The House of Mirth (Modern Library Classics)

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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]

My Winter with Edith Wharton

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At the turn of the 20th century, novelist Edith Wharton built The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts; a vast, Italianate villa of more than 16,000 square feet, finished according to Wharton’s own characteristically rigorous theories of architectural and garden design. New Yorkers of the Golden Age would drift languidly to the Berkshires in summer, to escape the sweltering Manhattan heat. They came for just such grand estates of manicured lawns and formal gardens; for the clear air and breezes; they came for the lakes, and the woodland; for the tennis courts, and courting rituals. I, by contrast, came to the Berkshires in January. The snow lay thick and undisturbed, muting the landscape like dustsheets in a home shut up for winter. Beneath it everything was democratised, disguised, submerged and snow-softened into soft indistinguishable hummocks. Among empty summer homes, the houses of hardy, year-round residents were easily identifiable—many locals take the quite sensible precaution of shrink-wrapping their clapboard houses in plastic sheeting, to insulate against the bitterly cold wind. On the day I drove into Lenox, the local radio announcer seemed exercised. It’s below zero out there, today, folks, he warned a few times, in between Bon Jovi and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Pfff, I said to myself, it’s always below zero in London. I was feeling jolly, testing the limits of the four-wheel drive, skidding merrily around treacherous corners overhung with snow-thickened elm and oak. Then I realized he meant that it was below zero Fahrenheit. I slowed the car out of respect. This was a cold too cold for my mild English comprehension. For three hours I had been snug in my rented Ford Explorer, a steaming New York coffee and a bag of donut Munchkins beside me. How was I to know it was polar, out there? I was coming to Lenox on a Wharton pilgrimage. The previous summer I had given a talk at the Mount, now restored and preserved as a museum and cultural center. My first novel, The Innocents, is a contemporary recasting of Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence, set in Jewish North-West London. I had come from Boston just for the afternoon to find French windows thrown open onto a glorious wide terrace, overlooking a formal, Italian-style garden, connected to the French garden by an avenue of pleached lindens. Sun-stunned drunken bees lurched and buzzed languidly, and Susan Wissler, the Mount’s director invited me to look out across this paradise and to imagine it in winter. Frigid January was their quietest month, but for staff the house was heated, and open. The off-season had its own charms. Susan wondered, would I like to come and write there? I would, I told her, without pausing for breath, and here I was. In my suitcase was a large tin of Marks and Spencer’s shortbread, to serve as a bribe, just in case she had forgotten her promise. I made a home in Edith’s sewing room where the silence was broken only by the hiss and steam of radiators. The window looked out upon the terrace and the formal garden of topiaried box that had won my heart. For the most part, I was entirely alone. Almost certainly more alone than Edith had ever been there; I did not have an army of silent maids and butlers busily lubricating the household wheels. Instead, I had Boots. Occasionally I would hear claws skittering on parquet and Boots would appear, the resident Alsatian on benign patrol, checking on my morning’s progress. It felt right to have a dog beside me as I worked, though Edith herself would have preferred it to be a rinky-dink Chihuahua or a Papillion, small enough to balance on a tasselled silk cushion, on a lap. A postcard I particularly cherish shows her with a tiny dog erect on each shoulder, like a pair of parrots. These were Wharton’s beloved Chihuahuas Mimi and Miza (now buried out there beneath the snow, in Wharton’s well-populated pet cemetery). Her leg of mutton sleeves are substantially larger than each dog. Close together, all three faces fit beneath Wharton’s feathered hat, and while the canines gaze aristocratically off stage right, Edith meets the eye of the camera, humourless, demanding and commanding absolute respect. [millions_ad] Often I took a break from work and drifted through the empty museum that now fills her many rooms, if one can be said to drift in tire-soled North Face snow boots. Day after day I became more enraptured with the house. Ethan Frome was written here. The House of Mirth, Wharton’s greatest success, was written in this house, upstairs, in bed (with dog du jour). As she finished pages she would drop them on the floor, for a scurrying secretary to retrieve and transcribe. And it was here, thanks to Susan, that I now began to write The Awkward Age , my own