The Temple of Glass (Perfect Library)

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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]

On Dreams and Literature

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“We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep.” — William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611) “A candy-colored clown they call the sandman/tiptoes to my room every night/just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper/’Go to sleep, everything is alright.’” — Roy Orbison, “In Dreams” (1963) Amongst the green-dappled Malvern Hills, where sunlight spools onto spring leaves like puddles of water in autumn, a peasant named Will is imagined to have fallen asleep on a May day when both the warmth and the light induce dreams. Sometime in the late fourteenth-century (as near as we can tell between 1370 and 1390), the poet William Langland wrote of a character in Piers Plowman who shared his name and happened to fall asleep. “In a summer season,” Langland begins, “when soft was the sun, /I clothed myself in a cloak as I shepherd were… And went wide in the world wonders to hear.” Presentism is a critical vice, a fallacy of misreading yourself into a work, supposedly especially perilous if it’s one that’s nearly seven centuries old. Hard not to commit that sin sometimes. “But on a May morning,” Langland writes, and I note his words those seven centuries later on a May afternoon, when the sun is similarly soft, and the inevitable drowsiness of warm contentment takes over my own nodding head and drowsy eyes so that I can’t help but see myself in the opening stanza of Piers Plowman. “A marvel befell me of fairy, methought./I was weary with wandering and went me to rest/Under a broad bank by a brook’s side,/And as I lay and leaned over and looked into the water/I fell into a sleep for it sounded so merry.” Good close readers that we are all supposed to be, it’s imperative that we don’t read into the poem things that aren’t actually in it, and yet I can’t help but imagine what that daytime nocturn was like. The soft gurgle of a creek through English fields, the feeling of damp grass underneath dirtied hands, and of scratchy cloak against unwashed skin; the sunlight tanning the backs of his eyelids; that dull, corpuscular red of daytime sleep, the warmth of day’s glow flushing his cheeks, and the almost preternatural quiet save for some bird chirping. The sort of sleep you fall into when you’re on a train that rocks you to sleep in the sunlight of late afternoon. It sounds nice. Piers Plowman is of a medieval poetic genre known as a dream allegory, or even more enticingly as a dream vision. Most famous of these is Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, where its central character (who as in Piers Plowman shares the poet’s name) discovers himself in a less pleasant wood than does Will, for that “When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,/I found myself within a shadowed forest,/for I had lost the path that does not stray.” The Middle Ages didn’t originate the dream vision, but it was the golden age of the form, where poets could express mystical truths in journeys that only happened within heads resting upon rough, straw-stuffed pillows. Langland’s century alone saw Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, John Gower’s Vox Clamantis, John Lydgate’s The Temple of Glass, and the anonymously written Pearl (by the same lady or gent who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Those are only English examples (or I should say examples by the English; Gower was writing in Latin), for the form was popular in France and Italy as well. A.C. Spearing explains in Medieval Dream-Poetry that while sleeping “we undergo experiences in which we are freed from the constraints of everyday possibility, and which we feel to have some hidden significance,” a sentiment which motivated the poetry of Langland and Dante. Dante famously claimed that his visions — of perdition, purgatory, and paradise — were not dreams, and yet everything in The Divine Comedy holds to the genre’s conventions. Both Langland and Dante engage the strange logic of the nocturne, the way in which the subconscious seems to rearrange and illuminate reality in a manner that the prosaicness of overrated wakefulness simply cannot. Dante writes that the “night hides things from us,” but his epic is itself proof that the night can just as often reveal things. Within The Divine Comedy Dante is guided through the nine circles of hell by the Roman poet Virgil, from the antechamber of the inferno wherein dwell the righteous pagans and classical philosophers, down through the frozen environs of the lowest domain whereby Lucifer forever torments and is tormented by that trinity of traitors composed of Cassius, Brutus, and Judas. Along the way Dante is privy to any number of nightmares, from self-disemboweling prophets to lovers forever buffeted around on