The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal

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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]

I Don’t Want to Move On: Johannes Göransson and Niina Polari in Conversation

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Johannes Göransson is the author of nine books of poems and one book of criticism, Transgressive Circulation: Essays On Translation, as well as the translator of works by Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, and many others. Together with his wife, the poet Joyelle McSweeney, he is also one-half of the founding team at Action Books, one of the most exciting, risk-taking small presses working in the U.S. today. I first met him a decade ago when Action published my translation of the Finnish poet Tytti Heikkinen’s collection, The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal. Göransson’s poetic work is informed by multilingualism and translation, and often defies genre and the limitations of narrative in poetry. Summer, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press, is his most recent book of poems. It deals with the death of his daughter, Arachne, but also with debt, capitalism, the economic framework and "worth" of poetry, and many more interwoven topics. We have several things in common in addition to our translation and writing practices: immigration at a formative age and family-building in America; publishing works of poetry in the same year that deal with the grief of child loss; a resistance to healing narratives around the subject of grief. Talking with Göransson about many of these subjects was a privilege. Niina Pollari: I have so many questions to ask you about Summer, but let’s start here. The book is teeming with Swedish words and phrases, which are not translated, leading the reader to choose one of two paths. You can either speed through not understanding some of the passages but appreciating the voice, or you can stop to translate (which is what I did) and gain the pleasure of the many double entendres, but at the expense of the unbroken reading experience. Then I got to this line: “I only ever write / about childhood / because that was before I died”—you immigrated to the U.S. in early adolescence, so is this death in a certain way a linguistic death? How did you choose the form of the language in this text? Johannes Göransson: This really cuts to the heart of the book, and to my writing in general. When I’m asked about my reasons for writing, I mostly answer that I write out of homesickness. I think one of the driving forces behind Summer was finally realizing that that place I have yearned for for so long doesn’t exist. Probably was always an illusion. At the time I was in Sweden, surrounded by the Swedish language (listening to mostly Swedish pop music on the radio, reading Swedish poetry). So along with that realization came the feeling that the Swedish language is a kind of undead language, or perhaps that I was a ghost, and that Sweden was still alive. In the poem, the languages began to mingle. Swedish leaked into English and vice versa. I can’t say that I “chose” this language mix-up so much as was afflicted by it—though that makes it seem painful; it was more like a joyful affliction at first. This leakage generated an odd poetic music, which I kept entering back into, even when I’d gone back to the U.S. Did you ever feel that way about language? About home? NP: Yes. At some point I realized that home as I knew it was lost to me—it had to do with the realization that you mention, where the place of your consciousness is no longer real. Some of this has to do with the fact that I was never an adult, with an adult’s problems, in Finland. My memories have the haze that all childhood memories do. I’ve been back since I came to America, but I don’t know how to exist as, like, a taxpayer with civic responsibilities and garbage duty and dentist visits and daycare arrangements. I visit in the warmer, brighter seasons and I eat all my favorite foods and show my American family where I come from, but Finland and I have both changed in the decades since our ways parted. My translation practice continues to be a way in which I stay in dialogue as a thinker with both the language and the real, current Finland, even though I don’t participate in its day to day. My particular poetic mode as a writer, not a translator, is definitely informed by bilingualism, but my language would die if I never participated in the translation exchange. Or its growth would be stunted—it would remain the Finnish of a 10-year-old. This way it gets to grow and infiltrate and mutate. I want to talk more about your book and its themes and mechanics, but while we are talking about nonexistent places, how do you feel about the mythic depictions of Sweden and Scandinavia? Ari Aster’s Midsommar, the city of Arandelle in the Disney movie Frozen, even the Nordic Noir trope in literature? We’ve talked about this a little on Twitter in the past so hopefully this isn’t redundant. [laughs] JG: Yes, that’s very similar to me. I can’t imagine poetry without translation. I first started writing poems by translating, so it’s in the DNA of my poems. As for U.S. fantasies about Sweden and Scandinavia, they keep proliferating. On one hand Berryman writes that Swedes “don’t exist”; on the other hand they are everywhere in US culture and literature. As in Phillip Roth’s story about “the Swede” who’s really Jewish, Swedes are often fakes—a mask (or a wig!) without interiority. Although Midsommar posits Scandinavia as a site of ancient authenticity, it ends up being about an anxiety about Scandinavian collectivity—and especially feminist collectivity—that