The History of Hell

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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]

Conquering Hell

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"You have reason to wonder that you are not already in hell." —Jonathan Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741) "For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside/that it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive."—Bruce Springsteen, "Badlands" (1978) Charging only a quarter, Joseph Dorfeuille allowed the curious to view Hell itself—admission was half-price for children. Not far from the Ohio River, amongst the steep hills of the Queen City, and from 1820 to 1867, the Western Museum of Cincinnati promised in an advertisement "Come hither, come hither by night or by day, /there's plenty to look at and little to pay." Founded by physician Daniel Drake, known by enthusiasts as the "Ben Franklin of the west," the institution was modeled after the Wunderkammers, "Wonder Cabinets," of Europe, displaying shells and rocks, feathers and fossils, pottery shards and arrow heads. Even ornithologist James Audubon was on staff. Only two years after its founding, however, and the trustees forced Drake to resign. In his place Dorfeuille was hired, who rather than assemble materials zoological, archeological, and geological, understood that the public was curious about the "occasional error of nature." In place of Drake's edifying scientific exhibits, Dorfeuille mounted skeletons that moved by mechanical apparatus, dancing while an organ grinder played. He featured a diorama of wax figurines depicting the local murderer, Cowan, in the act, while also preserving in formaldehyde the head and heart of Mathias Hoover, a Cincinnati serial killer. And with particular popularity, the director distributed huffs of nitrous oxide after his "lectures." But no exhibit—even the laughing gas—was quite as popular as "Dorfeuille's Hall." A recreation of characters and scenes from the 14th-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s epic religious allegory The Divine Comedy, as well as from the 17th-century British poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Molded in beeswax, the hall was mounted by Hiram Powers, who'd eventually become the first celebrated American neo-classical sculptor (Elizabeth Barret Browning would pen a sonnet in honor of his work). Powers was tasked with illustrating our most grotesque visions—it would be among the most talked about exhibits before the Civil War. Powers crafted wax figures of the demon Beelzebub and of fallen arch-rebel himself, Lucifer. Adept in mechanism and sound-effects, his wax statues would shakily move in the darkness while screams emanated. "Visitors…were so intrigued by the realism of the figures that they were constantly touching them for confirmation that they were indeed wax," writes Andrea Stulman Dennett in Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America. "To minimize the damage to his sculptures," she explains, "Dorfeuille had to put an iron grating charged with a mild electrical current." At the center was the "King of Terrors," a stock Devil with red horns and pitchfork, smoke swirling about him. Originally Powers played the role, though an automata would after he quit the Western Museum—moving onto a respectable art career in Washington DC and then in Dante's Florence—after Dorfeuille stiffed him on pay. By 1839, Dorfeuille sold off the Western Museum of Cincinnati, but he took his deteriorating waxworks to New York, where they were latter immolated in a fire, their owner following them into the underworld a few months after. King Entropy awaits us all. A skeleton at the exit to Dorfeuille's Hall held aloft a sign with some doggerel on it: "So far we are equal, but once left, /Our mortal weeds of vital spark bereft, /Asunder, father than the poles were driven;/Some sunk in deepest Hell, some raised to highest Heaven," though highest Heaven was never as pruriently fascinating as deepest Hell. Powers didn't outfit an exhibit with harp-playing, winged angels and shining halos; no wax figurines of the unassailable, the respectable, the decent. Not that it was ever much different, for people have always been more attracted—in both the neurotic's fear and the sadist's delight—with the fires of damnation. We recognized the 700th anniversary of Dante's The Divine Comedy in September, and while I have no reliable numbers, my hunch is that 10-to-1 more people have read "Inferno" than the remainder about Purgatory and Paradise. Hell is more visual; if asked to envision Heaven we could offer gauzy, sepia-toned cliches about clouds and pearly gates, but if being perfectly honest nothing about it sounds appealing. But Hell. Well, Hell, we can all agree is interesting. The sulphur and shrieks, bitumen and biting, the light that burns eternally but gives off no glow. It all sounds pretty bad. While our curiosity draws us to the grotesque, we also can't help but be haunted by Hell, traces of its ash smeared across even the most secular mind. "Understand, I'm not speaking here only of the sincerely religious," writes Dinty W. Moore in his irreverent To Hell With It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante's Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno, focusing on his shame-filled Catholic education. "The fable of our flawed souls, the troubling myth of original sin, the looming possibility of eternal damnation clandestinely infects even those of us who think ourselves immune: atheists, agnostics, secularists." Supposedly only the most zealous lives without