The Martian: A Novel

New Price: $18.26
Used Price: $3.79

Mentioned in:

Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

-
January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

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.”   [millions_ad] 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.