The Legend of Pradeep Mathew: A Novel

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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview

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With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them. —Sophia Stewart, editor October Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F] What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico. Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF] What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans  the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage. Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F] What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway. Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF] What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel. Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F] What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy. Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F] What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles. Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF] What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style. Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F] What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything. Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS The Great When by Alan Moore [F] What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it. Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF] What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians. Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF] What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy. Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F] What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English. Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F] What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family. Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF] What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences. Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F] What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers. Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF] What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence. Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF] What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy, Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F] What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel. Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF] What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion. Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F] What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut. Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF] What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath. Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F] What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language. Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF] What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare. Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF] What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet. Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF] What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way. Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF] What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening. Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF] What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description. Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF] What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager. Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F] What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy. Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF] What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem). Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F] What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village. Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF] What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee. Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF] What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance. Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF] What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years? Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB [millions_email] The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF] What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al. Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS Salvage by Dionne Brand  What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return. Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS Masquerade by Mike Fu [F] What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend. Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS November The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F] What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler. Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F] What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982. Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF] What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more. Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F] What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan. Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF] What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu. Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF] What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture. Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F] What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy. Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F] What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues. Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F] What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss. Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F] What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem. Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF] What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century. Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time. Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF] What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic. Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF] What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music. Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF] What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners. Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F] What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery. Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF] What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life. Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F] What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide. Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF] What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site. Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF Cher by Cher [NF] What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it. Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F] What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself. Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction.  —DF American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF] What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my! Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF] What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control. Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS December Rental House by Weike Wang [F] What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship. Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem. Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F] What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop. Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]  What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis. Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F] What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media. Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F] What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse. Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF] What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt. Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF] What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S. Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F] What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle. Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F] What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel. Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F] What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories. Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F] What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them. Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com. [millions_email]

A Year in Reading: Elizabeth Minkel

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My year in reading has been a lesson in letting go. It began with the physical: when my apartment building was sold in January, I began a series of culls of my unwieldy book collection, of a set of shelves I’d so carefully organized when I moved in, now obscured by random stacks of cheap paperbacks, uncorrected proofs, impulse purchases, unwanted offerings from friends -- so many books I’d never read, would never read, and simply couldn’t bring myself to pack up and unpack again somewhere else. I’ve always tended towards nesting and collecting -- this is the kindest possible way to describe my perpetual state of clutter -- but for once, I did it, discarding without mercy, hauling big bags of books into the office and depositing them on our communal bench for the next unsuspecting hoarder. I found a new apartment, and I swore I’d do the same for all the other unwieldy piles of things in my life before moving day arrived, but in the end, I never did. They were unceremoniously dumped into boxes and trucked a few exits down the BQE, then shoved into closets and corners; I have yet to fully finish unpacking them all. But there was more to the great book giveaway than simple space: I have been slowly learning to let go of books on another level -- something less tangible, I guess, maybe intellectual, or emotional, or spiritual. I am learning (just now!) to shed the guilt that keeps me turning the pages of books I honestly cannot stand; I am working to tell the difference between a book that is worth the struggle and a book that simply isn’t for me. This is, I suppose, all part of growing older: establishing and developing taste, learning to define and hone it, and being careful not to let your mind narrow -- or to snap shut -- in the process. And even as I joined this site as a staff writer a few months back, I was busy practicing reading books not for work, brushing off a whole different subsection of guilt, where I read classics, or books that came out three years ago, or something trashy, or novels I’ve come back to more times than seems healthy, and that was all OK, because, after all, there was a reason I’d become an English major in the first place. But here, at the end of all this, I’m left with an incredibly scattered year in reading -- I’m scratching my head and looking back at the last 11 months and wondering what the hell I was thinking through all of this. In the spring, I took a course in literary theory, filling in a gap in my undergraduate education, I thought, which meant rereading Frankenstein and The Tempest and then sighing a lot through Jacques Derrida & Co. before picking my own book -- A Passage to India -- for the final paper. It was my third time around, and I found it so different to when I read it last -- five years ago -- that it was kind of astounding. Who knew there was so much nuance! (Most people.) When I later revisited Netherland, for an essay on cricket, my memory of it held up better. I read Cloud Atlas sitting at a sidewalk café, and marveled at the number of people who stopped in their tracks to talk to me about it. There was some great new stuff -- Adam Wilson’s Flatscreen, for one, around which I built an argument about modern-day slacker literature for my first Millions piece of the year. There was some not-so-great new stuff -- much of that gave me the chance to practice the whole “putting down and not feeling guilty” thing. It mostly felt like I was reading a bunch of the not-particularly-new-but-largely-wonderful, like John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, followed by his earlier Blood Horses, part history, part mythology, part memoir, meandering and powerfully direct all at once. There was something slowly intoxicating about English, August, by Upamanyu Chatterjee, which I picked up for the aforementioned slacker lit piece and with which I easily fell in love. And then there was my favorite book this year, hands-down -- Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, published elsewhere as Chinaman, a reference to the left-armed bowl for which Mathew, the elusive cricketer at the heart of the story, is known. It’s the sort of book that turns you into an evangelist, in an almost embarrassing way, like, reaching into your purse to wave a copy in peoples’ faces when someone casually mentions, “I hear you’re writing about cricket?” But even as books come and go, loosened and removed from the physical and metaphorical shelves, the ones that stay get stickier, and I’ve got a very sticky shelf full of the collected works of Stephen Fry. I started the year with Fry’s new memoir, The Fry Chronicles, which I enjoyed, though not nearly as much as the first installment, Moab Is My Washpot. When he came to America to promote it, I waited for hours to ask him to sign a copy of his first book, The Liar, which I have read approximately one million times. As I handed him the world’s crappiest, most yellowed paperback, dog-eared and spine heavily creased, already shamefully beat-up probably a decade before I paid £3 for it at that permanent used book sale under the Waterloo Bridge, I blurted out how many times I’d read it and how much I loved it. He looked utterly exhausted, but he smiled brightly as he signed the title page, exclaiming, “Oh, well, thank you!” More from A Year in Reading 2012 Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? 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Wickets and Wonders: Cricket’s Rich Literary Vein

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1. What makes a sport a good subject for a novel? On American shelves, baseball is king: it often feels disproportionately represented in literature, especially with football and basketball taking up so much space in the cultural landscape. (Not to mention car racing, the most-watched sport in the country—though I’m not clamoring for that Great American NASCAR Novel just yet.) But books and baseball feel like an easy fit: after all, the sport has essentially fictionalized its own history, creating a big, century-long narrative that often serves to whip up equal parts nostalgia and excitement for the modern game. It seems that the most successful sports novels are those that can exist within these big narratives, regardless of the relative popularity of the sport: horse racing—a dying industry propped up by its own history—sits at one end of the spectrum, while soccer—living, breathing, and still rapidly growing—sits at the other, but great novels have been written about both. It’s not particularly surprising, then, that great novels have been written about cricket. Cricket fans hate lazy comparisons to baseball, but the literary analogy is an apt one here: if baseball is America, then cricket is—or rather, was—England. From Dickens (the All-Muggleton versus Dingely Dell match, in The Pickwick Papers) to P. G. Wodehouse (who played amongst remarkably impressive literary company on an XI that sometimes included Arthur Conan Doyle, J. M. Barrie, A. A. Milne, G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, and just about every other late Victorian writer who went by his first two initials), cricket served as a means to celebrate—or criticize—something intrinsically English: a game fashioned in the image of a nation. British culture has moved on in the intervening years; these days, soccer is clearly the ruling game. Cricket now belongs to the nations of the Commonwealth: the sport has huge international appeal and is dominated by the former colonies of the British Empire, from the Indian subcontinent to the West Indies to southern Africa to Oceania. The literary history of cricket, in turn, is a lesson in colonialism and post-colonialism. Cricket enthusiasts began building the sport’s narrative in the Victorian era—they wanted it to represent the idea of a near-fictional England, with an emphasis on the rural and the ancient, a construction that they exported to the farthest reaches of the British Empire. The sport was—and still is—imbued with a deep sense of morality. In 1909, Ford Madox Ford wrote, “‘playing cricket’ is synonymous with pursuing honourable courses.” "Not cricket" was code for unsportsmanlike and ungracious conduct; abroad, the same phrase evoked a sense of disorder that the colonizing British felt the need to conquer and set right, however misguided (and extraordinarily harmful) those impulses may have been. As cricket circumnavigated the globe, its narrative began to splinter and grow in different ways, but the idea of cricket as a gentlemen’s game remained. By the mid-twentieth century, cricket was being used as a metaphor and an argument for self-rule in the colonies. Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary, equal parts memoir and treatise, is politics by cricket—and considered one of the greatest sports books of all time. In the twenty-first century, these legacies remain. We’re left with two wonderful post-colonial novels in which cricket plays a central role: Joseph O’Neill’s 2008 critical darling, Netherland, and Shehan Karunatilaka’s extraordinary Chinaman, published that same year in Sri Lanka and the winner of this year’s Commonwealth Book Prize. It was released this spring in the U.S., re-titled The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. Reading these books side by side, you see more differences than similarities: old world versus new, and old styles versus new, as well, the occasionally stifling “lyrical Realism,” to borrow Zadie Smith’s critique of Netherland, versus the beautifully erratic—Michael Ondaatje rightly said that Pradeep Mathew was “a crazy ambidextrous delight.” Stylistically, structurally, and thematically, Netherland and Pradeep Mathew are wildly divergent. But the story of cricket is embedded deeply in both narratives, along with the code of ethics that rules the sport, however constructed those ideas might be. To read these novels as “cricket books” is to attempt to understand the story of cricket; without that shared narrative, we’d be left with a pair of books about lonely guys who can barely handle the reins of their own lives. 