second novel, its title borrowed shamelessly from Wharton’s friend and frequent guest at The Mount, Henry James, who wrote rapturously of the house, ‘I am very happy here, surrounded by every loveliness of nature & every luxury of art & treated with a benevolence that brings tears to my eyes." As I worked, I wondered at Wharton’s seeming fluidity, and ease. I longed for the house to yield up her essence: her elegance, her determination, her focus. In a sense it did. If I caught myself on Twitter, I would cringe at the thought of Edith’s scorn, shut my laptop with a guilty slam and return for a moment to her window, to remind myself what it was that she had here achieved. I did more work under Edith’s influence than I had done in the six months preceding it. I admit it—I was slightly scared of her. In the evenings I would scoop fresh snow into a highball tumbler to make cocktails. Whiskey and birch syrup; or bourbon, bitters and maple, a series of grown up New England Slurpees. I had received another, less grown up New England tip: boiling maple syrup poured on firm-packed snow turns to glorious taffy. I don’t think ever Edith did this, I thought, with rebellious delight, crouching in pale moonlight in pyjamas and boots and a fur trapper hat, extending a spitting saucepan to watch the steam rise as I poured with hands made clumsy with the cold. I retreated inside and silenced my chattering teeth by gumming them together with taffy, by the fire. The Mount’s trustees liked a living author making use of the house for its proper purpose: fiction. Since that magical winter, thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, The Mount has created a formalized program of Writer-in-Residence, available every February and March to "writers and scholars of demonstrated accomplishment" who "are invited to create, advance, or complete works-in-progress." I am wild with envy, jealous of all of those lucky so-and-sos with the experience ahead of them. I envy them the winter-hushed Narnian estate, the borrowed but intoxicating sense of luxury and privilege; the stark beauty, the solitude, but most of all, the union and intimacy with one of America’s great novelists. I was there first, I huffed to myself, upon learning of the new program, but even then I knew it wasn’t at all true. Edith Wharton was there before all of us; disdainful, imperious, brilliant foremother. Photos courtesy of the author. [millions_email]

The Guesthouse of Mirth

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Edith Wharton is known as a novelist but she was also a wonderful hostess, whose guests (including Henry James) remember her as "kindness and hospitality incarnate." Kate Bolick has turned Wharton's life-long attempt to master “the complex art of civilized living" into an entertaining guide, "The Guesthouse of Mirth," just in time for those last few summer parties. Pair with Roxana Robinson's reflections on Wharton's life and works, including the original The House of Mirth.

Edith Wharton: A Writer’s Reflections

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Born in New York City in 1862, 150 years ago, Edith Jones was part of a small, wealthy, patrician community. She was well-born, but she was not born rich. Socially, her family dwelt in the innermost circles, but financially they were somewhere closer to the outer rim. During the post-Civil War recession, more than once the Joneses had to rent out their property in America and move to the Continent. There they lived cheaply while they waited for their finances to recover. Edith married within her circle and led an affluent life, which was latterly true because of her writing: she made more money from royalties than she ever inherited. But she never forgot the threat of being poor, and the risk of expulsion it carried, from the only world she knew. Her work echoes with the subversive powers of wealth, and of the chilling presence of its counterpart, poverty. Much of Wharton’s work is set among the crystal chandeliers and gold plate of the very rich. Because she knew that community so well, and because she wrote so tellingly of its mandarin complexities, Wharton has been called a novelist of manners. But manners -- and money -- were never the point. Wharton’s deepest concern was morality. She wrote about the struggle between the body and the mind, that battlefield from which morality emerges. Central to her work are stifled and illicit passions, manifested in divorce, adultery, incest, and illegitimacy. She wrote about the struggle to integrate the life of the emotions within the life of the world. Her writing was stylistically decorous but socially transgressive: her prose is so elegant that her message comes as a shock, like a sword wrapped in satin. All of Wharton’s most important novels -- The House of Mirth, Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence -- take place, partly or entirely, in New York. This city was central to Wharton’s understanding of the world. Lily Bart, brave and vital, is at the heart of Wharton’s