Mentioned in:
Most Anticipated: The Great Spring 2024 Preview
April
April 2
Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall [F]
For starters, excellent title. This debut short story collection from playwright Marshall spans sex bots and space colonists, wives and divorcĂ©es, prodding at the many meanings of womanhood. Short story master Deesha Philyaw, also taken by the book's title, calls this one "incisive! Provocative! And utterly satisfying!" âSophia M. Stewart
The Audacity by Ryan Chapman [F]
This sophomore effort, after the darkly sublime absurdity of Riots I have Known, trades in the prison industrial complex for the Silicon Valley scam. Chapman has a sharp eye and a sharper wit, and a book billed as a "bracing satire about the implosion of a Theranos-like company, a collapsing marriage, and a billionairesâ 'philanthropy summit'" promises some good, hard laughsâhowever bitter they may beâat the expense of the ĂŒber-rich. âJohn H. Maher
The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso, tr. Leonard Mades [F]
I first learned about this book from an essay in this publication by Zachary Issenberg, who alternatively calls it Donoso's "masterpiece," "a perfect novel," and "the crowning achievement of the gothic horror genre." He recommends going into the book without knowing too much, but describes it as "a story assembled from the gossip of societyâs highs and lows, which revolves and blurs into a series of interlinked nightmares in which people lose their memory, their sex, or even their literal organs." âSMS
Globetrotting ed. Duncan Minshull [NF]
I'm a big walker, so I won't be able to resist this assemblage of 50 writersâincluding Edith Wharton, Katharine Mansfield, Helen Garner, and D.H. Lawrenceârecounting their various journeys by foot, edited by Minshull, the noted walker-writer-anthologist behind The Vintage Book of Walking (2000) and Where My Feet Fall (2022). âSMS
All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld [NF]
Hieronymus Bosch, eat your heart out! The debut book from Rothfeld, nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post, celebrates our appetite for excess in all its material, erotic, and gluttonous glory. Covering such disparate subjects from decluttering to David Cronenberg, Rothfeld looks at the dire culturalâand personalâconsequences that come with adopting a minimalist sensibility and denying ourselves pleasure. âDaniella Fishman
A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins [F]
Higgins, a regular contributor here at The Millions, debuts with a novel of a young woman who is drawn into an intense and all-consuming emotional and sexual relationship with a married lesbian couple. Halle Butler heaps on the praise for this one: âSometimes I could not believe how easily this book moved from gross-out sadism into genuine sympathy. Totally surprising, totally compelling. I loved it.â âSMS
City Limits by Megan Kimble [NF]
As a Los Angeleno who is steadily working my way through The Power Broker, this in-depth investigation into the nation's freeways really calls to me. (Did you know Robert Moses couldn't drive?) Kimble channels Caro by locating the human drama behind freeways and failures of urban planning. âSMS
We Loved It All by Lydia Millet [NF]
Planet Earth is a pretty awesome place to be a human, with its beaches and mountains, sunsets and birdsong, creatures great and small. Millet, a creative director at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, infuses her novels with climate grief and cautions against extinction, and in this nonfiction meditation, she makes a case for a more harmonious coexistence between our species and everybody else in the natural world. If a nostalgic note of âAuld Lang Syneâ trembles in Milletâs title, her personal anecdotes and public examples call for meaningful environmental action from local to global levels. âNathalie op de Beeck
Like Love by Maggie Nelson [NF]
The new book from Nelson, one of the most towering public intellectuals alive today, collects 20 years of her workâincluding essays, profiles, and reviewsâthat cover disparate subjects, from Prince and Kara Walker to motherhood and queerness. For my fellow Bluets heads, this will be essential reading. âSMS
Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal, tr. Robin Moger [NF]
Mersal, one of the preeminent poets of the Arabic-speaking world, recovers the life, work, and legacy of the late Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat in this biographical detective story. Mapping the psyche of al-Zayyat, who died by suicide in 1963, alongside her own, Mersal blends literary mystery and memoir to produce a wholly original portrait of two women writers. âSMS
The Letters of Emily Dickinson ed. Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell [NF]
The letters of Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest and most beguiling of American poets, are collected here for the first time in nearly 60 years. Her correspondence not only gives access to her inner life and social world, but reveal her to be quite the prose stylist. "In these letters," says Jericho Brown, "we see the life of a genius unfold." Essential reading for any Dickinson fan. âSMS
April 9
Short War by Lily Meyer [F]
The debut novel from Meyer, a critic and translator, reckons with the United States' political intervention in South America through the stories of two generations: a young couple who meet in 1970s Santiago, and their American-born child spending a semester Buenos Aires. Meyer is a sharp writer and thinker, and a great translator from the Spanish; I'm looking forward to her fiction debut. âSMS
There's Going to Be Trouble by Jen Silverman [F]
Silverman's third novel spins a tale of an American woman named Minnow who is drawn into a love affair with a radical French activistâa romance that, unbeknown to her, mirrors a relationship her own draft-dodging father had against the backdrop of the student movements of the 1960s. Teasing out the intersections of passion and politics, There's Going to Be Trouble is "juicy and spirited" and "crackling with excitement," per Jami Attenberg. âSMS
Table for One by Yun Ko-eun, tr. Lizzie Buehler [F]
I thoroughly enjoyed Yun Ko-eun's 2020 eco-thriller The Disaster Tourist, also translated by Buehler, so I'm excited for her new story collection, which promises her characteristic blend of mundanity and surrealism, all in the name of probingâand poking funâat the isolation and inanity of modern urban life. âSMS
Playboy by Constance Debré, tr. Holly James [NF]
The prequel to the much-lauded Love Me Tender, and the first volume in DebrĂ©'s autobiographical trilogy, Playboy's incisive vignettes explore the author's decision to abandon her marriage and career and pursue the precarious life of a writer, which she once told Chris Kraus was "a bit like Saint Augustine and his conversion." Virginie Despentes is a fan, so I'll be checking this out. âSMS
Native Nations by Kathleen DuVal [NF]
DuVal's sweeping history of Indigenous North America spans a millennium, beginning with the ancient cities that once covered the continent and ending with Native Americans' continued fight for sovereignty. A study of power, violence, and self-governance, Native Nations is an exciting contribution to a new canon of North American history from an Indigenous perspective, perfect for fans of Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America. âSMS
Personal Score by Ellen van Neerven [NF]
Iâve always been interested in books that drill down on a specific topic in such a way that we also learn something unexpected about the world around us. Australian writer Van Neerven's sports memoir is so much more than that, as they explore the relationship between sports and race, gender, and sexualityâas well as the paradox of playing a colonialist sport on Indigenous lands. Two Dollar Radio, which is renowned for its edgy list, is publishing this book, so I know itâs going to blow my mind. âClaire Kirch
April 16
The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins by Sonny Rollins [NF]
The musings, recollections, and drawings of jazz legend Sonny Rollins are collected in this compilation of his precious notebooks, which he began keeping in 1959, the start of what would become known as his âBridge Years,â during which he would practice at all hours on the Williamsburg Bridge. Rollins chronicles everything from his daily routine to reflections on music theory and the philosophical underpinnings of his artistry. An indispensable look into the mind and interior life of one of the most celebrated jazz musicians of all time. âDF
Henry Henry by Allen Bratton [F]
