The King in Yellow, Deluxe Edition

New Price: $13.74
Used Price: $7.36

Mentioned in:

Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

-
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]

Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story

- | 1
"One need not be a chamber to be haunted." —Emily Dickinson Drown Memorial Hall was only a decade old when it was converted into a field hospital for students stricken with the flu in the autumn of 1918. A stolid, grey building of three stories and a basement, Drown Hall sits half-way up South Mountain where it looks over the Lehigh Valley to the federal portico of the white-washed Moravian Central Church across the river, and the hulking, rusting ruins of Bethlehem Steel a few blocks away. Composed of stone the choppy texture of the north Atlantic in the hour before a squall, with yellow windows buffeted by mountain hawks and grey Pennsylvania skies. Built in honor of Lehigh University’s fourth president, a mustachioed Victorian chemistry professor, Drown was intended as a facility for leisure, exercise, and socialization, housing (among other luxuries) bowling alleys and chess rooms. Catherine Drinker Bowen enthused in her 1924 History of Lehigh University that Drown exuded “dignity and, at the same time, a certain at-home-ness to every function held there,” that the building “carries with it a flavor and spice which makes the hotel or country club hospitality seem thin, flat and unprofitable.” If Drown was a monument to youthful exuberance, innocent pluck, and boyish charm, then by the height of the pandemic it had become a cenotaph to cytokine storms. Only a few months after basketballs and Chuck Taylors would have skidded across its gymnasium floor, and those same men would lay on cots hoping not to succumb to the illness. Twelve men would die of the influenza in Drown. After its stint as a hospital, Drown would return to being a student center, then the Business Department, and by the turn of our century the English Department. It was in that final purpose that I got to know Drown a decade ago, when I was working on my PhD. Toward the end of my first year, I had to go to my office in the dusk after-hour, when lurid orange light breaks through the cragged and twisted branches of still leafless trees in the cold spring, looking nothing so much like jaundiced fingers twisting the black bars of a broken cage, or like the spindly embers of a church’s burnt roof, fires still cackling through the collapsing wood.  I had to print a seminar paper for a class on 19th-century literature, and to then quickly adjourn to my preferred bar. When I keyed into the locked building, it was empty, silent save for the eerie neon hum of the never-used vending machines and the unnatural pooling luminescence of perennially flickering fluorescent lights in the stairwells at either end of the central hall. While in a basement computer lab, I suddenly heard a burst of noise upstairs come from one end of the hall rapidly progress towards the other—the unmistakable sound of young men dribbling a basketball. Telling myself that it must be the young children of one of the department’s professors, I shakily ascended. As soon as I got to the top the noise ceased. The lights were out. The building was still empty. Never has an obese man rolled down that hill quite as quickly as I did in the spring of 2011. There are several rational explanations—students studying in one of the classrooms even after security would have otherwise locked up. Or perhaps the sound did come from some faculty kids (though to my knowledge nobody was raising adolescents at that time). Maybe there was something settling strangely, concrete shifting oddly or water rushing quickly through a pipe (as if I didn’t know the difference between a basketball game and a toilet flushing). When depleted of all explanations, I know what I heard and what it sounded like, and I still have no idea what it was. Nor is this the only ghost story that I could recount—there was the autumn of 2003 when walking back at 2 a.m. after the close of the library at Washington and Jefferson College, feet unsteady on slicked brown leaves blanketing the frosted sidewalk, that I noted an unnatural purple light emanating from a half-basement window of Macmillan Hall, built in 1793 (having been the encampment of Alexander Hamilton during the Whisky Rebellion) and the oldest university building west of the Alleghenies. A few seconds after observing the shining, I heard a high-pitched, unnatural, inhuman banshee scream—some kind of poltergeist cry—and being substantially thinner in that year I was able to book it quickly back to my dorm. Or in 2007 while I was living in Scotland, when I toured the cavernous subterranean vaults underneath the South Bridge between the Old and New towns of Edinburgh, and I saw a young chav, who decided to make obscene hand gestures within a cairn that the tour guide assured us had "evil trapped within it," later break down as if he was being assaulted by some unseen specter. Then there was the antebellum farm house in the Shenandoah Valley that an ex-girlfriend lived in, one room being so perennially cold and eerie that nobody who visited ever wanted to spend more than a few minutes in it. A haunted space in a haunted land where something more elemental than intellect screams at you that