greatest tragedy and arguably her greatest book, The House of Mirth. Lily is beautiful and well-born, but she is orphaned and impecunious. At 29, time is running out, and she knows she must marry. The New York world in which she lives is shrill and materialistic, but Lily is a woman of principle, which makes for a dilemma. How should she choose her future? Should she marry for love or for money? Tempted by luxury and practicality, Lily plans to marry Percy Gryce, who is unthinkably rich and unspeakably dull. But her principles interfere, and so begins her downfall. Wharton asks what all great writers ask: how should we make the choices that will shape our lives? It’s a deeply American story, and one that shows the conflict between market and morals, glitter and bedrock. It’s as true now as it was then: we choose continually between emotional veracity -- life in the deeps -- and getting and spending -- life in the shallows. The House of Mirth shows the consequences of our choices. Wharton’s work is part of the story of how we became the people we are. Money, idealism, and morality are central to our national chronicle, and Wharton’s novels remind us of the roles they have always played. She maintains that personal morality and emotional truth are essential for survival, which is still true today. The Custom of the Country is not a great novel, but a great problem novel. It’s great in its ambition and intensity, but it never achieves true greatness because it’s fueled by rage and untempered by compassion; it’s driven by judgment without understanding. At the center of this novel lies Wharton’s own understanding of marriage: she saw the institution as part of the most fundamental underpinnings of society. She believed that marriage vows were pledges that were given not only to the spouse but to the entire community. She saw divorce as a betrayal of that community. These beliefs made Wharton’s own decision to leave her husband agonizing, since it made her a traitor to her own world. Divorce was an act she’d felt compelled to perform, but for which she could not forgive herself. This sense of failure and self-contempt play a large part in the formation of The Custom of the Country, in which Wharton created a character she could despise for doing just as she had done. Undine Spragg outperforms Wharton, of course, by producing not one but a spectacular crescendo of divorces. And it’s not just the divorces that make Undine Spragg so unsavory: this woman typifies everything that Wharton holds in contempt. She’s shallow, vulgar, ignorant, narrow-minded, and grasping. Undine is Wharton’s loathed alter-ego, someone she can whole-heartedly despise. In this raging, contemptuous, furious novel, the protagonist’s immoral behavior threatens the whole of civilization, just as Wharton felt she had, in her own colossal and public failure at marriage, the great stabilizing linchpin of society. Wharton’s self-rage is expressed by her rage at Undine, and it’s this unmediated fury that keeps Custom of the Country from greatness. Rage can be used as a narrative engine to drive a novel, but in order for the novel to achieve greatness the rage must be tempered by compassion -- a deep understanding of the characters, despite their flaws. Wharton feels no compassion for the shallow, heartless Undine. The book is like a melody played only on the brasses -- it’s shrill and relentless, without the deep mellow notes of understanding. The Age of Innocence shows a profoundly different view of Wharton’s New York. Written in 1921, after World War I, it derives from Wharton’s meditations on the New York of her youth, and the view it presents is a far cry from the cold and grasping New York of Lily Bart. By now, Wharton has come to admire this  earlier world. This is one that celebrates family, rewards commitment, and requires morality. Newland Archer obeys the social codes, and, when he falls in love with the mesmerizing Ellen Olenska, he does not abandon his dull and conventional wife, May. He lives up to the promises he has made, to May and to the society in which he lives. And we admire him for his principles, despite their heart-breaking consequences. The Age of Innocence celebrates a society in which passion and romance are subordinated to an overarching moral code of great exigency, supporting family and community. It is a world Wharton respects and cherishes. Edith Wharton’s work has been part of my own world for many years. My first connection, as a reader and writer, came in my senior year at boarding school, when I first read The Age of Innocence. It was then that Wharton’s work took up residence in my mind. I was mesmerized by the elegance of her style and the acuity of her intellect, by her courage and her compassion. One of the brave things that Wharton does is to recognize the coexistence of the world of passion and the world of strictures. I don’t know another writer of her era who felt so seriously bound by the rules of society, and who took so seriously the great forces of emotion that were