Tristram Shandy - A Cock and Bull Story

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

A Comic Feast: Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip to Italy

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“To read a good comedy,” wrote William Hazlitt, is to keep the best company in the world, where the best things are said...” Said in the voices of Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Al Pacino, and Hugh Grant, Hazlitt might have added, had he lived to see The Trip to Italy, the latest collaboration between director Michael Winterbottom and the comic team of Steven Coogan and Rob Brydon. In The Trip to Italy and its precursor, The Trip (both originally shot as BBC mini-series), Coogan and Brydon play fictionalized versions of themselves, doing impressions, riffing and sparring with each other as they drive around the Lake District or Italy. They are on assignment for the Observer, which in each case has enlisted them to write a series of amateur restaurant reviews. Proceeding from such a wonderfully slight premise -- comedy, like dough, is best not overworked -- the pair set off on a well-fed pilgrimage to poetic shrines (Wordsworth and Coleridge’s in the first, Byron and Shelley’s Mediterranean haunts here). Balancing out the high culture are lengthy discussions of pop stars and loving recitations from Hollywood films. Despite their apparent casualness, the two films reveal a chiastic structure that reverses the men’s personal and professional fortunes. In the first, Coogan reluctantly invites Brydon on the trip he had originally planned to take with his girlfriend, mulls moving to Hollywood to film a project, and ends up moping around his austere London apartment. By contrast, we last see Brydon eating a homemade meal with his adoring wife, whom he promises never to leave for more than three days again. In the sequel, Brydon invites Coogan on the trip, auditions for his own Hollywood part as a mob accountant in a Michael Mann film (which irritates and baffles Coogan in equal measure), and is in no particular rush to return to his wife after conducting an affair with a younger woman. Coogan, meanwhile, has just had his American series Pathological cancelled and seems ready to leave Hollywood and rededicate himself to fatherhood. The men are friends, even if their relationship is often marked by needling, jealousy, frustration, hostility, exhaustion, and indifference. (When Brydon mentions his wife’s name at the beginning of the movie, Coogan has no idea who he’s talking about.) Coogan is the more saturnine of the two, harboring largely unrealized dreams of Hollywood dramatic success, and reading Byron in bed at night. The antic Brydon, who rents a Mini Cooper for the journey just to give himself an occasion to quote Michael Caine from The Italian Job, is always ready to slip into an inspired bit or impression, from Richard Burton to Gore Vidal. He soldiers on throughout, determined to combat his companion’s glumness and belittlements with incessant, exhausting cheer. When Coogan does occasionally lighten up, often in the midst of the multi-course meals that are ostensibly their reason for being together, the two embark on inspired flights of fancy in which the full splendor of their comic romance becomes momentarily visible. In The Trip To Italy, it’s on full display in an extended gag about a cowed assistant director asking Tom Hardy’s Bane and Christian Bale’s Batman from The Dark Knight Rises to enunciate and receiving profane, garbled replies. In The Trip, the best moment comes when they spoof the pre-fight battle speeches of historical epics: “Gentlemen, to bed, for tomorrow we rise at dawn.” By the end, Coogan’s blustery liege and Brydon’s obsequious aide-de-camp have pushed back the departure to 9:30ish, which allows for a quick continental breakfast and warm-up run. We then witness them engaged in a perfectly unmotivated a cappella scat session, a wordless duet as fun as the oratorical comedy that precedes it. But beneath the laughs, of which there are many, The Trip to Italy is an anxious comedy supremely anxious about comedy itself. In a previous collaboration with the pair, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Winterbottom expressed similar anxiety. Like the unruly autobiographical tale on which it is based, the film struggles to take shape, prompting the director and writers to ponder why they are taking a year out of their lives to make it. “Because it’s funny,” is one answer. When the director is asked, “Is that all?”, he replies: “Isn’t that enough?” It isn’t necessarily enough for Coogan, who in the course of insulting “inferior talents” like Brydon worries whether he as a comedian will be remembered as Byron and Shelley are. It is no wonder that Coogan has in his arsenal Hamlet’s “Alas, Poor Yorick!” speech, which he delivers to a blanching Brydon in a Neapolitan, skull-filled crypt: Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? A momentary chap-fallen Brydon is, in a first, left speechless. The Trip to Italy frets over much else besides the artistic importance of its comedic genre. The movie is anxious about sequels, of which it is one; anxious about male friendships (evidenced by some puerile gay jokes); anxious about aging and mortality, as seen in the lingering shots of Pompeii, Naples’s Cimiterio delle Fontanelle, and Shelley’s grave; anxious about morality, particularly about which transgressions cannot be laughed off; and finally anxious about comic masks, whether it is ever possible for a comedian to confront the “brutal reality” of life: “Behind every pithy, vaguely amusing little joke is a cry for help,” Coogan says in a mock-eulogy of Brydon at Bolton Abbey in The Trip. Coogan is of course just as unwilling to confront said reality. While Brydon’s compulsion to recite poetry in one of his celebrity imitation voices is a source of great frustration to his more serious companion, who sees in his friend’s comic deflation of high art a frustrating evasion, Coogan’s self-deluded view of himself as a Byronic figure -- Brydon suggests his friend write a “Childe Steve’s Pilgrimage” -- is a version of the same evasive impulse. What Henri Bergson said about the comic artist applies to both men: However interested a dramatist may be in the comic features of human nature, he will hardly go, I imagine, to the extent of trying to discover his own. Besides, he would not find them, for we are never ridiculous except in some point that remains hidden from our own consciousness. To wit: When the two comics pause to examine a petrified Pompeian corpse preserved in a glass bier, Coogan’s bathetic musings on death are in a way as deflective as Brydon’s decision to break out his famed “small man trapped in a box” voice and discuss footwear with the sandaled ancient. Masks come in different styles. Once or twice these masks come off -- to an extent. After a riotous lunch late in the film, Brydon, who has demonstrated little guilt for his infidelity, comes clean about the affair to Emma, Coogan’s pregnant assistant. Still laughing from Brydon’s humorous confession -- delivered in his Hugh Grant voice -- she demurs when asked for her advice, explaining that a hormonal pregnant woman might not be the best person to ask. Her lingering smile is one of the most ambivalent moments in the film, laughter and disappointment at war on her face. She can’t bring herself to deliver a moral judgment to the comic mask that delights her even as it reveals an unpalatable truth; the film slyly counts on the same from viewers. I’m not suggesting that one needs adopt a sententious stance on adultery, only that by tarnishing Brydon’s goofy, family-man image, the film demonstrates the powerful sense of complicity created by laughter. The Trip to Italy is more than just funny -- though that would be enough. It is a sneakily moral tale about historical figures (Byron, Casanova) renowned for their amorality; a capacious comedy about two rather narrow, inflexible characters; and a vivacious lark so haunted by death that by the final credits the title has acquired a newly metaphysical import. Each comedian, masked though he may be, knows exactly where the trip is ultimately headed.