something cruel happened there. Paranormal tales are popular, even among those who'd never deign to believe in something like a poltergeist, because they speak to the ineffable that we feel in those arm-hair-raised, scalp-shrinking, goose-bumped-moments where we can't quite fully explain what we felt, or heard, or saw. I might not actually believe in ghosts, but when I hear the dribbling of a basketball down an empty and dark hall, I'm not going to stick around to find out what it is. No solitary person is ever fully a skeptic when they're alone in a haunted house. Count me on the side of science journalist Mary Roach, who in Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife writes that "I guess I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science. Certainly, most things can… but not all. I believe in the possibility of something more." Haunting is by definition ambiguous—if with any certainty we could say that the supernatural was real it would, I suppose, simply be the natural. Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov formulated a critical model of the supernatural in his study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, in which he argued that stories about unseen realms could be divided between the "uncanny" and the "marvelous." The former are narrative elements that can ultimately be explained rationally, i.e., supernatural plot points that prove to be dreams, hallucinations, drug trips, hoaxes, illusions, or anything unmasked by the Scooby-Doo gang. The latter are things that are actually occult, supernatural, divine. When it's unclear as to whether or not a given incident in a story is uncanny or marvelous, then it's in that in-between space of the fantastic, which is the same place any ghostly experience has had to be honestly categorized. "The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event," writes Todorov, and that is a succinct description of my Drown anomaly. Were it to be simply uncanny, then I suppose my spectral fears would have been assuaged if upon my ascent I found a group of living young men playing impromptu pick-up basketball. For that experience to be marvelous, I'd have to know beyond any doubt that what I heard were actual spirits. As it is, it's the uncertainty of the whole event—the strange, spooky, surreal ambiguity—that makes the incident fantastic. "What I'm after is proof," writes Roach. "Or evidence, anyway —evidence that some form of disembodied consciousness persists when the body closes up shop. Or doesn't persist." I've got no proof or disproof either, only the distant memory of sweaty palms and a racing heart. Ghosts may haunt chambers, but they also haunt books; they might float through the halls of Drown, but they even more fully possess the books that line that building's halls. Traditional ghosts animate literature, from the canon to the penny dreadful, including what the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold grandiosely termed the "best which has been thought and said" as well as lurid paperbacks with their garish covers. We're so obsessed with something seen just beyond the field of vision that vibrates at a frequency that human ears can't quite detect—from Medieval Danish courts to the Overlook Hotel, Hill House to the bedroom of Ebenezer Scrooge—that we're perhaps liable to wonder if there is something to ghostly existence. After all, places are haunted, lives are haunted, stories are haunted. Such is the nature of ghosts; we may overlook their presence, their flitting and meandering through the pages of our canonical literature, but they're there all the same (for a place can be haunted whether you notice that it is or not). How often do you forget that the work that is the greatest in the language is basically a ghost story? William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is fundamentally a good old-fashioned yarn about a haunted house (in addition to being a revenge tragedy and pirate tale). The famed soliloquy of the Danish prince dominates our cultural imagination, but the most cutting bit of poetry is the eerie line that begins the play: "Who's there?" Like any good supernatural tale, Hamlet begins in confusion and disorientation, as the sentries Marcellus and Bernardo patrolling Elsinore's ramparts first espy the silent ghost of the murdered king, with the latter uttering the shaky two-word interrogative. Can you imagine being in the audience, sometime around 1600 when it was a widespread belief that there are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in our philosophies, and hearing the quivering question asked in the darkness, faces illuminated by tallow candle, the sense that there is something just beyond our experience that has come from beyond? The status of Hamlet’s ghost is ambiguous; some critics have interpreted the specter as a product of the prince's madness, others claim that the spirit is clearly real. Such uncertainty speaks to what's fantastic about the ghost, as ambiguity haunts the play. Notice that Bernardo doesn't ask "What's there?" His question is phrased towards a personality with agency, even as the immaterial spirit of Hamlet's dead father exists in some shadow-realm between life and death. A ghost's status was no trifling issue—it got to the core of salvation and damnation. Protestants wouldn't believe that souls could