2. Cricket’s exact origins are somewhat contentious, but the first recorded matches of the game as we recognize it today took place in England in the mid-1500s. Two centuries later, it was the national sport. The game was considered a “rough” one then, known for its violence and played for large sums of money, which invariably attracted the sort of spectator looking to turn a quick profit. By the nineteenth century, cricket had evolved into a deeply classist affair: “gentlemen,” amateurs mostly from the upper classes who learned to play in public schools, were pitted against “players,” professionals mostly from the lower classes. Gentlemen were widely known for batting, and the best among them were celebrated for their elegance and their economy of movement; players, meanwhile, were the workhorses, saddled with the less-glamorous and more physical task of bowling. (A woman was rumored to have invented the overarm bowl—her hoopskirt got in the way of overhand tosses—because in mixed-gender games, men would always bat, while women would always bowl. In reality, the overarm bowl was invented by a man, but the stratified imagery remains.) In the colonies, as the British taught the game to their new subjects, colonists would inevitably be cast in the role of players, bowling to their batting colonizers. For a comprehensive history of cricket and literature, it seems best to start with Anthony Bateman’s Cricket, Literature and Culture, published in 2009. It’s probably one of the most readable and lively academic books I’ve ever come across. Bateman is concerned with the “literaturization” of cricket, the process by which written material fed into and influenced changing perceptions—and eventually, the institutionalization—of cricket over the past two centuries. To introduce links between the sport and literature, there’s Benny Green, a cricket historian: “Not only does cricket, more than any other game, inspire the urge to literary expression; it is almost as though the game itself would not exist at all until written about.” Bateman begins with the Reverend James Pycroft and his wildly popular 1851 book The Cricket Field, which celebrated what would later be known as “Muscular Christianity”—“a doctrine that saw physical weakness as evidence of spiritual shortcomings against which Christian faith, clean living, self-discipline and exercise in the form of team sports was the only cure.” Bateman later describes the book as “overtly xenophobic”: Pycroft wrote, “Hence it has come to pass that, wherever her Majesty’s servants have ‘carried their victorious arms’ and legs, wind and weather permitting, cricket has been played. Still the game is essentially Anglo-Saxon. Foreigners have rarely, very rarely, imitated us.” As cricket evolved from a rough folk game to the sport of public schoolboys and gentlemen batsmen, it began to take on the pastoral and nostalgic overtones that it carries to this day (though it was celebrated in the Victorian era, in the twenty-first century, this sort of stuff isn’t usually seen as positive—with its white sweater vests and seemingly sleepy pace, cricket often feels anachronistic and stuffy to outsiders). But more importantly than all of that, it was an English game—the same celebration of the pastoral as something deeply English was happening across the country, in music, art, and popular literature. Cricket was well suited for the task. Neville Cardus, one of the most celebrated cricket writers of the twentieth century, wrote that “cricket more than any other game is inclined toward sentimentalism and cant.” Cricketing idealism carried the British upper classes blithely into the First World War—“When the sons of old England are all driven from their native land by foreign foes, then—and not till then—will the bat, the ball, and the wicket be laid aside and forgotten,” wrote Nicholas Wanostrocht half a century prior—and nostalgia for the pre-war days in the twenties and thirties featured a great deal of wistful cricket talk: the long, slow afternoons on the pitches of some fantasy Edwardian England stood in for the relative innocence that was decimated by the war. Far from these mythical fields, cricket was an integral part of the expansion of the British Empire. Bateman writes that the spread of the sport was “often informal, uneven and geographically specific…not part of a straightforward, centrally controlled and consciously executed ‘civilising mission’.” Cecil Headlam (whose racism Bateman later describes as “quite staggering but casually-expressed”) summed up the general trajectory of the invading Britons: “First the hunter, the missionary, and the merchant, next the soldier and the politician, and then the cricketer—that is the history of British colonisation. And of these civilising influences the last may, perhaps, be said to do least harm.” On the surface, there was some truth to that—colonists were being taught a sport, not converted or taxed or conscripted—but these test matches arrived with a rigid ideas about race and class: colonists were relegated to perpetual bowling slots, and when rules were misunderstood or their play was unorthodox or "not cricket", colonizers would chalk it up to racial inferiority, the idea that no non- (white) Englishman could ever master the game. But modernity arrived, and before long, white and non-white colonists alike were sending their best players for tours of England—and the English began to lose. (The 1932 Bodyline affair, in which the English, tired of losing to Australia, resorted to some largely "not cricket" tactics to take down Australian great Donald Bradman, is still known as one of the most infamous and important events in the sport’s history.) It was under the changing landscape of international cricket that C.L.R. James emerged. “Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it,” he wrote in Beyond a Boundary, published in 1963. “When I did turn to politics, I did not have too much to learn.” Bateman writes that James works within the tradition of English cricket writing—“part of a broader discourse of Englishness that functioned…[by] rendering culture no longer a construct to be fought over”—and turns that tradition on its head, arguing for Caribbean sovereignty within England’s own prescribed set of terms. This echoed throughout all cricket-loving nations in the decades that followed: the former colonists took cricket and expropriated it for themselves, though in the process, they overlaid their own cultural concerns and political conflicts on the game. In Netherland, we find a mix of cricket refugees, Commonwealth immigrants exiled in cricket-averse New York City, navigating the politics of America while trying to uphold the ideals of the sport. And in Pradeep Mathew, all of Sri Lankan politics are wrapped up in all of Sri Lankan cricket, played under the thumb of a decades-long civil war—one in which the eponymous cricketer has inevitably gotten tangled. 