is pretty common in U.S. culture. Frozen is based on the literalization of a stereotype that Scandinavians are “cold,” but paradoxically this trait leads to a kind of gothic individuality in this case. Rightwing media has its own fantasies about Scandinavia that they obsessively reproduce: Swedes used to be very masculine (Vikings!) but now they’ve been emasculated by feminism, which has allowed the country to be ruined by the generous immigrant policies. This is of course also fiction, though published not by presses but in online chatrooms. NP: I can definitely see the mythic in this book, in both the fantastical Sweden and other mythological references like Persephone and Orpheus. The text also has a sensory overwhelm, in the summery syrener and their ever-permeating scent (a smell I also vividly remember from childhood), as well as a sense of looming, unnamed conflict and the unsettling omnipresence of the rabble. But it's also got these moments of enormous despair which call to the death of your daughter. These devastated parts, which more obviously comprise more of the book as it progresses (and as some of the Swedish drops away), inform the sensory saturation of the text and make it into something more than just excess. There is this startling dialogue that goes: "I'm your daughter no / you're not you're her opposite / I'm her death she's always / dead here so I will stay here / with her death you can't I can / the whole world is my daughter's / room everyone is döttrar". This is also a text of annihilating and expanding grief, and I'm really sorry you had to write it. Can you tell me a little about incorporating grief into your writing? This is something I found really difficult, and hated myself for even wanting to do for a long time. JG: These poems began being about homesickness and its peculiar joys. A year later, when my daughter Arachne died, it seems it was the only language I could use to write about her, or perhaps to write to her, with her. I think it had to do with the intensity of the language, the “overwhelming” quality, as you say, and also the feeling that in the poem I was speaking partly in a language of death, and partly that when I wrote in that language I was partly dead, partly a ghost. The poem became a room where I could be both dead and alive, a permeable room. Arachne lived for two weeks, all of it spent in a hospital room in Indianapolis. It was an intense room. When I came into the chamber and saw my beautiful girl taped-up and hooked up with tubes, I walked up to her and weirdly I started singing this song that I hadn’t heard for literally 30 years, “Vakna Nu Anneli” by Magnus Johansson, a folk pop hit from the early ‘90s: “Wake up now Anneli, the men from Venice have closed the factory and you’re free to go. Put on something sky-blue and a hat…” The fear and sadness jumbled my synapses and this song came out. While I was down there with her I read a lot. I re-read Ballard’s Crash, Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Aase Berg’s Forsla fett, Eva-Kristina Olsson’s Eiderwhite: Extreme writing that deals with the body and its reproduction, its destruction. These poems were incredibly helpful for me. Or I don’t know if they “helped” me; they were there for me. I could enter into them and the intensity of the books measured up to the horror and fear I was feeling. Occasionally I would scroll social media and come across “healing poems”—poems of wise, self-help epiphanies—and I’ve never been so disgusted in my life. The dominant sound in Arachne’s room was the breathing machine that was keeping her alive; the problem she was born with had to do with her lungs, she couldn’t breathe. I thought a lot about the breath, which is supposed to be the source of the poem (in people like Ginsberg and Olson) and it began to feel like this mechanical breath was a kind of poem, or un-poem, something that hovers between life and death, through which she connected to us in that room. I recorded it. That was one of the last things I did before she died. I still have it, but I’ve never listened to it. So basically I think I’m saying that I always interacted with Arachne through art. Art was there in her room, art was how I was with her, and it’s still how I am with her. I didn’t incorporate the grief so much as the grief generated the poem. Grief and terror and, yes, hatred, but also a kind of joy. I never questioned that this would all find its way into my writing, though after I had written the poems I sometimes wondered if it’s a good idea. The poems often make me very sad, sometimes when I read them at readings I feel like I’m about to collapse. I can’t get over her. Maybe that’s a source of self-hatred. Maybe it’s just that grief is so unwieldy. There is no commensurate amount of grief. Grief is incommensurate; it ruins any kind of economic thinking. Maybe that’s why I was so repelled by the healing poems: they wanted to make my grief wieldy, commensurate, they wanted to buy off the grief. I feel like this is something Ursula Ankjaer Olsen explores in her trilogy of books. Why did you hate yourself for wanting to write about your grief? Is it that you hate yourself for writing about the grief or that the grief makes you hate yourself? I wonder if hatred is another affect like grief that unsettles economies of affect? One particularly striking poem in Path of Totality is “At a Reading Listening to a Poem About Motherhood,” where you write: “I erased the rage from this poem, but there is still rage in it. And so I failed again.” What’s the relationship of hatred and rage? NP: I didn’t realize that some of the book was written before Arachne’s death, but it makes sense given the book’s “flow,” though it also doesn’t