aligned against those rules. Since one of these rules was silence, it took great courage merely to declare the conflict, merely to write it down and speak it out. I was also struck by Wharton’s courage in declaring a woman’s story to be a tragedy. I don’t mean the story of a beautiful woman betrayed by her lover, for many writers have made that into a tragedy. I mean the story of a woman on her own, forging her own way, and making her own terrible mistakes. Lily Bart is beautiful, but her story is hers alone, and depends on no one else for its outcome. She is the tragic hero of her own narrative, the sole agent of her own downfall, just as King Lear was, or Oedipus, and this is remarkable. But most important to Wharton’s work is her own sense of compassion, something essential to all great fiction. It is Wharton’s empathy for her characters that makes our own possible. Wharton allows us to know them, to admire them, to understand their flaws and to forgive them -- in short, to love them -- as she does. For a writer, there is no greater skill. The way a young writer learns what is possible is by reading what other people have done. Wharton showed me that it was possible to write about the collision between passion and responsibility, about the complexities of class. That it was possible to write about a society in a way that was both ruthlessly observant and fundamentally forgiving. That it was possible to write beautifully and cleanly and intelligently. I aspired to all those things, and the awareness of what she accomplished has entered into my own sense of possibility. Virginia Woolf once said, “We think back through our mothers, if we are women.” This is also true for those of us who are not only women, but writers. Edith Wharton is one of my mothers, and for that I am grateful. Talk given at the opening of the exhibition "A Backward Glance," at the New York Society Library on March 14, 2012. Image Credit: Wikipedia.

The Millions Interview: Jonathan Dee

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In the Chicago Tribune review of Jonathan Dee’s third novel, The Liberty Campaign, Andy Solomon wagered that “if any under-40 writer will produce The Great American Novel, it will most probably be Dee.” Dee is a former senior editor at The Paris Review, and his literary criticism just earned Harper's a nomination for a National Magazine Award. His fifth and most recent novel, The Privileges, was published in January and only brings Dee closer to fulfilling Solomon’s prediction. James Wood called The Privileges “a clever, taught, cynically angry book about a couple with no moral tether,” and went on to say that the novel “knows exactly how to fill out its limits: well-chosen food on small plates.” Roxana Robinson echoed Woods’s praise in her New York Times review, where she said, “Dee’s writing is so full of elegance, vitality and complexity that I’m happy to entertain any notion he comes up with.” Last week, on one of the first springlike days in New York, Jonathan Dee met with me in the recesses of Edgar’s cafe, located off the honorarily named Edgar Allan Poe Street on the Upper West Side, where Poe resided when he completed “The Raven.” We talked at length about The Privileges, as well as withholding judgment while writing, his move away from classic American morality tales regarding money, originality, and lessons learned from his time at The Paris Review. The Millions: The Privileges begins with the marriage of Cynthia and Adam Morey, who are 22-year-old college graduates from middle class families. They’re the ideal couple who meet sophomore year and who, we assume, are engaged to be married by their senior year in college. After college, they move to New York and get married. Cynthia and Adam share a common ambition--a desire to accumulate wealth--and also an unshakeable love. What compelled you to write a novel about these characters who seemingly have everything by American standards--ambition, love, beauty, and increasing wealth as times goes on? Jonathan Dee: At the point the book opens, they have no wealth at all. I don’t think of it as a book about rich people, really, because, to me, who Adam is makes him money. Money doesn’t make Adam who he is. In college you probably knew one or more than one of these charmed couples--people who really just seemed socially, and charismatically, and in terms of how they looked, to have it all. But not only that. The ambition that they really share at that point is to leave their own families behind, to leave their own pasts behind, and that’s an impulse that never abandons them through the twenty years of the book. They are in a hurry in a lot of ways. They are in a hurry to succeed, but at least as important to me is that they are in a hurry to start again. They think of themselves as year zero in their own lives. As the book goes forward, they become interested to the point of sentimentality in the idea of what comes after them, but they never lose their lack of interest in what came before them and how that made