3. To most Americans, there is something inexplicably foreign about cricket. On the surface, it is pretty similar to baseball, at least compared to just about any other sport: bats and balls and runs and innings—like baseball, cricket is heaven for statisticians. But perhaps the similarities throw us off: we watch a few minutes, expecting it to be perfectly analogous and comprehensible, and are irreparably jarred by the differences. (The funniest example of our perceptions of cricket might be a sketch that, despite coming from the Dutch comedy show “Jiskefet”, is entitled “What playing cricket looks like to Americans” on YouTube, and involves a giant chessboard, a freestanding set of swinging doors, and commentary full of gibberish.) Halfway through the nineteenth century, baseball and cricket were on equal footing here—if anything, cricket was the more popular of the two—but during and after the Civil War, baseball’s “national pastime” narrative was constructed and spread. Baseball was supposedly more egalitarian—it could be played in any open space, rather than cricket’s proscribed pitches—and its promoters sold the game on a national level as a uniquely American sport. Cricket stayed local, largely in the big cities of the Northeast, and faded from the American consciousness. But when immigration laws were loosened in the sixties, members of the Commonwealth nations began to arrive, and cricket quietly came back to America. Today, an estimated 200,000 people play the sport in some organized way in the U.S., mostly in amateur leagues and casual games on weekends. It is within this slow cultural turn that we can locate Netherland, Joseph O’Neill’s 2008 novel which, according to the sticker affixed to my paperback copy, President Obama has described as both “fascinating” and “wonderful” (he turned to it when he was “sick enough of briefing books” in the spring of 2009). Netherland was a big hit: broad critical praise, prestigious awards, and a firm place in the pantheon of very-recent post-9/11 fiction—the subject is dealt with quietly but pervasively, a heavy undercurrent running through the entire anxiety-laden narrative. Irish-born O’Neill’s protagonist, Hans van den Broek, is a Dutch financial analyst living in New York City before and after September 11, trying to mend a disintegrating marriage and searching for a metaphorical and metaphysical place in both the city and the country. He finds the Staten Island Cricket Club, the oldest in America and an organization that is today largely frequented by these Commonwealth immigrants—Hans is the only white man on a team that is made up of Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and West Indians, “nominally, three Hindus, three Christians, a Sikh, and four Muslims.” On a foreigner’s map of New York City, these are growing but often largely invisible groups, relegated to enclaves at the far ends of subway lines: in the early pages of Netherland, Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian who is Hans’s closest friend through most of the book, makes an impassioned speech to this effect, which starts with the "not cricket" expression—he is discussing some poor behavior on the field prior to that evening’s game. He then draws some fairly unsubtle but potent metaphors about cricket and those who play it in America: "In this country, we’re nowhere. We’re a joke. Cricket? How funny. So we play as a matter of indulgence. And if we step out of line, believe me, this indulgence disappears. … What this means is, we have an extra responsibility to play this game right. We have to prove ourselves. We have to let our hosts see that these strange-looking guys are up to something worthwhile. I say ‘see.’ I don’t know why I use that word. Every summer the parks of this city are taken over by hundreds of cricketers but somehow nobody notices. Now that’s nothing new, for those of us who are black or brown. As for those who are not”—Chuck acknowledged my presence with a smile—“you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I say that I sometimes tell people, You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black." Chuck often speaks in big, sweeping metaphors. (Later, he tells Hans: “‘The noble bald eagle represents the spirit of freedom, living as it does in the boundless void of the sky.’ I turned to see whether he was joking. He wasn’t. From time to time, Chuck actually spoke like this.”) Playing cricket, living by cricket’s values, becomes a metaphor for quiet assimilation. In the first cricket scene, Hans describes the pitch on which they play, where the grass is never cut properly. On a traditionally kept pitch, with its trimmed grass, a skilled batsman will try to bank bouncing shots along the ground. In tall grasses, this is rendered impossible: “Consequently, in breach of the first rule of batting, the batsman is forced to smash the ball into the air…and batting is turned into a gamble.” Hans later realizes that he is going to have to change his batting style if he wants to play cricket in America, so to speak. But as the only person of privilege on the team—white, wealthy, Western—Hans consciously separates himself from his teammates. “But it was, I felt, different for them. They had grown up playing the game in floodlit Lahore car parks or in rough clearings in some West Indian countryside. They could, and did, modify their batting without spiritual upheaval. I could not.” Hans’s friendship with Chuck reorients that map of New York both physically and spiritually—traveling the long stretch of Coney Island Avenue, in South Brooklyn, or across Hillside Avenue, in the far reaches of Queens. Chuck pushes him forward, however slightly, towards action; Hans is the sort of passive and permissive character whose lack of movement becomes a plot point. But cricket remains an undercurrent, as the plot meanders: Chuck wants to start a cricket club in New York, to plow out an old Brooklyn airfield and open a cricket stadium, to reignite an American passion for the sport that died more than a century ago. He has other schemes, lots of schemes, and these are the least life threatening (we learn within the first pages of the book that he has turned up dead in the Gowanus Canal). But for Hans, cricket in America is a moral dilemma: “on the one hand, my sense of an innings as a chanceless progression of orthodox shots—impossible under local conditions—and, on the other hand, the indigenous notion of batting as a gamble of hitting out.” When he finally makes the leap, and smashes one out of the park, so to speak (only to be called out soon after): “And everything is suddenly clear, and I am at last naturalized.” 