The Real Life of the Parthenon (21st Century Essays)

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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]

A Year in Reading: Natalie Bakopoulos

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Maps of DaysThough I’ve always craved some kind of systematic approach to reading—whatever that might look like—my reading is often chaotic, starting six books at once, making it through one or two, starting five more, and so on. Eventually I get to them, I suppose. I know a lot of people lament not being able to read at all during these times—the overwhelming state of working from home, or homeschooling, or lots of activity in a small space, or the political distractions and dread. And I understand, my focus is often terrible—I can barely respond to email at all—but reading is one place I’ve found deep solace. Since I’ve been a child, reading has been a way I create calmness, a sort of reset—and also the way I procrastinate. It’s not just the immersion in another consciousness, though that’s of course part of it; it’s something about the slow, physical act of reading, the way my breathing slows down, my body sinks in to the language on the page. For the past several years, I’ve been keeping messy lists of books read, and books I buy, and books I begin. I won’t mention the latter two here of course because my putting a book down, or buying and not reading, rarely has little to do with quality or enjoyment and more to do with mood and happenstance and time. I think I might have started more books than I finished this year, though I’ve finished a lot, and my to-read pile is tall. (As a side note: thank you, indie booksellers, for not only providing curbside pickup and shipping but also for hosting nonstop Zoom events.) My reading this year in particular was its own sort of keeping time. I often associate a book with where I am, where I read it—planes, cafes, libraries, balconies, beaches, and so on—but this year my setting did not change. I found great relief when the warm weather arrived, and the summer seemed to open everything up and make the lockdown more bearable. Day 65, day 100, day 254: my to-read list grew and shrank, grew and shrank. Reading outside with a cold beer or iced coffee made the pandemic feel more bearable. Then came the shift in the light, the sudden cold days, and I returned to reading indoors, beneath a blanket. I finished Emily Wilson’s excellent translation of The Odyssey in 2018 but returned to it this year on audio, read by Claire Danes—those first two months of the year, when I still had a commute. It was a nice companion to Phoebe Giannisi’s Homerica (printed side-by-side in both Greek and in English translation by Brian Sneeden), which weaves in The Odyssey and Orpheus, mythology and motherhood, nostos and the domestic and the shocking passing and chasing of time: “for years / until yesterday / I was a girl.” Here is the Sweet Hand by francine j. harris I read in late summer, outdoors: “Being alone affects the canvas under language,” harris writes, and this fantastic collection had me thinking about the link between loneliness and language. I realize in writing this that I rarely read a poetry collection from beginning to end at once—a glaring omission from my reading map—but I read Henri Cole’s Blizzard one Sunday afternoon, the first snow falling outside my window. After Louise Glück won a Nobel Prize and her lines began to flood the internet, a great respite, I returned to her A Village Life. “When you look at a body you see a history,” she writes. “Once that body isn't seen anymore, / the story it tried to tell gets lost.” Let’s begin at the beginning. On the first day of the year, on a train from Chicago to Ann Arbor, I read Chia-Chia Lin’s powerful novel The Unpassing, and whizzing by that gray wintry scenery seemed a good match for Lin’s grief-stricken Alaskan landscape, at least the one I imagined in my mind. It’s a beautiful exploration of exile and home: “Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none,” she writes. Kate Brigg’s This Little Art is a marvel: a smart and lyrical meditation on translation. “I think we owe translators, and perhaps also ourselves as readers of translations, not gratitude but rather some intellectual recognition of the fact that her work pertains not just to this or that part picked out for late scrutiny by the reader or the reviewer, but to every single one of the small parts forming the whole” (emphasis hers).  It’s commonly noted that something is lost in translation, but I’ve always objected to this idea of loss, and Brigg’s generous, elegant meditation shows that something can also be gained. E. J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others is a lovely memoir-companion to it, a lyrical exploration of language, translation, and links between generations, as well as her own path to writing and translation. While translating her mother’s letters to her from Korean, Koh acknowledges the limits of her language, her own translations’ incompleteness and limitlessness: “If her letters could go to sleep, my translations would be their dreams.” The early days of the pandemic had me reading War and Peace with Yiyun Li and A Public Space, but I abandoned it—again!