seem abrupt or disconnected given that you describe art as a kind of continuous communication with her, and the room as the locus. I feel the sadness when I read your poems too, and know the reeling feeling of reading out loud; I’ve only read to an audience from Path of Totality once, and it took a lot of mental preparation. I wrote the book for my daughter Lumi, who died at birth, and the intensity of sharing it with other people is something I wasn’t prepared for. At the same time, it is important to me that the book accurately depicted how bad I felt—feel—and how important she is to me. I have no regrets about writing it, and it is a way in which I get to talk about her. It just took me longer to come to the realization of the poems’ purpose. It sounds like you always knew the purpose, which I admire. I hate the lesson-y grief poems too, so passionately. I read a lot as well, because I wanted to find something that understood how bad I felt. I loved Olsen’s trilogy for that reason, and it’s so cool that Action is the publisher of those books; you understand the capacity of those poems to be fine with being unresolved. I hate resolutions. I don’t want to move on. At one point, someone suggested that I do some kind of tapping therapy or sensory reprocessing to try to mitigate my trauma, and I felt horrified by the idea that I could lose something huge and fundamental about the experience. The suggestion felt like severing some part of my connection with my daughter. These therapeutic modalities help many people, but they are not for me, not in this circumstance. I guess you just asked me about hatred, and about rage. The hatred I felt for myself was a feeling of contempt for wanting to take something so immense and make it into, what, art? For whom? I felt the contempt of those placid grief-as-lesson poems, and I struggled with trying to make what I felt into poems because I hated my awareness of an audience, and my employment of poetic devices to try to convey the immensity of this feeling. It’s why I wrote so much in prose blocks. Even adding line breaks made me feel the contempt in the beginning. But it is separate from the rage, which is tied to what I perceived as a failure, which is maybe connected with motherhood with death as the outcome—the idea that I failed in my role somehow. Motherhood narratives are so pervasive—and generally so positive—that it’s hard narratively speaking to have an experience that deviates from expectation. So the hatred expands outward, but the rage inward. I have long been interested in material debt and its connection to poetry; your book talks a lot about money and debt: “I can’t afford to kill the sun / so I write a poem about the hole / in my daughter’s lung.” What is the relationship to debt in all of this? For one thing, I know hospital treatment and everything related to the medical experience is horrifyingly expensive. But this relationship between owing and poetry? JG: I understand where you’re coming from when you didn’t want to make your feelings poetic, with line breaks, etcetera. For me I was lucky to have a kind of poetic line/rhythm in place and it carried me. It had already made a room for me. And it was the only room I could be in at the time. I am interested in the way we use economic frameworks to understand a wide array of experiences. For example, creative writing pedagogy talks about “earning” an image or a line (and I have always been interested in the unearned), as if a kind of subdued personal narrative earns the capacity to write a more extravagant line. As if the personal was a kind of gold standard, and the extravagant inflationary. Rage and riots are generally viewed as inflationary—people who catch that violence are seen as lacking the proper interiority. All the money that went into Arachne’s treatment and the aftermath of her death made me feel the reality of debt much more immediately. For me the idea became tied up with having children and reproduction. That’s why I keep going back to the Swedish word virginity, oskuld (“un” + “debt”), because it sits there at the intersection of economics, sexuality, and poetry. In some ways, I think it’s a book about a desperate attempt to remove all debt. But this is of course an illusory urge to be a kind of “virgin,” pure and untainted. In an interview last spring, Olsen said her book was about rejecting the dream of debtlessness, about embracing the fact that we are in debt to many people—and that that’s not a bad thing! I think that’s a really profound point but I don’t think my poem ever arrives at that point. NP: That is such an interesting nexus, etymologically speaking. There is no such correlation in Finnish; the proto-Finnic word just has to do with maidens and maidenhood. But capitalist metaphor is everywhere, even in the craft of such pitifully compensated labor as poetry. I love the idea that Olsen proposes, because the outcome of embracing your debt to everyone would be a kind of anticapitalist community. Obviously the inclusion of Swedish, whether or not the reader understands it, adds a lot of sonic influence into the manuscript. There are also certain refrains that make me think of music, like the repeating phrase “I can’t hear you” in one section of the book, or the childhood music you described above, some which also crept into the text. What is the importance of sound for you? I get frustrated by the idea that sound is only important—or most important—in performance, not in the text on the page, for example. JG: I think the most important sonic element was simply the mash-up of Swedish and English. The effect of reading English words with a Swedish mouth is really what created the sound of the book—it interrupted the flow of