To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife

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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]

Rare Talent, Imperfect Art

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1. I am trying to recall when I first became aware that I don’t like teaching. Not what teachers -- or at least college teachers, as I am -- usually mean when they say that they don’t like it: the students who don’t read, and don’t care; the endless piles of papers to be graded, or in my case, drafts of stories or poems to be read and commented on. What I do not like, I gradually began to realize, was the actual time in class. The song-and-dance, as I came to see it, of trying to keep my students focused and engaged. What felt, to me, like the performance I had to ready myself for, each and every time. For years I taught in the same classroom, on the third floor of one of the buildings at the small liberal arts college where I teach. It’s a relatively small room, and by the second class meeting the twenty or so students in my fiction writing class or introductory creative writing class would know to lug the cumbersome desks into a tight circle around the perimeter of the room. It was a fine classroom really, if a little too small, with latecomers forced to squeeze into a desk positioned somewhere to the side and slightly behind mine. There were high, arched windows, and little in the way of technological tools, save a dusty, bulky old television set and DVD player/VCR set-up, housed on a rolling cart that was crammed in the corner and that usually didn’t work. There’s an elevator in that building, but I never took it. It was slow, and if I took it, I knew, I’d have to share that long ride up two floors with several of my students. Instead I opened the door to the long, sterile stairway and trudged up the two flights two or three times each week, filled with dread. It seems to me now that I didn’t recognize that dread for a number of years. But surely it was there. I’m still teaching, and it’s still there; I’m aware of it, now, as I approach whatever room I’m teaching in. In recent semesters I’ve been assigned to other classrooms, and even when I’m walking down one flight of stairs to the one in the building that also houses my office, there’s time for the dread to settle, somewhere between my stomach and my chest. I find myself muttering fairly empty words -- half prayer, half mantra, something along the lines of “Please let it go okay, please let it go okay” -- every single time. What is this about? I’ve been teaching for nearly twenty years now, in a few different contexts early on, but for the last sixteen, at the same place. And every course I’ve taught has gone reasonably well. So why the need to pray, half-consciously, before every single class, that everything goes okay? I suppose it could be linked with the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech. Surely every college-level creative writing teacher felt at least a bit of unease after the revelations that shooter Seung-Hui Cho wrote a number of violent and disturbing pieces in the creative writing courses that he took before the day that he opened fire in a classroom. In the years that followed that tragedy I eventually moved on from such half-conscious worries about my own students, particularly after a disruptive student who cast himself in hostile and aggressive roles in virtually everything he wrote for the multiple classes he took with me finally graduated. But then came Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords and twelve others in Tucson in January 2011, and who had a history of disruptive behavior at Pima Community College, from which he was eventually expelled. And then, of course, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, students at Bunker Hill Community College and the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, respectively. Every shooter or bomber was surely someone’s student at some point -- though maybe not in a creative writing class, where despair and desperation are, perhaps, on more immediate display. And so from time to time the niggling questions, about my students, about their writing and their apparent appetite for violence, return. After all, every college-level creative writing class, in my experience, has at least one student who kind of scares me, or at least worries me; there’s always at least one surly girl, or someone shifting restlessly throughout the class and walking out (to use the restroom? to take a phone call or respond to a text? I never know) at least once during most class sessions. Someone who writes adoringly about guns. And always -- always -- at least one student, usually male, who writes delirious accounts of blood and gore and destruction. Please let it go okay. Please let no one get shot. Mostly, though, if you worry about these students, you worry more about the harm they seem to be thinking of doing to themselves. Some creative writing teachers I know have established a “no suicide stories and/or poems” rule for their classes. I’ve never done it, but I’ve considered it. A few years ago I saw countless accounts of car accidents, many involving drunk drivers. Recently there have been a lot of characters who are addicted to prescription drugs. When you teach creative writing to college students, you can learn more than you ever wanted to know about the culture of American youth. Mostly I just found it all vaguely interesting, and also a little sad, until I had a daughter of my own. She’s now on the cusp of adolescence, and I suppose that could be another reason that I seem to be unnerved by the prospect of facing yet another roomful of twenty-year-old Americans, and yet more pages of the particular obsessions that surface in their creative work. The heartbreak, the eating disorders, the cutting, the Aderall and Vicodin, the poems written as loving tributes to their warm, comfortable beds, which they desperately wish they never had to leave. 