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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
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
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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.
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Island Time: On the Poetics of the Isle
“The isle is full of noises, /Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.”—Caliban in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610)
“Is our island a prison or a hermitage?”—Miranda in Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969)
In 1810 a struggling whaler by the name of Jonathan Lambert, “late of Salem…and citizen thereof,” set out for torrid waters. By December of 1811, Lambert and his crew of three alighted upon an unpopulated volcanic island in the south Atlantic that Portuguese navigators had christened Ilha de Tristão da Cunha three centuries before. Lambert, in a spirit of boot-strapping individualism, declared himself to be king. A solitary monarchy, this Massachusettsian and his three subjects on that rocky shoal of penguins and guano. Still, Lambert exhibited utopian panache, not just in spite of such remoteness, but because of it. Contrary to the British maritime charts that listed the archipelago as “Tristan de Cunha,” the American renamed them a far more paradisiacal “Islands of Refreshment.”
This whaler’s small kingdom promised not just refreshment from Lambert’s old life, where he explained that “embarrassments…have hitherto constantly attended me,” but from the affairs of all people. Lambert’s Islands of Refreshment were, and are, the most distant habitation on the planet, laying 2,166 miles from the Falkland Islands, 1,511 miles from Cape Town, South Africa, and 1,343 miles from St. Helena where lonely Napoleon Bonaparte would soon expire. And for the whaler’s sake, Lambert’s new home was 10,649 miles from Salem, Massachusetts.
Parliamentary records quote Lambert as claiming that he had “the desire
and determination of preparing myself and family a home where I can enjoy
life.” Here on the Islands of Refreshment, where he subsisted on the greasy
blubber of elephant seals, Lambert prayed that he would be “removed beyond the
reach of chicanery and ordinary misfortune.” As it was, all utopias are deigned
to fail sooner or later, and ordinary misfortune was precisely what would end
Lambert’s life, the experienced sailor drowning five months after arriving,
such final regicide belonging to the sea.
Four years after Lambert’s drowning, the British navy claimed the Islands of Refreshment for king, England, and St. George, hoping to prevent the use of the archipelago by either the Americans (whose ships trolled those waters during the War of 1812) or any French who wished to launch a rescue mission for their imprisoned emperor those 1,343 miles north. And as Tristan de Cunha was folded into that realm, so it remains, now administered by the office of the British Overseas Territory, joining slightly more than a dozen colonies from Anguilla to Turks and Caicos that constitute all that remain of the empire upon which it was said that the sun would never set. As of 2019, Lambert’s ill-fated utopia remains the most solitary land mass on Earth, some 250 hearty souls in the capital of Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas, as far from every other human as is possible on the surface of the planet, and a potent reminder of the meaning of islands. An island, you see, has a certain meaning. An island makes particular demands.
In trying to derive a metaphysics of the island—a poetics of the isle—few square miles are as representative as Tristan de Cunha. A general theory could be derived from Lambert’s example, for failure though he may have been, he was a sort of Prospero and Robinson Crusoe tied into one. Maybe more than either, Lambert’s project resembles that of Henry Neville’s strange 1668 utopian fantasy The Isle of Pines. Neville’s arcadian pamphlet was a fabulist account by a fictional Dutch sailor who comes upon an isle that had been settled by an English castaway named George Pine and four women from each corner of the world, whose progeny populate that isle three generations later.
Lambert drowned before he had opportunity to be a George Pine for the Islands of Refreshment, but the one survivor of his original quartet, at Italian named Tommaso Corri, has descendants among the populace of Tristan de Cunha today. Neville’s account is significantly more ribald than what we know of Tristan de Cunha’s peopling. The Isle of Pines is a psychosexual mine-field ripe for Freudian analysis, where the phallic anagram of Pine’s name makes clear the pornographic elements involved in a narrative of a castaway kept company not by Friday, but by four women. Pine’s account includes such exposition as “Idleness and Fulness of every thing begot in me a desire of enjoing the women…I had perswaded the two Maids to let me lie with them, which I did at first in private, but after, custome taking away shame (there being none but us) we did it more openly, as our Lusts gave us liberty.”