them who they are. TM: The book is concerned with the reinvention of self. Cynthia and Adam move to New York in order to forge a better future for themselves. The Privileges is also a very American tale, in the sense that they’re thinking of how to recreate themselves, how to fulfill their desires, and how to provide for their children. And also in the sense that there’s an endless reservoir of hope for a prosperous future. The pursuit of happiness is something that they pursue at all costs--it’s almost hypertrophic by the end of the novel. Are the Moreys the embodiment of the American Dream? And also, where does the American Dream fall short? JD: When I was writing it, I wanted to be extra-careful, and this was based in part on my own reading of my earlier books. It can be a kind of trap to fall into--if you conceive of the characters as symbolic of anything, I think that has a real deadening effect. Any time I caught myself thinking of Adam and Cynthia as symbolic of anything other than Adam and Cynthia, I would mentally slap myself in the face. I really wanted that to build strictly from the inside out. So it’s true that I do think of them as having some peculiarly American characteristics, among them the attitude toward the past that I mentioned. It’s not so much that they lose their sense of hope about the future, and it’s not true, either, that they feel entitled. It’s just simply that they have a great deal of faith in themselves. They have an enormous faith in themselves, their love for each other strengthens that faith, and in fact, they’re not wrong. The events bear that out, maybe not in the way that they would have originally imagined, but their life bears out their belief in their own sense of destiny. It’s tricky for me to start talking about them as being particularly American because the more I go in that direction, the further I get from the direction I wanted to go, which is to make these two people as credibly idiosyncratic as I possibly could. TM: I wanted to ask you about the complexity of the characters. If the characters were entirely symbolic, it would be difficult to have empathy for them, as it would if the narrative didn’t get inside their heads. I was reading your Harper’s essay, “Ready-Made Rebellion” about the empty tropes of contemporary fiction, and you quote Milan Kundera, who says that the novel “is a realm where moral judgment is suspended.” You go further to say that an author does this by complicating morality and providing multiple judgments and multiple viewpoints within the novel. I think you succeed doing that in The Privileges. The characters are complex, like in the way Adam justifies his insider trading in order to provide for his family and to make Cynthia happy. In terms of The Privileges, the moral judgment is suspended to the point that at the end the Moreys are still thriving. We, as readers, know what comes afterward, in economic terms. I don’t know if you intended that, but we also see their recklessness with the pursuit of wealth and desires. But we don’t see any negative consequences of their actions.  Why is that? Do you think the novel speaks for itself? Or do you see it as more of a family drama? JD: There’s a few questions in there. First of all, yeah, I was very conscious of the facts as Kundera says, it’s the writer’s job to frustrate or subvert any reader’s natural inclination to judge. That certainly is in play when you’re writing about characters like this. Ninety-nine percent of people, and probably a higher percentage of readers, have it in, in general, for characters like this, and feel when they read about people like this, “Oh, I know how I feel about them, I know what they’re like.” So, I was very much interested in making them hard to pass judgment on, at least until the book was shut, and possibly past that. As far as their not getting punished, I can’t say I knew that from the very beginning. When I was in the making-notes-on-napkins stage of the novel, there were certainly ideas I had about Adam being brought low in different ways. But I realized pretty quickly that novels are not fables, and to make the story of Adam and Cynthia into that kind of morality play where people would be satisfied by seeing them brought low--I just feel like I can be as judgmental as anyone else in real life,  but the idea of inventing fictional figures in order to then demonstrate my own superiority to them and to share that sense of superiority with the reader, and to take pleasure in watching them be punished for their arrogance, for their greed, for their fill in the blank, it just seems like a really empty exercise. So then the question became, OK, if the story of how these people move through the world is not about that, then what’s it about? I became interested in the same question that essentially Adam and Cynthia become interested in, which is, How will we have changed the world by moving through it? They don’t have a great spiritual life. Adam’s own philosophy, if you can call it that, is very much founded