2. “I have become a cartoon of myself for an audience of strangers,” wrote novelist Lynn Freed, in an essay titled “Doing Time: My Years in the Creative-Writing Gulag” that appeared in the July 2005 issue of Harper’s. That line resonated powerfully the first time I read it, in the spring of 2006, when I wrote it down in my journal. (Though these may have nothing to do with anything, I have to note here the two bumper stickers I’d also seen -- on the same car -- and recorded on the same page of my journal on that April day: “I used to have superhuman powers until my therapists took them away,” and “Fuck with me and you fuck with the whole trailer court.”) At that point I was nearing the end of my first year of teaching after a year’s sabbatical, during which I’d cut myself off from all contact with students and colleagues at my college and worked steadily on a new novel. I seem to recall feeing energized, at first, when I entered the third-floor classroom again at the beginning of that post-sabbatical academic year. But by the end of the year my journal entries had dwindled to a sour trickle, mostly angry, sarcastic quotations, like the one from Lynn Freed, and the bumper stickers. The last sneering lines I wrote in that journal for a while came a month later, when classes had ended. “From my Spring ’06 Fiction Writing course evaluations,” I wrote at the end of May: “‘Instructor is very emotionally attached to ideas sometimes.’” After that I taped in a scrap of paper on which I’d written that line from Lynn Freed yet again (apparently forgetting that I’d already written it only a page or two earlier): “I have become a cartoon of myself for an audience of strangers.” “And so I am caught,” Freed continues in that essay, “in the teacher’s trap -- the trap of wanting to be liked.” Judging by the online reactions to Freed’s essay, she needn’t have wasted time wanting to be liked. “Lynn Freed, you are a piece of shit,” went the title of a July 2005 blog post by graduate students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop who identified themselves as “Iowa Mafia.” “Lynn Freed was, hands down, the worst teacher of any kind I have ever had,” wrote a responder on a Chronicle of Higher Education forum. And writer Mark Pritchard satirized Professor Freed in his lengthy -- and very funny -- “Secret Diary of a Prisoner in the Creative Writing Gulag,” one entry of which concludes “Then I learned that what I thought was good behavior -- doing my work, exercising my rare Talent -- was in fact dooming me to more hard labor. Now I have to read twelve stories by next Thursday. If you want to call them that.” I do not teach graduate students, and while I sometimes pine for the company of other writers in the academic world that I inhabit -- and also for students who take themselves, and their written work, more seriously -- mostly I think that’s a good thing. There’s a freshness, even an innocence, in most of the undergraduates I teach; in many there’s also a youthful exuberance for literature and for creative work. Most aren’t yet entertaining fantasies of lucrative book contracts and thousands of adoring fans, as I imagine many graduate students are (I did after all; in fact sometimes I still do). But this isn’t to say that they want nothing from me. While Freed’s students might have expected her to somehow launch them on a career comparable to her own, my students seem mainly to want me to notice them. To pay close attention to everything they’ve written. To take them seriously. And sometimes that’s simply exhausting. I like Lynn Freed’s essay on her time in the “creative writing gulag.” I think her critics, those who see her as nothing but a contemptuous snob, are not reading the essay closely, or are perhaps -- understandably -- so incensed by the complaints of someone who’s secured a number of great teaching gigs in the last fifteen to twenty years that they can’t quite hear all that she’s actually saying. She seems to me to see, and to articulate eloquently, and often hilariously, the conflict between teaching and their own writing that many creative writing teachers experience. She is also refreshingly honest about her own limitations as a teacher. “The happiest teachers,” she writes, “are, perhaps, those who are most comfortable in the role of parent or mentor. I am not.” I don’t, however, find much to encourage or sustain my own teaching in Freed’s essay. It’s interesting to note the kind of “parent or mentor” she seems to have in mind. For Freed, the job of creative writing teacher requires “the language of injunction” -- a language that ruins her “for the real work of a writer -- listening, writing, listening...” She is convinced that such language -- of injunction, analysis, correction -- is what her unformed students most need. Yet as the semester progresses, and she becomes “Lost...in the language of injunction, lost for the real work of a writer,” she also becomes, she says, “both too clever and too stupid to write. What I am suffering -- this cleverness, this stupidity -- is the creative equivalent of an autoimmune disease.” The writer, forced into the classroom, ends up attacking her own writer self. She becomes “a cartoon of myself.” “Too clever and too stupid to write.” Each time I read those words, I wince in painful recognition. Of course, there is another kind of parenting, less about injunction than about nurturing, less concerned with correcting than with listening and, perhaps, gently nudging. Call it “attachment teaching” maybe. And yes, I’m aware of the attendant risks implied by such a term -- and I’ve experienced them, with, for example, the student who showed up every week during office hours with several new poems, long after he’d completed my