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Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2025 Preview
It's cold, it's grey, its bleak—but winter, at the very least, brings with it a glut of anticipation-inducing books. Here you’ll find nearly 100 titles that we’re excited to cozy up with this season. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to devour based on their authors, subjects, or blurbs. We'd love for you to find your next great read among them.
The Millions will be taking a hiatus for the next few months, but we hope to see you soon.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
January
The Legend of Kumai by Shirato Sanpei, tr. Richard Rubinger (Drawn & Quarterly)
The epic 10-volume series, a touchstone of longform storytelling in manga now published in English for the first time, follows outsider Kamui in 17th-century Japan as he fights his way up from peasantry to the prized role of ninja. —Michael J. Seidlinger
The Life of Herod the Great by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad)
In the years before her death in 1960, Hurston was at work on what she envisioned as a continuation of her 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain. Incomplete, nearly lost to fire, and now published for the first time alongside scholarship from editor Deborah G. Plant, Hurston’s final manuscript reimagines Herod, villain of the New Testament Gospel accounts, as a magnanimous and beloved leader of First Century Judea. —Jonathan Frey
Mood Machine by Liz Pelly (Atria)
When you eagerly posted your Spotify Wrapped last year, did you notice how much of what you listened to tended to sound... the same? Have you seen all those links to Bandcamp pages your musician friends keep desperately posting in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, you might give them money for their art? If so, this book is for you. —John H. Maher
My Country, Africa by Andrée Blouin (Verso)
African revolutionary Blouin recounts a radical life steeped in activism in this vital autobiography, from her beginnings in a colonial orphanage to her essential role in the continent's midcentury struggles for decolonization. —Sophia M. Stewart
The First and Last King of Haiti by Marlene L. Daut (Knopf)
Donald Trump repeatedly directs extraordinary animus towards Haiti and Haitians. This biography of Henry Christophe—the man who played a pivotal role in the Haitian Revolution—might help Americans understand why. —Claire Kirch
The Bewitched Bourgeois by Dino Buzzati, tr. Lawrence Venuti (NYRB)
This is the second story collection, and fifth book, by the absurdist-leaning midcentury Italian writer—whose primary preoccupation was war novels that blend the brutal with the fantastical—to get the NYRB treatment. May it not be the last. —JHM
Y2K by Colette Shade (Dey Street)
The recent Y2K revival mostly makes me feel old, but Shade's essay collection deftly illuminates how we got here, connecting the era's social and political upheavals to today. —SMS
Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay (Penguin)
In a vast dystopian reimagining of Nepal, Upadhyay braids narratives of resistance (political, personal) and identity (individual, societal) against a backdrop of natural disaster and state violence. The first book in nearly a decade from the Whiting Award–winning author of Arresting God in Kathmandu, this is Upadhyay’s most ambitious yet. —JF
Metamorphosis by Ross Jeffery (Truborn)
From the author of I Died Too, But They Haven’t Buried Me Yet, a woman leads a double life as she loses her grip on reality by choice, wearing a mask that reflects her inner demons, as she descends into a hell designed to reveal the innermost depths of her grief-stricken psyche. —MJS
The Containment by Michelle Adams (FSG)
Legal scholar Adams charts the failure of desegregation in the American North through the story of the struggle to integrate suburban schools in Detroit, which remained almost completely segregated nearly two decades after Brown v. Board. —SMS
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow)
African Futurist Okorafor’s book-within-a-book offers interchangeable cover images, one for the story of a disabled, Black visionary in a near-present day and the other for the lead character’s speculative posthuman novel, Rusted Robots. Okorafor deftly keeps the alternating chapters and timelines in conversation with one another. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Open Socrates by Agnes Callard (Norton)
Practically everything Agnes Callard says or writes ushers in a capital-D Discourse. (Remember that profile?) If she can do the same with a study of the philosophical world’s original gadfly, culture will be better off for it. —JHM
Aflame by Pico Iyer (Riverhead)
Presumably he finds time to eat and sleep in there somewhere, but it certainly appears as if Iyer does nothing but travel and write. His latest, following 2023’s The Half Known Life, makes a case for the sublimity, and necessity, of silent reflection. —JHM
The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill (Avon)
A local bookstore becomes a literal portal to the past for a trans man who returns to his hometown in search of a fresh start in Underhill's tender debut. —SMS
Good Girl by Aria Aber (Hogarth)
Aber, an accomplished poet, turns to prose with a debut novel set in the electric excess of Berlin’s bohemian nightlife scene, where a young German-born Afghan woman finds herself enthralled by an expat American novelist as her country—and, soon, her community—is enflamed by xenophobia. —JHM
The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich (Two Dollar Radio)
Krilanovich’s 2010 cult classic, about a runaway teen with drug-fueled ESP who searches for her missing sister across surreal highways while being chased by a killer named Dactyl, gets a much-deserved reissue. —MJS
Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski (Liveright)
In the latest novel from the National Book Award finalist, a 50-something actress reevaluates her life and career when #MeToo allegations roil the off-off-Broadway Shakespearean company that has cast her in the role of Cleopatra. —SMS
Something Rotten by Andrew Lipstein (FSG)
A burnt-out couple leave New York City for what they hope will be a blissful summer in Denmark when their vacation derails after a close friend is diagnosed with a rare illness and their marriage is tested by toxic influences. —MJS
The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow by Kristen Martin (Bold Type)
Martin's debut is a cultural history of orphanhood in America, from the 1800s to today, interweaving personal narrative and archival research to upend the traditional "orphan narrative," from Oliver Twist to Annie. —SMS
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, tr. E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth)
Kang’s Nobel win last year surprised many, but the consistency of her talent certainly shouldn't now. The latest from the author of The Vegetarian—the haunting tale of a Korean woman who sets off to save her injured friend’s pet at her home in Jeju Island during a deadly snowstorm—will likely once again confront the horrors of history with clear eyes and clarion prose. —JHM
We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard (Milkweed)
As the conversation around emerging technology skews increasingly to apocalyptic and utopian extremes, Béchard’s latest novel adopts the heterodox-to-everyone approach of embracing complexity. Here, a cadre of characters is isolated by a rogue but benevolent AI into controlled environments engineered to achieve their individual flourishing. The AI may have taken over, but it only wants to best for us. —JF
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case (Grand Central)
Singer-songwriter Case, a country- and folk-inflected indie rocker and sometime vocalist for the New Pornographers, takes her memoir’s title from her 2013 solo album. Followers of PNW music scene chronicles like Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl and drummer Steve Moriarty’s Mia Zapata and the Gits will consider Case’s backstory a must-read. —NodB
The Loves of My Life by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)
The 85-year-old White recounts six decades of love and sex in this candid and erotic memoir, crafting a landmark work of queer history in the process. Seminal indeed. —SMS
Blob by Maggie Su (Harper)
In Su’s hilarious debut, Vi Liu is a college dropout working a job she hates, nothing really working out in her life, when she stumbles across a sentient blob that she begins to transform as her ideal, perfect man that just might resemble actor Ryan Gosling. —MJS
Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids by Leyna Krow (Penguin)