Imaginary islands often present colonial fantasy, an isolated Eden ready for exploitation by an almost always male character, where the morality of home can be shuffled off, while those whose home has been violated are not even given the dignity of names. Such is in keeping with the pastoral origins of the island-narrative, the myth that such locations are places outside of time and space, simultaneously remote and yet connected by the ocean to every other point on the globe. This is the metaphysics of the island, for they may be sun-dappled, palm-tree-lined, blue-water isles many fathoms from “civilization,” but by virtue of the ocean current they are connected to every other location that sits on a coast. By dint of that paradoxical property, islands are almost always the geographic feature with which utopias are associated, for paradise is not paradise if it’s easily accessible.
The Isle of Pines is an example of the utopian genre that flourished in early modern England, and includes Francis Bacon’s 1627 science fiction novel New Atlantis and James Harrington’s 1656 The Commonwealth of Oceana. Writers popularized the idea of the New World island; authors like Richard Hakluyt in his 1600 Principle Navigations and Samuel Purchas in his 1614 Purchas, his Pilgrimage collated the fantastic accounts of Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, Thomas Harriot, and Martin Frobisher, even while those compilers rarely ventured off another island called Britain. Renaissance authors were fixated not on river or lake, isthmus or peninsula, but on islands. Not even the ocean itself held quite as much allure. “The Island” was that era’s geographic feature par excellence.
Islands have of course been the stuff of fantasy since Homer sang tales of brave Ulysses imprisoned on Calliope’s erotic western isle, or Plato’s account of the sunken continent of Atlantis. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values explains that the “island seems to have a tenacious hold,” arguing that unlike continental seashores or tropical forests, islands played a small role in human evolution, and that rather their “importance lies in the imaginative realm.” But it was the accounts of the so-called “Age of Discovery” that endowed the geography of the island with a new significance, a simultaneous rediscovery and invention of the very idea of the island. We’re still indulging in that daydream.
Scholar Roland Greene explains in Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas that the island took on a new significance during the Renaissance, writing that the geographical feature often signified a “figurative way of delimiting a new reality in the process of being disclosed, something between a fiction and an entire world.” Knowledge of islands obviously existed before 1492, and earlier stories about them even had some of the same fantastic associations, as indicated in the aforementioned examples. But unlike the Polynesians who were adept navigators, Europeans had to anxiously hug the coasts for centuries. Improvements in Renaissance technology finally allowed sailors to venture into the open ocean, and in many ways the awareness that on the other side of the sea was a different continent meant the discovery of something that people had travelled on for millennia—the Atlantic Ocean. And the discovery of that ocean invested the remote and yet interconnected island with a glowing significance.
It’s not a coincidence that Thomas More’s Utopia was printed in 1516 only 14 years after the navigator Amerigo Vespucci argued that the islands off the coast of Asia which Christopher Columbus had “discovered” were continents in their own right—though in many ways the Americas are islands off the coast of Asia, even if the scale and distance are larger than might have been assumed. More’s account of an imagined perfect society as narrated by yet another Dutch sailor has occasioned five centuries of disagreement on how the tract should be read, but whether in earnest or in jest, Utopia’s American location and its status as an island “two hundred miles broad” that holds “great convenience for mutual commerce” is not incidental. If the sandy, sunny island took on new import, it’s because the isolated hermitage of the isle made the perfections of utopia seem possible.
So powerful was More’s tract that later colonists would pilfer his utopian imagery, conflating real Caribbean isles with the future saint’s fiction. Such was the magic of what Tuan describes as the “fantasy of island Edens” that Ponce de Leon assumed a place as lovely as Florida must be an island, and for generations cartographers depicted California as such, as they “followed the tradition of identifying enchantment with insularity.” Utopias, paradises, or Edens have no place in a landlocked location. Tuan explains that the island “symbolizes a state of prelapsarian innocence and bliss, quarantined by the sea from the ills of the continent,” and that in the early modern era they signaled “make-believe and a place of withdrawal from high-pressured living on the continent.” Watch an advertisement from the Bahamian travel board and see if much has changed in that presentation since the 16th century, or spend a few days on a carefully manicured Caribbean beach in the midst of a cold and grey winter, and see if you don’t agree.
