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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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The Possibility of A Voice: The Millions Interviews Joshua Corey
Joshua Corey is a poet who wrote a novel that reads like a film. Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a poet’s novel, its poetic concision married to a cameralike-gaze to create what might be classified as an art-house film of a novel. A poet’s noir, if you will. The novel straddles two continents -- traveling between America and Europe -- and opens in present-day Chicago, with Ruth, a wife and young mother lying in bed, envisioning raindrops falling like letters onto her roof and neighboring roofs. These dreams give rise to the receipt of letters, sent by her dead mother, M, who had become terminally ill and went abroad to die. The letters prompt Ruth to hire an investigator to trace her mother’s footsteps through Europe, and dually unearths M’s past, intertwined with a third narrative, which involves a college-age M, not yet a mother, in Paris during May '68.
The reception of Beautiful Soul book has been quiet yet emphatic. It was listed by Dennis Cooper as a favorite book of 2014, praised by Chris Higgs as one of “the most interesting and impressive books” he’s read of late, and championed by Laird Hunt who called its “push-pull between stunning language and inventive narrative" as "pure pleasure.” With three books of poetry under his belt, and a fourth, The Barons, released last year (only months after Beautiful Soul), Corey is certainly prolific. He has also co-edited, with G.C. Waldrep, The Arcardia Project, an anthology of postmodern pastoral poems, and acts as co-director of NOW Books, which publishes experimental, often hybrid, works. Our conversation here touches on the allure of the novel as form, Beautiful Soul's cinematic quality, artist Joseph Beuys as lodestar, and the book’s feminism, with regard to Ruth’s struggle with identity, her mothering, and her elusive history.
The Millions: Reading Beautiful Soul is an unexpectedly filmic experience. The novel opens with a film’s beginning: “Black screen. A flicker," and only then, “The letter.” There’s an awareness of the camera’s gaze, its angles and panning, and the third section set in Paris '68 for me recalls Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. In many ways, Beautiful Soul seems to give life to its own film within the book. Would you talk about the influence of film on this novel, and if in this way the novel for you supersedes film?
Joshua Corey: I really like that idea -- “to give life to its own film within the book.” I’ve long been fascinated by film treatments and by the parts of screenplays that aren’t dialogue, which in effect personify or subjectify the position of the camera as a peculiar kind of “we:” we see the protagonist, we see her face in close-up, we see the establishing shot...Here again I wanted that sense of active involvement in the story -- of the story creating itself or being created by and for the reader-viewer in front of her eyes. I also wanted to play with some cinematic tropes evocative of American noir, Italian Neorealism, and the French New Wave -- the midcentury visual imagination.
It’s funny you mention Bertlolucci’s The Dreamers, which is a film I deliberately chose not to watch once I realized the imaginative territory that the novel was leading me toward -- perhaps foolishly I didn’t want to be influenced, even though I was already being influenced by what surely was one of Bertolucci’s primary influences -- [François] Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. I suppose it would be all right if I watched it now!
I don’t think Beautiful Soul in any way “supersedes” film, but I truly love the idea of a novel that is somehow also a film, and I’m flattered that you think I might have accomplished that.
TM: As a poet, what was your attraction to the novel, and, specifically, to writing a novel that conceives of itself as a film?
JC: I love the old Henry James line describing 19th-century novels as “large, loose, baggy monsters.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but I like the idea of the novel as a kind of supergenre capable of absorbing any kind of text -- poems, essays, table talk, drama. I never got over my first encounter with Ulysses, which gave me the idea that the novel was at least as appropriate a site for formal experimentation as poetry. But most novels aren’t Ulysses and the mechanics of plot and the market-driven expectations that drive most American novels (beginning, middle, end; conflict, resolution, redemption) kept me from attempting fiction for a long time. It wasn’t until I began to realize the possibility of a voice, in prose, that I became able to write what eventually revealed itself as a novel with characters, scenes, a plot, and all the rest. My poetry has always been highly voiced. I think the first-person monologue, a la [William] Shakespeare and [Robert] Browning, is the poetic mode that made fiction possible for me.