language, made me pay attention to the exterior of language, to the sound. One thing this caused was that I started to run sentences together, playing with line breaks to create a kind of morphing syntax. From this sonic play, various lyrical and narrative patterns emerged. My performance of these poems is very particular, but like you say, the sonic element of this poem does not just come out in performance; it was a key to the very composition of the book. I was just reading some very normative creative writing textbooks, and there it seems “sound” is always a threat to the gold standard of “clarity” and personal interiority. The books portray sound as an exterior, inflationary force that is constantly threatening the “meaning” with a lure of “nonsense,” the lure of the feeling of the words in one’s mouth, the corporeality of sound. Summer is definitively a poem where that sonic lure becomes a driving force. I want the words to be felt in the mouth, I want to feel them in the mouth. One of the features of this “nonsense” dynamic is its capacity to generate an ambience that can contain a multiplicity of feelings. Like when I give readings of the poems I focus most of my attention to the sonic patterns, and the result is both that the grief comes back to me—Arachne feels present in her absence—and at the same time I feel ecstatic. On the other hand, there’s a long tradition that wants poetry to aspire to music, or to take its cues from music. It’s there in the very definition and history of “the lyric.” I think also of Walter Pater’s famous dictum: “All art aspires toward the condition of music”—that is, because of music’s ability “obliterate” the difference between form and content. You’re somebody who has done a lot of actual music, for example the band Mindtroll a few years ago. What kind of music projects are you working on these days and how do they overlap or differ from your poems? Do you feel like working with music involves the same part of your mind, the same kind of thinking as your poems? Do you feel like music obliterates the distinction between form and content? NP: That Pater quote is right on; music is very aspirational for me, even if I can’t bring my two brains together perfectly when I am working on making it myself. All the albums I admire the most hold a kind of elevating power that comes from the blur between form and content, the interaction of the writing and the music, and I want desperately to be able to achieve it, but I don’t know if I can. That said, I’m also not a terribly skilled musician. But I believe it and know its power and maybe that’s enough. Most recently I made some music with the poets Ben Fama and Matt Roar, which was very fun—they have a particular vision and energy, and I just tried to respect it with my contributions. In addition to that, I have one small project I’ve been working on very, very slowly. Who knows if it will ever come to light? But music is connected to my poetic work; on a fundamental level, it taught me how to use a microphone, which is a skill I employ every time I read poems out loud somewhere. JG: Yes, skill often gets away of the “power,” as I think Patti Smith and whoever else have taught us! I’m getting around to an issue that has maybe hovered in the background of this whole discussion: Both of us are immigrants writing in English. Poetry, we are told over and over again, has to be written in the poet’s “mother tongue.” Similarly, translation discourse tells us translation has to be done into the translator’s mother tongue—we can learn to read another language but we cannot write in it. To some extent this whole discussion has been about this issue, so I thought I would ask you how you think being an immigrant has affected your writing? NP: I wonder all the time if I would be a writer had I not moved to the U.S. I think the answer is yes, but I also know that being an immigrant child contributed a lot to my loneliness and interiority and desire to document my feelings. I grew up here, and all my education is American; in some ways, English is the language I wield most proficiently, though it’s always tinged with the color of that first language. I disagree with the idea, though, that you can’t write in a language that isn’t your own—I think it’s fearful. I remember some early translations I did from Spanish, which I speak conversationally at best. They felt generative in a way that led me to better understand the way that the words worked, which made me want to try writing in it, and those fragments were not good, but the experience was. I think being an immigrant and translation and writing are fundamentally connected in a way that demonstrates potential and possibility, and being “bad” at a language is kind of a license to experiment. Why are we so afraid to make mistakes? To me, error is a part of the creation process. JG: I love this, especially the Spanish example. I started writing poems soon after moving to the U.S. and what I was doing was largely translating pop songs (mostly Thåström/Imperiet lyrics) into English, but in a very loose sense. This “error” or noise, friction in language has always fascinated me. But in literary culture, there’s this monolingual idealization of mastery that drives so much about both the way we talk about poetry and the way we talk about translation. There’s an imagined expert at the center of this model (let’s face it, someone of privileged background). It’s such a static model of culture, such a fearful way of conceiving of art. I think you’re right that to be multilingual is to be aware of versions, errors, transformations. We could talk about the mistakes as bad, but we could also talk about them as entryways to metamorphosis. [millions_email]