Such were the feelings for the crew of the Sea Venture bound for Jamestown in 1609, finding themselves blown by a hurricane onto the corrals off an isolated isle whose eerie nocturnal bird-calls had long spooked navigators, known to posterity as Bermuda. Historians Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic write that Bermuda was a “strange shore, a place long considered by sailors to be an enchanted ‘Isle of Devils’ infested with demons and monsters… a ghoulish graveyard.” During that sojourn, many of the Sea Venture’s crew came to a different conclusion, as Bermuda “turned out to be an Edenic land of perpetual spring and abundant food.”
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A gentleman named William Strachey, dilettante sonneteer and investor in both the Blackfriars Theater and the Virginia Company, would write that Bermuda’s environment was so ideal that it “caused many of them utterly to forget or desire ever to return…they lived in such plenty, peace, and ease.” Silvester Jourdain, in his 1610 A Discovery of the Bermudas, Otherwise Called the Isle of Devils, claimed that contrary to its reputation, this island was “the richest, healthfullest and pleasantest they ever saw.” Trouble in this paradise, as Strachey reported, for so pleasant was Bermuda that many of the shipwrecked sailors endeavored never to continue onto Virginia, for on the continent “nothing but wretchedness and labor must be expected, with many wants and churlish entreaty, there being neither that fish, flesh, nor fowl which here… at ease and pleasure might be enjoyed.”
The Virginia Company could of course not allow such intransigence, so while those 150 survivors made do on Bermuda’s strand for nine months, the threat of violence ensured that all the sailors would continue onto America after two new ships were constructed. For a pregnant year, the survivors of the Sea Venture sunned themselves on Atlantic white-sand beaches, nourished by the plentiful wild pigs, coconuts, and clean fresh-water streams, while in Jamestown the colonists resorted to cannibalism, having chosen to hand their agriculture over entirely to the cultivation of an addictive, deadly, and profitable narcotic called tobacco. When the Sea Venture’s crew arrived in Jamestown, including Pocahontas’s future husband, John Rolfe, they found a settlement reduced from more than 500 souls to fewer than 60, while the Bermudian vessel lost only two sailors whom history remembers as Carter and Waters, the pair so enraptured with this Eden that they absconded into its internal wilderness never to be seen again.
William Shakespeare’s sprite Ariel in The Tempest refers to the isle as the “still-vex’d Bermoothes,” and for a generation scholars have identified Strachey’s letter as source material for that play, the two men having potentially been drinking buddies at the famed Mermaid Tavern. Long has it been a theoretical point of contention as to if The Tempest could be thought of as Shakespeare’s “American play.” Excluding Strachey’s letter, the plot of this last play of Shakespeare's is arguably his only original one, and though geographic calculation places Prospero’s isle in the Mediterranean, his concerns are more colonial in an American sense, with Ariel and the ogre Caliban being unjustly exploited. The latter makes this clear when he intones that this “island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother/Which thou tak’st from me.” In a disturbing reflection of actual accounts, the working-class castaways Trinculo and Stephano (Is that you Carter and Waters?) conspire to exhibit Caliban in a human zoo after plying him with liquor.