4. If Netherland is a book of cricketing outsiders, what does the sport look like from the inside, from the heart of the cricket-loving world? We can turn, then, to Sri Lanka: the narrator and hero of Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is a washed-up, alcoholic sports writer named W.G. Karunasera—Wiji to his Sri Lankan friends, “WeeGee” to the English ones, and Gamini to his long-suffering wife. He himself longs to be known by his initials only—“W.G. May not roll of the tongue, but I like how it sounds. Come W.G., let’s put a drink. W.G. at your service madam. I’m sorry, Mr. W.G., but we cannot refund your bet. Sadly, the only place my initials appear is where I place them myself.” Wiji is an extraordinarily charming narrator—and a suitably unreliable one. Cricket isn’t merely a metaphor here, as it is in Netherland, though it often serves as one: Wiji treats cricket as he does alcohol—his passion for both is painful and debilitating, and he cannot live without either. He doesn’t waste any time getting into the details of it, to both his amusement and the bewilderment of the uninitiated reader. From page 6, “Clean Bowled”: The simplest dismissal is when the bowler knocks over the batsman’s wickets. Mathew did this with most of his victims. He sent left-arm chinamen, googlies, armballs and darters through pads and feet. Here is a not-so-random sample of batsmen whose balls he dislodged. Border. Chappell. Crowe. Gatting. Gavaskar. Gower. Greenidge. Hadlee. Imran. Kapil. Lloyd. Miandad. You are shaking your head. You are closing the book and frowning at the cover. Rereading the blurb at the back. Wondering if a refund is out of the question. On the surface, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is about the search for Pradeep Sivanathan Mathew, a Sri Lankan cricketer who seems to have slipped from the record books, even though peoples’ vague memories and sketchy stories paint a portrait of one of the greatest and most mercurial players in Sri Lanka’s history. (The original title, Chinaman, refers to a common type of bowling style.) In the opening lines of the novel, another list: “Why, you ask, has no one heard of our nation’s greatest cricketer? Here, in no particular order. Politics, racism, power cuts, and plain bad luck. If you are unwilling to follow me on the next God-knows-how-many pages, re-read the last two sentences. They are as good a summary as I can give from this side of the bottle.” Politics, racism, power cuts—in a few words, the story of Sri Lankan cricket, and, in turn, Sri Lanka, unfurl: Mathew is Tamil, and, unrelated or not, seems to have made some shady deals. But the entirety of the novel takes place within the long, bloody stretch of the Sri Lankan Civil war, which began in 1983 and ended just three years ago. This book couldn’t exist without that context. Like C.L.R. James, this is politics by sport, though Karunatilaka often muddies these waters; the analogies aren’t nearly as cut and dry. Wiji is a poor detective, though what he lacks in focus and skill he makes up for in enthusiasm. To reduce this novel—either of these novels—to books “about cricket” is to take away from all the amazing things that Karunatilaka does here: the entire book, with its brief episodes, lists, and anecdotes, is sleight-of-hand, but the sort that leaves you feeling gratified in the end, rather than cheated. But to say that Pradeep Mathew isn’t “about cricket” is also a gross misrepresentation: there are diagrams, photographs, statistics, random asides, and all the rules of the sport in what seems like the completely wrong order, so that a cricket novice might close the back cover and say, “I still don’t really understand how this game is basically played.” It’s as though your drunk uncle set out to explain something to you, giving you all the wrong information at the wrong time and getting far too excited about minor details or non-sequiturs—which, I suppose, is exactly what’s happening here. In Pradeep Mathew we come at the sport from the most unusual angles, but luckily, our understanding of the game deepens in turn. Running beneath all of this is politics. Wiji sees it, acknowledges it—in some ways, he’s internalized it long ago—but he stops every so often to lay it out, and to explain some basic things to a non-Sri Lankan, which is helpful to a Western reader trying to sort out cultural differences from cricket talk. Like when Karunatilaka revisits the rebel South African tours: in the eighties, South Africa was banned from international cricket as a result of Apartheid, but test matches were still organized and staged by South Africa, luring players desperate for money and able to overlook any political or moral misgivings. Or when he’s talking with his English friend, Jonny, about the British ability to set aside conflicts of nationality and culture on the sporting field, something, he says, Sri Lankans didn’t manage to inherit: Sri Lanka is filled with many shades of brown…It is not so much the colours as the ideas that these colours spawn that I find objectionable. The united super-race of Britons may have started it when they, among other things, segregated our cricket clubs. Though it is perhaps unfair and inaccurate to lay the blame for our racial problems on the streets of Downing or the palaces of Buckingham. Despite the existence of a Sinhalese Sports Club, a Tamil Union, a Moors SC, a Burgher Recreation Club and a perversely christened Nondescripts Cricket Club, cricket as a sport refuses to be segregated. Clubs grab talent regardless of vowels or consonants or moustaches or chalk. So much for divide and conquer. In the end, at the heart of The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is a deep, unwavering love for cricket—and just as we inevitably fall for the story’s narrator, we come to love the sport itself, despite its history or its faults. In a world where facts and statistics are painstakingly recorded and often celebrated, we find just as much joy—maybe more—in something less tangible: the idea of the game, and the people devoted to it. Early on, Karunatilaka snags us easily, seducing even the most skeptical reader. From “Sales Pitch,” we’re hooked: If you’ve never seen a cricket match; if you have and it has made you snore; if you can’t understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you.   Image via Wikimedia Commons