violent winds (bearing no similarity to a gentle Malvern breeze). In the Purgatorio and Paradiso he is spectator to far more pleasant scenes (though telling that more people have read Inferno, as our nightmares are always easiest to remember), whereby he sees a heaven that’s the “color that paints the morning and evening clouds that face the sun,” almost a description of the peacefulness of accidentally nodding off on an early summer day. Both The Divine Comedy and Piers Plowman express verities accessed by the mind in repose; Langland’s poem, for not beginning in a dark wood but rather in a sunny field, embodies mystical apprehensions as surely as does Dante. A key difference is that Langland’s allegory is so obvious (as anyone who has seen the medieval play Everyman can attest is true of the period). Characters named after the Seven Deadly Sins, or called Patience, Clergy, and Scripture (and Old Age, Death, and Pestilence) all interact with Will — whose name has its own obvious implications. By contrast, Dante’s characters bear a resemblance to actual people (or they are actual people, from Aristotle in Limbo to Thomas Aquinas in Heaven), even while the events depicted are seemingly more fantastic (though in Piers Plowman Will witness both the fall of man and the harrowing of hell). Both are, however, written in the substance of dreams. Forget the didactic obviousness of allegory, the literal cipher that defines that form, and believe that in a field between Worcestershire and Hertfordshire Will did plumb the mysteries of eternity while sleeping. What makes the dream vision a chimerical form is that maybe he did. That’s the thing with dreams and their visions; there is no need to suspend disbelief. We’re not in the realm of fantasy or myth, for in dreams order has been abolished, anything is possible, and nothing is prohibited, not even flouting the arid rules of logic. A danger to this, for to dream is to court the absolute when we’re at our most vulnerable, to find eternity in a sleep. Piers Plowman had the taint of heresy about it, as it inspired the revolutionaries of 1381’s Peasant Rebellion, as well as the adherents of a schismatic group of proto-Protestants known as Lollards. Arguably the crushing of the rebellion led to an attendant attack by authorities on vernacular literature like Piers Plowman, in part explaining the general dismalness of English literature in the fifteenth-century (which excluding Mallory and Skelton is the worst century of writing). Scholars have long debated the relationship between Langland and Lollardy, but we’ll let others more informed tease out those connections[. T]he larger point is that dreaming can get you in trouble. That’s because dreaming is the only realm in which we’re simultaneously complete sovereign and lowly subject; the cinema we watch when our eyes are closed. Sleep is a domain that can’t be reached by monarch, tyrant, state, or corporation — it is our realm. Dreams had a radical import in George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984. You’ll recall that in that novel the main character of Winston Smith is a minor bureaucrat in totalitarian Oceania. Every aspect of Smith’s life is carefully controlled; his life is under total surveillance, all speech is regulated (or made redundant by New Speak), and even the truth is censored, altered, and transformed (which the character himself has a role in). Yet his dreams are one aspect of his life which the government can’t quite control, for Smith “had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.’” Sleep is an anarchic space where the dreamer is at the whims of something much larger and more powerful than themselves, and by contrast where sometimes the dreamer finds themselves transformed into a god. A warning here though — when total independence erupts from our skulls into the wider world (for after all, it is common to mutter in one’s sleep) there is the potential that your unconsciousness can betray you. Smith, after all, is always monitored by his telescreen. Whether it’s the thirteenth or the twenty-first centuries, dreaming remains bizarre. Whether we reduce dreams to messages from the gods and the dead, or repressed memories and neurosis playing in the nursery of our unconscious, or simply random electric flickering of neurons, the fact that we spend long stretches of our life submerging ourselves in bizarre parallel dimensions is so odd that I can’t help but wonder why we don’t talk about it more (beyond painful conversations recounting dreams). So strange is it that we spend a third of our lives journeying to fantastic realms where every law of spatiality and temporality and every axiom of identity and principle of logic is flouted, that you’d think we’d conduct ourselves with a bit more humility when dismissing that which seems fantastic in the experience of those from generations past who’ve long since gone to eternal sleep. Which is just to wonder that when William