—after 250 pages. Will I ever finish it? The holes in my reading used to give me great shame, but I’ve long gotten over that. Along with A Public Space, I did read Mavis Gallant’s Green Water, Green Sky, which was devastating—I love her stories but have never read her novels. Elliott Holt, who led this reading, also brought me to Anita Brookner’s Hotel Du Lac (through an Instagram post), and I was pulled in by its atmosphere, its tone, its introspection—I see that hotel lobby so clearly in my mind, as though I had been sitting there all along, having a cocktail and observing the characters. Andrew Durbin’s slim, sensual novel Skyland features a quest to find a painting of the iconic writer Hervé Guibert on the Greek island of Patmos, and I, missing Greece this summer, found relief and pleasure in entering that landscape through the page. There’s something very satisfying about this sort of quest, even if it doesn’t turn out as hoped. I mean, do they ever? I’m writing about Greece, and various kinds of appropriations, and Johanna Hanink’s The Classical Debt is an excellent, generous, incisive examination of the tendency to always look at Greece through the lens of nostalgia for an ancient, classical past, and how this relates to modern-day debts. I also loved The Real Life of the Parthenon, by Patricia Vigderman, a ruminative, satisfying look at ruins, aesthetics, power, and ownership. On the topic of cultural appropriation in writing, Paisley Rekdal’s upcoming Appropriate is compassionate and smart, a mapping of her own lifetime of reading and teaching, an exploration of whose stories we tell—and how, and why—and the way returning to a work of art often elicits such a drastically different response from our first encounter. “One could call this a peaceful time, I suppose,” Yuko Tsushima writes in Territory of Light (translated by Geraldine Harcourt), “but in fact I spent it on edge with something close to fear, because I no longer had any clues as to what to expect.” Tell me about it! I read this absorbing novel in the early days of the pandemic, and in my mind the narrator’s small apartment I associate with quarantine, not only because of a memorable scene where both she and her daughter run high fevers, and not only because the neighborhood experiences a succession of deaths, but also simply her astute attention to small physical spaces. Among the many pleasures of this novel is the way Tsushima writes space and the way it affects us. I felt bereft when I finished it, and when I saw Katie Kitamura compare it to the new Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd), I read, and loved, that too. Like many of the novels I’ve read this year, it’s a novel about a woman writer/artist, and though this book, too, pays close attention to physical space, it’s also keenly, hyperfocused on the female body, as well as the nuances and patterns of language. Courtney Maum’s Costalegre is narrated by fifteen-year-old Lara, whose mother, an art-collecting heiress, brings Lara and a group of European artists to a compound in Mexico—it’s 1937, fascism is on the rise and Europe is on the brink of war. Lara is fascinated by an artist named Jack, and though the others speculate he unable to work, he’s doing so quietly, making pure and clean sculpture from the rock. Lara herself is an aspiring artist, but she doesn’t realize it’s words that might will free her from her mother’s shadow. The book takes the form of a diary, and it’s her fragmented mind, her approach to the world through language, not necessarily image, that helps her shape herself and her role in this place. Luster by Raven Leilani and its exploration of shifting power dynamics, and sex and race and class, is also about the female artist growing into herself, and the voice was both raucous and vulnerable. Such surprising turns, both on the level of the sentence and the story. Though this novel has received many accolades, what first piqued my interest was Kaitlyn Greenidge’s excellent early review of it in VQR—I love everything Greenidge writes—where she notes that Edie, Luster’s narrator, is “a black-female flaneur,” a figure who embodies “the individual that the flaneur usually observes and categorizes.” I was hooked from her review alone. A recommendation from Ayşegül Savaş (whose Walking on the Ceiling was one of my favorite books of 2019) led me to the charming and poignant Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami (translated by Allison Markin Powell), which also has a lot of walking through the city, but mostly takes place in a particular bar (remember bars?) around drinks and meals, and had me bursting with longing. It explores intimacy and loneliness and the slow burn, the joy and sadness, of getting to know someone. On the topic of walking, I also read Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, which charts her own walkings through various beloved cities, and the walks of other women writers. This might be my favorite sort of book, the sort that map the intersections between life and writing and literature. I suppose I understand the aversion to books narrated by or about writers, though sometimes it seems those books are easy targets. For me, what’s not to like? We are holding a book in our hands that has been written by someone who has mostly likely come to writing through a love of reading. Though I understand the pleasure