course. But many things, besides my own lack of time and energy, mitigate against such a model, the model of teacher as caregiver. On many, if not most, college campuses, success as a teacher can brand you, in the eyes of colleagues (and also of tenure and promotion committees), as an intellectual lightweight, someone who is more engaged with students than with the weightier, and more meaningful, work of academic scholarship. “Teaching, we implicitly say to our graduate students, is not as important as scholarship; you will get a teaching assistantship based on our assessment of your potential as a scholar.” So wrote literary scholar Judith Fetterley, in an essay published the Winter 2005 issue of American Literary History. “Of course, if we think you are really hot,” Fetterley continues, “we will give you a fellowship, and then you won’t have to teach at all!” And how can success in teaching be measured anyway? The most widely used tool for such measurement is student evaluations, maybe the least-respected instrument of faculty evaluation there is. To take student evaluations seriously is to take students seriously, to cede to them some awareness of what has happened in their classes, and some authority in reporting on that. But for the most part, we don’t cede them any of that. Also, everyone knows that high numbers on your student evaluations mean your students think you’re an easy grader. Or so the standard wisdom goes on my campus. Who knows what actually goes on in most college classrooms, or any classrooms for that matter? Students, presumably -- at least the ones who are awake and reasonably alert. But if we aren’t going to look to them for answers as we try to understand good teaching, where else can we look? Certainly not to media images of teachers. As Elizabeth Alsop notes, thanks to television shows and movies ranging from Mr. Holland’s Opus to Breaking Bad, viewers “are now all too familiar with certain tropes of teaching yet all but unacquainted with anything like the real thing.” This, Alsop contends, could explain our often unrealistic perceptions of teachers themselves. “The fact that we see teachers in such extreme terms -- as angelically good, as horrifyingly bad -- may in fact be an indication,” she writes, “that we don’t see them at all.” But as any parent can tell you, there’s nothing dramatic or sexy about caretaking and nurturing. There’s mainly a lot of spit and shit and spilled food, all of which somehow morphs into slamming bedroom doors and threats to take away her phone. With, yes, many transcendent moments in between, such as the rapturous experience of watching your child while she sleeps, which is something I never tire of doing. But the transcendent moments are of course fewer than the mundane ones. Just as with teaching creative writing, there are, frankly, a lot of really mediocre, or worse, drafts of poems and stories and essays -- some of which actually get better after some sessions of attachment teaching. That kind of teaching, like the day-to-day moments of caring for a child, doesn’t make for particularly good TV, and if there’s any group that’s even more overlooked than teachers, it’s probably caregivers: the people, for instance, who look after our preschool-aged children, or our aging parents. One of the best discussions of this oversight that I’ve seen came in Meghan Falvey’s 2007 review of the last rash of books about over- and under-employed upper middle class women. We’re constantly in the throes of another wave of cultural obsession with things like “the mommy wars,” of course, but at that point it was books like Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary? and Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell with All That that Falvey was discussing when she wrote, “Care of others hampers self-development -- at least, development of the kind employers require,” and concluded that “Care is long-term, it strives to create security, and it requires personal sacrifice.” The writer -- forced into a seemingly endless series of student conferences and reading a seemingly endless pile of student poems and stories and essays -- sacrificing herself. The “creative equivalent of an autoimmune disease.” Maybe there’s no getting around the exhaustion part of it all. But let’s be honest: we all know that the vast majority of writers, in this age of free content and the free-for-all that the world of print publication has become, have to make a living doing something else. And it’s probably going to make us tired. At least, maybe, we can be tired but respected. Tired, but not also objects of contempt -- because of our favorable teaching evaluations, because of the part-time status that is the likely fate for many of us. “It is feminism,” Falvey says, “that offers the best solution. For feminism’s most important unfinished work lies precisely here: in a redefinition of our attitude toward care and care workers, and in securing for them social recognition and material support.” In his 2012 NEH Jefferson Lecture, “It All Turns on Affection,” Wendell Berry makes a similar argument for the value of care and care workers. Our notion of “culture,” or more specifically of the “arts and humanities,” needs rethinking and revitalizing, Berry says near the end of that soaring speech. Our habitual understanding of culture as “high” culture “actually debases it, as it debases also the presumably low culture that is excluded: the arts, for example, of land use, life support, healing, housekeeping, homemaking” -- a list of arts to which I would add the difficult and, often, low-status job of teaching. Particularly teaching as caring. 