Langland dreamt, is it possible that he dreamt of me? Even with our advancements in the modern scientific study of the phenomenon, their mysteriousness hasn’t entirely dissipated. If our ancestors saw in dreams portents and prophecies, then this oracular aspect was only extended by Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. He who inaugurated the nascent field of psychoanalysis explained dreams as a complex tapestry of wish fulfillment and sublimation, an encoded narrative that mapped onto the patient’s waking life and that could be deciphered by the trained therapist. Freud writes that there “exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state.” Not so different from Will sleeping in his field. The origin may be different — Langland sees in dreams visions imparted from God and Freud finds their origin in the holy unconsciousness, but the idea isn’t dissimilar. Dreaming imparts an ordered and ultimately comprehensible message, even though the imagery may be cryptic. Freud has been left to us literary critics (who’ve even grown tired of him over the past generation), and science has abandoned terms like id, ego, and superego in favor of neurons and biochemistry, synapses and serotonin. For neurologists, dreaming is a function of the prefrontal cortex powering down during REM sleep, and of the hippocampus severing its waking relationship with the neocortex, allowing for a bit of a free-for-all in the brain. Scientists have discovered much about how and why dreaming happens — what parts of the brain are involved, what cycles of wakefulness and restfulness a person will experience, when dreaming evolved, and what functions (if any) it could possibly serve. Gone are the simple reductionisms of dream interpretation manuals with their categorized entries about your teeth falling out or of showing up naked to your high school biology final. Neuroscientists favor a more sober view of dreaming, whereby random bits of imagery and thought thrown out by your groggy chemical induced brain rearrange themselves into a narrative which isn’t really a narrative. Still, as Andrea Rock notes in The Mind at Night: The New Science of How and Why we Dream, “it’s impossible for scientists to agree on something as seemingly simple as the definition of dreaming.” If we’re such stuff as dreams are made of, the forensics remain inconclusive. [millions_email] Not that dreaming is exclusively a human activity. Scientists have been able to demonstrate that all mammals have some form of nocturnal hallucination, from gorillas to duck-billed platypuses, dolphins to hamsters. Anyone with a dog has seen their friend fall into a deep reverie; their legs pump as if they’re running, occasionally they’ll even startle-bark themselves awake. One summer day my wife and I entertained our French bulldog by having her chase a sprinkler’s spray. She flapped her jowly face at the cool gush of water with a happiness that no human is capable of. That evening, while she was asleep, she began to flap her mouth again, finally settling into a deeper reverie where she just smiled. Dreaming may not necessarily be a mammalian affair — there are indications that both birds and reptiles dream — albeit it’s harder to study creatures more distant from us. Regardless, evidence is that animals have been sleeping perchance to dream for a very long time, as it turns out. Rock writes that “Because the more common forms of mammals we see today branched off from the monotreme line about 140 million years ago… REM sleep as it exists in most animals also emerged at about the time that split occurred.” We don’t know if dinosaurs dreamt, but something skittering around and out of the way of their feet certainly did. If animal brains are capable of generating pyrotechnic missives, and if dreaming goes back to the Cretaceous, what then of the future of dreaming? If dogs and donkeys, cats and camels are capable of dreaming, will artificial intelligences dream? This is the question asked by Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was itself the source material for Ridley Scott’s science fiction film classic Blade Runner. Dick was an author as obsessed with illusion and reality, the unattainability of truth, and doubt as much as any writer since Plato. In his novel’s account of the bounty hunter Rick Deckard’s decommissioning of sentient androids, there is his usual examination of what defines consciousness, and the ways in which its illusions can present realities. “Everything is true… Everything anybody has ever thought,” one character says, a pithy encapsulation of the radical potential of dreams. Dick imagined robots capable of dreaming with such verisimilitude that they misapprehended themselves to be human, but as it turns out our digital tools are able to slumber in silicon. Computer scientists at Google have investigated what random images are produced by a complex artificial neural network as it “dreams,” allowing the devices to filter