Krow’s debut novel, Fire Season, traced the combustible destinies of three Northwest tricksters in the aftermath of an 1889 wildfire. In her second collection of short fiction, Krow amplifies surreal elements as she tells stories of ordinary lives. Her characters grapple with deadly viruses, climate change, and disasters of the Anthropocene’s wilderness. —NodB
Black in Blues by Imani Perry (Ecco)
The National Book Award winner—and one of today's most important thinkers—returns with a masterful meditation on the color blue and its role in Black history and culture. —SMS
Too Soon by Betty Shamieh (Avid)
The timely debut novel by Shamieh, a playwright, follows three generations of Palestinian American women as they navigate war, migration, motherhood, and creative ambition. —SMS
How to Talk About Love by Plato, tr. Armand D'Angour (Princeton UP)
With modern romance on its last legs, D'Angour revisits Plato's Symposium, mining the philosopher's masterwork for timeless, indispensable insights into love, sex, and attraction. —SMS
At Dark, I Become Loathsome by Eric LaRocca (Blackstone)
After Ashley Lutin’s wife dies, he takes the grieving process in a peculiar way, posting online, “If you're reading this, you've likely thought that the world would be a better place without you,” and proceeds to offer a strange ritual for those that respond to the line, equally grieving and lost, in need of transcendence. —MJS
February
No One Knows by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy (New Directions)
A selection of stories translated in English for the first time, from across Dazai’s career, demonstrates his penchant for exploring conformity and society’s often impossible expectations of its members. —MJS
Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (Bloomsbury)
This queer love story set in post–Gilded Age New York, from the author of Glassworks (and one of my favorite Millions essays to date), explores on sex, power, and capitalism through the lives of three queer misfits. —SMS
Pure, Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III (Random House)
This podcaster and pop culture critic spoke to indie booksellers at a fall trade show I attended, regaling us with key cultural moments in the 1990s that shaped his youth in Milwaukee and being Black and gay. If the book is as clever and witty as Madison is, it's going to be a winner. —CK
Gliff by Ali Smith (Pantheon)
The Scottish author has been on the scene since 1997 but is best known today for a seasonal quartet from the late twenty-teens that began in 2016 with Autumn and ended in 2020 with Summer. Here, she takes the genre turn, setting two children and a horse loose in an authoritarian near future. —JHM
Land of Mirrors by Maria Medem, tr. Aleshia Jensen and Daniela Ortiz (D&Q)
This hypnotic graphic novel from one of Spain's most celebrated illustrators follows Antonia, the sole inhabitant of a deserted town, on a color-drenched quest to preserve the dying flower that gives her purpose. —SMS
Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya (Random House)
As odes to the "lifesaving power of books" proliferate amid growing literary censorship, Chihaya—a brilliant critic and writer—complicates this platitude in her revelatory memoir about living through books and the power of reading to, in the words of blurber Namwali Serpell, "wreck and redeem our lives." —SMS
Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch (Riverhead)
Yuknavitch continues the personal story she began in her 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water. More than a decade after that book, and nearly undone by a history of trauma and the death of her daughter, Yuknavitch revisits the solace she finds in swimming (she was once an Olympic hopeful) and in her literary community. —NodB
The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha (Graywolf)
A son reevaluates the life of his Egyptian mother after her death in Rakha's novel. Recounting her sprawling life story—from her youth in 1960s Cairo to her experience of the 2011 Tahrir Square protests—a vivid portrait of faith, feminism, and contemporary Egypt emerges. —SMS
Tetra Nova by Sophia Terazawa (Deep Vellum)
Deep Vellum has a particularly keen eye for fiction in translation that borders on the unclassifiable. This debut from a poet the press has published twice, billed as the story of “an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century,” seems right up that alley. —JHM
David Lynch's American Dreamscape by Mike Miley (Bloomsbury)
Miley puts David Lynch's films in conversation with literature and music, forging thrilling and unexpected connections—between Eraserhead and "The Yellow Wallpaper," Inland Empire and "mixtape aesthetics," Lynch and the work of Cormac McCarthy. Lynch devotees should run, not walk. —SMS
There's No Turning Back by Alba de Céspedes, tr. Ann Goldstein (Washington Square)
Goldstein is an indomitable translator. Without her, how would you read Ferrante? Here, she takes her pen to a work by the great Cuban-Italian writer de Céspedes, banned in the fascist Italy of the 1930s, that follows a group of female literature students living together in a Roman boarding house. —JHM
Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield (Norton)
Named for the humble beet plant and meaning, in a rough translation from the Latin, "vulgar second," Sarsfield’s surreal debut finds a seasonal harvest worker watching her boyfriend and other colleagues vanish amid “the menacing but enticing siren song of the beets.” —JHM
People From Oetimu by Felix Nesi, tr. Lara Norgaard (Archipelago)
The center of Nesi’s wide-ranging debut novel is a police station on the border between East and West Timor, where a group of men have gathered to watch the final of the 1998 World Cup while a political insurgency stirs without. Nesi, in English translation here for the first time, circles this moment broadly, reaching back to the various colonialist projects that have shaped Timor and the lives of his characters. —JF
Brother Brontë by Fernando A. Flores (MCD)
This surreal tale, set in a 2038 dystopian Texas is a celebration of resistance to authoritarianism, a mash-up of Olivia Butler, Ray Bradbury, and John Steinbeck. —CK
Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez (Crown)
The High-Risk Homosexual author returns with a comic memoir-in-essays about fighting for survival in the Sunshine State, exploring his struggle with poverty through the lens of his queer, Latinx identity. —SMS
Theory & Practice by Michelle De Kretser (Catapult)
This lightly autofictional novel—De Krester's best yet, and one of my favorite books of this year—centers on a grad student's intellectual awakening, messy romantic entanglements, and fraught relationship with her mother as she minds the gap between studying feminist theory and living a feminist life. —SMS
The Lamb by Lucy Rose (Harper)
Rose’s cautionary and caustic folk tale is about a mother and daughter who live alone in the forest, quiet and tranquil except for the visitors the mother brings home, whom she calls “strays,” wining and dining them until they feast upon the bodies. —MJS
Disposable by Sarah Jones (Avid)
Jones, a senior writer for New York magazine, gives a voice to America's most vulnerable citizens, who were deeply and disproportionately harmed by the pandemic—a catastrophe that exposed the nation's disregard, if not outright contempt, for its underclass. —SMS
No Fault by Haley Mlotek (Viking)
Written in the aftermath of the author's divorce from the man she had been with for 12 years, this "Memoir of Romance and Divorce," per its subtitle, is a wise and distinctly modern accounting of the end of a marriage, and what it means on a personal, social, and literary level. —SMS
Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis (Haymarket)
Lewis, one of the most interesting and provocative scholars working today, looks at certain malignant strains of feminism that have done more harm than good in her latest book. In the process, she probes the complexities of gender equality and offers an alternative vision of a feminist future. —SMS
Lion by Sonya Walger (NYRB)
Walger—an successful actor perhaps best known for her turn as Penny Widmore on Lost—debuts with a remarkably deft autobiographical novel (published by NYRB no less!) about her relationship with her complicated, charismatic Argentinian father. —SMS
The Voices of Adriana by Elvira Navarro, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines)
A Spanish writer and philosophy scholar grieves her mother and cares for her sick father in Navarro's innovative, metafictional novel. —SMS
Autotheories ed. Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan (MIT)
Theory wonks will love this rigorous and surprisingly playful survey of the genre of autotheory—which straddles autobiography and critical theory—with contributions from Judith Butler, Jamieson Webster, and more.
Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein (Doubleday)
I enjoy retellings of classic novels by writers who turn the spotlight on interesting minor characters. This is an excursion into the world of Charles Dickens, told from the perspective iconic thief from Oliver Twist. —CK
Crush by Ada Calhoun (Viking)
Calhoun—the masterful memoirist behind the excellent Also A Poet—makes her first foray into fiction with a debut novel about marriage, sex, heartbreak, all-consuming desire. —SMS
Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House)
Sittenfeld's observations in her writing are always clever, and this second collection of short fiction includes a tale about the main character in Prep, who visits her boarding school decades later for an alumni reunion. —CK
Right-Wing Woman by Andrea Dworkin (Picador)
One in a trio of Dworkin titles being reissued by Picador, this 1983 meditation on women and American conservatism strikes a troublingly resonant chord in the shadow of the recent election, which saw 45% of women vote for Trump. —SMS
The Talent by Daniel D'Addario (Scout)
If your favorite season is awards, the debut novel from D'Addario, chief correspondent at Variety, weaves an awards-season yarn centering on five stars competing for the Best Actress statue at the Oscars. If you know who Paloma Diamond is, you'll love this. —SMS
Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Sarah Booker and Robin Myers (Hogarth)
The Pulitzer winner’s latest is about an eponymously named professor who discovers the body of a mutilated man with a bizarre poem left with the body, becoming entwined in the subsequent investigation as more bodies are found. —MJS
The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker (Random House)
Jane goes missing after a sudden a debilitating and dreadful wave of symptoms that include hallucinations, amnesia, and premonitions, calling into question the foundations of her life and reality, motherhood and buried trauma. —MJS
Song So Wild and Blue by Paul Lisicky (HarperOne)
If it weren’t Joni Mitchell’s world with all of us just living in it, one might be tempted to say the octagenarian master songstress is having a moment: this memoir of falling for the blue beauty of Mitchell’s work follows two other inventive books about her life and legacy: Ann Powers's Traveling and Henry Alford's I Dream of Joni. —JHM
Mornings Without Mii by Mayumi Inaba, tr. Ginny Tapley (FSG)
A woman writer meditates on solitude, art, and independence alongside her beloved cat in Inaba's modern classic—a book so squarely up my alley I'm somehow embarrassed. —SMS
True Failure by Alex Higley (Coffee House)
When Ben loses his job, he decides to pretend to go to work while instead auditioning for Big Shot, a popular reality TV show that he believes might be a launchpad for his future successes. —MJS
March
Woodworking by Emily St. James (Crooked Reads)
Those of us who have been reading St. James since the A.V. Club days may be surprised to see this marvelous critic's first novel—in this case, about a trans high school teacher befriending one of her students, the only fellow trans woman she’s ever met—but all the more excited for it. —JHM
Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder (Graywolf)
Told as a series of conversations, Sunder’s debut novel follows its recently graduated Indian protagonist in 2006 Cambridge, Mass., as she sees out her student visa teaching in a private high school and contriving to find her way between worlds that cannot seem to comprehend her. Quietly subversive, this is an immigration narrative to undermine the various reductionist immigration narratives of our moment. —JF
Love, Queenie by Mayukh Sen (Norton)
Merle Oberon, one of Hollywood's first South Asian movie stars, gets her due in this engrossing biography, which masterfully explores Oberon's painful upbringing, complicated racial identity, and much more. —SMS
The Age of Choice by Sophia Rosenfeld (Princeton UP)
At a time when we are awash with options—indeed, drowning in them—Rosenfeld's analysis of how our modingn idea of "freedom" became bound up in the idea of personal choice feels especially timely, touching on everything from politics to romance. —SMS
Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul (St. Martin's)
One of the internet's funniest writers follows up One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter with a sharp and candid collection of essays that sees her life go into a tailspin during the pandemic, forcing her to reevaluate her beliefs about love, marriage, and what's really worth fighting for. —SMS
The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria by José Donoso, tr. Megan McDowell (New Directions)
The ever-excellent McDowell translates yet another work by the influential Chilean author for New Directions, proving once again that Donoso had a knack for titles: this one follows up 2024’s behemoth The Obscene Bird of Night. —JHM
Remember This by Anthony Giardina (FSG)
On its face, it’s another book about a writer living in Brooklyn. A layer deeper, it’s a book about fathers and daughters, occupations and vocations, ethos and pathos, failure and success. —JHM
Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro (Deep Vellum)
In this metaphysical and lyrical tale, a captain known for sticking to protocol begins losing control not only of her crew and ship but also her own mind. —MJS
We Tell Ourselves Stories by Alissa Wilkinson (Liveright)
Amid a spate of new books about Joan Didion published since her death in 2021, this entry by Wilkinson (one of my favorite critics working today) stands out for its approach, which centers Hollywood—and its meaning-making apparatus—as an essential key to understanding Didion's life and work. —SMS
Seven Social Movements that Changed America by Linda Gordon (Norton)
This book—by a truly renowned historian—about the power that ordinary citizens can wield when they organize to make their community a better place for all could not come at a better time. —CK
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson (Chronicle Prism)
Lipson reconsiders the narratives of womanhood that constrain our lives and imaginations, mining the canon for alternative visions of desire, motherhood, and more—from Kate Chopin and Gwendolyn Brooks to Philip Roth and Shakespeare—to forge a new story for her life. —SMS
Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian (Penguin)
Doppelgängers have been done to death, but Sathian's examination of Millennial womanhood—part biting satire, part twisty thriller—breathes new life into the trope while probing the modern realities of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting. —SMS
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters (Random House)
The author of Detransition, Baby offers four tales for the price of one: a novel and three stories that promise to put gender in the crosshairs with as sharp a style and swagger as Peters’ beloved latest. The novel even has crossdressing lumberjacks. —JHM
On Breathing by Jamieson Webster (Catapult)
Webster, a practicing psychoanalyst and a brilliant writer to boot, explores that most basic human function—breathing—to address questions of care and interdependence in an age of catastrophe. —SMS
Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories (Two Lines)
The stories of Unusual Fragments, including work by Yoshida Tomoko, Nobuko Takai, and other seldom translated writers from the same ranks as Abe and Dazai, comb through themes like alienation and loneliness, from a storm chaser entering the eye of a storm to a medical student observing a body as it is contorted into increasingly violent positions. —MJS