Brattonâs ambitious debut reboots Shakespeareâs Henriad, landing Hal Lancaster, whoâs in line to be the 17th Duke of Lancaster, in the alcohol-fueled queer party scene of 2014 London. Halâs identity as a gay man complicates his aristocratic lineage, and his dalliances with over-the-hill actor Jack Falstaff and promising romance with one Harry Percy, who shares a name with historyâs Hotspur, will have English majors keeping score. Donât expect a rom-com, though. Halâs fraught relationship with his sexually abusive father, and the fates of two previous gay men from the House of Lancaster, lend gravity to this Bard-inspired take. âNodB
Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek [F]
Graywolf always publishes books that make me gasp in awe and this debut novel, by the author of the entrancing 2020 story collection Imaginary Museums, sounds like itâs going to keep me awake at night as well. Itâs a tale about a young woman whoâs lost her way and writes a letter to a long-dead ballet dancerâwho then visits her, and sets off a string of strange occurrences. âCK
Norma by Sarah Mintz [F]
Mintz's debut novel follows the titular widow as she enjoys her newfound freedom by diving headfirst into her surrounds, both IRL and online. Justin Taylor says, "Three days ago I didnât know Sarah Mintz existed; now I want to know where the hell sheâs been all my reading life. (Canada, apparently.)" âSMS
What Kingdom by Fine GrÄbÞl, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
A woman in a psychiatric ward dreams of "furniture flickering to life," a "chair that greets you," a "bookshelf that can be thrown on like an apron." This sounds like the moving answer to the otherwise puzzling question, "What if the Kantian concept of ding an sich were a novel?" âJHM
Weird Black Girls by Elwin Cotman [F]
Cotman, the author of three prior collections of speculative short stories, mines the anxieties of Black life across these seven tales, each of them packed with pop culture references and supernatural conceits. Kelly Link calls Cotman's writing "a tonic to ward off drabness and despair." âSMS
Presence by Tracy Cochran [NF]
Last year marked my first earnest attempt at learning to live more mindfully in my day-to-day, so I was thrilled when this book serendipitously found its way into my hands. Cochran, a New York-based meditation teacher and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner of 50 years, delivers 20 psycho-biographical chapters on recognizing the importance of the present, no matter how mundane, frustrating, or fortuitousâbecause ultimately, she says, the present is all we have. âDF
Committed by Suzanne Scanlon [NF]
Scanlon's memoir uses her own experience of mental illness to explore the enduring trope of the "madwoman," mining the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, and others for insights into the long literary tradition of women in psychological distress. The blurbers for this one immediately caught my eye, among them Natasha Trethewey, Amina Cain, and Clancy Martin, who compares Scanlon's work here to that of Marguerite Duras. âSMS
Unrooted by Erin Zimmerman [NF]
This science memoir explores Zimmerman's journey to botany, a now endangered field. Interwoven with Zimmerman's experiences as a student and a mother is an impassioned argument for botany's continued relevance and importance against the backdrop of climate changeâa perfect read for gardeners, plant lovers, or anyone with an affinity for the natural world. âSMS
April 23
Reboot by Justin Taylor [F]
Extremely online novels, as a rule, have become tiresome. But Taylor has long had a keen eye for subcultural quirks, so it's no surprise that PW's Alan Scherstuhl says that "reading it actually feels like tapping into the internetâs best celeb gossip, fiercest fandom outrages, and wildest conspiratorial rabbit holes." If that's not a recommendation for the Book Twitterâbrained reader in you, what is? âJHM
Divided Island by Daniela Tarazona, tr. Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn [F]
A story of multiple personalities and grief in fragments would be an easy sell even without this nod from Ălvaro Enrigue: "I don't think that there is now, in Mexico, a literary mind more original than Daniela Tarazona's." More original than Mario Bellatin, or Cristina Rivera Garza? This we've gotta see. âJHM
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton [NF]
Coffee House Press has for years relished its reputation for publishing âexperimentalâ literature, and this collection of short stories and essays about literature and art and the strangeness of our world is right up there with the rest of Coffee Houseâs edgiest releases. Donât be fooled by the simple cover artâDuttonâs work is always formally inventive, refreshingly ambitious, and totally brilliant. âCK
I Just Keep Talking by Nell Irvin Painter [NF]
I first encountered Nell Irvin Painter in graduate school, as I hung out with some Americanists who were her students. Painter was always a dazzling, larger-than-life figure, who just exuded power and brilliance. I am so excited to read this collection of her essays on history, literature, and politics, and how they all intersect. The fact that this collection contains Painterâs artwork is a big bonus. âCK
April 30
Real Americans by Rachel Khong [F]
The latest novel from Khong, the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, explores class dynamics and the illusory American Dream across generations. It starts out with a love affair between an impoverished Chinese American woman from an immigrant family and an East Coast elite from a wealthy family, before moving us along 21 years: 15-year-old Nick knows that his single mother is hiding something that has to do with his biological father and thus, his identity. C Pam Zhang deems this "a book of rare charm," and Andrew Sean Greer calls it "gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft." âCK
The Swans of Harlem by Karen Valby [NF]
Huge thanks to Bebe Neuwirth for putting this book on my radar (she calls it "fantastic") with additional gratitude to Margo Jefferson for sealing the deal (she calls it "riveting"). Valby's group biography of five Black ballerinas who forever transformed the art form at the height of the Civil Rights movement uncovers the rich and hidden history of Black ballet, spotlighting the trailblazers who paved the way for the Misty Copelands of the world. âSMS
Appreciation Post by Tara Ward [NF]
Art historian Ward writes toward an art history of Instagram in Appreciation Post, which posits that the app has profoundly shifted our long-established ways of interacting with images. Packed with cultural critique and close reading, the book synthesizes art history, gender studies, and media studies to illuminate the outsize role that images play in all of our lives. âSMS
May
May 7
Bad Seed by Gabriel Carle, tr. Heather Houde [F]
Carleâs English-language debut contains echoes of Denis Johnsonâs Jesusâs Son and Mariana Enriquezâs gritty short fiction. This story collection haunting but cheeky, grim but hopeful: a student with HIV tries to avoid temptation while working at a bathhouse; an inebriated friend group witnesses San Juan go up in literal flames; a sexually unfulfilled teen drowns out their impulses by binging TV shows. Puerto Rican writer Luis NegrĂłn calls this âan extraordinary literary debut.â âLiv Albright
The Lady Waiting by Magdalena Zyzak [F]
Zyzakâs sophomore novel is a nail-biting delight. When Viva, a young Polish Ă©migrĂ©, has a chance encounter with an enigmatic gallerist named Bobby, Vivaâs life takes a cinematic turn. Turns out, Bobby and her husband have a hidden agendaâthey plan to steal a Vermeer, with Viva as their accomplice. Further complicating things is the inevitable love triangle that develops among them. Victor LaValle calls this âa superb accomplishment," and Percival Everett says, "This novel popsâcosmopolitan, sexy, and funny." âLA
América del Norte by Nicolås Medina Mora [F]
Pitched as a novel that "blends the Latin American traditions of Roberto Bolaño and Fernanda Melchor with the autofiction of U.S. writers like Ben Lerner and Teju Cole," Mora's debut follows a young member of the Mexican elite as he wrestles with questions of race, politics, geography, and immigration. n+1 co-editor Marco Roth calls Mora "the voice of the NAFTA generation, and much more." âSMS
How It Works Out by Myriam Lacroix [F]
LaCroix's debut novel is the latest in a strong early slate of novels for the Overlook Press in 2024, and follows a lesbian couple as their relationship falls to pieces across a number of possible realities. The increasingly fascinating and troubling potentialitiesâB-list feminist celebrity, toxic employer-employee tryst, adopting a street urchin, cannibalism as relationship cureâform a compelling image of a complex relationship in multiversal hypotheticals. âJHM
Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang [F]
Ting's debut novel, which spans two continents and three timelines, follows two gay men in rural Chinaâand, later, New York City's Chinatownâwho frequent the Workers' Cinema, a movie theater where queer men cruise for love. Robert Jones, Jr. praises this one as "the unforgettable work of a patient master," and Jessamine Chan calls it "not just an extraordinary debut, but a future classic." âSMS