various images they’ve encountered and to recombine, recontextualize, and regenerate new pictures. In The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance writes that the “computer-made images feature scrolls of color, swirling lines, stretched faces, floating eyeballs, and uneasy waves of shadow and light. The machines seemed to be hallucinating, and in a way that appeared uncannily human.” Artificial Intelligence has improved to an unsettling degree in just the past decade, even though a constructed mind capable of easily passing the Turing Test has yet to be created, though that seems more an issue of time than possibility. If all of the flotsam and jetsam of the internet could coalesce into a collective consciousness emerging from the digital primordial like some archaic demigod birthing Herself from chaos, what dreams could be generated therein? Or if it’s possible to program a computer, a robot, an android, an automaton to dream, then what oracles of Artificial Intelligence could be birthed? I can’t help but thrill to the idea that we’ll be able to program a desktop version of the Delphic Oracle analyzing its own microchipped dreams. “The electric things have their life too,” Dick wrote. We’ve already developed AI capable of generating completely realistic-looking but totally fictional women and men. Software engineer Philip Wang invented a program at ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com which does exactly what its title advertises itself as doing: it gives you a picture of a person who doesn’t exist. Using an algorithm that combs through actual images, Wang’s site uses something called a generative adversarial network to create pictures of people who never lived. If you refresh the site, you’ll see that the humans dreamt of by the neural network aren’t cartoons or caricatures, but photorealistic images so accurate that they look like they could be used for a passport. So far I’ve been presented with an attractive butch woman with sparkling brown eyes, a broad smile, and short curly auburn hair; a strong jawed man in his 30s with an unfortunate bowl cut and a day’s worth of stubble who looks a bit like swimmer Michael Phelps; and a nerdy-looking Asian man with a pleasant smile and horn-rimmed glasses. Every single person the AI presented looked completely average and real, so that if I encountered them in the grocery store or at Starbucks I wouldn’t think twice, and yet not a single one of them was real. I’d read once (though I can’t remember where) that every invented person we encounter in our dreams has a corollary to somebody that we once met briefly in real life, a waitress or a store clerk whose paths we crossed for a few minutes drudged up from the unconscious and commissioned into our narrative. I now think that all of those people come from ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com. One fictional person who reoccurs in many of our dreams is “This Man,” a pudgy, unattractive balding man with thick eyebrows, and an approachable smile who was the subject of Italian marketer Andrea Natella’s now defunct website “Ever Dream This Man?” According to Natella, scores of people had dreams about the man (occasionally nightmares) across all continents and in dozens of countries. Blake Butler, writing in Vice Magazine, explains that “His presence seems both menacing and foreboding at the same time, unclear in purpose, but haunting to those in whom he does appear.” This Man doesn’t particularly look like any famous figure, nor is he so generic that his presence can be dismissed as mere coincidence. A spooky resonance concerns this guy who looks like he manages a diner on First Avenue and 65th emerging simultaneously in thousands of peoples’ dreams (his cameo is far less creepy after you’re aware of the website). Multiple hypotheses were proffered, ranging from This Man being the product of the collective unconscious as described by Carl Jung to Him being a manifestation of God appearing to people from Seattle to Shanghai (my preferred theory). As it turns out, he was simply the result of a viral marketing campaign. Meme campaigns aside, the sheer weirdness of dreams can’t quite exorcize them of a supernatural import — we’re all looking for portents, predictions, and prophecies. Being submerged into what’s effectively another universe can’t help but alter our sense of reality, or at least make us question what exactly that word means. For years now I’ve had dreams that take place in the same recurring location — a detailed, complex, baroque alternate version of my hometown of Pittsburgh. This parallel universe Pittsburgh roughly maps onto the actual place, though it appears much larger and there are notable differences. Downtown, for example, is a network of towering, interconnected skyscrapers all accessible from within one another (there’s a good bookstore there); a portion of Squirrel Hill is given over to a Wild West experience set. It’s not that I