The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf)
Russell has quipped that this Dust Bowl story of uncanny happenings in Nebraska is the “drylandia” to her 2011 Florida novel, Swamplandia! In this suspenseful account, a woman working as a so-called prairie witch serves as a storage vault for her townspeople’s most troubled memories of migration and Indigenous genocide. With a murderer on the loose, a corrupt sheriff handling the investigation, and a Black New Deal photographer passing through to document Americana, the witch loses her memory and supernatural events parallel the area’s lethal dust storms. —NodB
On the Clock by Claire Baglin, tr. Jordan Stump (New Directions)
Baglin's bildungsroman, translated from the French, probes the indignities of poverty and service work from the vantage point of its 20-year-old narrator, who works at a fast-food joint and recalls memories of her working-class upbringing. —SMS
Motherdom by Alex Bollen (Verso)
Parenting is difficult enough without dealing with myths of what it means to be a good mother. I who often felt like a failure as a mother appreciate Bollen's focus on a more realistic approach to parenting. —CK
The Magic Books by Anne Lawrence-Mathers (Yale UP)
For that friend who wants to concoct the alchemical elixir of life, or the person who cannot quit Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Lawrence-Mathers collects 20 illuminated medieval manuscripts devoted to magical enterprise. Her compendium includes European volumes on astronomy, magical training, and the imagined intersection between science and the supernatural. —NodB
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Riverhead)
The first novel by the Tanzanian-British Nobel laureate since his surprise win in 2021 is a story of class, seismic cultural change, and three young people in a small Tanzania town, caught up in both as their lives dramatically intertwine. —JHM
Twelve Stories by American Women, ed. Arielle Zibrak (Penguin Classics)
Zibrak, author of a delicious volume on guilty pleasures (and a great essay here at The Millions), curates a dozen short stories by women writers who have long been left out of American literary canon—most of them women of color—from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Zitkala-Ša. —SMS
I'll Love You Forever by Giaae Kwon (Holt)
K-pop’s sky-high place in the fandom landscape made a serious critical assessment inevitable. This one blends cultural criticism with memoir, using major artists and their careers as a lens through which to view the contemporary Korean sociocultural landscape writ large. —JHM
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga)
Jones, the acclaimed author of The Only Good Indians and the Indian Lake Trilogy, offers a unique tale of historical horror, a revenge tale about a vampire descending upon the Blackfeet reservation and the manifold of carnage in their midst. —MJS
True Mistakes by Lena Moses-Schmitt (University of Arkansas Press)
Full disclosure: Lena is my friend. But part of why I wanted to be her friend in the first place is because she is a brilliant poet. Selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and blurbed by the great Heather Christle and Elisa Gabbert, this debut collection seeks to turn "mistakes" into sites of possibility. —SMS
Perfection by Vicenzo Latronico, tr. Sophie Hughes (NYRB)
Anna and Tom are expats living in Berlin enjoying their freedom as digital nomads, cultivating their passion for capturing perfect images, but after both friends and time itself moves on, their own pocket of creative freedom turns boredom, their life trajectories cast in doubt. —MJS
Guatemalan Rhapsody by Jared Lemus (Ecco)
Jemus's debut story collection paint a composite portrait of the people who call Guatemala home—and those who have left it behind—with a cast of characters that includes a medicine man, a custodian at an underfunded college, wannabe tattoo artists, four orphaned brothers, and many more.
Pacific Circuit by Alexis Madrigal (MCD)
The Oakland, Calif.–based contributing writer for the Atlantic digs deep into the recent history of a city long under-appreciated and under-served that has undergone head-turning changes throughout the rise of Silicon Valley. —JHM
Barbara by Joni Murphy (Astra)
Described as "Oppenheimer by way of Lucia Berlin," Murphy's character study follows the titular starlet as she navigates the twinned convulsions of Hollywood and history in the Atomic Age.
Sister Sinner by Claire Hoffman (FSG)
This biography of the fascinating Aimee Semple McPherson, America's most famous evangelist, takes religion, fame, and power as its subjects alongside McPherson, whose life was suffused with mystery and scandal. —SMS
Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood (Pantheon)
In this bold and layered memoir, Hood confronts three decades of sexual violence and searches for truth among the wreckage. Kate Zambreno calls Trauma Plot the work of "an American Annie Ernaux." —SMS
Hey You Assholes by Kyle Seibel (Clash)
Seibel’s debut story collection ranges widely from the down-and-out to the downright bizarre as he examines with heart and empathy the strife and struggle of his characters. —MJS
James Baldwin by Magdalena J. Zaborowska (Yale UP)
Zaborowska examines Baldwin's unpublished papers and his material legacy (e.g. his home in France) to probe about the great writer's life and work, as well as the emergence of the "Black queer humanism" that Baldwin espoused. —CK
Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett (Riverhead)
Arnett is always brilliant and this novel about the relationship between Cherry, a professional clown, and her magician mentor, "Margot the Magnificent," provides a fascinating glimpse of the unconventional lives of performance artists. —CK
Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp (S&S)
The deal announcement describes the ever-punchy writer’s debut novel with an infinitely appealing appellation: “debauched picaresque.” If that’s not enough to draw you in, the truly unhinged cover should be. —JHM
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A Year in Reading: 2024
Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose.
In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it.
Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.)
The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger.
Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small
Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love
Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor
Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Zachary Issenberg, writer
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves
Nicholas Russell, writer and critic
Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
Deborah Ghim, editor
Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety
Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship
John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things
Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
A Year in Reading: Emma Hager
1.A week before the Camp Fire raged through Butte County and decimated a little town called Paradise, I sat on the edge of Lake Tahoe, reading, until the sun went down. That evening the sun grew round and pink in the sky, and as it swelled, it turned the clouds pastel, too, and made a rosy blanket out of the lake’s surface. Usually the wind picks up at sunset and the water heaves against the shore’s pebbled incline. But as I sat there, looking east to the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, the air was eerily still, even ominous. I thought it miraculous that our state had made it out of one of the most vicious legs of fall unscathed.