First Love by Lilly Dancyger [NF]
Dancyger's essay collection explores the platonic romances that bloom between female friends, giving those bonds the love-story treatment they deserve. Centering each essay around a formative female friendship, and drawing on everything from AnaĂŻs Nin and Sylvia Plath to the "sad girls" of Tumblr, Dancyger probes the myriad meanings and iterations of friendship, love, and womanhood. âSMS
See Loss See Also Love by Yukiko Tominaga [F]
In this impassioned debut, we follow Kyoko, freshly widowed and left to raise her son alone. Through four vignettes, Kyoko must decide how to raise her multiracial son, whether to remarry or stay husbandless, and how to deal with life in the face of loss. Weike Wang describes this one as âimbued with a wealth of wisdom, exploring the languages of love and family.â âDF
The Novices of Lerna by Ăngel Bonomini, tr. Jordan Landsman [F]
The Novices of Lerna is Landsman's translation debut, and what a way to start out: with a work by an Argentine writer in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares whose work has never been translated into English. Judging by the opening of this short story, also translated by Landsman, Bonomini's novel of a mysterious fellowship at a Swiss university populated by doppelgĂ€ngers of the protagonist is unlikely to disappoint. âJHM
Black Meme by Legacy Russell [NF]
Russell, best known for her hit manifesto Glitch Feminism, maps Black visual culture in her latest. Black Meme traces the history of Black imagery from 1900 to the present, from the photograph of Emmett Till published in JET magazine to the footage of Rodney King's beating at the hands of the LAPD, which Russell calls the first viral video. Per Margo Jefferson, "You will be galvanized by Legacy Russellâs analytic brilliance and visceral eloquence." âSMS
The Eighth Moon by Jennifer Kabat [NF]
Kabat's debut memoir unearths the history of the small Catskills town to which she relocated in 2005. The site of a 19th-century rural populist uprising, and now home to a colorful cast of characters, the Appalachian community becomes a lens through which Kabat explores political, economic, and ecological issues, mining the archives and the work of such writers as Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick along the way. âSMS
Stories from the Center of the World ed. Jordan Elgrably [F]
Many in America hold onto broad, centuries-old misunderstandings of Arab and Muslim life and politics that continue to harm, through both policy and rhetoric, a perpetually embattled and endangered region. With luck, these 25 tales by writers of Middle Eastern and North African origin might open hearts and minds alike. âJHM
An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker [NF]
Two of the most brilliant minds on the planetâwriter Jamaica Kincaid and visual artist Kara Walkerâhave teamed up! On a book! About plants! A dream come true. Details on this slim volume are scantâsee for yourselfâbut I'm counting down the minutes till I can read it all the same. âSMS
Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov, tr. Angela Rodel [F]
I'll be honest: I would pick up this bookâby the International Booker Prizeâwinning author of Time Shelterâfor the title alone. But also, the book is billed as a deeply personal meditation on both Communist Bulgaria and Greek myth, soâyep, still picking this one up. âJHM
May 14
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud [F]
I read an ARC of this enthralling fictionalization of Messudâs family historyâpeople wandering the world during much of the 20th century, moving from Algeria to France to North Americaâ and it is quite the story, with a postscript that will smack you on the side of the head and make you re-think everything you just read. I can't recommend this enough. âCK
Woodworm by Layla Martinez, tr. Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott [F]
Martinezâs debut novel takes cabin fever to the max in this story of a grandmother, granddaughter, and their haunted house, set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. As the story unfolds, so do the houseâs secrets, the two women must learn to collaborate with the malevolent spirits living among them. Mariana Enriquez says that this "tense, chilling novel tells a story of specters, class war, violence, and loneliness, as naturally as if the witches had dictated this lucid, terrible nightmare to MartĂnez themselves.â âLA
Self Esteem and the End of the World by Luke Healy [NF]
Ah, writers writing about writing. A tale as old as time, and often timeworn to boot. But graphic novelists graphically noveling about graphic novels? (Verbing weirds language.) It still feels fresh to me! Enter Healy's tale of "two decades of tragicomic self-discovery" following a protagonist "two years post publication of his latest book" and "grappling with his identity as the world crumbles." âJHM
All Fours by Miranda July [F]
In excruciating, hilarious detail, All Fours voices the ethically dubious thoughts and deeds of an unnamed 45-year-old artist whoâs worried about aging and her capacity for desire. After setting off on a two-week round-trip drive from Los Angeles to New York City, the narrator impulsively checks into a motel 30 miles from her home and only pretends to be traveling. Her flagrant lies, unapologetic indolence, and semi-consummated seduction of a rent-a-car employee set the stage for a liberatory inquisition of heteronorms and queerness. July taps into the perimenopause zeitgeist that animates Jen Beaginâs Big Swiss and Melissa Broderâs Death Valley. âNodB
Love Junkie by Robert Plunket [F]
When a picture-perfect suburban housewife's life is turned upside down, a chance brush with New York City's gay scene launches her into gainful, albeit unconventional, employment. Set at the dawn of the AIDs epidemic, Mimi Smithers, described as a "modern-day Madame Bovary," goes from planning parties in Westchester to selling used underwear with a Manhattan porn star. As beloved as it is controversial, Plunket's 1992 cult novel will get a much-deserved second life thanks to this reissue by New Directions. (Maybe this will finally galvanize Madonna, who once optioned the film rights, to finally make that movie.) âDF
Tomorrowing by Terry Bisson [F]
The newest volume in Duke Universityâs Practices series collects for the first time the late Terry Bissonâs Locus column "This Month in History," which ran for two decades. In it, the iconic "Theyâre Made Out of Meat" author weaves an alt-history of a world almost parallel to ours, featuring AI presidents, moon mountain hikes, a 196-year-old Walt Disneyâs resurrection, and a space pooch on Mars. This one promises to be a pure spectacle of speculative fiction. âDF
Chop Fry Watch Learn by Michelle T. King [NF]
A large portion of the American populace still confuses Chinese American food with Chinese food. What a delight, then, to discover this culinary history of the worldwide dissemination of that great cuisineâwhich moonlights as a biography of Chinese cookbook and TV cooking program pioneer Fu Pei-mei. âJHM
On the Couch ed. Andrew Blauner [NF]
AndrĂ© Aciman, Susie Boyt, Siri Hustvedt, Rivka Galchen, and Colm TĂłibĂn are among the 25 literary luminaries to contribute essays on Freud and his complicated legacy to this lively volume, edited by writer, editor, and literary agent Blauner. Taking tacts both personal and psychoanalytical, these essays paint a fresh, full picture of Freud's life, work, and indelible cultural impact. âSMS
Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace [NF]
Wallace is one of the best journalists (and tweeters) working today, so I'm really looking forward to his debut memoir, which chronicles growing up Black and queer in America, and navigating the world through adulthood. One of the best writers working today, Kiese Laymon, calls Another Word for Love as âOne of the most soulfully crafted memoirs Iâve ever read. I couldnât figure out how Carvell Wallace blurred time, region, care, and sexuality into something so different from anything Iâve read before." âSMS
The Devil's Best Trick by Randall Sullivan [NF]
A cultural history interspersed with memoir and reportage, Sullivan's latest explores our ever-changing understandings of evil and the devil, from Egyptian gods and the Book of Job to the Salem witch trials and Black Mass ceremonies. Mining the work of everyone from Zoraster, Plato, and John Milton to Edgar Allen Poe, Aleister Crowley, and Charles Baudelaire, this sweeping book chronicles evil and the devil in their many forms. --SMS
The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, tr. Peter Filkins [NF]
In this newly-translated collection, Nobel laureate Canetti, who once called himself death's "mortal enemy," muses on all that death inevitably touchesâfrom the smallest ant to the Greek godsâand condemns death as a byproduct of war and despots' willingness to use death as a pathway to power. By means of this book's very publication, Canetti somewhat succeeds in staving off death himself, ensuring that his words live on forever. âDF