I did want to stage a sort of confrontation between the novel and the cinematic. It’s become a cliché now to say that TV shows like The Wire and The Sopranos are to us what [Charles] Dickens and Anthony Trollope were to the Victorians. But as someone who was skeptical about fiction for a long time, I really did wonder what the novel as medium can accomplish -- what is proper to it, most fully its own, in the age of the total image. I was surprised as I went on to rediscover some of the sturdier virtues of storytelling, and some of that material -- particularly the May -68 stuff -- was the most fun for me to write.
TM: Ruth, protagonist of Beautiful Soul, is a mother, daughter, wife, and seeker, who has placed her desires on the back burner to raise her daughter, and who is often referred to as “the new reader.” “New reader” implies that there is an “old reader,” too, and that difference between these categories are significant. While some of the implications of “new reader” are obvious to the narrative and to our times, the idea of the new reader seems to run even deeper. Would you talk more about Ruth, her identity as the “new reader,” and what this means?
JC: There are a couple of “old readers” in the book -- most obviously Ruth’s mother, M, whom she remembers as a compulsive reader of “cozy” English mysteries, but there’s also Ruth’s husband Ben, who like so many of us no longer reads much of anything because he ends up being distracted by screens. But any sort of reader, old or new, is an investigator and interpreter. Ruth’s mother’s story prefigures Ruth’s: as the story unfolds we discover that she too is investigating the mysterious and inexplicable past of her parents, both Holocaust survivors. Her investigation fails; the success or failure of Ruth’s depends upon the powers of her imagination, her willingness to become a character in her own story rather than remaining outside of it (which is what the “beautiful soul” does in [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel's account of the progress of Spirit). The new reader is someone for whom reading is in question -- whether in print or on a Kindle -- for whom the experience of reading puts her identity into question. I think readers are heroic when they put themselves and their expectations of a text at risk.
TM: “Extimation” is deemed to be what Ruth needs, as a new reader, to connect to the rupture between her actions and her desire, which at one point manifests as the desire to lie carelessly in the grass with her daughter, but ignores it to play the role of the responsible mother. This is called “a flawless trap of a moment.” I’m curious about the idea of this trap, the roles characters fall into, or perhaps demand, as it’s asked, “Why do we insist on the narrative of our lives?” I’m also curious about this idea of extimacy, and why it’s what Ruth needs.
JC: This really goes back to the novel's title, which practically begs to be misunderstood as sentimental. As I remarked before, it's a term from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and refers to a subject whose stakes in his own innocence or purity are such that he insists on seeing evil, or experience, or history, or nature, or "the world," as something "over there." It's a stance in perfect tension with noir, which I define as the narrative in which the subject finds herself part of and implicated in the dark territory she purports to investigate. [Jacques] Lacan's term is another disruptor of this notion of an inside and outside that are sealed off from each other, when in fact the "outside world" is completely inside each one of us, and manifests as pathology precisely to the degree we are unable to acknowledge that. Ruth's struggle to fully inhabit her various identities -- as daughter, as mother, as mourner, as American, as reader, and as writer -- produces the plot as well as the struggle with plot.
TM: Beautiful Soul has been called a feminist novel and seems to be very much about mothers and mothering, about origins, and the attempt to trace them. What drew you to write about mothering, and how this is tied to ideas of homeland and the domestic?
JC: I’m honored that it might be construed as a feminist novel. But the answer to this question is rooted in the personal: my mother wrote poetry, and spoke several languages, and in all ways inspired me to become a writer. She was also the daughter of a pair of Auschwitz survivors; she was born in Budapest in 1942, survived the war there, and then came to this country after a bleak interval in a displaced persons camp in Germany; all her life long she was haunted by these stubborn historical facts, and she never really had a career to suit her talents but lived out her days as a housewife in suburban New Jersey. She was a brilliant, funny, often depressed, sometimes bitter woman, and she died of cancer when I was 21, just as she seemed to be finding a new path for herself as a clinical social worker. I’ve never gotten over that loss, and the novel represents both an elegy for her (as indicated in the subtitle) and an imaginative investigation of the forces that shaped her and through her, me.