That evening was too miraculous to last. The long week of the fires, masks were donned as defense against toxic air. Texts and calls accumulated, from family and friends, either inquiring about the blazes or noting the destruction they had caused in their lives, or the lives of those who were special to them. Coworkers and passersby buzzed with nervous inquiries about what’s to become of this state. I’ve noticed a decline in the amount of hope people are willing to wrangle out of the maxim that the uncertainty of California’s future is the only certain thing about it.
Autumn in California has always felt existential, the grave threat of wildfires aside. The light shifts and my mood shifts with it, toward melancholy. I lean on books about the state or the American West or the “frontier” — that confused, cruel place! — and often resort to rereading a select few. This year was no different. (If anything, the impulse seemed more exaggerated since I resumed probing my family’s pioneer past.) And on the shore of Lake Tahoe that evening, I had beside me Joan Didion’s mournful but resolute Where I Was From. “The redemptive power of the crossing,” Didion writes of pioneers’ journey westward, “was the fixed idea of the California settlement, and one that raised a further question: for what exactly, and at what cost, had one been redeemed?”
Didion does not pose such questions with the hope that they’ll be answered. Instead, they’re a useful means of illuminating a consequence of turning places into ideas: fraught histories, and to some degree catastrophic natural disasters, get flattened out in spells of obsession. But even Didion, who demonstrates a grating awareness to the ways in which overdetermined relationships to geographies are formed, is not fully immune to the urge. In this way, Where I Was From fits comfortably into the long tradition of texts that seek to touch the weight of the West, California included — only to come up with dead ends and futile object lessons. Perhaps this might always be a symptom of writing sacrament into the land, or the less successful project of seeking to untangle one from the other.
Still, this shared and unrelenting ambition to confront the ineffable seems unity enough. My consideration of Didion’s insoluble questions about settler redemption cast new light on Willa Cather’s brimming masterpiece of a novel, My Antonia (1918), and Mary Austin’s stunning collection of lyric essays, The Land of Little Rain (1903), both of which were autumn rereads. It is equally easy to be seduced by the prose styles of Cather and Austin — each singularly beautiful, but similarly tender and sure — and thus to read these works solely for the aesthetic rush. But behind the bewitching descriptions of billowing prairie grasses and deep, desolate valleys is the pang of something more sorrowful, if not entirely sinister. These texts don’t have the relative advantage of historical distance, yet monumental atrocity haunts both, its effects delivered through key absences — mostly of Native Americans, unless they appear as quiet relics or in the form of landmark names — and the glaring implications of the rhetoric of forged possibility.
Eula Biss articulates the compounded factors of the American West better than I can, though, in her astonishing book Notes from No Man’s Land. Over 13 essays she examines the potent and enabling mixture of racism, selective memory, and downright delusion that continues to make the frontier idea feasible. I reread the title essay at least once a week this fall, each time in awe of Biss’s ability, through vignettes and telling details, to identify modern offshoots of the pioneers’ “hostile fantasy” — that grave “mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited.”
In the wake of California’s apocalyptic blazes, I suspect there’s some contemporary form of this fantasy at play, too. A form that, despite the new and intransigent reality of a prolonged Fire Season, still indulges an idea of misplaced resilience as a justification for business as usual. I’m curious to see how the next generation of California writers will toggle between depicting our new reality (perversely beautiful descriptions of flames aplenty) and tending the mythologies of our state that keep us all marching onward, toward infinity.
2.When I graduated from university earlier this year it felt like I was foreclosing on some other kind of infinity. Aside from the idea that I was to be endowed with a few practical skills along the way, my undergraduate education largely revolved around the selfish cultivation of my intellectual curiosity. I spent four years reading various works of literature before discussing them with any number of encouraging professors, whom I idolized. Everything about this loop of artificial circumstances felt limitless, and giving it up was sobering. But it was not until doing so that I realized how transactional college had made my relationship to reading. There was always the underlying pressure to read better, smarter, and more rigorously—not to mention the relative impossibility of applying such a careful practice to the handful of novels that had to be read each week. Because I am naive, few aspects of leaving college felt as revelatory as coming to terms with my altered relationship to books.
I thus spent the months just after graduation freshly falling under reading’s spell. I would go to work, then go for a swim, then cancel plans so that I could curl up with a book on some grassy knoll with a view of the Bay, in the light's remaining hours. And, as if an immediate prompting from the gods, Between Friends: The Collected Letters of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy — a book over which I’d been in a semester-long Library-Hold War — became mine for more than a week. (In one letter, Arendt deems a scarf gifted from McCarthy too beautiful to be a “use-object,” and I suggest you read the collection just for moments like that.) Because it was the letters’ perfect complement, I finally finished Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough, which is a dazzlingly smart and persuasive examination of several female intellectuals who, at least rhetorically, took no prisoners. Naturally this called for a rereading of Renata Adler’s perfect and hilarious novel Speedboat and a first galavant with n+1’s pamphlet, No Regrets, which features several discussions between women writers about reading in their 20s. Wisdom abounds in this delightful little book on topics like unusual author pairings and navigating first encounters with theory. But the conversations that both challenge collegiate obligations to the “boy canon,” and also the “oughts” of disciplined reading, were of particular comfort to me during my postgraduate limbo.
Regardless, there was still the plan, during those lulling summer months, to finally conquer George Eliot’s Middlemarch because the novel is Important. The conquering was to be done with a friend, also a recent graduate, who lived in Rhode Island. Through June and July he sent clever messages about his progress with the book until he finished it entirely. I disappointingly did neither. But what I did do — that is, fully immerse myself in the world of newly published fiction for the first time — was mostly a joyous and worthwhile experience.
I read Ottessa Moshfegh’s pithy and conniving My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Then there was Andrew Martin’s enviably precise debut Early Work, which seems the blueprint for a certain kind of LRB-reading, late-millennial milieu. Ling Ma’s Severance is a dynamic and intriguing courting of the old “goodbye to all that” adage, though here it gets an update, you might say, with the onset of apocalypse, epidemic, and the ills of late capitalism. And I enjoyed Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, not least for the author’s near-philosophical treatment of an affair between a young, intellectually ambitious editorial assistant and a decaying, Roth-like writer. These books, with the exception of Moshfegh’s, join a host of recently published works whose plots are driven, in part, by the demands of literary production and the apprehensions they generate. More interesting still is the overarching trend in characterization: fictional attributes seem to emerge almost exclusively through the real-world connotations of cultural objects and of industries, rather than through descriptive language. This year novels and memes appear to have functions in common.
I found the fiction-as-snapshot tendency compelling, but R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries was a refreshing departure from the above works. It’s a stunning novel. The author’s ability to maintain such a streamlined style while fostering her characters’ unique perspectives is nothing short of alchemy. I feel similarly enthusiastic about Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State, which I regret reading in a sitting because I didn’t want it to end. This debut is a welcome modernization of the California novel because it seamlessly challenges all the genre’s mentioned absences, and also makes room for literary documentation of parenting’s tediousness. And while the contemporary and its objects loom large in Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country—Russian politics, Facebook, and the grim academic job market all make cameos—I ardently devoured this book and reveled in the presence of its narrative arc, a construction that feels rarer and rarer.
