives are infinite is a slur against them; it’s the blasphemy of pretending that every person is the same as every other. For in a warped way, there is but one monomyth, but it’s not what the stamp collectors say it is. In all of their variety, diversity, and multiplicity, every tale is a creation myth because every tale is created. From the raw material of life is generated something new, and in that regard we’re not all living variations of the same story, we’re all living within the same story.   Bonus Links:—The Purpose of Plot: An Argument with MyselfThe Million Basic PlotsOn Not Going Out of the House: Thoughts About Plotlessness Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.