doubt, but just as such a pose evidences more anxiety than might be assumed, so too is nobody an atheist all of the time. The pious are haunted by absence and apostates by a presence, but the fear is the same. I don't believe in a literal Hell, a place of eternal torment where our sins are punished by demons—most of the time. Hell is often on my mind, but unlike Moore I think that occasionally there is intellectual benefit in that which is sulphury (or at least the idea of it). Moore writes about the traumas of "depressive guilt brought on by religious malarkey," and it would be a cold critic to disagree that belief has been used to oppress, persecute, and inculcate shame. Not just a cold critic, but one incapable of parsing objective reality. But even though he's right, it's still hard for me to throw the demon out with the hot coals. Hell's tragedy is that those who deserve to go there almost never think that they will, while the pious shame-filled neurotic imagines those flames with scrupulous anxiety. My soul is content if God prepared a place of eternal torment for the EXXON executive who sees climate change as an opportunity to drill for Arctic oil, the banker who gave out high-risk loans with one hand and then foreclosed on a family with the other, the CEO who makes billions getting rich off of slave labor, the racist representative who spreads hate for political gain, the NRA board member unconcerned with the slaughter of the innocent, the A.M. peddlers of hokum and bullshit, the fundamentalist preacher growing rich off his flock's despair, and the pedophile priest abusing those whom he was entrusted to protect. Here's an incomplete list of people who don't belong in Hell—anyone who eats the whole sleeve of Oreos, somebody who keeps on pressing "Still Watching" on the Netflix show that they're binging, the person who shouts "Jesus Fucking Christ" after they stub their toe, anybody who has spied on their neighbor's home through Zillow, the Facebook humble-bragger talking about a promotion who keeps hitting "Refresh" for the dopamine rush of digital approval, the awkward subway passengers suddenly fascinated by their feet when a loud panhandler boards, and mastrubators. That so many guilty of the little sins, peccadillos, tics, frailties, and flaws that are universal and make us all gloriously imperfect humans so often feel crippling shame, guilt, and depression over these things is tragic. That my first category of sinners almost never feels those things is even more so.       Before either Hell or Heaven there was the shadow land of indeterminate conclusions. Neither the ancient Greeks or Jews much delineated out an afterlife. Greek Hades was a grey place, a foggy place, and not particularly pleasant, even if it wasn't exactly inferno. "Gloomy as night," is how Alexander Pope describes Hades in his 18th-century translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, a realm populated by "Thin airy shoals of visionary ghosts." Excepting Elysium—where excellence is more honored than virtue—and everybody has Hades to anticipate, though Homer is content to consign even the glorious to this depressing place. "I'd rather slave on earth for another man," the hero Achilles tells Odysseus in Robert Fagles’s contemporary translation, "than rule down here over all the breathless dead." The ancient Jewish conception of an afterlife was originally not much more hopeful, with the Hebrew Scriptures speaking of Sheol, described in Ecclesiastes as a place of "neither deed nor reckoning, neither knowledge nor wisdom." As smudgy and unfocused as Sheol was, the Bible sometimes draws distinction (and conflation) with a horrific domain known as Gehenna.    Drawing its name from a dusty valley where pagan child sacrifice had once been practiced, and which became a filthy heap where trash was burnt in a frenzy of ash and dirt, Gehenna is ruled over by Baal and dedicated to the punishment of the wicked. Both the Talmud and the New Testament use the word "Gehenna," an indication of how, in the first centuries of the Common Era, a comprehensive vision of the afterlife emerged in Judaism and Christianity. Among the Sadducees, who composed the Temple elite, the afterlife was largely defined by absence, but the Pharisees (from whom rabbinic Judaism emerged) shared with early Christians an interest in charting the geography of death, and Gehenna was a highlighted location. (Worth mentioning that the historical Pharisees bear no similarity to the hatchet job performed on them in the Gospels). As it was, Jewish Gehenna would be understood slightly differently from Hell, more akin to Purgatory, a place of finite punishment cleansing the soul of its inequities. Though as the 13th-century Kabbalistic Zohar makes clear, the truly evil are "judged over in this filth… [and] never get released… the fire remains." Though both Judaism and Christianity developed a complex vocabulary of Heaven and Hell, it's not unfair to attribute much of the iconography of perdition to Dante. Writing a generation after Dante's death, and Giovanni Boccaccio predicted that as regards the Florentine poet's name "the more it is furbished by time, the more brilliant it will ever be." Boccaccio's prediction has been perennially proven correct, with the Victorian critic John Ruskin describing Dante as the "central man of all the world," and T.S. Eliot arguing that "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third." All of this might seem a tad Eurocentric, a tad chauvinist, and a tad too focused on Christianity—the apotheosis of Dante into a demigod. Concerning prosody—Dante's ingenious interlocking