wander the earth; they would either be rewarded in heaven or punished in hell, while ghosts must necessarily be demons. Yet Shakespeare's play seems to make clear that Hamlet's father has indeed returned, perhaps as an inhabitant of that way station known as purgatory, that antechamber to eternity whereby the ghost can ascend from the Bardo to skulk around Elsinore for the space of a prologue. Of course, when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, ostensibly good Protestant that he was, he should have held no faith in purgatory, that abode of ghosts being in large part that which caused Luther to nail his theses to the Wittenberg Cathedral door. When the final Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England were ratified in 1571 (three decades before the play's premier), it was Article 22 that declared belief in purgatory was a " thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of scripture; but rather repugnant to the word of God." According to Stephen Greenblatt’s argument from Hamlet in Purgatory, the ghost isn't merely Hamlet's father, but also a haunting from the not-so-distant Catholic past, which the official settlement had supposedly stripped away with rood screens and bejeweled altars. Elsinore's haunting is not just that of King Hamlet's ghost, but also of those past remnants that the reformers were unable to completely bury. Greenblatt writes that for Shakespeare purgatory "was a piece of poetry" drawn from a "cultural artery" whereby the author had released a "startling rush of vital energy." There are a different set of ambiguities at play in Hamlet, not least of which is how this "spirit of health or goblin damned" is to be situated between orthodoxy and heresy. In asking "who" the ghost is, Bernardo is simultaneously asking what it is, where it comes from, and how such a thing can exist. So simple, so understated, so arresting is the first line of Hamlet that I'm apt to say that Bernardo's question is the great concern of all supernatural literature, if not all literature. Within Hamlet there is a tension between the idea of survival and extinction, for though the prince calls death the "undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns," he himself must know that's not quite right. After all, his own father came back from the dead (a role that Shakespeare played himself). Shakespeare's ghoul is less ambiguous than those of Charles Dickens, for the ghost of Jacob Marley who visits Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol is accused of simply being an "undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!" Note that the querying nature of the final clause ends in an exclamation rather than a question mark, and there's no asking who somebody is, now only what they are. Because A Christmas Carol has been filtered through George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart, Bill Murray, and the Muppets, there is a tendency to forget just how terrifying Dickens's novel actually is. The ultimately repentant Scrooge and his visitations from a trinity of moralistic specters offer up visions of justice that are gothic in their capacity to unsettle. The neuter sprite that is the Ghost of Christmas Past with holly and their summer flowers; hail-fellow-well-met Bacchus that is the Ghost of Christmas Present; and the grim memento mori visage of the reaper who is the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (not to mention Marley padlocked and in fetters). Dickens in the mold of Dante, for whom haunting is its own form of retribution, a means of purging us of our inequities and allowing for redemption. Andrew Smith writes in The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History that "Dickens's major contribution to the development of the ghost story lies in how he employs allegory in order to encode wider issues relating to history, money, and identity." Morality itself—the awesome responsibility impinging on us every second of existence—can be a haunting. The literal haunting of Scrooge is more uncertain, for perhaps they're gestated from madness, hallucination, nightmare, or as he initially said, indigestion. Dickens's ghosts are ambiguous—as they always must be—but the didactic sentiment of A Christmas Carol can't be. Nothing is more haunting than history, especially a wicked one, and few tales are as cruel as that of the United States. Gild the national narrative all that we want, American triumphalism is a psychological coping mechanism. This country, born out of colonialism, genocide, slavery, is a massive haunted burial ground, and we all know that grave yards are where ghosts dwell. As Leslie Fiedler explained in Love and Death in the American Novel, the nation itself is a "gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic—a literature of darkness and the grotesque." America is haunted by the weight of its injustice; on this continent are the traces of the Pequod and Abenaki, Mohawk and Mohegan, Apache and Navajo whom the settlers murdered; in this country are the filaments of women and men held in bondage for three centuries, and from every tree hangs those murdered by our American monstrosity. That so many Americans willfully turn away from this—the Faustian bargain that demands acquiescence—speaks not to the absence of haunting; to the contrary, it speaks of how we live among the