The New Testament: A Translation

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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]

The Beautiful Faraway: Why I’m Grateful for My Soviet Childhood

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At 10 I wanted to be an artist, practiced a hysterical form of Christianity, talked to trees, and turned a sunset at a local park into a visionary experience. My great-aunt lured me to Evangelical Christianity with the strangeness of Gospel stories where Jesus always ended up angry at his disciples’ failure to understand. I sympathized with being misunderstood, and latched on. Besides, Christianity was a forbidden fruit in Soviet Russia so I had to worship in secret. This was unnerving but also alluring. I was a breathless romantic who wanted to be surprised by a knight on a white horse. From the early ‘80s to the early ‘90s, my childhood was formed by the images, atmosphere, and allusiveness of Soviet songs. I grew up in an artistic family where emotions flew high. I was the kind of imaginative child who could spin an entire tale from an oblong stain on the kitchen table. But there’s more to it than that. My family was not always idealistic or romantic, especially not in New York in the early ‘90s when they were too busy looking for a job or navigating the Byzantine rules of the pluperfect in English. So I attribute at least half of my preteen sensibility to growing up on Soviet songs that embarked on flights of fancy, made an idol of hope, and regaled its young audiences with a strange perspective on time. Remembering my childhood now that I have a child of my own, I realize that it’s not so bad for childhood to be a land of illusion, ideological and otherwise. After all, “illusion” comes from illudere which means to “play with”—so every kind of illusion can become a playground for imagination. To harbor illusions is to hope, to dream, to construct imaginary landscapes and characters. But illusion does more than stimulate the imagination; it can also stimulate emotional development as the child dares to imagine a better existence or learn to face her fears. The earnestness with which they approached the pains of childhood, as well as the equally painful idea that childhood is bound to end—stayed with me through adulthood. Even now, I see the flood of irony in our culture as a certain anxiety about emotional engagement; funny that the Soviet songs’ simple lyrics seem more emotionally mature to me that a lot of mainstream fiction published in The New Yorker. These songs were also making me self-aware. While enveloping me in the fog of whimsy and illusion, Soviet songs also showed me how to notice of the work of mythmaking, the snares of narrative, the “ardor of art.” The songs taught me to dream while distrusting the hopefulness of dreams. Hopeful yet often uneasy about what’s to come, they made me interrogate my future—and my childhood—in ways that were revealing and even frightening. To cope with this ambivalence, I started making art. Perhaps the best way to harness illusions is by creating your own. 1. “The Winged Swing” The Soviet songs of my childhood were replete with images of clouds, the sky, or even flight.  “The Winged Swing” begins with a boy’s melodious voice over some shimmering piano chords and then is backed up by a lush children’s chorus along with some '80’s electronic percussion. This is the main song from the 1980 miniseries The Adventures of the Elektronic (about a robot boy posing as his human double) and it includes the following lyrics: The beginning of the April Snow in the park begins to thaw, And the jolly winged swing Is beginning to take off. Everything has been forgotten, Frozen heart inside the chest, Just the sky, the wind and gladness Will be awaiting us ahead! The winged swing is a pretty straightforward metaphor for something that takes you away from your troubles and literally brings you closer to “sky, wind, and gladness,” allowing you to come closer to the beautiful unknown. Weirdly, the swing also makes you painfully aware of the end of childhood: Childhood won't last forever, It will be over in the end, Kids will turn into grown men, Each will go his own way. But so far we are still children, We have time for growing yet, Just the sky, the wind and gladness Will be awaiting us ahead! This cultivated, somewhat maudlin nostalgia for childhood becomes even stranger when you consider that the robot singing the song about the swing is posing as an 11-year-old boy in a local Soviet school and that his audience—within the fictional framework of the film and outside of it—consists of other children. Why does the winged swing take us out of the painful present, make us realize we’re children, and move us towards the future? And what is Soviet about this whole set-up? Addressing the stars of Soviet literature at the Soviet Writers Congress in 1934, the Central Committee Secretary Andrei Zhdanov gave an important speech that codified Soviet aesthetics for decades to come. In this speech, he argued that Socialist Realism was to depict reality in its revolutionary development. (If writers didn’t conform to this aesthetic policy, they would be unpublished and shunned.) This demand is a contradiction in terms, and a fascinating one: it’s already difficult to depict “reality,” whatever we believe this reality to be, but what exactly is its “revolutionary development”? Zhdanov, Maxim Gorky, and others dictating Soviet aesthetic policy saw no contradiction since they saw the reality of the Soviet Union—its rapid industrialization and growth, as well as its high-ranking literacy—as being precisely in line with the goals of the 1917 October Revolution. So for Party officials, all art had to reflect the ways in which Soviet society followed revolutionary goals. But the way this policy trickled down to the producers of mass art and media was to cause a permanent confusion between past, present, and future. In children’s media, “revolutionary development” became simplified to a vision of the future that was immanent in the present but still had to be aspired to. Thus, the “winged swing” is a metaphor for a kind of faith—in the system, or in a better life—that will literally propel children to the future of “gladness.” They will leave aside both the troubles of the present and the realization that adulthood is inevitable. Paradoxically, what gives the winged swing momentum is the very nostalgia for the childhood from which it’s taking us away. This song impacted me precisely because of this mélange of sadness and hopefulness, vague and manufactured as it may be. As a child, I felt a certain nostalgia about endings. The end of summer, the season of our dacha with its many hours of shadow-dappled indolence spent making a long-legged man out of Play-Doh, watching the family of hedgehogs drink milk out of a saucer on the attic balcony and easing my phobia of the attic, practicing my TV-announcer skills on the pear trees in the orchard, watching the electric-green dragonfly drag its exotic body across the train platform. The end of an illness when I wouldn’t be pampered anymore. The end of a train ride, even. And hope, joy? There was always hope, a kind of banal hope, that it would all repeat, that it would all be as wonderful as before. The tension between this hopefulness and its counterpart, a sinister air of foreboding, an anxiety about what’s to come, is at the crux of the way the songs I listened to defined my Soviet childhood. 2. “May There Always Be Sunshine” The ambivalence of Soviet songs stemmed from their bittersweet treatment of childhood as a time of possibility but also of losses, present and future. The 2015 American Disney film Inside Out made headlines in the world of popular culture because it valorized sadness as the emotion that help the child protagonist come to terms with big changes in her life. But children’s media in the Soviet Union had been aware of this at least 35 years ago. As strange as it can sound, making a child nostalgic for her own childhood can be beneficial in forging self-awareness, specifically, the understanding that this period in her life is not permanent. Perhaps this self-inflicted nostalgia also doubled as a wink towards the childhood of the Soviet Union—the Russian Revolution, whose aims were betrayed at its inception. Some of the songs of my childhood pointed not towards the future but towards the eternal Now. The 1962 song “May There Always Be Sunshine!” was written by the famous children’s writer Korney Chukovsky, who claimed that the refrain was composed in 1928 by the four-year-old boy Kostya Barannikov. Written by a child, the song was about a child and performed by a child, and thus, seemed to give children agency. “May There Always Be Sunshine” juxtaposed a children’s choir with a march rhythm and a child solo singing the refrain. Translated into English, the song was adopted by Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie and became an anti-war anthem: “Bright blue the sky, Sun up on high - That was the little boy’s picture. He drew it for you, Wrote for you, too Just to make clear what he drew. Chorus (twice): May there always be sunshine, May there always be blue skies, May there always be mommy, May there always be me!” The song ends with “Down with all war!/ We want no more./ People stand up for you children. Sing everyone -/ Peace must be won,/ Dark clouds must not hide the sun.” A couple of years after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and a few years before its invasion of Czechoslovakia, it seems sentimental and downright disingenuous to associate the Soviet Union with peace. Yet singing about peace—even if such peace is a counterfactual—can become the first step to envisioning it as a viable possibility. Commenting on two impossibly “hopeful” texts, the late philosopher Richard Rorty bids us to “concentrate on the[ir] expressions of hope. We should read both [The New Testament and The Communist Manifesto] as inspirational documents, appeals to what Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature', rather than as accurate accounts of human history or of human destiny.” In other words, it’s not as important that The New Testament and The Communist Manifesto do not reflect humanity’s faults in a viable, realistic way; what’s more important is that they show us a different way to be. These documents are aspirational and idealistic; they are literally visionary in displacing the reality of the present moment with a dream of a better (more virtuous, more just) future. “May There Always Be Sunshine” also hovers in the uncertain verb tense of dreams—the conditional/subjunctive/future. Singing about peace might not help achieve it, but it might help us envision a world where peace is, indeed, possible, against all odds. It’s a dream of a child who wants herself, mommy, and blue skies to persist in the Eternal Now, which is especially poignant given that 1962—the year the song was written—was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the heart of the nuclear threat. In the 1980s, I was secretly an Evangelical Christian. I believed in the parables of The New Testament and the miracle math of feeding a crowd of 3,000 with five loaves of bread. I believed in the vision of the lion lying down with the lamb and turned a blind eye to apocalypse. I also believed The Little Prince was real. After I read The Master and Margarita in the early '90s, I believed that “to each will be according to their own belief.” Yet this, too, was a fierce belief like any other. I was drunk on belief, and the idea that belief—my belief!—has consequences. “May there always be…” always excites me with its ellipses, but the first part of the phrase, the invocation of a hidden force, is even more inebriating. 3. “Cheburashka” Many Soviet children’s songs also thrived on nostalgia as well as a longing for the idyllic future. The classic 1966 cartoon Cheburashka is about a misfit toy that is “an animal unknown to science.” The Cheburashka birthday song created its memorable tune through the accordion riding on top of some gentle percussion. With monkey ears and the body of a cub, Cheburashka is a lovable misfit who wants a friend and resists all labels. One of its musical numbers became the iconic birthday song for children of all generations to come. These are the coveted wishes of the birthday girl or boy: “A wizard will suddenly appear In a blue whirlybird, And will show me free movies. He'll say Happy Birthday And just before he flies away He'll probably leave 500 ice cream cones for me.” In a country where children’s programming only appeared for two hours a day on a meager two channels in the '80s and where you had to stand in a long line for an ice cream cone (you also had to wait in line for milk, butter, toilet paper, and many other items), the pleasures were simple. The “Blue Train” song is even more iconic; nostalgic for the past, it heralds the Soviet promise of a better future ahead as the train propels Cheburashka and his best friend Crocodile Gena into the unknown: “Slowly the minutes swim far away, And even though we're a little sad to let the past go The best is, of course, yet to come! Smoothly, smoothly, the far road runs along And runs up right against the skyline Everybody, everybody, believes in the best The blue train rides and rides along.” “Blue Train” matched the energetic melody of the accordion with the train’s rhythmic to-and-fro; the cartoon ends with the characters riding off into the future we’re not privy to as they sing along to Crocodile Gena’s accordion. As a child in the United States, I longed for the future. I harbored wild fantasies of all the adult things I would do at 12, of trips to Manhattan for “real” chocolate and artisanal bread and the FAO Schwartz Toy Store, of the thrill of high school with its boys and high heels and all the books I would read and the poems I would write. It is a little sad to be living your childhood believing that “the best is, of course, yet to come!” because, in a way, this diminishes the life that you’re living right now. But “hope is the thing with feathers,” and dreaming of a better life really did save me from the doldrums when I was an awkward big-nosed 15-year-old who dressed exclusively in black and read Jean-Paul Sartre. Like “real” Communism for the Soviets, adulthood seemed sweet with promise unattainable, or at least very far away. [millions_ad] I don’t remember what I ate or who I talked to, but I do remember that in sophomore year, I was high on William Shakespeare monologues, scribbles in the school library, trips to the Brooklyn Heights Starbucks cafe (my writing haunt) and the Promenade. I didn’t so much dream of the future but surround myself with the dreams of others—Virginia Woolf’s short story about a perfect piece of colored glass, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and The Glass Bead Game, Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths, and even a dream gone wrong, Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. The prison house of language became my playground; my future, consciously or unconsciously, became enmeshed with stringing together (or pulling apart, for closer inspection) the glass beads of words and meanings, my own and those of others. Now I can’t help falling into old habits and keeping to the mantra that “the best is yet to come.” At 34, dealing with my mom’s recent death, meager job prospects, and Donald Trump’s presidency, this is becoming harder to believe than it had been at 15. But I can’t help dreaming, wishing, and hoping. Such hope is often painful in the face of the unpalatable present. Yet it also gives me the capacity to dream of a future that makes a laughable illusion of the present—through the process of making art. 4. “The Beautiful Faraway” While “Blue Train” propels us to a beautiful future, “The Beautiful Faraway” plays with our assumptions about time yet suddenly turns very serious in terms of the speaker’s inner journey. The song appears in the 1985 miniseries The Guest from the Future, which is about a girl from the future who travels to the present and a boy who lives in the year 1984 and travels to the future. The song confides in the listener with its child singer, intimate guitar accompaniment, and some flutes chiming in while the singer implores the future to not be cruel: “I'm hearing a voice from the wonderful future The morning's voice in silver dew I'm hearing a voice, and the glittering path Makes my head spin like a carousel from my childhood. Oh wonderful future, Don't be cruel to me. Towards a wonderful future, I'm beginning my journey.” While the voice from the future is beguiling, it also asks “What have I done today to earn tomorrow,” implying the future will only be wonderful if consequences from the present make it so. The song makes childhood a state that is always and already absent, or at least receding into the past as the future, however wonderful, makes its way into the present. The sense of responsibility for the future—and not knowing exactly what this responsibility entails—always made me slightly anxious as I listened. Maybe this was because I didn’t have many responsibilities as a child, and even the knowledge that more will come was anxiety-inducing.  Just as in “Winged Swing,” the foreboding tone of “The Beautiful Faraway” was winning over its hopefulness. In a strange sense, this song rendered the future as well as beauty itself more abstract and weirdly interchangeable. Was the Beautiful Faraway beautiful because of its abstract positioning in the future? Or did it reside in the future precisely because that was the space for beauty? It was hard to tell. If childhood entails dreaming of the beautiful future and also making sure it comes to be through responsible actions, the song also made childhood come to terms with its own absence. The dream becomes an act of erasure, and the song doesn’t hide it since the narrator is “... hearing a voice, and...hastening towards its call/ On a road with no footprints.” This road with no footprints is the road of childhood. It seems to exist only to bring us closer to the impossible future. And then it is no more. When I was six, I entertained myself by taking an empty box of chocolates and, Joseph Cornell-style, inserting a miniature character in each empty niche. I would make princesses out of matchsticks with cotton and loose strips of fabric; attach buttons to tall clothespins to make a lopsided face; adorn an empty niche with a shard of glass found on an Odessa beach at night. I didn’t even need dolls or stuffed animals to keep myself amused. Yet, at other times, dreaming made it impossible to be present or connected to the everyday world. For one thing, my dreams were solitary and didn’t require a companion; so detailed was my fantastical inner life that any intrusion would shatter its fey fragility. And I was encouraged to while my days with my dreams by my parents, sister, and grandparents. Of course, this fueled my imagination, but also became the reason why I only learned to wash by myself at age 11, would fail to make my bed every morning, and never really had any responsibilities. 5. Irony vs. Art Thus ends the whirlwind tour of the Soviet songs that formed my childhood. Beautifully orchestrated, at times schmaltzy, they imbued me with a sense of longing for my own childhood (almost like the 1960s Soviet bard song “Nostalgia for the Present”). This childhood was like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s God, a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. It was a void that didn’t have any definable characteristics except for longing itself, a space where I could long for an opaque future that also provided a convenient escape from the past. Childhood was a space to dream, even if the dreams I conjured—of kissing my best friend, getting an American Barbie, growing up—were vacuous. They were vacuous because they were born of the collective unconscious of Soviet childhood and were not especially unique to me. But they also provided me with the ability to connect with others, and this was significant. Dreaming the same dream as other little girls made me feel less alone. And now I’m going to assert something very strange: that Soviet songs (and Soviet popular culture) encouraged me to make art because of their unironic belief in hope. To be capable of enacting even inner change through art-making, you first need to believe that this change is at least possible, that art is even worth making in an age when, most likely, no one will pay you for it and it won’t reach a whole lot of people. To be an artist you need to have hope even when your vision of hope comes against all odds, when others will judge you as naïve for such hopefulness. According to David Foster Wallace, the so-called “New Sincerity” movement was a cultural response to postmodernist irony and cynicism; its heroes are the anti-rebels “who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.” Interestingly, New Sincerity became relevant in the post-Soviet context as scholar Michael Epstein employed it in response to the sense of absurdity permeating Soviet culture. According to Epstein, “Postconceptualism, or the New Sincerity, is an experiment in resuscitating ‘fallen’, dead languages with a renewed pathos of love, sentimentality and enthusiasm.” Because their emotional kernel speaks to a bygone era in the Soviet story, the outmoded languages of Soviet songs should re-emerge for analysis and scrutiny. They speak to the hopefulness of childhood, as well as to our genuine fear as to what will happen if we give in to such hope. I had such hope because of my Soviet upbringing. Irony doesn’t have to be the opposite of hopefulness, but too much skepticism—the very precondition for irony—can wither ambitions and narrow artistic horizons. At 12 I began writing breathlessly and badly, manically overestimating my abilities, overreaching my boundaries of knowledge and life experience. I was naïve as to the power of language to effect real change in the world and even more naïve about romantic love. But sometimes I think that realistic expectations and the whip of irony would have helped me achieve one thing only: failure. On the surface, it seems like the Soviet songs I mentioned here aim to imbue us with hope, a confidence in the future. Yet on deeper inspection, they also show the future to be a kind of “confidence game”—constantly receding, never certain, only definite because of a break from the past. The songs make childhood into a state that is defined by perpetual dreaming. The etymology of “child” comes from Proto-Germanic *kiltham (source also of Gothic kilþei “womb,” inkilþo “pregnant.”) In a way, children are pregnant with the future, with the confidence of what’s to come. They are professional dreamers, and this is fascinating and anxiety-inducing at once. Paradoxically, their dreams almost always have to do with the displacement of childhood by a shadowy future self. (Children always play at being doctors and firemen, mommies and daddies, almost never other children.) On my daughter’s second birthday, my father played “Blue Train” on the accordion and we all sang the Cheburashka birthday song about the wizard descending on a blue helicopter as she blew out the candles. Will she be taken in by songs about “The Beautiful Faraway” and “Winged Swings,” or will she find their sentiments groundless? I really can’t say. But one thing is clear—even now, so many years after my own childhood came and went, I still find myself humming to the tune of “May there always be sunshine.”