rhyme scheme known as terza rima or his ability to describe a "place void of all light, /which bellows like the sea in tempest, /when it is combated by warring winds"—he was brilliant. But acknowledging acumen is different—even Voltaire quipped that more people valorize Dante than read him. And yet (there's always an "And yet"…), there must be a distinction between the claim that Dante says something vital about the human condition, and the objective fact that in some ways Dante actually invented the human condition (or a version of it). John Casey argues in After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, & Purgatory that Dante's was "without doubt the supreme imagining of the afterlife in all [Western] literature," while Alberto Manguel in The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor claims that his epic has "acquired a permanent and tangible geography in our imagination." "Dante's story, then, is both a landscape and a map" writes Manguel. None of the poem's unfortunates get out, save for one—the author. Midway in the course of life Dante falls into despair, loneliness, alienation, and The Divine Comedy is the record of his descent and escape from those doldrums. Alice K. Turner argues in The History of Hell that Dante was the progenitor of a "durable interior metaphor." Claiming that the harrowing and ascension that he described can be seen in everything from psychoanalysis to 12-step programs, Turner writes that "this entirely comfortable and pervasive method of modern metaphorical thinking might not exist if Dante had never written." "Empathy" might not be the first word readers associate with a book sticky with the blood of the damned—"punishment" or even "justice" would figure higher—and yet Dante feels pain for these characters. That aspect of The Divine Comedy is why we're still talking about it. Turner explains that "Dante was concerned with history, with Florentine politics, with the corruption of the clergy, with the moral position of his contemporaries, and most of all with the state of his own psyche," while arguing that at a "distance of seven centuries, we can no longer easily appreciate any of these things except the last—Dante is generous with his emotions." It's true that for any contemporary reader, concerns with forgotten factions like the Ghibelline and Guelphs, parsing of Thomas Aquinas, or condemnations of this or that obscure pope can seem hermetic. When perusing a heavily glossed and footnoted copy of The Divine Comedy, it's his intimate perspective that is the most human. Eliot may have claimed that between Dante and Shakespeare there was no third, but that's the sort of thing that a self-declared "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion" would say, giving short shrift to that bomb-throwing author of Paradise Lost. Earth can be given over to Shakespeare, but Heaven and Hell belong to Dante and Milton. If The Divine Comedy is the consummate expression of Catholicism, then Milton's epic is Protestantism's fullest literary flowering, and yet neither of the two are orthodox. Milton's depiction of damnation in media res after the rebel angels have been expelled from Heaven and the once beautiful Lucifer has been transformed into Satan, revises our understanding of Hell for the first time since Dante. Much remains recognizable in Milton, even if immaculately portrayed, this "dungeon horrible, on all sides round, /As one great furnace, flames; yet from those flames/No light, but rather darkness visible," a fallen kingdom defined by "sights of woe, /Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace/And rest can never dwell, hope never comes… but torture without end." Paradise Lost’s beauty belies the darkness of that sunken pit, for Milton's brilliance has always been that he acknowledges what's evocative, what's magnetic, what's attractive about Hell, for Lucifer in his intransigence and his obstinacy declares that it is "Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heav'n." Dante's Satan is a monster encased in ice, weeping frozen tears as he forever masticates the bodies of Casius, Brutus, and Judas. He is bestial, animalistic, and barely sentient. Nobody would admire him; nobody would want to be Dante's Satan. Milton's Lucifer, on the other hand, is a revolutionary who gets all the best lines; certainly, better than God and Christ. As William Empson had it in his vaguely heretical Milton's God, the "poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions."         Milton is a "Puritan," that wooly category of killjoy whom we associate with the Plymouth Pilgrims (though they were technically different), all belt-buckled black hats and shoes, trying to sniff out witches and other people having impure thoughts. As it goes, Milton may have politically been a Puritan, but he was also a unitarian and a materialist, and on the whole a rather cracked Protestant, not least of all because of his Devil's thinly disguised heroism. Paradise Lost is honest because it exemplifies a principle that we all know, something expressed by Augustine in his Confessions when filching a pear from a Tunisian marketplace like he was Eve in Eden with her apple, admitting that he wasn't even hungry but he did it because "It was foul and I loved it. I loved my own undoing." Doing bad things is fun. Puritans ironically seem more apt to admit that clear truism than all of the Panglossian advocates for humanity's intrinsic good nature, an obvious foolishness. Just try and negotiate a Trader Joe's parking lot and then tell me that you're so certain that Original Sin is old-fashioned superstition. Acknowledging