Tristram Shandy, Dilettante: Laurence Sterne and the Pleasures of Attention-Deficit Literature

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There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about attention atrophy and the Internet. And I mean a lot of talk. If you haven’t noticed, it’s because some of the trend pieces are really long (like, 2,000 words long) and your gchat may have been buzzing at a clip that precluded sustained focus on what a given writer for the The Atlantic, Slate, or The New York Times had to say about the latest UCLA study on how Google can affect your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Entering freshmen at the university where I teach are required to read Nicholas Carr’s Pulitzer-finalist The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. It clocks in at 280 pages, and most students will not finish it. I’ve got nothing against the hand-wringers -- idle hands, etc. -- but I’d like to advance a modest defense of the good that can come from the browser’s mindset, and from inattentive dilettantism. Indeed, let me suggest that we can find solace for the dilemma not in studies showing that video games make you smarter, but rather in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a long, obstreperous 18th-century work that Virginia Woolf (author of short, prismatic 20th-century works) called “the greatest of all novels.” Shandy makes the Cervantes/Fielding/Dickens picaresque look like a straight walk down a well-lit road. It is both a challenge to read and a sustained work of jumpy, distracted hilarity. Attention deficit, for Sterne, is not something to be feared in the reader -- it is the basis for his process of composition. A précis of Shandy is more or less impossible, and tempts Shandean distractions of its own. Nonetheless: the title character wishes to write his memoirs. (The why is unclear, though an encyclopedic impulse runs in the family -- Shandy senior has written tracts on the naming of children; pseudo-Descartian meditations on the pineal gland; a discourse on the importance of proper balance between “radical heat and radical moisture” in the human animal -- you get the idea.) Along the way, everything goes wrong, both in the writing and the living. A mis-wound clock distracts his parents at the moment of his conception; a scullery maid’s malapropism results in his absurd, medieval first name; the memoirist himself becomes so distracted that he does not emerge from the womb until the novel is one-third done. Sterne writes a chapter on buttons; he writes a chapter on knots. Many of the chapters are shorter than a page. The author’s preface arrives in chapter 20 of the third volume. The novel’s most endearing character -- besides the garrulous autobiographer himself -- is Uncle Toby, a veteran of the French wars who returns with an embarrassing wound to his groin and, post-convalescence, spends his days in the backyard building scale models of various theaters of battle, the better to relive his glory days. Transitions between high, anarchic comedy and sustained passages of sentiment can be sudden and vertiginous. Shandy is accidentally circumcised by a falling window sash; Shandy falls in love with a “nut-brown maid” in France; a heartstring-yanking obituary for a jolly priest named Yorick is followed by a wordless, all-black page; an inveterate bore named Phutatorius (Latin for “Fucker”) has the misfortune to catch a burning chestnut in his breeches. (Genitalia in general do not fare well in this book.) And an alleged act of bestiality leads to the iconic final words of the novel: 'L--d!' said my mother, 'what is all this story about?' ---- 'A COCK and a BULL,' said Yorick ---- 'And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.' I could go on, but that’s the point -- Shandy’s project is telescopically expandable, as he notes with less anxiety than glee: “At this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write.” Days are more easily lived than written, at least with the narrator’s level of detail and errant whimsicality: “I write a careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good-humoured Shandean book, which will do all your hearts good.” Hamlet saturates certain volumes of Shandy, the Dane’s inability to take action here spun into a structural literary motif: the fullness, absurdity, hilarity, and pathos of life outpace man’s ability to take stock of them -- and man, in turn, responds