Rise of a Killah by Ghostface Killah [NF]
"Why is the sky blue? Why is water wet? Why did Judas rat to the Romans while Jesus slept?" Ghostface Killah has always asked the big questions. Here's another one: Who needs to read a blurb on a literary site to convince them to read Ghost's memoir? âJHM
May 21
Exhibit by R.O. Kwon [F]
It's been six years since Kwon's debut, The Incendiaries, hit shelves, and based on that book's flinty prose alone, her latest would be worth a read. But it's also a tale of awakeningâof its protagonist's latent queerness, and of the "unquiet spirit of an ancestor," that the author herself calls so "shot through with physical longing, queer lust, and kink" that she hopes her parents will never read it. Tantalizing enough for you? âJHM
Cecilia by K-Ming Chang [F]
Chang, the author of Bestiary, Gods of Want, and Organ Meats, returns with this provocative and oft-surreal novella. While the story is about two childhood friends who became estranged after a bizarre sexual encounter but re-connect a decade later, itâs also an exploration of how the human body and its excretions can be both pleasurable and disgusting. âCK
The Great State of West Florida by Kent Wascom [F]
The Great State of West Florida is Wascom's latest gothicomic novel set on Florida's apocalyptic coast. A gritty, ominous book filled with doomed Floridians, the passages fly by with sentences that delight in propulsive excess. In the vein of Thomas McGuane's early novels or Brian De Palma's heyday, this stylized, savory, and witty novel wields pulp with care until it blooms into a new strain of American gothic. âZachary Issenberg
Cartoons by Kit Schluter [F]
Bursting with Kafkaesque absurdism and a hearty dab of abstraction, Schluterâs Cartoons is an animated vignette of life's minutae. From the ravings of an existential microwave to a pencil that is afraid of paper, Schluterâs episodic outrĂ© oozes with animism and uncanniness. A grand addition to City Lightâs repertoire, it will serve as a zany reminder of the lengths to which great fiction can stretch. âDF
May 28
Lost Writings by Mina Loy, ed. Karla Kelsey [F]
In the early 20th century, avant-garde author, visual artist, and gallerist Mina Loy (1882â1966) led an astonishing creative life amid European and American modernist circles; she satirized Futurists, participated in Surrealist performance art, and created paintings and assemblages in addition to writing about her experiences in male-dominated fields of artistic practice. Diligent feminist scholars and art historians have long insisted on her cultural significance, yet the first Loy retrospective wasnât until 2023. Now Karla Kelsey, a poet and essayist, unveils two never-before-published, autobiographical midcentury manuscripts by Loy, The Child and the Parent and Islands in the Air, written from the 1930s to the 1950s. It's never a bad time to be re-rediscovered. âNodB
I'm a Fool to Want You by Camila Sosa Villada, tr. Kit Maude [F]
Villada, whose debut novel Bad Girls, also translated by Maude, captured the travesti experience in Argentina, returns with a short story collection that runs the genre gamut from gritty realism and social satire to science fiction and fantasy. The throughline is Villada's boundless imagination, whether she's conjuring the chaos of the Mexican Inquisition or a trans sex worker befriending a down-and-out Billie Holiday. Angie Cruz calls this "one of my favorite short-story collections of all time." âSMS
The Editor by Sara B. Franklin [NF]
Franklin's tenderly written and meticulously researched biography of Judith Jonesâthe legendary Knopf editor who worked with such authors as John Updike, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Tyler, and, perhaps most consequentially, Julia Childâwas largely inspired by Franklin's own friendship with Jones in the final years of her life, and draws on a rich trove of interviews and archives. The Editor retrieves Jones from the margins of publishing history and affirms her essential role in shaping the postwar cultural landscape, from fiction to cooking and beyond. âSMS
The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth [NF]
A history of the book told through 18 microbiographies of particularly noteworthy historical personages who made them? If that's not enough to convince you, consider this: the small press is represented here by Nancy Cunard, the punchy and enormously influential founder of Hours Press who romanced both Aldous Huxley and Ezra Pound, knew Hemingway and Joyce and Langston Hughes and William Carlos Williams, and has her own MI5 file. Also, the subject of the binding chapter is named "William Wildgoose." âJHM
June
June 4
The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan [F]
A gay Hungarian immigrant writing crappy monster movies in the McCarthy-era Hollywood studio system gets swept up by a famous actress and brought to her estate in Malibu to write what he really cares aboutâand realizes he can never escape his traumatic past. Sunset Boulevard is shaking. âJHM
A Cage Went in Search of a Bird [F]
This collection brings together a who's who of literary writersâ10 of them, to be preciseâ to write Kafka fanfiction, from Joshua Cohen to Yiyun Li. Then it throws in weirdo screenwriting dynamo Charlie Kaufman, for good measure. A boon for Kafkaheads everywhere. âJHM
We Refuse by Kellie Carter Jackson [NF]
Jackson, a historian and professor at Wellesley College, explores the past and present of Black resistance to white supremacy, from work stoppages to armed revolt. Paying special attention to acts of resistance by Black women, Jackson attempts to correct the historical record while plotting a path forward. Jelani Cobb describes this "insurgent history" as "unsparing, erudite, and incisive." âSMS
Holding It Together by Jessica Calarco [NF]
Sociologist Calarco's latest considers how, in lieu of social safety nets, the U.S. has long relied on women's labor, particularly as caregivers, to hold society together. Calarco argues that while other affluent nations cover the costs of care work and direct significant resources toward welfare programs, American women continue to bear the brunt of the unpaid domestic labor that keeps the nation afloat. Anne Helen Petersen calls this "a punch in the gut and a call to action." âSMS
Miss May Does Not Exist by Carrie Courogen [NF]
A biography of Elaine Mayâwhat more is there to say? I cannot wait to read this chronicle of May's life, work, and genius by one of my favorite writers and tweeters. Claire Dederer calls this "the biography Elaine May deserves"âwhich is to say, as brilliant as she was. âSMS
Fire Exit by Morgan Talty [F]
Talty, whose gritty story collection Night of the Living Rez was garlanded with awards, weighs the concept of blood quantumâa measure that federally recognized tribes often use to determine Indigenous membershipâin his debut novel. Although Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, his narrator is on the outside looking in, a working-class white man named Charles who grew up on Maineâs Penobscot Reservation with a Native stepfather and friends. Now Charles, across the river from the reservation and separated from his biological daughter, who lives there, ponders his exclusion in a novel that stokes controversy around the terms of belonging. âNodB
June 11
The Material by Camille Bordas [F]
My high school English teacher, a somewhat dowdy but slyly comical religious brother, had a saying about teaching high school students: "They don't remember the material, but they remember the shtick." Leave it to a well-named novel about stand-up comedy (by the French author of How to Behave in a Crowd) to make you remember both. --SMS
Ask Me Again by Clare Sestanovich [F]
Sestanovich follows up her debut story collection, Objects of Desire, with a novel exploring a complicated friendship over the years. While Eva and Jamie are seemingly oppositesâshe's a reserved South Brooklynite, while he's a brash Upper Manhattaniteâthey bond over their innate curiosity. Their paths ultimately diverge when Eva settles into a conventional career as Jamie channels his rebelliousness into politics. Ask Me Again speaks to anyone who has ever wondered whether going against the grain is in itself a matter of privilege. Jenny Offill calls this "a beautifully observed and deeply philosophical novel, which surprises and delights at every turn." âLA
Disordered Attention by Claire Bishop [NF]
Across four essays, art historian and critic Bishop diagnoses how digital technology and the attention economy have changed the way we look at art and performance today, identifying trends across the last three decades. A perfect read for fans of Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (also from Verso).