on, this is the only life and you have to maximize it--you’re not going to pass this way again. So they become very interested in the kind of legacy they leave, and I became very interested in it, too, but in a different way. The legacy they leave behind is hopefully borne out through the portraits of their children rather than through the kind of plot mechanics that would result in Adam going to jail and Cynthia having her money taken away. Does that makes sense? TM: It definitely makes sense. In some ways I read the novel as more of a family drama, about a privileged family. JD: Yeah, definitely. TM: They encounter the same issues that other people do, but they have a larger playing field because of their money. Also, when I think of money and class in the American novel, like in The Great Gatsby or The House of Mirth, money traditionally holds out something--it represents an empty desire or in some way causes the characters’ downfall. I thought it was an interesting choice to move away from that. JD: To say that the desires that are sparked by wealth turn out to be empty--there’s a whole set of presumptions behind that, obviously, that are not presumptions these characters would share, so what’s the point? I mean, they do live very much in another realm, certainly another moral realm. What’s the point of dragging them forcefully onto your turf so that you can then punish them according to those terms, you know? One book that I had in mind, as odd as it might seem, when I was writing this was The Postman Always Rings Twice. Have you read that? TM: I haven’t. JD: It’s a magnificent book, an underrated book, underrated by the fact that it had a famous movie made from it. But, very much a novel about two people who are epically in love and that love generates its own morality. It generates its own spirituality, and makes them into outlaws, but in a way that you never lose your sense of recognition about where it’s all coming from. You never lose your sense of the rigidity of that system even though that system diverges more and more from the rest of the world. That’s a first-person book, so in that respect it’s easier to create the sense of being more or less imprisoned within the moral system of the characters. That’s a book I really admired. TM: That’s interesting—creating a morality system within your own realm, within your own love—because that’s very much something that Adam and Cynthia do. In a sense that’s all they have. They’ve cut their ties to the past, and in doing so they’ve lost their sense of heritage and tradition. Even their wedding ceremony is a hodgepodge of readings. Their daughter April is distressed to learn that her name has no significance within the family and that her parents’ knowledge of their ancestry is really unspecific. They don’t revisit the same vacation spots until Adam has business reasons to do so, and so it seems that a sense of novelty is very important to them,  as is recreating themselves. Their gains are more tangible than their losses, and so I’m wondering, is anything lost in this? What do they lose? JD: That’s a good question. Adam is very obsessed with his physical condition, which is explicitly a way of being obsessed with time and of doing battle with time. And even though you don’t really see him lose that battle, you pretty much know that after the book is over that battle will be lost for him, just like it is with everybody else. Cynthia is conscious of that, too. One of the things that characterize both of them very early for me is the idea that they were never where they wanted to be, in terms of time. When they were young they were in a hurry to get older, and as they become older they would try whatever trickery they could employ to either look or to actually feel younger. The losses are small, and I wouldn’t want to overstate them because that seems to me like gaming your own system in a way--to try to balance out their gains with losses--because that’s not how they live. Cynthia’s relationship with her daughter--that’s a loss. At the point where the novel ends that’s pretty much shot, and to me it’s shot as an outgrowth of wanting to be her daughter’s peer when she was younger. TM: I’m wondering, has the economic climate altered reception of the book? JD: Oh, for sure. Actually, before I answer that I just remembered I didn’t answer something that you said earlier about the timing of the book, in terms of what happens after the last scene, in terms of current events. It’s really the opposite for me. I had the opportunity to write anything like that into the book that I wanted to and I really did just the opposite. I took as many explicit time markers as I could out of it. Inevitably, some are still in there, there are cell phones and whatnot. But my feeling is that there were guys like Adam a hundred years ago, there will be guys like Adam a hundred years from now--it’s not really tied to current events. He is a recurring phenomenon, a kind of eternal American phenomenon. He’s not a product of his times in any way. I