On another level, perhaps because I had such a strong mother figure, I’ve long been interested in the domestic drama or what they used to call in Hollywood the “woman’s picture”; [Virginia] Woolf and [Jane] Austen are two of my favorite novelists, and Henry James (who was passionately preoccupied with women’s lives) isn’t far behind. It seems to me that becoming a mother is a crisis in a woman’s life in a way that’s not very analogous to what happens with men; women are asked to identify with motherhood but the fathers I know are mostly just men with kids. I wanted to write a kind of domestic noir that would explore the strength and toughness of women, while puncturing a little bit the mythic invulnerability of masculinist figures like the detective or the revolutionary. I just saw the David Bowie show at the MCA, which reminds me of how strongly I am sometimes drawn to flamboyance and androgyny -- not in my personal style, but in my writing.
TM: Artist Joseph Beuys as shaman graces the cover of both Beautiful Soul and of your new book of poetry, The Barons. What's Beuys's influence on your work?
JC: Beuys fascinates me on a number of levels. First of all, there’s his situation as a charismatic German artist who served in the Luftwaffe, and whose entire subsequent career can be read as an atonement for or evasion of that history. There’s an amazing sound poem by the Fluxus artist Al Hansen (grandfather of Beck) that I discovered called “Joseph Beuys Stuka Dive Bomber Piece,” which imagines, in sputtering phonemes that very occasionally resolve themselves into words, Beuys flying his Stuka (a kind of dive bomber) during World War II -- I pay homage to that piece with a transcription of what I hear in it in a poem in The Barons. Beuys was a pacifist and an environmental activist who at one time stood for a seat in the European Parliament as a member of the Green Party, nevertheless implicated in the greatest historical crime of his time. The art itself is an art of process and vulnerability; his totemic materials are animal fat and felt, “warm” rather than “cool” media for bizarre sculptures and performances that nonetheless carry with them aspects of the cozy and the cute. I was particularly drawn to the “America” performance, and wanted it for the cover of Beautiful Soul, because it's a remarkable updating of Henry James's "international" theme, the collision of innocent America with decadent experienced Europe. Wrapped in folds of felt, wielding a kind of magic staff reminiscent, yes, of a shepherd's crook but also of vaudeville and the Sally Bowles of Cabaret, Beuys the shaman from Europe confronts the American coyote, which suggests wildness but also something of a trickster quality. You can't see Beuys's face in the image and yet it's enormously expressive in its mystery. It puts the "American" in "American Elegy" into question, I think, since the loss of American innocence is perhaps devoutly to be wished instead of mourned.
TM: With images of Beuys gracing both books' covers (and with both published this year) it leads me to ask, are they born from similar sources of inspiration, or are they entirely distinct?
JC: Beuys on both covers is a kind of Easter egg for those who might actually follow my work closely enough to read both books! And they both feature animals, don't they; a coyote for Beautiful Soul and a white horse for The Barons. But the differences between the two images maybe suggest what's different about the two books as well, which might be summarized this way: the novel is about the past, the poetry is about the present or maybe the future. The image on the cover of The Barons is a diptych from a 1969 performance of "Iphigenie / Titus Andronicus" in which Beuys appeared on a Frankfurt stage in a fur coat with a horse behind him. Beuys uttered various sounds and guttural cries during the performance, but also snatches of dialogue from Shakespeare's play, his most lurid, and Goethe's Iphigenia in Taurus -- in an interview Beuys remarked, "I thought it was time to handle language the way I had previously handled felt." Both plays featured endangered young women, victimized by their fathers' blindness: Iphigenia is sacrificed by her father for the sake of going to war, while Lavinia is raped and has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out by two brothers whose other brothers were killed in ritual sacrifice by Lavinia's father, Titus. The notion of unnatural sacrifice, particularly of the innocent, resonated with me as a dark image of our historical moment, not only of the endless war footing we've been on since 9/11 but our insane war against the earth itself. But there's a ray of hope in Goethe's reworking of the Iphigenia story: in his play Iphigenia was saved from death and is now a priestess of Diana who must battle against the ancient custom of human sacrifice. The diptych itself is striking: on top we see Beuys kneeling in contemplation or discouragement while the horse -- a symbol of the threatened earth as well perhaps of ancient notions of chivalry -- crops straw in the background. On the bottom, in a brilliant negative image, we see a standing Beuys holding a pair cymbals -- an image of resonance. The poems of The Barons enact a similar dialectic between despair and music, the percussion of language and the absurd particulars of modern life.