If America has always been a sort of Faustian bargain, a fantasy of Eden purchased for the inconceivable price of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, then The Tempest offers an alternative history where imperialism is abandoned at the very moment that it rendered Paradise lost. As Faustian a figure as ever, the necromancer Prospero ends those revels with “As you from crimes would pardon’d be/Let your indulgences set me free.” And so, the Europeans return home, leaving the isle to Ariel and Caliban, its rightful inhabitants. Something unspeakably tragic, this dream of a parallel universe penned by Shakespeare, an investor in that very same Virginia Company. Shortly after The Tempest was first staged, Bermuda would be transformed from liberty to a place “of bondage, war, scarcity, and famine,” as Linebaugh and Rediker write. But even if such a terrestrial heaven was always the stuff of myth, in the play itself “something rich and strange” can endure, this place where “bones are coral made” and there are “pearls that were his eyes,” and were “Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.”
This is the island of Andrew Marvell’s 1653 poem “Bermudas,” an archipelago “In th’ocean’s bosom unespied,” until religious schismatics fleeing for liberty come “Unto an isle so long unknown, /And yet far kinder than our own.” In their “small boat,” the pilgrims land “on a grassy stage/Safe from the storm’s and prelates’ rage.” God has provided in these fortunate isles fowls and oranges, pomegranates, figs, melons, and apples. On Bermuda cedars are more plentiful than in Lebanon, and upon the beaches wash the perfumed delicacy of ambergris, the whale bile that Charles II supposedly consumed alongside his eggs. For these Englishmen, they sing a “holy and a cheerful note, /And all the way, to guide their chime, with falling oars they kept the time,” for Bermuda itself is a “temple, where to sound his name.” In Marvell’s imagination the islands are a place where the Fall itself has reversed, where the expulsion from Eden never happened, here on Bermuda where God “gave us this eternal spring/Which here enamels everything.”
While Strachey wrote of their nine-month vacation of indolence, sensuality, and pleasure, islands have also been feared and marveled at as sites of hardened endurance. If utopian literature sees the island as a hermitage, then its sister genre of the Robinsonade sees the isle as a prison, albeit one that can be overcome. That later genre draws its name, of course, from Daniel Defoe’s 1719 classic Robinson Crusoe. Greene notes that “shipwreck become a locus for the frustrations of conquest and trade,” and nowhere is that clearer than in Defoe’s book. The titular character remarks that “We never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.” In the fiery cauldron that is the desert island, we’re to understand that the hardship and isolation of Crusoe’s predicament will reveal to him (and us) what he actually is, and what he should be. Defoe concludes that the proper state of man should be defined by industry, imperialism, Puritanism, and an anal-retentive sense of organizing resources, time, and our very beliefs.
Robinson Crusoe was written when the relationship between travelogue and fiction was still porous; readers took the account of the sailor shipwrecked on an isle at the mouth of Venezuela’s Orinoco River as factual, but the character was always the invention of Defoe’s mind. Defoe’s novel, if not the first of that form, was certainly an early bestseller; so much so that Robinson Crusoe endures as an archetypal folktale, the narrative of the castaway and his servant Friday known by multitudes who’ve never read the book (and perhaps still don’t known that it was always a fiction). Living on in adaptation over the centuries, its influence is seen everywhere from the Robert Zemeckis film Cast Away, to the television series Lost and Gilligan’s Island. With what we’re to read as comfortable acclimation, Crusoe says that he “learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side.” Whether Crusoe is aware of that dark side or not, he very much promulgates a version of it, the castaway turning himself into a one-man colonial project, ethnically cleansing the island of its natives, basically enslaving “my man Friday” after converting him to Christianity, and exploiting the isle’s natural resources.
With more than a bit of Hibernian skepticism towards the whole endeavor, James Joyce claimed that Crusoe was the “true prototype of the British colonist” (and the Irishman knew something about British colonialism). Joyce sees the “whole Anglo-Saxon spirit in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity.” Something appropriate in the Robinsonade using the atomistic isolation of the island as a metaphor for the rugged individual, the lonely consumer, the lonelier capitalist. Crusoe spent three decades on his island, from 1651 to 1686, but unbeknownst to him, half-way during his seclusion the Second Anglo-Dutch War settled a few small issues of geography not very far from Crusoe’s natural anchorage. When that war ended, the English would trade their colony in Suriname, watered by the tributaries of the Orinoco, in exchange for an island many thousands of miles to the north called Manhattan. That colder bit of rock would be much more associated with capitalism and rugged individualism than even Crusoe’s.