possessed still, a nation of demoniacs. William Faulkner’s observation in Requiem for a Nun that "The past is never dead. It's not even past" isn't any less accurate for being so omnipresent. No author conveyed the sheer depth and extent of American haunting quite like Toni Morrison, who for all that she accomplished must also be categorized among the greatest authors of ghost stories. To ascribe such a genre as that to a novel like Morrison's Beloved is to acknowledge that the most accurate depictions of our national trauma have to be horror stories if they're to tell the truth. "Anything dead coming back to life hurts"—there's both wisdom and warning in Morrison's adage. Beloved's plot is as chilling as an autumnal wind off of the Ohio River, the story of the former enslaved woman Sethe whose Cincinnati home is haunted by the ghost of her murdered child, sacrificed in the years before the Civil War to prevent her being returned to bondage in Kentucky. Canonical literature and mythology have explored the cruel incomprehension of infanticide—think of Euripides’s Medea—but Sethe's not irrational desire to send her "babies where they would be safe" is why Beloved's tragedy is so difficult to contemplate. When a mysterious young woman named Beloved arrives, Sethe becomes convinced that the girl is the spirit of her murdered child. Ann Hostetler, in her essay from the collection Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning, writes that Beloved's ghost "was disconcerting to many readers who expected some form of social or historical realism as they encountered the book for the first time." She argues, however, that the "representation of history as the return of the repressed…is also a modernist strategy," whereby "loss, betrayal, and trauma is something that must be exorcized from the psyche before healing can take place." Just because we might believe ourselves to be done with ghosts doesn't mean that ghosts are done with us. Phantoms so often function as the allegorical because whether or not specters are real, haunting very much is. We're haunted by the past, we're haunted by trauma, we're haunted by history. "This is not a story to pass on," Morrison writes, but she understands better than anyone that we can't help but pass it on. Historical trauma is more occluded in Stephen King’s The Shining, though that hasn't stopped exegetes from interpreting the novel about homicide in an off-season Colorado resort as being concerned with the dispossession of Native American, particularly in the version of the story as rendered by director Stanley Kubrick. The Overlook Hotel is built upon a Native American burial ground, Navajo and Apache wall hangings are scattered throughout the resort. Such conjectures about The Shining are explored with delighted aplomb in director Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237 (named after the most haunted place in the Overlook), but as a literary critical question, there's much that's problematic in asking what any given novel, or poem, or movie is actually about; an analysis is on much firmer ground when we're concerned with how a text works (a notably different issue).  So, without discounting the hypothesis that The Shining is concerned with the genocide of indigenous Americans, the narrative itself tells a more straightforward story of haunting, as a bevy of spirits drive blocked, recovering alcoholic writer and aspiring family destroyer Jack Torrance insane. Kubrick's adaptation is iconic—Jack Nicholson as Torrance (with whom he shares a first name) breaking through a door with an axe; his son, young Danny Torrance, escaping through a nightmarish, frozen hedge-maze of topiary animals; the crone in room 237 coming out of the bathtub; the blood pouring from the elevators; the ghostly roaring '20s speakeasy with its chilling bartender, and whatever the man in the boar costume was. Also, the twins. [millions_member] Still, it could be observed that the only substantiated supernatural phenomenon is the titular "Shining" that afflicts both Danny and the Overlook's gentle caretaker, Dick Halloran. "A lot of folks, they got a little bit of shine to them," Dick explains. "They don't even know it. But they always seem to show up with flowers when their wives are feelin blue with the monthlies, they do good on school tests they don't even study for, they got a good idea how people are feelin as soon as they walk into a room." As hyper-empathy, the shining makes it possible that Danny is merely privy to a variety of psychotic breaks his father is having rather than those visions being actually real. While Jack descends further and further into madness, the status of the spectral beings' existence is ambiguous (a point not everyone agrees on, however). It's been noted that in the film, the appearance of a ghost is always accompanied by that of a mirror, so that The Shining’s hauntings are really manifestations of Jack's fractured psyche. Narrowly violating my own warning concerning the question of "about," I'll note how much of The Shining is concerned with Jack's alcoholism, the ghostly bartender a psychic avatar of all that the writer has refused to face. Not just one of the greatest ghost stories of the 20th century, The Shining is also one of the great novels of addiction, an exploration of how we can be possessed by own deficiencies. Mirrors can be just as haunted as houses. Notably, when King wrote The Shining, he was in the midst of his own full-blown alcoholism, so strung out he barely remembers writing doorstopper novels (he's now been sober for more than 30 years). As he notes in The Shining, "We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives."    