Most of the poems were written before I wrote the novel, but there are some interesting gestures there toward narrative, including a poem that's titled, "The Novel."
TM: John Ashbery says that with The Barons, you have "reinvented the good old-fashioned American avant-garde epic poem (Whitman, Stein, Crane, O'Hara) and thrust it, kicking if not screaming, into the early 21st century.” Your preceding book of poetry, Severance Songs, deconstructed the sonnet. With each book of poetry, do you attempt a different experiment with form?
JC: I’m a formalist at heart, in the sense that I have always been fascinated by the material-historical properties of words -- their sonic qualities, their viscosity, their etymologies -- and the ways in which both traditional and open forms pattern those properties and work on a reader’s nervous system a beat or three before semantic cognition kicks in. The sonnet is a constant temptation to a poet because it’s brief enough and graceful enough in its structure to suggest that perfection might be possible. At the same time, I’m suspicious of purity and so I wanted in Severance Songs to dirty up the sonnet, to work both in and against the grain of the form. The Barons harkens back to my first book, Selah, in being various formally: there’s a long quasi-epic poem about post-9/11 New York, Compostition Marble, which is where I think the Crane and Whitman comes in; there are prose poems, brief lyrics, visionary Ginsbergesque rants, you name it. One of the poems, “It Goes by in Flashes, It Bows” was partly based on conversations overheard while riding the Metra here in Chicago; I like to think of the different forms as drawing upon or drawing out some of the confused and angry and deadpan voices of all of us living in the hurtling doomstruck world that the titular barons have made.
TM: Beautiful Soul seems to embrace an idea of the multiplicity of the self, of the I, of fragmentation of identity, while at the same time, Ruth yearns to define her unique identity, to be distinct. Would you talk more about this idea of identity in relation to ancestry, and the tension this brings?
JC: This is another angle on the "extimacy" question: the desire to be an autonomous self versus the desire to be part of something larger or something other, whether that something be a family, a lineage, an ethnic group or religion (in this case Jews and Judaism), or European history. Ruth is unsurprisingly ambivalent: I think she knows that some kind of pure identity as beautiful soul is not a realistic option for her, but at the same time she feels overwhelmed by what her mother represents, both as formidable personality and as representative of a historical experience that resonates in Ruth's life, but that she is powerless to change -- that was never really hers. That's why she dreams up Lamb, the P.I., a kind of animus who will do the dirty work of integrating the wound of M (M is W upside-down; a Beuysian motto is "Show your wound") into Ruth's self without her having to compromise her own integrity. Of course it's not that easy; it's more than any dream can do. Ruth has to open herself to otherness -- and as is so often the case, it's the otherness that's closest to us that she finds the most threatening.
TM: Ruth is literally haunted by her past and yet she hires an investigator to seek out information about her mother’s demise and her father, too, as if knowledge will bring resolution. What is the allure of uncovering facts, and are facts always elusive, like M herself?
JC: Again, it's a question of integration. We in America are poor in history compared to Europe; Ruth's investigation by proxy is an attempt to appropriate some of that history for herself (and what could be more American that that?). But history resists her: the core historical experience that affects her, Auschwitz, cannot be narrated without repeating the atrocity. The secondary history, that of the '60s (compressed for reasons of expedience into Paris '68, though earlier drafts also had storylines set in early-'70s New York and in a university on the brink of the theory wars of the '80s), can be narrated and is in the voice of Gustave, the former art student who may or may not be Ruth's biological father. And yet hearing this story brings Ruth no closer to understanding her mother as her mother; it only reveals something of her as a person, which to a child is no help. Among other things Ruth must surrender her child's position if she is to be reconciled with her mother's ghost. Does she, can she succeed? I think it's left up to the reader.
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