Innumerable are the permutations of utopia’s hermitage and the prison of the Robinsonade. Consider the kingdoms of Jonathan Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels; the pseudonymous Unka Eliza Winkfield in 1767's The Female American, with its tiki idols talking through trickery; Johann David Wyss’s wholesome 1812 Swiss Family Robinson; Jules Verne’s fantastic 1874 The Mysterious Island; H.G Wells’s chilling 1896 The Island of Dr. Moreau; William Golding’s thin 1954 classic Lord of the Flies (which has terrified generations of middle school students); Scott O’Dell’s 1960 New Age Island of the Blue Dolphins; Yann Martel’s obscenely popular 2001 Life of Pi; and even Andy Weir’s 2012 technocratic science fiction novel The Martian. All are Robinsonades or utopias of a sort, even if sometimes the island must be a planet. Once you start noticing islands, they appear everywhere. An archipelago of imagined land masses stretching across the library stacks.
Which is to remember that islands may appear in the atlas of our canon, but actual islands existed long before we put words to describe them. There is the platonic island of the mind, but also the physical island of reality, and confusion between the two has ramifications for those breathing people who call the latter home. Both utopias and Robinsonades reflected and created colonial attitudes, and while it’s easy to get lost in the reverie of the imagined island, actual islanders have suffered upon our awakening. Island remoteness means that one person’s paradisiacal resort can be another person’s temperate prison. So much of the writing about islands is projection from those on the continent, but no true canon of the island can ignore those who actually live there, so that we can study “utopian literature,” but there is no literature from a real Utopia, rather we must also read poetry, prose, and drama from Jamaica and Haiti, Cuba and Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
We must orient ourselves to not just the imagined reveries of a Robinson Crusoe, but the actual words of Franz Fanon, C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Marlon James, Junot Diaz, Claude McKay, and Edwidge Danticat. Imagined islands can appear in the atlases of our minds, but real islands have populations of real people. An author who refused to let his audience forget that fact was the Martinique dramatist Aimé Césaire’s who, in his 1969 play Une Tempête, rewrote the cheery conclusion of Shakespeare’s play so as to fully confront the legacy of colonialism. If Shakespeare gave us a revision before the facts of imperialism, then Césaire forces us to understand that Prospero has never been fully willing to go home, and that for Caliban and Ariel happy endings are as fantastic as utopia. Yet Césaire’s characters soldiers on, a revolutionary Caliban reminding us of what justice looks like, for “I’m going to have the last word.”
What is the use then, of an island? We may read of Utopia, but we must not forget the violent histories of blood and sugar, plantations and coups, slavery and revolution. Yet we must not abandon “The Island” as an idea in our sweltering days of the Anthropocene, with Micronesia and the Maldives, the Seychelles and the Solomon Islands threatened by the warm lap of the rising ocean. In Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, the poet John Donne wrote that “No man is an island,” but viewed another way, everything is an island, not least of which this planet that we float upon. I’ve claimed that islands are defined by their parallel remoteness and interconnectedness, but even more than that, an island is a microcosm of the world, for the world is the biggest island on which life exists, a small land mass encircled by the infinite oceanic blackness of space.
As the astronomer Carl Sagan famously said in a 1994 address at Cornell University, “Our planet is a lonely speck… it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot.” On Christmas Eve of 1968, the astronaut William Anders took the first photograph of the entire planet as it rose over the dead surface of the dusty grey moon. In that photo we see all islands, all continents, all oceans subsumed into this isolated, solitary thing. Islands are castles of the imagination, and as thought got us into this ecological mess, so must it be thought that redeems us. Hermitage or prison? Can such an island ever be a utopia, or are we marooned upon its quickly flooding beaches?
Image credit: Unsplash/Benjamin Behre.
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