War by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, tr. Charlotte Mandell [F]
For years, literary scholars mourned the lost manuscripts of CĂ©line, the acclaimed and reviled French author whose work was stolen from his Paris apartment after he fled to Germany in 1944, fearing punishment for his collaboration with the Nazis. But, with the recent discovery of those fabled manuscripts, War is now seeing the light of day thanks to New Directions (for anglophone readers, at leastâthe French have enjoyed this one since 2022 courtesy of Gallimard). Adam Gopnik writes of War, "A more intense realization of the horrors of the Great War has never been written."Â âDF
The Uptown Local by Cory Leadbeater [NF]
In his debut memoir, Leadbeater revisits the decade he spent working as Joan Didion's personal assistant. While he enjoyed the benefits of working with Didionâher friendship and mentorship, the more glamorous appointments on her social calendarâhe was also struggling with depression, addiction, and profound loss. Leadbeater chronicles it all in what ChloĂ© Cooper Jones calls "a beautiful catalog of twin yearnings: to be seen and to disappear; to belong everywhere and nowhere; to go forth and to return home, andâabove all elseâto love and to be loved." âSMS
Out of the Sierra by Victoria Blanco [NF]
Blanco weaves storytelling with old-fashioned investigative journalism to spotlight the endurance of Mexico's RarĂĄmuri people, one of the largest Indigenous tribes in North America, in the face of environmental disasters, poverty, and the attempts to erase their language and culture. This is an important book for our times, dealing with pressing issues such as colonialism, migration, climate change, and the broken justice system. âCK
Any Person Is the Only Self by Elisa Gabbert [NF]
Gabbert is one of my favorite living writers, whether she's deconstructing a poem or tweeting about Seinfeld. Her essays are what I love most, and her newest collectionâfollowing 2020's The Unreality of Memoryâsees Gabbert in rare form: witty and insightful, clear-eyed and candid. I adored these essays, and I hope (the inevitable success of) this book might augur something an essay-collection renaissance. (Seriously! Publishers! Where are the essay collections!) âSMS
Tehrangeles by Porochista Khakpour [F]
Khakpour's wit has always been keen, and it's hard to imagine a writer better positioned to take the concept of Shahs of Sunset and make it literary. "Like Little Women on an ayahuasca trip," says Kevin Kwan, "Tehrangeles is delightfully twisted and heartfelt."Â Â âJHM
Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers [NF]
The moment I saw this book's titleâwhich comes from the opening (and, as it happens, my favorite) track on Mitchell's 1971 masterpiece BlueâI knew it would be one of my favorite reads of the year. Powers, one of the very best music critics we've got, masterfully guides readers through Mitchell's life and work at a fascinating slant, her approach both sweeping and intimate as she occupies the dual roles of biographer and fan. âSMS
All Desire Is a Desire for Being by René Girard, ed. Cynthia L. Haven [NF]
I'll be honestâthe title alone stirs something primal in me. In honor of Girard's centennial, Penguin Classics is releasing a smartly curated collection of his most poignantâand timelyâessays, touching on everything from violence to religion to the nature of desire. Comprising essays selected by the scholar and literary critic Cynthia L. Haven, who is also the author of the first-ever biographical study of Girard, Evolution of Desire, this book is "essential reading for Girard devotees and a perfect entrĂ©e for newcomers," per Maria Stepanova. âDF
June 18
Craft by Ananda Lima [F]
Can you imagine a situation in which interconnected stories about a writer who sleeps with the devil at a Halloween party and can't shake him over the following decades wouldn't compel? Also, in one of the stories, New York Cityâs Penn Station is an analogue for hell, which is both funny and accurate. âJHM
Parade by Rachel Cusk [F]
Rachel Cusk has a new novel, her first in three yearsâthe anticipation is self-explanatory. âSMS
Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi [F]
Multimedia polymath and gender-norm disrupter Emezi, who just dropped an Afropop EP under the name Akwaeke, examines taboo and trauma in their creative work. This literary thriller opens with an upscale sex party and escalating violence, and although pre-pub descriptions leave much to the imagination (promising âthe elite underbelly of a Nigerian cityâ and âa tangled web of sex and lies and corruptionâ), Emezi can be counted upon for an ambience of dread and a feverish momentum. âNodB
When the Clock Broke by John Ganz [NF]
I was having a conversation with multiple brilliant, thoughtful friends the other day, and none of them remembered the year during which the Battle of Waterloo took place. Which is to say that, as a rule, we should all learn our history better. So it behooves us now to listen to John Ganz when he tells us that all the wackadoodle fascist right-wing nonsense we can't seem to shake from our political system has been kicking around since at least the early 1990s. âJHM
Night Flyer by Tiya Miles [NF]
Miles is one of our greatest living historians and a beautiful writer to boot, as evidenced by her National Book Awardâwinning book All That She Carried. Her latest is a reckoning with the life and legend of Harriet Tubman, which Miles herself describes as an "impressionistic biography." As in all her work, Miles fleshes out the complexity, humanity, and social and emotional world of her subject. Tubman biographer Catherine Clinton says Miles "continues to captivate readers with her luminous prose, her riveting attention to detail, and her continuing genius to bring the past to life." âSMS
God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer by Joseph Earl Thomas [F]
Thomas's debut novel comes just two years after a powerful memoir of growing up Black, gay, nerdy, and in poverty in 1990s Philadelphia. Here, he returns to themes and settings that in that book, Sink, proved devastating, and throws post-service military trauma into the mix. âJHM
June 25
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing [NF]
I've been a fan of Laing's since The Lonely City, a formative read for a much-younger me (and I'd suspect for many Millions readers), so I'm looking forward to her latest, an inquiry into paradise refracted through the experience of restoring an 18th-century garden at her home the English countryside. As always, her life becomes a springboard for exploring big, thorny ideas (no pun intended)âin this case, the possibilities of gardens and what it means to make paradise on earth. âSMS
Cue the Sun! by Emily Nussbaum [NF]
Emily Nussbaum is pretty much the reason I started writing. Her 2019 collection of television criticism, I Like to Watch, was something of a Bible for college-aged me (and, in fact, was the first book I ever reviewed), and I've been anxiously awaiting her next book ever since. It's finally arrived, in the form of an utterly devourable cultural history of reality TV. Samantha Irby says, "Only Emily Nussbaum could get me to read, and love, a book about reality TV rather than just watching it," and David Grann remarks, "Itâs rare for a book to feel alive, but this one does." âSMS
Woman of Interest by Tracy O'Neill [NF]
OâNeill's first work of nonfictionâan intimate memoir written with the narrative propulsion of a detective novelâfinds her on the hunt for her biological mother, who she worries might be dying somewhere in South Korea. As she uncovers the truth about her enigmatic mother with the help of a private investigator, her journey increasingly becomes one of self-discovery. ChloĂ© Cooper Jones writes that Woman of Interest âsolidifies her status as one of our greatest living prose stylists.â âLA
Dancing on My Own by Simon Wu [NF]
New Yorkers reading this list may have witnessed Wu's artful curation at the Brooklyn Museum, or the Whitney, or the Museum of Modern Art. It makes one wonder how much he curated the order of these excellent, wide-ranging essays, which meld art criticism, personal narrative, and travel writingâand count Cathy Park Hong and Claudia Rankine as fans. âJHM
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Alliterationâs Apt and Artful Aim
âIt used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in as much as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration.â
âRobert Louis Stevenson, âOn Some Technical Elements of Style in Literatureâ (1905)
When the first English poetry was given by the gift and grace of God it was imparted to an illiterate shepherd named CĂŠdmon and the register that it was received and was alliterative. In the seventh century, the English, as they had yet to be called, may have had Christianity, but they did not yet have poetry. Pope Gregory I, having seen a group of them sold as slaves in the markets of Rome, had said âThey are not Angles, but angels,â and yet these seraphim did not sing (yet). There among his sheep at the Abbey of Whitby in the rolling Northumbrian countryside, CĂŠdmon served a clergy whose prayers were in a vernacular not their own, among a people of no letters. A lay brother, CĂŠdmon feasted and drank with his fellow monks one evening when they all took to reciting verse from memory (as one does), playing their harps as King David had in the manner of the bards of the Britons, the scops of the Saxons, the Makers of songâfor long before poetry was written it should be plucked and sung.