of the suspension of disbelief, I also find great pleasure when a writer shows their work. Writers and Lovers by Lily King I read in a weekend, and her portrayal of grief and the uncertainty of youth and the hope for validation was deeply affecting, and brought back my own memories of waiting tables in the 90s, the idea of being a writer so far away. Often these books are some of my favorites, whether the story is autofictional and engaged in the actual process of writing the story we are reading—or more broadly about the creation of art, a stand-in, perhaps, for the act of writing. Or being. A self-portrait of the female artist as x might also include some other favorites, which felt like a linked trio: Kate Zambreno’s meditative Drifts and Amina Cain’s wonderful Indelicacy and Amanda Michalopoulou’s bold God’s Wife (translated by Patricia Felisa Berbeito). I have always loved Lara Vapnyar’s work since I first read her stories in the New Yorker, but Divide Me By Zero truly captured my imagination, and made me wish I’d gone far enough in math to understand the elegance of certain solutions. Lucie Britsch’s witty and melancholy Sad Janet, though it came out in the summer, is a perfect book for the holiday season, particularly if you find this time of year less than joyous, all that forced cheer. Such wit and such heart. “We convert ourselves into something absurd because the absurd is already living inside us,” writes Pola Oloixarac in Mona, a wonderful line that could apply to so many of the works I read this year. Translated by Adam Morris, Mona is a provocative commentary on the “Western” literary world—and also on violence, and women—and the way identity is often essentialized, even by those trying to resist any sort of harmful “othering.” It’s also about writing—“We can’t write except in drag,” another woman tells her, in the sauna, after insulting Mona’s “hyper-feminine affect”—the novel is impious and funny but also takes a surprising, disconcerting turn. With its forests and mood it brought to my mind the myth of Eurydice. The ending was astounding. I’ve been talking mostly of novels but this year, working on my own nonfiction, I read so many wonderful essay collections. William Gass called sentences “containers of consciousness,” and the elegant prose in Donovan Hohn’s meditative exploration of place and memory, climate and coast, in his aptly named collection The Inner Coast is a gorgeous illustration of such. As is Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s lyrical World of Wonders, which also explores our relationship with the natural world, and particularly the way her own engagement—particular as a woman of color, a perspective often overlooked when it comes to nature writing—with the flora and fauna of the many places she’s lived became a sort of home all its own. As does writing: “To sense one’s presence on this earth,” she notes. In a way this whole book is a sort of ars poetica. Sejal Shah’s artfully constructed essay collection This Is One Way to Dance is organized in the order in which she wrote the essays and circles around complex ideas of identity, belonging, and the particularities of place, and made me think about the aesthetics of form in the essay in particular. “Lyric or braided, traditional or flash, essays have granted me the space to stretch, pivot, and grow…. I worry the boundaries and borders to observe where sparks rise,” she writes in the introduction. Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory is a remarkable immersion into a very astute consciousness, and over the months I dipped in and out of Olivia Laing’s wise collection Funny Weather, which felt like just the thing I needed; her words were like a smart and calming companion through these months, and when I realized I had read all the essays I wanted to start again. Joanna Eleftheriou’s moving This Way Back is takes us between Cyprus and New York—and other places too—and gently explores her identity as a lesbian Greek Orthodox woman who has spent her life in between; the way she combines literature with history with personal narrative with landscape is exceptional. It’s a collection of essays, but their arrangement and progression creates a wonderful narrative urgency and arc, making it feel like a memoir too. Zadie Smith’s Intimations is another mapping of an elegant mind at work, a short collection of six essays, and though I read them in one sitting, they are certainly not light. More collections! So many wonderful essay collections this year. In Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity, Porochista Khakpour writes with a compelling wit and candid voice. At the time of this writing I’m in the middle of two other collections—Like Love by Michele Morano, who is funny and poignant and always so smart.  