by dragging his feet, gazing at his navel, and losing focus whenever a new and shiny object is presented to him. Let’s not mince words: this is all deeply silly. And that, of course, is the point. On trial in Shandy are the masturbatory elements of scholarship; distractible humans and their whimsical hobbies; the proliferating literary phenomenon of “biographical freebooters”; and self-involved males who can argue (with a Voltairean antilogic) finer points of causality while, upstairs, poor Mrs. Shandy lies in excruciating, protracted labor. Few novels -- even few early novels -- have less believability in them. And yet Shandy, in all its digressive, distracted, ADD glory, captures something of life that narratives of linear focus rarely can. The characters who labored in service to the early novel -- the fictional memoirists of Defoe, the virtuous letter-writers of Richardson -- told tales semi-intended to be taken as true, and which sometimes were: after the massive success of Gulliver’s Travels, Arbuthnot wrote to Swift, “Gulliver is in every body’s hands...I lent the book to an old Gentleman, who went immediately to his map to search for Lilliput.” The idea of readerly enjoyment was a vicarious identification with characters we might, in an idle moment, fancy to be real. (Richardson coyly dubbed himself the mere “editor” of Clarissa; Fielding, in proto-Sternean mockery of Richardson, insisted on Tom Jones as a “history.”) Sterne took this early and enduring premise of fiction and extended it to its illogical conclusion: a book that seeks to mimic “reality” will, in fact, smack of distraction and madness. When people talk about Shandy nowadays, it is in the context of the postmoderns. In the inventive and charming 2006 film, Steve Coogan intones: “Shandy was a postmodern classic before there was a modernism to be post about." Sterne indeed anticipated many of the tics and preoccupations that came to define (and oversimplify) postmodernism as inherently “self-conscious.” A text is a text, and there is an author behind it, whatever Roland Barthes may say, and somewhere in the 20th century the dominant premise of fiction -- the suspension of disbelief, of our knowledge that these characters aren’t real -- was no longer enough. The Wizard had to emerge from behind the curtain; metacritical comment became de rigueur. Books of fiction had to declare as such, and to remark, speciously or otherwise, on the process of their own composition. What is lacking in the more paranoid of the postmoderns is a Shandean sense of textual play as total entertainment. Did Sterne agonize over the “constructed” nature of his opus? No; he reveled in it. His footnotes were not self-lacerating interrogations of the potential dishonesty of the enterprise -- they were postscript punchlines to jokes that already had you splitting your sides and getting weird looks in terminal D at O’Hare. The book is a total funhouse, full of toys, surprises, and regressive loops. Volume IX leaves two chapters totally blank, where the author sees fit to introduce the events of chapter 25 before returning to numbers 18 and 19. In lieu of describing the toothsome Widow Wadman in Volume VI, Sterne allows you an empty page on which to draw your conception of the perfect woman: “Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind----as like your mistress as you can----as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you--'tis all one to me.” ‘Tis all one to us, as well. Sterne invites us to skip passages that bore, forget passages that displease, to hop and jump between chapters, and to reimagine scenes to our own liking. In elevating to muse-status his own fickle fancy, Sterne indulges ours, creating a book that is less a novel than the longest sustained joke in the English language. And yes, it is long. But here’s the secret: you don’t really need to finish it to get the joke. Just follow the big F, if you prefer -- you’ll miss the climax between Toby and the Widow, but so did Coogan et al. in the film. (There was just a lot happening on the set, see, and they got distracted.) Information overload is not a new phenomenon -- it’s sort of just part of being alive. Our current objects of distraction may be somewhat newer and shinier, and fewer of us read Latin and French, but the Shandean truths abide. If Sterne can teach us anything, it is to enjoy the flightiness of our mortal minds -- not to lament, but to laugh.