In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, St. Bede described how the monks were âsometimes at entertainmentsâ and that it was âagreed for the sake of mirth that all present should sing in their turn.â But in a scene whose face-burning embarrassment still resonates a millennium-and-a-half later, Bede explained that when CĂŠdmon âsaw the instrument come towards him, he rose up from the table and returned home.â Pity the simple monk whom Alasdair Gray in The Book of Prefaces described as a âlocal herdsman [who] wanted to be a poet though he had not composed anything.â An original composition would wait for that night. CĂŠdmon went to sleep among his mute animals, but in the morning he arose with the fiery tongue of an angel. Bede records that in those nocturnal reveries âsomeoneâ came to CĂŠdmon asking the herdsman to sing of âthe beginning of created things.â Like his older contemporary, the prophet Muhammad, some angelic visitor had brought to CĂŠdmon the exquisite perfection of words, and with a commission most appropriateâto create English verse on the topic of creation itself. When CĂŠdmon awoke, he was possessed with the consonantal bursts of a hot, orange iron bar being hammered against a glowing, sparkly anvil; the sounds in his head were the characteristic alliteration of his native English.
That bright night in a dark age, what was delivered unto the shepherd were the first words of English poetry: âNĆ« scylun hergan hefaenrÄ«caes Uard, / metudĂŠs maecti end his mĆdgidanc, /uerc Uuldurfadur, suÄ hÄ uundra gihwaes, / Äci dryctin Ćr ÄstelidĂŠ / hÄ ÇŁrist scĆp aelda barnum / heben til hrĆfe, hÄleg scepen,â and so on and so forth. The other monks brought CĂŠdmon to the wise abbess St. Hilda, who declared this delivery a miracle (preserved only in 19 extant manuscripts). Gray described this genesis of English literature: A herdsman sang in a âNorthumbrian dialect of Anglo-Saxonâ to an amanuensis âwho got learning from the Irish Scots,â his narrative being a âJewish creation story transmitted to him through at least three other languages by a Graeco-Roman-Celtic-Christian churchâ with verse forms âlearned from pagan German warrior chants.â The migrations of peoples and stories would, as with all languages, contribute to the individual aural soul of English, so that the result was an Anglo-Saxon literature that sounded like wind blowing in over the whale-road of the North Sea, reminding us that âAlliteration is part of the sound stratum of poetry. It predates rhyme and takes us back to the oldest English and Celtic poetries,â as Edward Hirsch writes in A Poetâs Glossary.
Read that bit of quoted verse from CĂŠdmon aloud and it might not sound much like English to you, the modern translation roughly reading as âNow [we] must honor the guardian of heaven, / the might of the architect, and his purpose, / the work of the father of glory / as he, the eternal lord, established the beginning of wonders,â (and so on and so forth). But if you sound out what philologists call âAnglo-Saxon,â youâll start to hear the characteristic rhythms of Englishâstaccato firing of short, consonant rich words, and most of all the alliteration. Anglo-Saxon, if heard without concentration, can sound like someone speaking English in another room just beyond your hearing; it can sound like an upside-down version of what we speak every day; it can sound like what our language would be if imitated by a non-fluent speaker. CĂŠdmonâs verse may have been gifted from angels, but the ingredients were his tongueâs phonemes, and unlike the Romance languageâs rhyme-ready vowels, he had hard Germanic edges.
Such was the template set by CĂŠdmon, for though âOld English meter is not fully understood,â as Derik Attridge explained in Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction, it does appear to âhave been written according to complex rules.â Details of prosody are beyond my purview, but as a crackerjack explanation, what defines Anglo-Saxon meter is a heavy reliance on alliteration, whereby what connects the two halves of a line, separated by a caesura (the gap you see between words in the bit of CĂŠdmon quoted above), is an alliterated meter stress. In CĂŠdmonâs first line we have the alliteration of âhergan/hefaenrÄ«caes,â in the second line the alliterative triumvirate of âmetudĂŠs/maecti/mĆdgidanc,â a pattern that continues throughout the rest of the hymn. A meter that David Crystal in The Stories of English described as âthe most structurally distinctive verse form to have emerged in the history of English.â
The vast majority of Anglo-Saxonâs âstructurally distinctive verse,â as with all literatures, is lost to us. By necessity, oral literature disappears, as ephemeral as breath in the cold. Words are subject to decay; poetry to entropy. Only about 400 manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon survive, less than the average number of books in a professorâs office in Cambridge, or Berkeley, or Ann Arbor. Of those, slightly fewer than 200 are considered âmajor,â and there are but four major manuscripts of specifically poetry. The earliest of these, the Junius manuscript, is that which contains CĂŠdmonâs hymn; the latest of these, the Nowell Codex, contains among other things the only extant Anglo-Saxon epic, that which we call Beowulf. Such is undoubtedly an insignificant percentage of what was once written, of what was once sung to the accompaniment of a lute. Much was lost in the 16th century when Henry VIII decided to dissolve the monasteries, so that most alliterative verse was either turned to ash, or stripped into the bindings of other books, occasionally discovered by judicious bibliographers. Almost all Anglo-Saxon literature, from poetry to prose, hagiography to history, bible translation to travelogue, could be consumed by the committed reader in a few months as theyâre squirreled away in a Northumbrian farm house.