If Hamlet, A Christmas Carol, Beloved, and The Shining report on apparitions, then there are novels, plays, and poems that are imagined by their creators as themselves being chambers haunted by something in between life and death. Such a conceit offers an even more clear-eyed assessment of what's so unsettling about literature—this medium, this force, this power—capable of affecting what we think, and see, and say as if we ourselves were possessed. As a trope, haunted books literalize a profound truth about the written word, and uneasily push us towards acknowledging the innate spookiness of language, where the simplest of declarations is synonymous with incantation. Richard Chambers’s collection of short stories The King in Yellow conjures one of the most terrifying examples of a haunted text, wherein an imaginary play that shares the title of the book is capable of driving its audience to pure madness. "Strange is the night where the black stars rise, /And strange moons circle through the skies," reads verse from the play; innocuous, if eerie, though it's in the subtlety that the demons get you. Chambers would go on to influence H.P. Lovecraft, who conceived of his own haunted book in the form of the celebrated grimoire The Necronomicon, which he explains was "Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaa in Yemen, who was said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D.," and who rendered into his secret book the dark knowledge of the elder gods who were responsible for his being "seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses." Despite the Necronomicon’s fictionality, there are a multitude of occultists who've claimed over the years that Lovecraft's haunted volume is based in reality (you can buy said books online). Then there are the works themselves which are haunted. Shakespeare's Macbeth is the most notorious example, its themes of witchcraft long lending it an infernal air, with superstitious directors and actors calling it the "Scottish play" in lieu of its actual title, lest some of the spells within bring ruin to a production. Similar rumors dog Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe and his play Doctor Faustus, with a tradition holding that the incantations offered upon the stage summoned actual demons. With less notoriety, the tradition of "book curses" was a full-proof way to guard against the theft of the written word—a practice that dates back as far as the Babylonians, but that reached its apogee during the Middle Ages, when scribes would affix to manuscript colophons warnings about what should befall an unscrupulous thief. "Whoever steals this Book of Prayer/May he be ripped apart by swine, /His heart splintered, this I swear, /And his body dragged along the Rhine," writes Simon Vostre in his 1502 Book of Hours. To curse a book is perhaps different than a stereotypical haunting, yet both of these phenomenon, not-of-this-world as they are, assume disembodied consciousness as manifest among otherwise inert matter; the curse is a way of imbuing yourself and your influence beyond your demise. It's to make yourself a ghost, and it worked in leaving those books complete. "If you ripped out a page, you were going to die in agony. You didn't want to take the chance," Marc Drogin dryly notes in Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses. [millions_email] Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page; Shakespeare can't hear us, but we can still hear him (and don't ghosts wander through those estate houses upon the moors unaware that they've died?). Disenchantment has supposedly been our lot since Luther, or Newton, or Darwin chased the ghosts away, leaving behind this perfect mechanistic clockwork universe with no need for superfluous hauntings. Though like Hamlet's father returned from a purgatory that we're not supposed to believe in, we're unwilling to acknowledge the specters right in front of us. Of all of the forms of expression that humanity has worked with—painting, music, sculpture—literature is the eeriest. Poetry and fiction are both incantation and conjuration, the spinning of specters and the invoking of ghosts; it is very literally listening to somebody who isn't there, and might not have been for a long while. All writing is occult, because it's the creation of something from ether, and magic is simply a way of acknowledging that—a linguistic practice, an attitude, a critical method more than a body of spells. We should be disquieted by literature; we should be unnerved. Most of all, we should be moved by the sheer incandescent amazement that such a thing as fiction, and poetry, and performance are real. Every single volume upon the shelves of Drown, every book in an office, every thumbed and underlined play sitting on a desk, is more haunted than that building. Reader, if you seek enchantments, turn to any printed page. If you look for a ghost, hear my voice in your own head. Bonus Link:—Binding the Ghost: On the Physicality of Literature Image Credit: Flickr/Kevin Dooley