have the same dreams about this place, it’s that the place is the same, regardless of what happens to me in those dreams when I’m there. So much so that I experience the uncanny feeling of not dreaming, but rather of sliding into some other dimension. An eerie feeling comes to me from a life closer then my own breath, existing somewhere in the space between atoms, and yet totally invisible to my conscious eye. Such is the realm of seers and shamans, poets and prophets, as well as no doubt yourself — the dream realm is accessible to everyone. As internal messages from a universe hidden within, whereby the muse and oracle are within your own skull. Long have serendipitous missives arisen from our slumber, even while we debate their ultimate origin. Social activist Julia Ward Howe wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic” when staying at Washington D.C.’s Ward Hotel in 1861, the “dirtiest, dustiest filthiest place I ever saw.” While “in a half dreaming state” she heard a group of Union soldiers marching down Pennsylvania Avenue singing “John Brown’s Body,” and based on that song Howe composed her own hymn while in a reverie. Howe’s dreaming was in keeping with a melancholic era enraptured to spiritualism and occultism, for she commonly was imparted with “attacks of versification [that] had visited me in the night.” The apocalyptic Civil War altered peoples’ dreams, it would seem. Jonathan White explores the sleep-world of nineteenth-century Americans in his unusual and exhaustive study Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams During the Civil War, arguing that peoples’ “dream reports were often remarkably raw and unfiltered… vividly bringing to life the horrors of the conflict; for others, nighttime was an escape from the hard realities of life and death in wartime.” Every era imparts its own images, symbols, and themes into dreams, so that collective analysis can tell us about the concerns of any given era. White writes that during the Civil War people used dreams to relive “distant memories or horrific experiences in battle, longing for a return to peace and life as they had known it before the war, kissing loved ones that had not seen for years, communing with the dead, traveling to faraway places they wished they could see in real life,” which even if the particulars may be different, is not so altered from our current reposes. One of the most famous of Civil War dreamers was Abraham Lincoln, whose own morbid visions were in keeping with slumber’s prophetic purposes. Only days before his assassination, Lincoln recounted to his bodyguard that he’d had an eerily realistic dream in which he wandered from room to room in the White House. “I heard subdued sobs,” Lincoln said, as “if a number of people were weeping.” The president was disturbed by the sound of mourning, “so mysterious and so shocking,” until he arrived in the East Room. “Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments,” the body inside being that of Lincoln. Such dreams are significant — as the disquieting quarantine visions people have had over the past two months can attest to. We should listen — they have something to tell us. Within literature dreams seem to always have something to say, a realm of the fantastic visited in novels as diverse as L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland. The dream kingdom is a place where the laws of physics are muted, where logic and reason no longer hold domain, and the wild kings of absurdity are allowed to reign triumphant. Those aforementioned novels are ones in which characters like Dorothy, Ebenezer Scrooge, Morpheus, and Alice are subsumed into a fantastical dream realm, but there are plenty of books with more prosaic dream sequences, from Mr. Lockwood’s harrowing nightmare in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to Raskolnikov’s violent childhood dreams in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. “I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas,” writes Brontë, “they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.” Then there is the literature that emerges from dreams, the half-remembered snippets and surreal plot lines, the riffs of dialogue and the turns of phrase that are birthed from the baked brain of night. Think of the poppy reveries of Thomas DeQuincy’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater or the delicious purpose of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” written in a similar drug haze until the poet was interrupted by that damned person from Porlock. Spearing writes that “from the time of the Homeric poems down to the modern novel, it is surely true that the scene of the great bulk of Western literature has not been the internal world of the mind, in which dreams transact themselves, but the outer, public world of objective reality,” but this misses an important point. All novels actually occur in the internal world of the mind, no matter how vigorous