Sheila Heti’s Motherhood yielded the most obliterating reading experience of the summer. I picked up a copy the weekend my family was in town for my department commencement, and in between the hours we’d spend together, I’d sneak away to read bits of it. The book’s central question is outwardly simple: Should or shouldn’t the writer-protagonist have a baby? But what transpires from this question is a profound and expansive engagement with all the ways one can be a mother, or a child. In a later chapter titled “PMS,” our narrator wrestles with her mother’s own parenting orientation. That is, how the narrator’s mother “lived her life turned towards her mother,” and not towards her offspring.
I clung tightly to this articulation of a life turned backwards, of a life lived for one’s mother, either out of honor or indebtedness or both. Though I read Jacqueline Rose’s comprehensive Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty back in April, it wasn’t until encountering Motherhood that I felt as if a book had captured all that is indescribable, and oftentimes inexplicably tragic, about matrilineal bonds. What’s more, Heti confronts earnestly what can sometimes feel mystical about maternal lines, not least for their internal logics and passed-down lore. And as much as these bonds can be sources of love and pride, they can also be wells of great sadness, regret and loss. The afternoon I finished that chapter titled “PMS” I sobbed and sobbed, and then met my mother for a walk. As we ambled through the eucalyptus groves on my college campus, she retold the story of her medical school aspirations and how my birth had superseded but not ruined them. I told her I did not take it for granted that she was turned towards my brothers and me.
3.In these final moments of 2018, the mystical has hurtled into my life once again. If you walk into a bar or coffee shop in many parts of the Bay Area, you’re bound to hear people discussing astrology. Asking one’s star sign seems as much a habitual platitude as it does a search for cosmic compatibility. I remain skeptical, but I get the craze: like the mythologizing of California or the psychic weight one attributes to matrilineal bonds, astrology affords us an organizing principle for all that seems destined and chaotic in life. Now I reluctantly read The Cut’s Madame Clairvoyant column for my sign’s entry (Taurus) and also the entries for the signs of people I love or loathe. Then I check them all against tweets from the Astro Poets.
My doubt of and preoccupation with astrology has met its match in Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School darling and iconic grump. I recently finished his tome-like 1957 essay “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column,” which takes Carroll Righter’s new age-y, quintessentially Los Angeles horoscopes column as its case study. From there, Adorno harangues his readers about astrology’s “pseudo-rationality” and its horrible incentive to “provide gratifications to aggressive urges on the level of the imaginary.” Naturally this means that people who “choose” astrology possess a lack of what is vaguely called “intellectual integration,” which I guess is depleted most profoundly by the unravelling of the social world.
There is something sustaining, or at least entertaining, about Adorno’s application of a critical seriousness to an enterprise he found so critically unserious. But the idea of closing out the year with such a dense and misanthropic essay is virtually unbearable to me. To remedy this I’m returning to Kiese Laymon’s Long Division, which is the first novel I read in 2018. As I revisit its pages, I am struck by how impossible it feels to capture all that Long Division does and is, in a matter of sentences. The book has time travel and romance and confrontations with race, sexuality, and gender, all of which are often cleverly introduced through the guise of satire, or wordplay. Moments of humor masterfully become moments of critique. For 2019 we should take note of how Laymon treats the realms of history and language with a cautionary capaciousness. Within the vastness of both there is always the threat that the reprehensible and catastrophic will multiply or mutate — and yet there remains room and potential enough to create something better.
More from A Year in Reading 2018
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“Tough Little Numbers”: Women and Criticism
1.
Swept up in the wave of resignations and mea culpa that rolled through the literary establishment at the height of the #metoo movement late last year was Paris Review editor Lorin Stein. Stein stepped down from his post on December 6, 2017, amid an internal investigation into his treatment of female employees and writers. After he was tapped for the job in 2010, Stein had garnered media buzz as the Paris Review’s “new playboy,” according to a 2011 New York Times profile, a fixture of the glamorous, boozy New York literary life hired to reboot the magazine’s cool quotient. It turned out otherwise.
But in the midst of this very public housecleaning, there emerged a curious erasure that was, if less spectacular than Stein’s ouster, perhaps even more telling as a measure of the uphill work women routinely face in the literary establishment. For Stein, widely cited in the media coverage of the scandal as the third editor in the history of the Paris Review, was in fact its fourth editor. This calculus left out Brigid Hughes, hired as George Plimpton’s successor in 2004 and dismissed just one year later.
How did this error manage to slip through the fact-checkers, become enshrined in print as the official history of a leading literary magazine? A.N. Devers, a London-based novelist and rare book dealer, provided an answer. “I’m going to show you how a woman is erased from her job,” she announced in a thread posted to Twitter on December 7, 2017, the day following Stein’s departure. Devers backtracked through the New York Times’s coverage of the Paris Review leadership, from Hughes’ dismissal in 2005 (a move the board’s female members met by resigning in protest), through the hiring of Philip Gourevitch, through the latter’s replacement in 2010 by Stein. The Times article announcing the changing of the guard failed to mention Hughes’s tenure, an omission that was sealed into the historical record one year later with the running of the “playboy” profile, declaring Stein “only the third to hold the title in the magazine’s 58-year history, and the second to follow George Plimpton, himself a legendary New York social figure.” According to Devers, even after being called out on the omission, the Times failed to retract or amend the error.
It is these kinds of erasures that Michelle Dean’s new book, Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, is meant to remedy. Focusing on the self-styled “New York intellectuals” of the 1940s, but radiating out to include both forerunners and inheritors, Dean documents the intersecting lives and works of ten twentieth-century American literary women from Dorothy Parker to Janet Malcolm. None of the writers on her list can be said, properly speaking, to have slipped through the cracks of literary and cultural history. And yet, as Dean notes, most sweeping histories of modern American letters continue to frame it as a story dominated by men, with women cast in walk-on roles. “The longer I looked at the work these women laid out before me,” she confesses in the preface, “the more puzzling I found it that anyone could look at the literary and intellectual history of the twentieth century and not center women in it.”
Dean’s book is a riposte to this systematic decentering, providing a counter-narrative to the well-worn tales of American literary critical fathers and sons. Along the way, Sharp offers a catalogue of the complex strategies twentieth-century women have adopted, both consciously and unconsciously, in order to navigate a man’s world: to stave off, precisely, being “erased from their job.”
2.