3. “We denigrate teaching,” Judith Fetterley writes, “as a form of self-protection from the pain of failure.” I have felt like a cartoon of myself in front of an audience of strangers in various classrooms throughout the years. Like a stand-up comic whose routine is hopelessly out of date, or a grinning, sweating tap dancer, dancing my heart out even though no one’s even watching. (“Instructor is very emotionally attached to ideas sometimes.” That still stings, I’ll admit it, and it still makes me defensive. You think a writer is supposed to be detached from ideas?) Wanting your students to like you -- to find you smart, or funny, or charming, or somehow relevant to their lives -- is dangerous, I’ve found. Especially as I’ve grown older and they, remarkably, have remained young. It’s dangerous because a good number of them inevitably won’t like you, and it’s easy to turn that failure to be liked into the thinly-veiled contempt that, for example, Lynn Freed’s “Doing Time,” for all its clever self-awareness, is dripping with. But, as Judith Fetterley notes, “There is no place for contempt in the classroom. Occasionally, anger is necessary and healthy, and disappointment is inevitable, but contempt poisons the enterprise. Contempt breeds nothing but contempt.” Just as it’s impossible for me to stay furious at my daughter, I find that it’s impossible for me to be contemptuous of my students and their writing once I’ve gotten to know them, once I’ve talked with them one-on-one, once they’ve explained what they’re trying to do in, say, that tenth poem about their insomnia or that fight with their best friend last year. Or in that story about the girl who keeps sleeping with losers until one day she gets a diamond from a really nice guy, the story that infuriated me, that made me want to throw up my hands and say “I give up!” -- except I couldn’t, because she was due at my office any minute, and though a part of me kind of hoped she wouldn’t show up, I knew that when she did, there would soon be a way into talking about this alarmingly naive story of romantic redemption, a way into talking about it that would reveal that she wasn’t, in fact, as naive as the story made her seem. And I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the way into talking about it would only appear if I just sat and listened a bit, to hear what she really wanted to say, and once I’d done that, then -- and only then -- could I have a real conversation with her about how to make the story better. Of course, this doesn’t happen all that often. Most students don’t want to come for conferences with me; they’re content to have me read what they’ve written and assign it a grade. And I don’t want most of them to come for conferences with me either. Conferences take a lot of time, and by the time I’ve prepared and taught my classes, and read and evaluated my students’ assigned work, I have precious little time left, and that’s time I’d rather spend doing something else -- like writing, for Christ’s sake (“exercising my rare Talent”), or like being a mother to the girl who actually is my child. And so I must acknowledge that though I know Judith Fetterley and others are right about what I should be doing as a teacher -- though I’ve had enough experience with students through the years to recognize that what they say is true -- I’m capable of slipping, in a heartbeat, into the caustic voice of Lynn Freed, and of many other writing teachers that I’ve known. I began by saying that I’ve recently admitted to myself that I don’t like teaching, and in many ways that’s true. But this is probably mostly because I am, in many ways, an anxious and introverted person, which means that beyond the simple peevishness that so many of us feel about not being able to make a decent living from our writing, there is, for me, this additional thing, this discomfort in the skin of a teacher. It will probably always be difficult for me, but maybe no more difficult, and probably more rewarding, than I would have found other forms of paying work. I’m trying to hold on to the wisdom of writers like Grace Paley, who said it was simply “interesting,” this never-ending effort to balance everything -- an everything that, for her, included not only writing and teaching and a family, but deeply engaged political activism as well. Or like Scott Russell Sanders, who said in a 2008 Writer’s Chronicle interview, “Like any writer, I struggle to preserve the mental space necessary for creative work. But I’m not willing to abandon the students and others who depend on me...So I go on struggling to make my imperfect art in the midst of relationships and responsibilities.” Bitterness creeps into my voice -- into me actually -- when I’m not writing, when I’m feeling overwhelmed by my students, or my family, or some combination of these and other things. Bitterness, and self-pity; angry, mocking one-liners taped into the pages of my journal, and nothing else written there for weeks. I recognize it; it’s been there for a long time. It’s the voice of the anxious, defensive me -- the me, probably, that realized I wanted to be a writer. Back in college, as a matter of fact, at a small school rather like the one where I teach now, where some important teachers took me seriously. Back when I first realized that literature, and writing, could save me from the paralysis of a growing bitterness, a sense that I was alone in a world filled with people who did not see the world -- the strange, ridiculous, and sometimes beautiful world -- in the way that I did. Literature, and writing, have saved me countless times since then -- as I know they’ve also saved a number of my students. How important, in the face of that possibility, is the sick feeling at facing yet another pile of student stories or poems; the barb of a less-than-stellar teaching evaluation; or the sinking feeling between my stomach and my chest as I walk out of my office, down some steps and over some pathways, up some other steps, and into the classroom one more time? Surely I can handle it, at least for a little longer. Please let it go okay. Image via riaskiff/Flickr