Anglo-Saxon has a distinctive literary register that revels in riddles, in ironic understatement, in the creative metaphorical neologisms called âkennings,â and of course in alliteration. This is the literature of the anonymous poem âThe Seafarer,â a fatalistic elegy of a mere 124 lines about the life of a sailor, whose opening was rendered by the 20th-century modernist poet Ezra Pound as âMay I for my own self songâs truth reckon, /Journeyâs jargon, how I in harsh days / Hardship endured oft.â Pound was not only bewitched by alliterationâs alluring galumph, but the meter of âThe Seafarerâ propels the action of the poem forward, the cadence of natural English speech tamed by the defamiliarization of enjambment and stress, rendering it simultaneously ordinary and odd (as the best poetry must). Anglo-Saxon is a verse, for which the Irish poet and translator of Beowulf Seamus Heaney remarks, where even when the language is elevated itâs also âalways, paradoxically, buoyantly down to earth.â Read aloud âThe Wanderer,â which sits alongside âThe Seafarerâ in the compendium known as the Exeter Book, where the anonymous scop sings of âThe thriving of the treeland, the townâs briskness, / a lightness over the leas, life gathering, / everything urges the eagerly mooded / man to venture on the voyage he thinks of, / the faring over flood, the far bourn.â Prosody is an art of physical feeling before it ever is one of semantic comprehensionâpoems exist in the mouth, not in the mind. Note the mouth-feel of âThe Wandererâsâ aural sense, the way in which reading it aloud literally feels good. Poetry is a science of placing tongue against teeth and pallet, it is not philosophy. This is what Heaney described as âthe element of sensation while the mindâs lookout sways metrically and farsightedly,â and as English is an alliterative tongue itâs that alliteration which gives us sensation. A natural way of speaking, for as Heaney wrote âPart of me⊠had been writing Anglo-Saxon from the start.â
The cumulative effect of this meter is as if a type of sonic galloping, the clip-clop of horses across the frozen winter ground of a Northumbrian countryside. Such was the sound imparted to CĂŠdmon by his unseen angel, and these were the rules drawn from the natural ferment and rich, black soil of the English language itself, where alliteration grows from our consonant top-heavy tongue. Other Germanic languages based their prosody on alliteration for the simple reason that, in the Icelandic of the Poetic Eddas or the German of Muspilli, the sounds of the words themselves make it far easier to alliterate than to rhyme, as in Italian or French. The Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman-edited Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms explains that among the âfour most significant devices of phonic echo in poetryâârhyme, assonance, consonance, and alliterationâit was the last which most fully defined Anglo-Saxon prosody, grown from the raw sonic materials of the language itself. To adopt a line from Charles Churchillâs 1763 The Prophecy of Famine, CĂŠdmon may have âprayed / For apt alliterationâs artful aid,â but the angel only got his attentionâthe sounds were already in the monkâs speech.
Every language has a certain aural spirit to it, a type of auditory fingerprint which is related to those phonemes, those sounds, which constitute the melody and rhythm of any tongue. Romance languages with their languid syllables, words ending with the open-mouthed expression of the sprawled vowel; the spittle-flecked plosives of the Slavic tongues, or the phlegmy gutturals of the Germanic, and despite their consonants the gentle lilt of the Gaelic languages. Sound can be separate from meaning as something that can be felt in the body without the need to comprehend it in the mind.
In his masterpiece Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, the logician Douglas Hofstadter provides examples of individual languagesâ aural spirit. Hofstadter examines several different âtranslationsâ of the Victorian author Lewis Carrolâs celebrated nonsense lyric âJabberwockyâ from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. That strange and delightful poem, as you will probably recall, encapsulates the aural spirit of English rather well. Carrol famously declared âTwas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.â Other than some articles and conjunctions, the poem is almost entirely nonsense. Yet in its hodge-podge of invented nouns, verbs, and adjectives, most readers can imagine a fairly visceral scene, but this picture is generated not from actual semantic meaning, but rather from the strange wisdom of Englishâs particular aural soul. From âJabberwockyâ we get a sense of its preponderance of consonants and its relatively short words, a language that sounds like chewing a tough slab of air-dried meat. As Hofstadter explains, this poses a difficulty in âtranslating,â because the aural sense of English has to be converted into that of another language. Despite that difficulty, there have been several successful attempts, each of which enact the auditory anatomy of a particular tongue.
[millions_ad]Frank L. Warrinâs French translation of Carrolâs poem begins, âIl brilgue: les tĂŽves lubricilleux / Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guaveâ; Adolfo de Albaâs Spanish starts, âEra la asarvesperia y los flexilimosos toves / giroscopiaban taledrando en el vadeâ; and my personal favorite, the German of Robert Scottâs first stanza, reads as âEs brillig war. Die schlichte Toven / Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben; / Und aller-mĂŒmsige Burggoven / Die mohmen RĂ€th' ausgraben.â What all translations accomplish is a sense of the sounds of a language, the aural soul that I speak of. You need not be fluent to identify a languageâs aural soul; unfamiliarity with the actual literal meanings of a language might arguably make it easier for a listener to detect those distinct features that define a dialect. Listen to a YouTube video of the prodigious, late comedic genius Sid Caesar, a master of âdouble-talk,â who while working in his fatherâs Yonkers restaurant overheard speakers of âItalian, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, French, Spanish, Lithuanian, and even Bulgarianâ and subsequently learned that he could adeptly parrot the cadence and aural sense of those and other languages.
In his memoir Caesarâs Hours: My Life in Comedy, with Love and Laughter, the performer observes that âEvery language has its own song and rhythm.â If youâre fluent in fake French or suspect Spanish, you may naturally inquire as to what fake English sounds like. When I lived in Scotland I had a French room-mate whom I posed that query too, and after much needling (and a few drinks) he recited a sentence of perfect counterfeit English. Guttural as German, but with far shorter words; it was a type of rapid-fire clanging-and-clinking with words shooting out with a âpingâ as if lug-nuts from a malfunctioning robot. If you want a more charitable interpretation of what American English sounds like, listen to Italian pop star Adriano Celentanoâs magnificently funky fake-English song "Prisencolinensinainciusol,â where with all the guttural urgency THAT our language requires, he sings out âUis de seim cius nau op de seim/Ol uoit men in de colobos dai/Not s de seim laikiu de promisdin/Iu nau in trabol lovgiai ciu gen.â
If every language has this sonic sense, then poetry is the ultimate manifestation of a tongueâs unique genius; a languageâs consciousness made manifest and self-aware, bottled and preserved into the artifact of verse. Language lives not in the mind, but rather in the larynx, the soft pallet, the mouth, and the tongue, and its progeny are the soft serpentine sibilant, the moist plosive, the chest gutturalsâ heart-burn. A languageâs poetry will reflect the natural sounds that have developed for its speakers, as can be witnessed in the meandering inter-locking softness of Italian ottava rima or the percussive trochaic tetrameter of Finlandâs The Kalevala. For Romance languages, rhyme is relatively easyâall of those vowels at the ends of words. That Anglo-Saxon meter should be so heavily alliterative, along with its consonant-heavy West Germanic cousins like Frisian, also makes sense. Why then is rhyme historically the currency of English language poetry after the Anglo-Saxon era? After all, one couldnât imagine a philistineâs declaration of âThis canât be poetry; it doesnât alliterate.â
The reasons are both complex and contested, though the hypothesis is that following the Norman invasion (1066 and all that) Romance poetic styles were imposed on the Germanic speaking peoples (as indeed theyâd once imposed their language on the Celts). In A Poetâs Guide to Poetry by Mary Kinzie, she writes that âIn the history of English poetry, rhyme takes over when alliteration leaves off.â A century-and-a-half of free verse, and almost five centuries of blank verse, and so enshrined is rhyme that your average reader still assumes that itâs definitional to what poetry is. But alliteration, despite its integral role in the birth of our prosody, and its continual presence (often accidental) in our everyday speech, is relegated to the role of adult child from a first marriage whose invitation to Thanksgiving dinner has been lost in the mail. There is an important historical exception to this, during the High Middle Ages, when the Germanic throatiness of old English was rounded out by the softness of Norman French and some poets chose to once again write their verse in the characteristic alliterative meter of their ancestors. Or maybe thatâs what happened, itâs entirely possible that English poets never chose to abandon alliteration, and the so-called alliterative revival with poems like the anonymous Pearl Poetâs Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and William Langlandâs Piers Plowman are just that which survives, giving the illusion that something has returned which never actually left.