sin's innate attractiveness—our "total depravity" as John Calvin described it in his 16th-century tome The Institutes of Christian Faith—means that detailed descriptions of Hell can sound perverse. At a pulpit in Enfield, Conn., the minister Jonathan Edwards delivered an infamous sermon in 1741 in which he told the assembled that "Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell… if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf" for God abhors all of us, and is " his wrath… burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing… but to be caste into the fire." According to Edwards, all women and men are "ten thousand times more abominable in [God's] eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours." Historians note that while Edwards delivered his sermon, congregants rolled around in the church aisles and stood on the pews, moaning and screaming. All of this is a bit kinky, honestly.    Calvinism's God has always read more like his nemesis, omnipotent enough that He created us, but apparently not so omnipotent that He makes us worthy of salvation. More than a tyrant, He reads as a sadist, but when God is deleted from Calvinism what's left is only the putrid, jaundiced, rotting corpse of our contemporary world, where nobody knows the value of anything, but only the price of everything. Nothing better expressed the dark American transition to post-Calvinism than our greatest of novels, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, the Whale, of which the author wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851 that "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb." Immature exegetes perseverate on what the white whale means, what he is a symbol of. God? Satan? America? That's the Holy Trinity, though only one of them has ever kept his promises (I'll let you guess who). It's both more and less complicated than that; the whale is the terrifying, naked abyss stripped bare of all our presuppositions. In short, he is the world as it actually is, where Hell is all around us. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael listens to the former harpooner Father Mapple's sermon at the New Bedford, Mass., Whaling Chapel (with its cenotaphs and its massive cetacean bones), and though the sermon is ostensibly on Jonah, it describes a type of Hell. The congregants sing a strange hymn about the "ribs and terrors in the whale/Arched over… a dismal gloom, /While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by, /And lift me deepening down to doom." Mapple preaches that despite how sinful the reluctant prophet was, "Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just… And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment." You'll go to Hell—or the belly of a whale—and you'll be happy about it, too.      Not that this rhetoric is limited to Protestantism, for fire and brimstone come just as often from homily as sermon. James Joyce knew that Catholic priests could chill the blood every bit as much as an evangelical bible thumper, with perhaps no more disturbing a vision of Hell ever offered than in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His roman a clef Stephen Dedalus attends a religious retreat, and the visiting priest provides visceral description to the adolescents—buffeted by arrogance and hormones—of what awaits them if they give into temptation, for "Hell is a straight and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke" where all of the punished are "heaped together in their awful prison… so utterly bound and helpless that… they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it." Drawing upon the Jansenist Catholicism that migrated from France to Ireland, and the priest's descriptions of Hell are the equal of anything in Edwards. With barely concealed sadism he intones how amongst the damned the "blood seethes and boils in the veins.. the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls." Sin is spoken of in sensory terms—the taste of gluttony, the touch of lust, the rest of sloth—then so too does the priest give rich description of Hell's smell. That pit is permeated by the odor of "some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing… a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption… giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition… a huge and rotting human fungus." Heaven can remain vague, because none of us will ever agree on what it is we actually want. Pleasure is uncertain, but pain is tangibly, deeply, obviously real, and so Hell is always easier to envision.        After Stephen is convinced to become rigidly austere following that terrifying, he finds himself once again straying. A friend asks if he plans on converting to Protestantism, and Dedalus responds that "I said I had lost the faith… not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" Funny in the way that Joyce is, and true as well, though it might only make sense to lapsed Catholics who fumble over the newly translated words of the liturgical preface at Mass. Such Catholic atheism, or Catholic agnosticism, or Catholic what-ever-you-want-to-call-it influenced one of the great contemporary depictions of Hell in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Guirgis engages an idiom that could be called "bureaucratizing the sacred," transposing the rigid elements of our society in all of its labyrinthine absurdity onto the transcendent order. Whenever Hell (or Heaven) is depicted as an office, or a waiting room, or a border checkpoint, a prison, a hospital, or a school, that's bureaucratizing the sacred. In Guirgis's play, the action takes place in