Sharp is divided into fourteen chapters, one devoted to each of Dean’s ten principal subjects individually, with the remaining four chronicling their complex interrelationships. Dean explains that she gathered the women in her study, “under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: they were called sharp.” Some, like Dorothy Parker, were sharp by temperament. Her innate “inability to accept other people’s self-images” at face value, Dean suggests, “haunted her as a critic.” She was dismissed from her post as theater reviewer for Vanity Fair after bruising one too many Broadway egos. Nonetheless she persisted; Parker would spring back to helm The New Yorker’s “Constant Reader” column in the 1920s. Others profiled in the book viewed sharpness as a moral imperative, like Pauline Kael who, according to Dean, believed her role as critic demanded that she “run roughshod over the politics of reputation.” Still others were, if not motivated by it, at least attentive to the promotional uses of sharp criticism. Nora Ephron, who once famously quipped that to the writer, ‘everything is copy,’ would turn her “willingness to anger the people she knew… [into a] professional asset.”
The adjective “sharp” could be bestowed as a compliment, suggesting these were women with wit, brains, smarts. A number wrote manifestos calling for a more robustly critical criticism, bemoaning the milquetoast flavor pervading modern literary reviews (“a chorus of weak cheers… that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger,” Rebecca West charged in a 1914 essay appropriately titled “The Duty of Harsh Criticism”). In this case, sharpness connoted intellectual rigor.
But more frequently, as Dean documents, “sharp” was lodged as a complaint by male writers who claimed that these women’s cutting, acid, venomous (choose your painful adjective) prose belied a failure of femininity, in the best of cases, and a failure of critical seriousness, in the worst. Whether they came to sharpness by temperament or calculated choice, these women’s style provided ample fodder for those eager to dismiss or dilute their seriousness. While declaring Mary McCarthy’s novel The Company They Keep “very serious,” Alfred Kazin went on to dampen the compliment by suggesting the book’s prose was “as maliciously female as one chorus girl’s comments on another.” Pauline Kael’s 1963 take-down of the boys club of “auteur” film critics was met with an acid rebuttal from Movie magazine targeting her “fanatical feminism” as grounds for a blanket dismissal of her views: “When Miss Kael says that there are no female auteur critics, she is right. She could have gone further: there are, alas, no female critics."
In addition to being trivialized as “catty” or “hysterical,” these women were frequently savaged for their lack of manners—a critique from which male writers were, naturally, exempt. Lionel Abel, a member of the New York intellectual set, famously referred to Hannah Arendt as “Hannah Arrogant” behind her back— an epithet she earned for daring to wade into the traditionally masculine fields of philosophy and politics. When Susan Sontag’s first collection of essays appeared in print, a Washington Post reviewer sniffed that its author was, “hardly a likable person”; her voice “rasps and is rude and strident,” they complained. In the highly gendered responses to these women’s voices, sharpness bled into shrill, and commitment tipped over into crazy.
Dean meticulously traces the intricate webs, both institutional and personal, that bound these women together and kept them afloat. McCarthy and Sontag overlapped at the Partisan Review and were frequently lumped together as critics. “I hear you’re the new me,” an apocryphal story has McCarthy quipping to Sontag when they were first introduced at a literary soiree. McCarthy and Arendt, after a spat upon first meeting, eventually made up one day when forced to wait on a subway platform together, and were lifelong friends ever after. McCarthy delivered the eulogy at Arendt’s funeral, and painstakingly pieced together her friend’s notes for posthumous publication as The Life of the Mind. Not all of the connections Dean unearths are this substantial. She also records these critics’ references to one another that crop up in passing, littered through letters and interviews, such as aging silent-film star Louise Brooks’s comment to Pauline Kael upon receiving a copy of her latest book: “‘Your picture on the dust cover made me think of Dorothy Parker when she was young in a moment of happiness.’” Such off-hand remarks suggest that even when they hadn’t met face-to-face, these women haunted each other’s mental universes. They were icons: whether to be smashed or modeled mattered little. They measured for one another, even if unconsciously, the terrain already covered, and that still left to conquer.
Conspicuously absent from this milieu are women writers of color— an absence Dean addresses, and that is made painfully clear when, in Chapter Three, Zora Neale Hurston makes a cameo appearance that is most notable for its brevity. Where the other writers weave in and out of each other’s lives with predictable regularity and ease, Hurston never penetrated their chummy circle. Dean brings her up in the context of Rebecca West’s 1947 coverage for The New Yorker of the Willie Earle lynching trial in South Carolina. West was shocked by the lynching in the standard way New York liberals always claimed to be shocked by racist violence in the South. But the resulting piece failed to probe the dynamics of American race relations in any substantial way, and Dean notes that West’s offense at the proceedings was “an offense taken on the part of humanity” rather than on the part of African Americans specifically.
Zora Neale Hurston would have been a better choice to report on the trial. But black writers, while their novels were covered by major white literary publications in a tip of the hat to “the Negro problem,” were scrupulously excluded from these same forums in the role of critic, Dean writes. Hurston protested this exclusion. “The fact that there is no demand for incisive and full-dress stories about Negroes above the servant class is indicative of something of vast importance to this nation,” she wrote in a 1950 editorial, entitled “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” for The Negro Digest. The protest was, of course, a cry in the wilderness, unlikely to be read by the very white publishers who were in a position to do something about it. Hurston’s double erasure— as a woman, as an African American— was not an erasure the white women critics in Dean’s study were equipped to, or even particularly interested in, addressing. When Hurston died in 1961, she was buried in Florida in an unmarked grave in The Garden of Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery.
3.
The critics in Dean's study were not always friends. They could tongue-lash one another just as well as outside targets. Pauline Kael criticized one of Joan Didion’s novels as “ridiculously swank,” claiming to have read it “between bouts of disbelieving giggles.” And Kael was flogged in turn by fledgling critic Renata Adler, who in the pages of the New York Review of Books baldly declared the former’s collection of film reviews, When the Lights Go Down, “worthless.” Feminine solidarity, in other words, was not their strong suit.
This contrarian streak is evident, Dean emphasizes, in her subjects’ general hostility to second-wave feminism. By and large, they viewed feminism as reductive, essentialist, and overly emotional. Arendt was perhaps the most cutting, declaring Women’s Liberation “not serious,” and opining flatly that the “woman problem” had never posed a problem for her (she had “always just done what she liked to do,” she once remarked airily. Didion, Sontag, and Ephron shared her skepticism, with Ephron the most tolerant of the three. Still, even she complained of the pressure she felt to review feminist writers positively which, if it made for “good politics,” decidedly did not make for “good criticism.” Knee-jerk group allegiance worked against truth and honesty, Ephron insisted— a sentiment clearly shared by others in Dean’s group.