their subjects may be. I’ll never be able to see the exact same cool colors of Jay Gatsby’s shirts that you envision, nor will I hear the exact timber of Mr. Darcy’s voice that you imagine, in the same way that no photographs or drawings or paintings can be brought back from the place you go to when you sleep. Dreaming and reading are unified in being activities of fully created, totally self-contained realities. Furthermore, there is a utopian freedom in this, for that closed off dimension, that pinched off universe which you travel to in reveries nocturnal or readerly is free of the contagion of the corrupted outside world. There are no pop-up ads in dreams, there are no telemarketers calling you. Even our nightmares are at least our own. Here, as in the novel, the person may be truly free. Dreaming is the substance of literature. It’s what comes before, during, and after writing and reading, and there can be no fiction or poetry without it. There is no activity in waking life more similar to dreaming than reading (and by proxy writing, which is just self-directed reading). All necessitate the complete creation of a totally constructed universe constrained within your own head and accessible only to the individual. The only difference between reading and dreaming is who directs the story. As in a book as in our slumber, the world which is entered is one that is singular to the dreamer/reader. What you see when you close your eyes is forever foreign to me, as I may never enter the exact same story-world that you do when you crack open a novel. “Life, what is it but a dream?” Carol astutely asks. We spend a third of our day in dream realms, which is why philosophers and poets have always rightly been preoccupied with them. Dreams necessarily make us question that border between waking and sleeping, truth and falsity, reality and illusion. That is the substance of storytelling as well, and that shared aspect between literature and dreaming is just as important as the oddity of existing for a spell in entirely closed off, totally self-invented, and completely free worlds. What unites the illusions of dreams and our complete ownership of them is subjectivity, and that is the charged medium through which literature must forever be conducted. Alfred North Whitehead once claimed that all of philosophy was mere footnotes to Plato — accurate to say that all of philosophy since then has been variations on the theme of kicking the tires of reality and questioning whether this exact moment is lived or dreamt. The pre-Socratic metaphysician Gorgias was a radical solipsist who thought that all the world was the dream of God and the dreamer was himself. Plato envisioned our waking life as but a pale shadow of a greater world of Forms. Rene Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy forged a methodology of radical doubt, whereby he imagined that a malicious demon could potentially deceive him into thinking that the “sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.” So, from the assumption that everything is a dream, Descartes tried to latch onto anything that could be certain. Other than his own mind, he wasn’t able to find much. In dreams there is the beginning of metaphysics, for nothing else compels us to consider that the world which we see is not the world which there is, and yet such philosophical speculation need not philosophers, since children engage in it from the moment they can first think. When I was a little kid, I misunderstood that old nursery rhyme “Row Your Boat.” When it queried if “life is but a dream,” I took that literally to mean that all which we experience is illusion, specter, artifice. In my own abstract way I assumed that according to the song, all of this which we see: the sun and moon, the trees and flowers, our friends and family, are but a dream. And I wondered what it would be like when I woke up, who I would recount that marvelous dream too? “I had the strangest dream last night,” I imagined telling faces unknown with names unconveyed. I assumed the song meant that all of this, for all of us, was a dream — and who is to know what that world might look like when you wake up? Such a theme is explored in pop culture from the cyberpunk dystopia The Matrix to the sitcom finale Newhart, because this sense of unreality, of dreams impinging on our not-quite-real world is hard to shake. Writing about a classic metaphysical thought-experiment known as the Omphalos Argument (from the Greek for “navel,” as relating to a question of Eden), philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in The Analysis of Mind that “There is no logical impossibility… that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that ‘remembered’ a wholly unreal past.” Perhaps we’ve just dozed off for a few minutes then? Here’s the thing though — even if all of this is a dream — it doesn’t matter. Because in dreams you’re innocent. In dreams you’re free. Image credit: Pexels/Erik Mclean.