that most arcane of bureaucratic structures, the court system. "In biblical times, Hope was an Oasis in the Desert," a character says. "In medieval days, a shack free of Plague. Today, Hope is no longer a place for contemplation—litigation being the preferred new order of the day." The Last Days of Judas Iscariot portrays a trial of its largely silent titular character, held in a courtroom that exists beyond time and space, where expert witnesses include not just Christ and Pontius Pilate, but Sigmund Freud and Mother Teresa as well. True to the mind-bending vagaries of eternity, both God and the Devil exist in a country unimaginably far from us and yet within our very atoms, for as Christ says "Right now, I am in Fallujah. I am in Darfur. I am on Sixty-third and Park… I'm on Lafayette and Astor waiting to hit you for change so I can get high. I'm taking a walk through the Rose Garden with George Bush. I'm helping Donald Rumsfeld get a good night's sleep… I was in that cave with Osama, and on that plane with Mohamed Atta… And what I want you to know is that your work has barely begun." Who does the messiah love?—"every last one." A vision expansive and universalist, and like all great portrayals—including Dante and Milton who most definitely didn't think you could breach the walls of inferno by drilling into the earth—Hell is entirely a mental place. "Despair," Guirgis writes, "is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accepts happiness," or as Milton famously put it, "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."  Like all things in the sacred—that vast network of metaphors, allusions, images, allegories, poems, and dreams—the question of "is it real or not?" is entirely nonsensical. Heaven and Hell have always been located in the human mind, along with God and the Devil, but the mind is a vast country, full of strange dreams and unaccounted things. Perdition is an idea that is less than helpful for those who fear (or hope) that there is an actual Hell in the black waters of the Mariana Trench, or in scorched, sunbaked Death Valley, or near a sandy cave next to the Dead Sea. But when we realize that both Hell and Heaven exist in a space beyond up or down, left or right, any of the cardinal directions and towards a dimension both infinitely far away and nearer than our very hearts, then there just might be wisdom. Such is the astuteness of Dante, who with startling psychological realism, records the woeful tale of illicit lovers Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, tempted into an adulterous kiss after reading the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, now caught in a windstorm as they had once tussled in bedsheets. "There is no greater sorrow," Francesca tells the poet, "Than to be mindful of the happy time/in misery." Because we often think of sin as simply a matter of broken rules, psychological acuity can be obscured. Drawing from Thomas Aquinas, Dante writes that "Pride, Envy, and Avarice are/the three sparks that have set these hearts on fire," and the interpretative brilliance of the Seven Deadly Sins is that they explain how an excess of otherwise necessary human impulses can pervert us. Reading about Paolo and Francesca, it's understandable to doubt that they deserve such punishment—Dante does. But in the stomach-dropping, queasy, nauseous, never-ending uncertainty of their lives, the poet conveys a bit of their inner predicament.     "There are those… who, undoubtedly, do not feel personally touched by the scourge of Dante, [or] by the ashen pall of Augustine," writes Moore, and while I wouldn't say that I'm so irreverent that I'm willing to lustily eat a rare hamburger on Good Friday without worrying a bit, I will admit that if I make a visit to Five Guys after forgetting that it's Holy Week I don't fret too much. A privilege to play with the idea of Hell without fearing it (at least too much), but the concept still has some oomph in it. Returning to an earlier observation, Hell must be the language with which we think about that which divides us, estranges us, alienates us, not for when we despair at having eaten a bit too much or sleeping in on the weekend. If anything, that Puritanical rugged individualism that so defines American culture whether we've opted into it or not—You need to be up by 5a.m.! You have to be a productive worker! You must avoid any real joy except for the curated experience chosen for you by algorithm!—is the true wage of sin. In opposition, I lustily and gluttonously and slothfully advocate for eating a bit too much, laughing a bit too loud, and sleeping a bit too long. Preachers once told us that to be alive was a sin, but that was never it at all. Now we have pundits and TED talk lecturers forcing us to weigh our souls instead, but there's no shame in knowing that the road rises to meet us, in feeling the wind at our back and the warmth of the sun or the cool rain upon our faces. Shame and guilt are utilitarian, but they belong on the other side. Notable that the idea of Hell developed contemporaneously with that of Heaven, and if it wasn't for the former, then what would we ever struggle against? "Without contraries there is no progression," writes the poet and prophet William Blake in his 1793 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. "Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence." Whether temporary or eternal, finite or infinite, a place of extreme punishment implied another for reward. There's no Heaven unless there is also Hell, and both places are much closer than might be supposed. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons