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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Marks of Significance: On Punctuation’s Occult Power
“Prosody, and orthography, are not parts of grammar, but diffused like the blood and spirits throughout the whole.” —Ben Jonson, English Grammar (1617)
Erasmus, author of The Praise of Folly and the most erudite, learned, and scholarly humanist of the Renaissance, was enraptured by the experience, by the memory, by the very idea of Venice. For 10 months from 1507 to 1508, Erasmus would be housed in a room of the Aldine Press, not far from the piazzas of St. Mark’s Square with their red tiles burnt copper by the Adriatic sun, the glory and the stench of the Grand Canal wafting into the cell where the scholar would expand his collection of 3,260 proverbs entitled Thousands of Adages, his first major work. For Venice was the home to a “library which has no other limits than the world itself;” a watery metropolis and an empire of dreams that was “building up a sacred and immortal thing.”
Erasmus composed to the astringent smell of black ink rendered from the resin of gall nuts, the rhythmic click-click-click of movable type of alloyed lead-tin keys being set, and the whoosh of paper feeding through the press. From that workshop would come more than 100 titles of Greek and Latin, all published with the indomitable Aldus Manutius’s watermark, an image filched from an ancient Roman coin depicting a strangely skinny Mediterranean dolphin inching down an anchor. Reflecting on that watermark (which has since been filched again, by the modern publisher Doubleday), Erasmus wrote that it symbolized “all kinds of books in both languages, recognized, owned and praised by all to whom liberal studies are holy.” Adept in humanistic philology, Erasmus made an entire career by understanding the importance of a paragraph, a phrase, a word. Of a single mark. As did his publisher.
Erasmus’s printer was visionary. The Aldine Press was the first in Europe to produce books made not by folding the sheets of paper in a bound book once (as in a folio), or four times (as in a quarto), but eight times, to produce volumes that could be as small as four to six inches, the so-called octavo. Such volumes could be put in a pocket, what constituted the forerunner of the paperback, which Manutius advertised as “portable small books.” Now volumes no longer had to be cumbersome tomes chained to the desk of a library, they could be squirreled away in a satchel, the classics made democratic. When laying the typeface for a 1501 edition of Virgil in the new octavo form, Manutius charged a Bolognese punchcutter named Francesco Griffo to design a font that appeared calligraphic. Borrowing the poet Petrarch’s handwriting, Griffo invented a slanted typeface that printers quickly learned could denote emphasis, which came to be named after the place of its invention: italic.
However, it was an invention seven years earlier that restructured not just how language appears, but indeed the very rhythm of sentences; for, in 1496, Manutius introduced a novel bit of punctuation, a jaunty little man with leg splayed to the left as if he was pausing to hold open a door for the reader before they entered the next room, the odd mark at the caesura of this byzantine sentence that is known to posterity as the semicolon. Punctuation exists not in the wild; it is not a function of how we hear the word, but rather of how we write the Word. What the theorist Walter Ong described in his classic Orality and Literacy as being marks that are “even farther from the oral world than letters of the alphabet are: though part of a text they are unpronounceable, nonphonemic.” None of our notations are implied by mere speech, they are creatures of the page: comma, and semicolon; (as well as parenthesis and what Ben Jonson appropriately referred to as an “admiration,” but what we call an exclamation mark!)—the pregnant pause of a dash and the grim finality of a period. Has anything been left out? Oh, the ellipses…
No doubt the prescriptivist critic of my flights of grammatical fancy in the previous few sentences would note my unorthodox usage, but I do so only to emphasize how contingent and mercurial our system of marking written language was until around four or five centuries ago. Manutius may have been the greatest of European printers, but from Johannes Guttenberg to William Caxton, the era’s publishers oversaw the transition from manuscript to print with an equivalent metamorphosis of language from oral to written, from the ear to the eye. Paleographer Malcolm Parkes writes in his invaluable Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West that such a system is a “phenomenon of written language, and its history is bound up with that of the written medium.” Since the invention of script, there has been a war of attrition between the spoken and the written; battle lines drawn between rhetoricians and grammarians, between sound and meaning. Such is a distinction as explained by linguist David Crystal in Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation: “writing and speech are seen as distinct mediums of expression, with different communicative aims and using different processes of composition.”
Obviously, the process of making this distinction has been going on for quite a long time. The moment the first wedged-stylus pressed into wet Mesopotamian clay was the beginning of it, through ancient Greek diacritical and Hebrew pointing systems, up through when Medieval scribes began to first separate words from endless scripto continua, whichbroachednogapsbetweenwordsuntiltheendofthemiddleages. Reading, you see, was normally accomplished out loud, and the written word was less a thing-unto-itself and more a representation of a particular event—that is the event of speaking. When this is the guiding metaphysic of writing, punctuation serves a simple purpose—to indicate how something is to be read aloud. Like the luftpause of musical notation, the nascent end stops and commas of antiquity didn’t exist to clarify syntactical meaning, but only to let you know when to take a breath. Providing an overview of punctuation’s genealogy, Alberto Manguel writes in A History of Reading how by the seventh century, a “combination of points and dashes indicated a full stop, a raised or high point was equivalent to our comma,” an innovation of Irish monks who “began isolating not only parts of speech but also the grammatical constituents within a sentence, and introduced many of the punctuation marks we use today.”
No doubt many of you, uncertain on the technical rules of comma usage (as many of us are), were told in elementary school that a comma designates when a breath should be taken, only to discover by college that that axiom was incorrect. Certain difficulties, with, that, way of writing, a sentence—for what if the author is Christopher Walken or William Shatner? Enthusiast of the baroque that I am, I’m sympathetic to writers who use commas as Hungarians use paprika. I’ll adhere to the claim of David Steel, who in his 1785 Elements of Punctuation wrote that “punctuation is not, in my opinion, attainable by rules…but it may be procured by a kind of internal conviction.” Steven Roger Fischer correctly notes in his A History of Reading (distinct from the Manguel book of the same title) that “Today, punctuation is linked mainly to meaning, not to sound.” But as late as 1589 the rhetorician George Puttenham could in his Art of English Poesie, as Crystal explains, define a comma as the “shortest pause,” a colon as “twice as much time,” and an end stop as a “full pause.” Because our grade school teachers weren’t wrong in a historical sense, for that was the purpose of commas, colons, and semicolons, to indicate pauses of certain amounts of time when scripture was being aloud. All of the written word would have been quietly murmured under the breath of monks in the buzz of a monastic scriptorium.
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For grammarians, punctuation has long been claimed as a captured soldier in the war of attrition between sound and meaning, these weird little marks enlisted in the cause of language as a primarily written thing. Fischer explains that “universal, standardized punctuation, such as may be used throughout a text in consistent fashion, only became fashionable…after the introduction of printing.” Examine medieval manuscripts and you’ll find that the orthography, that is the spelling and punctuation (insomuch as it exists), is completely variable from author to author—in keeping with an understanding that writing exists mainly as a means to perform speaking. By the Renaissance, print necessitated a degree of standardization, though far from uniform. This can be attested to by the conspiratorially minded who are flummoxed by Shakespeare’s name being spelled several different ways while he was alive, or by the anarchistic rules of 18th-century punctuation, the veritable golden age of the comma and semicolon. When punctuation becomes not just an issue of telling a reader when to breathe, but as a syntactical unit that conveys particular meanings that could be altered by the choice or placement of these funny little dots, then a degree of rigor becomes crucial. As Fischer writes, punctuation came to convey “almost exclusively meaning, not sound,” and so the system had to become fixed in some sense.
If I may offer an additional conjecture, it would seem to me that there was a fortuitous confluence of both the technology of printing and the emergence of certain intellectual movements within the Renaissance that may have contributed to the elevation of punctuation. Johanna Drucker writes in The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination how Renaissance thought was gestated by “strains of Hermetic, Neo-Pythagorean, Neo-Platonic and kabbalistic traditions blended in their own peculiar hybrids of thought.” Figures like the 15th-century Florentine philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola reintroduced Plato into an intellectual environment that had sustained itself on Aristotle for centuries. Aristotle rejected the otherworldliness of his teacher Plato, preferring rather to muck about in the material world of appearances, and when medieval Christendom embraced the former, they modeled his empirical perspective. Arguably the transcendent nature of words is less important in such a context; what difference does the placement of a semicolon matter if it’s not conveying something of the eternal realm of the Forms? But the Florentine Platonists like Ficino were concerned with such things, for as he writes in Five Questions Concerning the Mind (printed in 1495—one year after the first semicolon), the “rational soul…possesses the excellence of infinity and eternity…[for we] characteristically incline toward the infinite.” In Renaissance Platonism, the correct ordering of words, and their corralling with punctuation, is a reflection not of speech, but of something larger, greater, higher. Something infinite and eternal; something transcendent. And so, we have the emergence of a dogma of correct punctuation, of standardized spelling—of a certain “orthographic Platonism.”
Drucker explains that Renaissance scholars long searched “for a set of visual signs which would serve to embody the system of human knowledge (conceived of as the apprehension of a divine order).” In its most exotic form this involved the construction of divine languages, the parsing of Kabbalistic symbols, and the embrace of alchemical reasoning. I’d argue in a more prosaic manner that such orthographic Platonism is the well-spring for all prescriptivist approaches to language, where the manipulation of the odd symbols that we call letters and punctuation can lend themselves to the discovery of greater truths, an invention that allows us “to converse even with the absent,” as Parkes writes. In the workshops of the Renaissance, at the Aldine Press, immortal things were made of letters and eternity existed between them, with punctuation acting as the guideposts to a type of paradise. And so it can remain for us.
Linguistic prescriptivists will bemoan the loss of certain standards, of how text speak signals an irreducible entropy of communication, or how the abandonment of arbitrary grammatical rules is as if a sign from Revelation. Yet such reactionaries are not the true guardians of orthographic Platonism, for we must take wisdom where we find it, in the appearance, texture, and flavor of punctuation. Rules may be arbitrary, but the choice of particular punctuation—be it the pregnant pause of the dash or the rapturous shouting of the exclamation mark—matters. Literary agent Noah Lukeman writes in A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation that punctuation is normally understood as simply “a convenience, a way of facilitating what you want to say.” Such a limited view, which is implicit for either those that advocate punctuation as an issue of sound or as one of meaning, ignores the occult power of the question mark, the theurgy in a comma. The orthographic Platonists at the Aldine Press understood that so much depended on a semicolon; that it signified more than a longer-than-average pause or the demarcation of an independent clause. Lukeman argues that punctuation is rarely “pondered as a medium for artistic expression, as a means of impacting content,” yet in the most “profound way…it achieves symbiosis with the narration, style, viewpoint, and even the plot itself.”
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Keith Houston in Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks claims that “Every character we type or write is a link to the past;” every period takes us back to the dots that Irish monks used to signal the end of a line; every semicolon back to Manutius’s Venetian workshop. Punctuation, as with the letters whom they serve, has a deep genealogy, their use places us in a chain of connotation and influence that goes back centuries. More than that, each individual punctuation has a unique terroir; they do things that give the sentence a waft, a wisdom, a rhythm that is particular to them. Considering the periods of Ernest Hemingway, the semicolons of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson’s sublime dash, Lukeman writes that “Sentences crash and fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language.”
To get overly hung up on punctuation as either an issue of putting marks in the right place, or letting the reader know when they can gulp some air, is to miss the point—a comma is a poem unto itself, an exclamation point is an epic! Cecelia Watson writes in her new book, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark, that Manutius’s invention “is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated.” And she is, of course, correct, as evidenced by all of those partisans of aesthetic minimalism from Kurt Vonnegut to Cormac McCarthy who’ve impugned the Aldine mark’s honor. But what a semicolon can do that other marks can’t! How it can connect two complete ideas into a whole; a semicolon is capable of unifications that a comma is too weak to do alone. As Adam O’Fallon Price writes in The Millions, “semicolons…increase the range of tone and inflection at a writer’s disposal.” Or take the exclamation mark, a symbol that I’ve used roughly four times in my published writing, but which I deploy no less than 15 times per average email. A maligned mark due to its emotive enthusiasms, Nick Ripatrazone observes in The Millions that “exclamation marks call attention toward themselves in poems: they stand straight up.” Punctuation, in its own way, is conscious; it’s an algorithm, as much thought itself as a schematic showing the process of thought.
To take two poetic examples, what would Walt Whitman be without his exclamation mark; what would Dickinson be without her dash? They didn’t simply use punctuation for the pause of breath nor to logically differentiate things with some grammatical-mathematical precision. Rather they did do those things, but also so much more, for the union of exhalation and thought gestures to that higher realm the Renaissance originators of punctuation imagined. What would Whitman’s “Pioneers! O pioneers!” from the 1865 Leaves of Grass be without the exclamation point? What argument could be made if that ecstatic mark were abandoned? What of the solemn mysteries in the portal that is Dickinson’s dash when she writes that “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers –"? Orthographic Platonism instills in us a wisdom behind the arguments of rhetoricians and grammarians; it reminds us that more than simple notation, each mark of punctuation is a personality, a character, a divinity in itself.
My favorite illustration of that principle is in dramatist Margaret Edson’s sublime play W;t, the only theatrical work that I can think of that has New Critical close reading as one of its plot points. In painful detail, W;t depicts the final months of Dr. Vivian Bearing, a professor of 17th-century poetry at an unnamed, elite, eastern university, after she has been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. While undergoing chemotherapy, Bearing often reminisces on her life of scholarship, frequently returning to memories of her beloved dissertation adviser, E.M. Ashford. In one flashback, Bearing remembers being castigated by Ashford for sloppy work that the former did, providing interpretation of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet VI based on an incorrectly punctuated edition of the cycle. Ashford asks her student “Do you think the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail?” In the version used by Bearing, Donne’s immortal line “Death be not proud” is end stopped with a semicolon, but as Ashford explains, the proper means of punctuation, as based on the earliest manuscripts of Donne, is simply a comma. “And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt die.”
Ashford imparts to Bearing that so much can depend on a comma. The professor tells her student that “Nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from everlasting…With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points…Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.” Ashford declares that “This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn’t you say?” Such is the mark of significance, an understanding that punctuation is as intimate as breath, as exulted as thought, and as powerful as the union between them—infinite, eternal, divine.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/Sam Town.
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