just answered the question you didn’t ask. What was the question you asked again? TM: About the reception of the book. I find it’s difficult not to read the current circumstances into the book. JD: It cuts both ways. On the one hand, there’s certainly a lot of reader interest and a lot of critical interest in characters from that world--an interest that wouldn’t have been there maybe two or three years ago. But on the other hand, like I was saying before, what’s at the bottom of that interest is a desire to see these people brought low, a desire to see them explicitly punished. When that doesn’t happen, people find that frustrating. There’s a lot of reception I’ve seen that’s along the order of, “While it is brave of Dee not to tar and feather these characters and have them publicly hanged, one wonders, if he’s not going to do that, why write about them at all?” I get that, but like I said, it was too easy to spend years doing. TM: Changing the ending would change the perspective. Instead of the novel being a portrait of this family, the focus would become the moral component brought into it. JD: It would be more like a portrait of the audience. TM: I was wondering why you chose to use a close third person narrator who moves between characters, instead of sticking with one character, or just Cynthia and Adam. April and Jonas come into it more as the novel progresses. JD: I really enjoyed doing that opening chapter of the book, in which, as you say, sometimes the perspectives change mid-paragraph. But I didn’t think that could possibly be sustained for the whole book. There were certainly drafts of the book that had other sections from other perspectives that weren’t the family’s and I ended up getting rid of them because I liked the idea of the book being built on these four pillars. There’s one scene in the book that violates that rule, but otherwise it’s just the four corners of the castle, and they’re looking out at the world, always with their backs to each other. I thought that seemed like an appropriate model for the book. It goes back to the question of how to forestall a judgment. It’s definitely a closer third person than I’ve ever done before because you can’t for an instant let that kind of critical gap open between yourself and the character, the sense that the character is doing something that you wouldn’t approve of, or that you wouldn’t do. There has to be no seam there at all, because once that air of keeping them at arm’s length or passing judgment on them sneaks in, it’s very toxic. So, yeah, I tried to, even though it was third person, to do it from the inside out. I could've done four different first-persons, but that’s very messy. There are all kinds of reasons I don’t like that. TM: On a broader scale, your novels often deal with American enterprise--here it’s Adam working at a private equities firm. Palladio and The Liberty Campaign both deal with advertising. Your approach is realist and character-driven in novels that consider larger issues in society, business, status, and culture. In a sense it almost seems like a throwback to a more traditional American novel, and I mean this in a good way. There was a reviewer of the Liberty Campaign who at the time said if any under-40 writer could write the Great American Novel, it would be you. I’m wondering, in that sense, who do you see as your literary forebears? And what do you think of contemporary fiction--which is a very broad question, but answer it as you see fit. JD: If there’s something traditional, or of a throwback nature, that’s in spite of myself. It doesn’t have to do with what I particularly value in literature, it just seems to be what I can do. When ideas come to me, they seem to be founded on  certain types of work, and I don’t know why that is. I sort of wish it weren’t always that way, but it kind of is always that way.  So, who my actual forebears are is probably more for other people to say than for me. But who I wish they were, I could say. Like Dos Passos. I have to admit, I lifted much of the end of my last book, Palladio, straight from Dos Passos. The more I go back to those books, the more I find myself emulating them. In terms of the speed of the narrative, it was very important in this book, in a character sense, that there not be any flashbacks. I wanted to cover a lot of time but for the book to be as short as possible. It’s still not as short as I wanted it to be but I did the best I could. And the way I solved that was to have big time gaps between chapters but no flashbacks to explain what happened in the gap. Each unit has to stand for what happened in the time in between. If you look at the U.S.A. trilogy, it’s all like that. I think Alfred Kazin called it “machine prose for a machine age.” I really like some DeLillo, not other DeLillo. Often, and I won’t name any names, but often I find when I am reviewed,  I’m complimented by being compared to certain writers who I actually don’t like. And I don’t know why that is, but it’s really true. TM: That’s unfortunate. JD: Yeah. As far as what I like in contemporary literature, I think the same thing, really. I tend, especially as I get older and I write more, the things that I’m drawn to are the things I could never do. I read Denis Johnson or I read Deborah Eisenberg or people who just have a particular type of gift or seem to be descending into something I could never descend into. That’s the stuff I’m really drawn to. Roberto Bolaño, like everybody else in the world. Donald Barthelme. I could go on. But the point is, I used to be drawn to people I thought I was like and now I’m drawn to people that I really know I’m very unlike. TM: You were an editor at The Paris Review for many years in the 1980s. How was this a formative experience for you as a reader and as a writer? JD: It was formative in a lot of ways. When I started working there I was 22 and I liked reading, but like most 22-year-olds, I was just a huge vista of ignorance. I would work there during the day and I would take home an armload of either the magazines or the Writers at Work volumes and read all the interviews. I really read them all, even though at that point many of them were with writers I had never heard of. That was hugely formative for me--I would really recommend that for anybody, not only because you find things in there that inspire you but because it gets across that there’s no one right way to do it. You see how varied are the forms of craziness that people bring to making a successful career out of fiction writing. People would often say, “You spend your day reading other people’s short stories, that must be really useful to you.” And it is to a point. You can’t learn from that endlessly but you can learn a few things about what not to do. And more than what not to do, you learn what’s original and what’s not. If you have a particular idea for a story or how to begin a story or how to end a story and you think, especially at age 22, That’s really good stuff, and then you read it literally 250 times when other people do it and send it in the mail to you, it starts to get across the premium you should be putting on originality, that it’s not just about craft. My old college writing teacher John Hersey once said, on our last day in class actually, he said to us, “Just remember the world doesn’t need any new writers.” Which at first seemed like an offputting thing to say, but his point was it’s not enough simply to be good at it, even though very few people are good at it. You have to bring something to it that it has not seen or heard before. Reading 200 short stories a week will bring that idea home to you for sure. It’s not enough to write well. You have to write originally. TM: Reading the slush pile is then a lesson in what not to do as much as it is what you can do. JD: I guess that’s it, that’s what limits it in terms of the lessons you can learn from it. It’s really, the lessons are all about what not to do. TM: I know that feeling from having read submissions at Tin House, too. I mean there were the cancer stories and there were the stories about babies. Sometimes they were successful, but it was what made those stories successful that was really important, what was original. JD: It’s not enough to prove you can write just as good a cancer story as anybody else. That’s not going to get you anywhere.

Title Your Novel in Three Easy Steps! or, The Abstraction of Abstraction

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We've written about how difficult it can be to find a proper title for a work-in-progress. Lately, however, we've started to notice a certain trend that may make things easier on the budding novelist. Consider the following novels, all published within the last couple years: The Inheritance of Loss; The History of Love; The Story of Forgetting; The God of Small Things; and The Secret of Lost Things.Certainly there's some precedent for titling a work with the prepositional construction "The Blank of Blank." (The Wings of the Dove, The Heart of the Matter, and The Nightmares' forgotten R&B classic "The Horrors of the Black Museum..." come to mind, and and that's just off the top of our heads.) Indeed, pairing a wispy abstraction with something surprisingly concrete can be a recipe for piquancy: Think of The Possibility of an Island or The House of Mirth.The innovation represented by the recent spate of prepositional titles is the pairing of two abstractions. A writer willing to settle for the tried-and-true might consider recombining some of the nouns above to create a title for her manuscript, such as The Secret of God, The Lost Things of Small Things, or The Inheritance of History. But for the truly ambitious, may we suggest the following approach: roll some virtual dice, take the corresponding abstract nouns from Column A and Column B, insert a "the" (or two) and an "of," and you're off to the races!Column A:1. Earnestness2. Persistence3. Irritability4. Malodorousness5. Malice6. WhimsyColumn B:1. Splendor2. Etiquette3. Particle Physics4. Numismatism5. Large Things6. Medium Things