In All the Fun's in How you Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification, Timothy Steele writes that some regard the alliterative revival as a âconscious protest against the emerging accentual-syllabic tradition and as a nationalistic effort to turn English verse back to its German origins.â Whether thatâs the case is an issue for medievalists to debate. What is true is that the Middle English poetry of this period represents a vernacular renaissance of the 13th and 14th centuries when much English poetry read as, well, English. Again, with a sense of mouth feel, read aloud Simon Armitageâs translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight when the titular emerald man picks up his just severed head and says, âyou must solemnly swear/that youâll seek me yourself; that youâll search me out/to the ends of the earth to earn the same blow/as youâll dole out today in this decorous hall.â That âs,â and âe,â and âdâ â thereâs a pleasure in reading alliteration that can avoid the artifice of rhyme, with its straitjacket alterity. Armitage explains that âalliteration is the warp and weft of the poem, without which it is just so many fine threadsâ (that line itself replicating Anglo-Saxon meter, albeit in prose). For the translator, alliteration exists as âpercussive patterningâ which is there to âreinforce their meaning and to countersink them within the memory,â what Crystal calls âphonological mnemonics.â
But if the alliterative poetry of the High Middle Ages signaled not a rupture but an occluded continuity, then it is true that by the arrival of the Renaissance, rhyme would permanently supplant it as the prosodic element du jour. Adoption of continental models of verse are in large part due to the coming influence of Renaissance humanism, yet the 14th-century also saw the political turmoil of the Peasantâs Rebellion, when an English-speaking rabble organized against the French-speaking aristocracy, motivated by a proto-Protestant religious movement called Lollardy and celebrated in a flowering of vernacular spiritual writing, which contributed to the Churchâs eventual fear of bible translation. As the rebellion would be violently put down in 1381, there was a general distrust among the ruling classes of scripture rendered into an English tongueâcould a similar distrust of alliteration, too common and simple, have shifted poetry away from it for good? Melvyn Bragg writes in The Adventures of English: The Biography of a Language that poets like Langland (himself possibly a Lollard) rendered their verse âmore believable for being so plainly painted,â a poetry âmeant to sound like the language of the people.â This was precisely what was to be avoided, and so perhaps alliteration migrated from the rarefied realms of poetry back to simple speech, eventually reserved mostly for instances in which, as Bragg writes, there is a need to âGrab the listenerâs or readerâs attentionâŠsuch as in news headlines and advertising slogans.â
Madison Avenue understands alliterationâs deep wisdom, such that âGuinness is good for youâ (possibly true) and âGreyhound going greatâ (undoubtedly not true).â While at home in advertising, Attridge explained that alliteration is a ârare visitor to the literary realm,â with Hirsch adding that it now exists as a âsubterranean stream in English-language poetry.â Subterranean streams can still have a mighty roar however, as alliterationâs preponderance in the popular realm of slogans and lyrics can attest to. Alliteration exists because alliteration works, and while itâs been largely supplanted by rhyme for several hundred years it remains in the wheelhouse of some of our most canonical poets. The 19th-century British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins largely derived his âsprung rhythmâ from Anglo-Saxon meter, where he lets the Sybilâs leaves declare âlet them be left, wildness and wet; Love live the weeds and the wilderness yet,â calling forth all the forward momentum of âThe Wanderer.â
For exhibition of alliterationâs sheer magnificent potential, examine W.H. Audenâs under-read 1947 masterpiece The Age of Anxiety, which demonstrates our indigenous tropeâs full power, especially in a contemporary context, and not just as a fantasy novel affectation for when an author needs characters to sound like stock Saxons. Across six subsections spread amongst 138 pages, four war-time characters in a Manhattan bar reflect on modernityâs traumas in a series of individual inner alliterative monologues. Alliteration is perfectly attuned to this setting, which Auden later described as âan unprejudiced space where nothing particular ever happens,â because alliteration simultaneously announced itself as common (i.e. âThis is what English speakers sound likeâ) while also clearly poetic (âBut we donât normally alliterate as regularly as thatâ). Take the passage in which one of the characters, now drunk in a stream of consciousness reverie (for thatâs what good Guinness does for youâŠ), examines his own face across from himself in the barroom mirror (as one does). Auden writes:
How glad and good when you go to bed,
Do you feel, my friend? What flavor has
That liquor you lift with your left hand;
Is it cold by contrast, cool as this
For a soiled soul; does yourself like mine
Taste of untruth? Tell me, what are you
Hiding in your heart, some angel face,
Some shadowy she who shares in my absence,
Enjoys my jokes? Iâm jealous, surely,
Nicer myself (though not as honest),
The marked man of romantic thrillers
Whose brow bears the brand of winter
No priest can explain, the poet disguised,
Thinking over things in thievesâ kitchens.
That thrum supplied by alliterative meter, so much sharper and more angular than rhymeâs pleasing congruencies or assonanceâs soft rounding, feels like nothing so much as the rushing blood in the temples of that drunk staring at his own disheveled reflection. Savor the slink of that âshadowy she who sharesâ or the pagan totemism of the âmarked manâ and the colloquialism of that which is âHiding in your heart.â The Age of Anxiety perfectly synthesizes a type of vernacular bar-room speech that nonetheless is clearly poetry in the circumscribed constrictions of its language. In choosing our rhetorical tropes certain metaphysical implications necessarily announce themselves. Were The Age of Anxiety rhymed or in free verse it would be a very different poem, in this case a less successful one (despite our collective ignorance about Audenâs elegy). At one point, one of the characters imagines the future, imagines us, and she predicts that the future will be âOdourless ages, an ordered world/Of planned pleasures and passport-control, /Sentry-go sedatives, soft drinks and/Managed money, a moral planet/Tamed by terror.â This is, first of all, an obviously accurate prediction of life in 2019. Itâs also one all the more terrifying in the familiar wax and wane of alliteration, for it calls forth the beating heart of English itself, and while not sounding like that stock medieval herdsman it still harkens back towards the primordial hymns of our tongue, of CĂŠdmon strumming his lute while he pops antidepressants and checks Facebook for the 500th time that day.
Such experiments as The Age of Anxiety have been at best understood as literary affectations, or at worst declarations of nativist Anglophilia (as with Pound). Kinzie complains that alliteration draws âattention away from what words mean to hint at what are often theâŠirrational similarities in their sounds,â though Iâd argue that that describes all rhetorical devices, from metaphor to metonymy, catachresis to chiasmus. She writes that alliteration appears âtowards the self-conscious end of the continuum of diction,â but itâs precisely self-awareness of medium that makes language poetry. Hirsch writes that âAlliteration can reinforce preexisting meaningsâŠand establish effective new ones,â which Kinzie interprets as mere âfondness for gnomic utterance.â But thatâs the prodigious brilliance of alliterationâits uniquely English oracular quality. As with all verse, itâs these âgnomic utterancesâ that are birthed from the pregnant potential of our particular words, and alliterationâs naturalism is what makes it so apt for this purpose in our language. Prosody at its most affecting incongruously marries the realism of speech with the defamiliarization that announces poetry as being artifice, and thatâs why alliteration is among the most haunting of our aural ghosts. Poetry is of the throat before it is of the brain, and alliteration is the common well-spring of English, sounding neither as contrived nor as straight-jacketed as rhyme. As such, why not embrace alliterative meter as more than just gimmick; why not draw attention to that aural quality of our language that is our common ownership? Our tongues already talk in alliteration, so let us once again proclaim our poems in alliteration, let us declare our dreams in it.
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Image Credit: Unsplash/Olmes Sosa.