Claire Messud’s Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write does what some of my favorite collections do: intermingle the writer’s personal history with that of their literary one: a literary mapping. I read more memoir than usual this year: T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls struck me with its struck me with its nonchronological way of telling a story, her look at the instability of family and home and privilege, the messiness and beauty of girlhood, time as a jumble of fragments we look for ourselves within. Heidi Julavits’s innovative The Folded Clock—defined as “quasi-memoir”—inspired me to think about how I map my days, and also about the strangeness of time. I loved Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House about growing up in New Orleans and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and her exploration of individual, cultural, and communicated memories. Things visible and invisible, and to whom—her own neighborhood was often left of maps of New Orleans. I love the way we see how she begins to see, to further chart the map of her world. I’m in awe of Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. “Archives always conjure this mix of overwhelming constraint and bewildering freedom for me,” she writes, which had me writing Yes!! in the margins, and I might use these words to describe memoir too. Critics have called this work “genre-bending,” and have noted that The Yellow House too, is beyond memoir, but to me these books are illustrations of all the complex and intricate things memoir, and essay, can do. Kapka Kassabova’s wonderful To the Lake is memoir, return narrative, and an exploration of a complicated family history against a larger, complicated Balkan one.  It’s a gorgeous meditation on the link between landscape and memory and Kassobova’s own space in it. I’m particularly drawn to short story collections linked by place, and Stephanie Soileau’s Last One Out Shut Off the Lights is simply stunning. Such heart and deep attention, particularly to the lives of women and girls and the particularities of place—in this case, Southwest Louisiana—and if these characters might be difficult we love them all the more for it. And by difficult I mean real, and complicated, and alive. Speaking of difficult, I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the cranky, lovable Olive Kitteridge and her Maine landscape until I returned to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Again. The beloved-to-many Randall Kenan died this year, and he left behind a new, beautiful collection, If I Had Two Wings, which captures the uncanniness of reality, the sweetness of relationships, and various kinds of hauntings. These stories were moving and mysterious and structurally exciting too, and I loved the way a character named “Randall Kenan” appears here and again, just like the grounding fictional small town of Tims Creek. Apollo Papafrangou’s forthcoming We Grew Here is a novel-in-stories that explores masculinity and gentrification through a Greek American Oakland lens. Maria Adelmann’s forthcoming story collection Girls of a Certain Age is funny and irreverent, and the characters, often lost or misguided, were a delight to spend time with, going along with them as they tried to find their way. Coming soon, but get ready, because it’s excellent: I read, in draft form, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s smart and stirring novel Movement, which explores Sri Lankan politics, loss, and the complexities of ideology, loyalty, grief, and violence. I’ve been particularly interested in novels that play with time and space, past and present, myth and history, a mix-up of it all, as well as those that are eerily atmospheric and strange. Peter Stamm’s The Sweet Indifference of the World (translated by Michael Hoffman) was mysterious and absorbing. Though its concerns are much different, in my mind it’s linked with Charles Baxter’s new, mesmerizing The Sun Collective, which will stay with me a long time. I wouldn’t call it futuristic—it’s oddly, eerily prescient, mirroring a current reality in uncanny ways—but it’s uncanny. It explores mysterious connection, the crushing bleakness of capitalism, ideologies gone awry, and the sense of transcending physical worlds in order to live in them. To be everywhere and nowhere at once. Though the fantastical is a small element in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s epic A Girl is a Body of Water, it’s a memorable, important one, particularly in the way she explores the complexity of female identity. Set against the backdrop of Idi Amin’s reign in Uganda, the novel intertwines ideas of silence, seeing, disappearances, storytelling, myth and history, and both the small and large shifts of power that affect a friendship, a place, a life, and also suggests that time is not linear, nor does it move in one direction. And it’s gorgeous. Maybe because it’s the last book I finished before sending this off, and I hate to pick favorites—but Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through is among my favorites of the year. Two nights ago, unable to sleep, I read half of it, slept several hours, and woke up and finished the rest. The way we are invited to follow the narrator’s meanderings, the way the novel felt both warm-blooded and earthy and deeply philosophical, the way I felt I was in the presence of a sharply intelligent, benevolent sensibility—I loved all this (“all this: the inexorable, the inexpressible,” Nunez writes) and felt such sadness upon having finished it. I felt so wrecked, so torn apart—yet somehow, miraculously, also shored back up. More from A Year in Reading 2020 Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now. Don't miss: A Year in Reading 20192018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005[millions_ad]