Dean is clear-eyed in treating her subjects’ ambivalent relationship to feminism, and honest about the delicacy of her own position as a feminist marshalling these women’s stories in the name of a more gender-inclusive history. (At one point, she imagines Hannah Arendt rolling over in her grave were she to guess at her inclusion in such a book). Yet she defends her choice of subjects, noting she was troubled by the number of feminist critics she encountered during her research who “wanted to cut these women out of history” for failing to turn their talents “to the explicit support of feminism.” This impulse to erase dissenters, she asserts, would be an error. In what comes across as a model of sense and sensitivity in the context of our fractious twenty-first century efforts to construct a workable feminist practice, Dean agrees that while feminism is “supposed to be about sisterhood,” it is also possible for sisters to argue— even to the point of estrangement. “It is not only commonality that defines us,” she remarks in closing. “There is room, in this deep ambivalence about and even hostility toward feminism, to take away a feminist message.”
4.
Within the first few pages of The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion narrates with clinical precision the evening her husband died, of a heart attack, as they were sitting down together for dinner. At the hospital, after his body has been discretely tucked away behind a curtain, she overhears a social worker telling the on-call doctor that he needn’t mince words, as she is “a cool customer.” The phrase is one that Didion retains, bemused by what it might imply: that she has failed in her new role of grieving widow? That she is deficient in the art of feeling?
If “sharp” women fail at femininity by evincing improper or inappropriate feeling, even more egregious are those who fail to feel at all: those who manifest not sharp edges but, to quote Emily Dickinson, “a Quartz contentment, like a stone.” It is this latter quality in the work of female critics that forms the heart of Deborah Nelson’s study, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil. Dean’s and Nelson’s lists of cutting women overlap, and both center their studies loosely on the post-war New York intellectual scene. But where Dean’s project involves mapping the social milieu of literary New York in order to trace her writers’ interconnected passages through it, Nelson’s work is more theoretical. What critics often deride as the “tough,” unfeeling, or indifferent tone of these writers’ prose, Nelson argues is in fact a conscious ethical choice. A critic for the Washington Post once complained of Sontag that, “there is nothing in this book to indicate that she cares very much what we think of her tone and manners,” and he was absolutely right: these writers’ eschewed thinking about the readers’ “feelings,” not as a matter or oversight, but as a matter of principle.
These artists wrote (or photographed, in the case of Arbus) against the cultural grain for at least two reasons. First, women writers from the nineteenth century onward had been associated with the sentimental style, using emotion in their work in order to bring about social change. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a tear-jerking depiction of the evils of slavery, was intended as political protest, and was largely successful. An apocryphal story tells of Abraham Lincoln greeting the authoress at the White House as, “the little woman whose book started the great war.” If sappiness was somewhat out of style by the 1950s and 60s, the basic premise of sentimentalism was not: sympathy, compassion, and identification with the pain of others was the key to healing collective wounds, as well as to bringing about political and social change. The nascent feminist and civil rights movements, Nelson suggests, looked to leverage such “bonds of feeling and group identification” with the experience of pain in order to bring about social change.
The women artists in Nelson’s study quite simply refused to accept the efficacy of sympathy as a political wedge. In doing so, they ran afoul not only of the gendered conventions for protest, but also the ambient culture of therapeutic healing and shared feeling as the road to progress. These women confronted painful subjects, but refused to do so from the point of view of empathy. In bucking this liberal imperative, they committed an unpardonable sin— for which they were frequently excommunicated, by leftists and feminists alike.
Perhaps the most notorious example of critical heartlessness— which Dean treats at length in her book as well— is the 1963 publication of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a principal architect of the Nazi Final Solution, caused an uproar in the critical community for what Gershom Scholem called the “heartless, frequently almost malicious or sneering tone” with which she treated the topic. Her characterization of Eichmann as almost comically ordinary and “thoughtless” rather than evil incarnate was read by many as levity, a refusal to take the suffering of his Jewish victims at its full measure.
Yet what others diagnosed as a failure of feeling in Arendt was in fact a conscious choice to exile sentiment from politics. Arendt’s prodigious body of political philosophy and criticism is, in Nelson’s analysis, one long meditation on the dangers of bringing feeling into the public sphere. For Arendt, political rhetoric which shifts attention away from an event to feelings about the event is liable to lead to precisely the kind of murderous “thoughtlessness” she diagnoses in Eichmann. For Eichmann is so dangerous not because he is unthinkably evil, but because he fails to think at all: in the place of imagining plurality, the possibility of other points of view, he substitutes cliché, oceanic “feeling,” commitment to a utopian ideal that necessarily runs roughshod over any fact (or person) whose particularity resists it. “The answer for her,” Nelson concludes, “is to refuse to translate the horrors into emotion rather than into language.”
The other writers in Nelson’s study follow a similar logic, insisting that the saturation of public life by “feeling” and spectacles of suffering ironically leads to numbness and inaction rather than a true understanding of the sources of suffering. Sontag included rigorous critiques of sympathy as a useful response to art in her writing on photography and on the Vietnam War. Sympathy, she claimed, was a way of stroking our egos (we congratulate ourselves on our capacity to feel for others, or “feeling good about one’s capacities for feeling bad,” as Nelson writes) while sanctioning political inaction and immobility. The “moral drama of helplessness” is intensely seductive, she argues—and for that reason must be resisted. It is only by exiling feeling from the portrayal of suffering, eliminating the possibility for a sham ethics of what Nelson calls “consolatory distraction [or] moral vanity,” that a writer is true to her subject and to the lived, irreducible experience of pain.
If Dean’s study is an effort to rectify a certain erasure of critical women from the annals of American literary history, Nelson’s project is also, at some level, a work of restitution. She resurrects a strain of distinctly feminine political engagement that, in refusing the gendered polarity of masculine stoicism and feminine feeling, quite simply failed to register as a tradition at all. The fact that these women critics so obviously fell short of expected modes of feminine ethical response—soft, sympathetic, emotionally expressive—not only brought censure upon them individually, but contributed to the historical erasure of emotional detachment as a legitimate alternative to the politics of empathy.
5.
Finally, Nelson’s study clarifies a question left open by Dean’s book: why Sontag, Arendt, Didion and McCarthy were so lukewarm on feminism. Their commitment to the concrete, the individual, the “fact” made them suspicious of abstract principles generally, especially group identity or what today would be called “identity politics.” They could only see such blanket categories as, in Ephron’s words, constricting and “dishonest.” They saw their fierce commitment to the value of the individual and particularity as a bulwark against the political and historical dangers of abstraction— not to mention the aesthetic pitfalls of didacticism.
These women fought, tooth and nail, against the harassment, wrath, dismissal, and erasure that waited for them around every corner as they sought to secure a place for themselves in male-dominated literary institutions. They were subjected to this treatment because they belonged to a class of humans long held incapable of critical genius. And it was because, perhaps, their membership in this class (“women” writers) had so little to do, in their own minds, with what they were capable of or who they were in the fullness of their humanity, that they were reluctant to use their successes as a political lever on behalf of other women. To do so would be to acknowledge and even reinforce the very group-based prejudice they felt was so arbitrary a barrier to their own voices being heard. It should be possible to do both.
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