The Treacherous Journey From Page to Screen

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When it comes to adapting serious fiction for the screen, John Huston has few peers. But the English director Michael Winterbottom continues to burnish his reputation as a master of this maddeningly slippery art at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, which is featuring the American premiere of Trishna, Winterbottom's daring re-imagining of the Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Today, by way of exploring the difficulty of transporting stories from page to screen, we'll look at three Winterbottom adaptations of three very different novels from three different centuries. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles Trishna is not Winterbottom's first foray into Hardy's fiction, nor the first time he has lifted Hardy's characters from fictional Wessex and plunked them down in a faraway place. Winterbottom adapted Hardy's most controversial novel, Jude the Obscure, in 1996, and followed it four years later with The Claim, a retelling of The Mayor of Casterbridge set in California's Sierra Nevada mountains during the gold rush. But Trishna, set in contemporary India, is by far Winterbottom's most daring – and successful – adaptation of Hardy. The conventional reading of Hardy is that he was a forward-thinker who railed against the two most confining straitjackets of life in Victorian England: the pressure to conform to social conventions and the stark boundaries imposed by class and gender. Winterbottom offers a much subtler reading. As he told The Guardian recently by way of explaining his decision to set Trishna (and, he might have added, The Claim) far from England: "Hardy's novels are often about modernity and speed and energy. But it's hard to get that sense of a dynamically changing world if you set one in this country [England]. Here the problems are more to do with a lack of mobility rather than an excess of it." That's smart, but it carries a risk. While contemporary India offers an abundance of photogenic modernity, speed, and energy, it is also a gargantuan cliche: the gaudy colors, the cows, the slums and traffic and noise and dirt, those nearly visible smells. It's worth remembering that two of the biggest international hits to come out of India recently, Slumdog Millionaire and Darjeeling Limited, were avalanches of these very cliches. Winterbottom, who also wrote the screenplay, avoids this trap by streamlining Hardy's story and using the frenzied urbanization and changing class structure of contemporary India as tools to tell his story, never as mere eye candy. The title character is played by Freida Pinto (who had her breakout in Slumdog Millionaire), a poor girl in the rural northwestern state of Rajasthan who catches the eye of a wealthy hotel owner named Jay (Riz Ahmed) when he passes through her town with a freewheeling gang of rich tourists. Smitten, Jay offers Trishna a job at his hotel in the capital city of Jaipur, which her family pushes her to accept. Inevitably, a romance will bloom. A composite of the novel's two love interests, Alec d'Urberville and Angel Clare, Jay spirals from seduction to genuine love to fatal cruelty after the lovers move to Mumbai. There are other deft echoes of the novel. Instead of giving birth to her illegitimate child and losing it to illness, as happened to Tess, Trishna deals with an unwanted pregnancy by having an abortion. And in a moment of extreme need, Trishna goes to work in a dehumanizing food-packaging factory, just as Tess was nearly crushed by a ravenous new invention called the threshing machine. Hardy's fiction, as Winterbottom noted, was suffused with the tension in an urbanizing society – the seduction of modern inventions even as they brutally obliterate old ways. A rural English train depot perfectly captures this tension. It is, Hardy writes, a place where "a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the dark-green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between their secluded world and modern life. Modern life stretched out its steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what it touched had been uncongenial." By bringing this tension to life in contemporary India, Winterbottom has captured the spirit of Hardy's novel without being slavish to its letter. As a result, the movie manages the difficult trick of being both faithful and new, less a reproduction than a rich act of re-imagining. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy If ever a work of literature deserved to be called "unfilmable," The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is surely it. Laurence Sterne's great bawdy romp of a novel – a man named Tristram Shandy is talking to the reader about the story of his life he is trying to write as he writes it – is so disheveled, so plotless, so self-referential, so sprawling and messy and repetitive and hilarious that it almost dares a filmmaker to take a whack at it. For his 2005 adaptation, which he called Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Winterbottom worked from a screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce, who also wrote the scripts for Winterbottom's The Claim, 24 Hour Party People, and Code 46. This time out, Boyce cleverly solves the conundrum of the source material by turning it on its head: if Sterne wrote a book about writing a book, then let's make a movie about making a movie about that book. The cast is led by two more Winterbottom regulars – Steve Coogan playing himself playing Tristram Shandy and Rob Brydon playing himself playing Tristram's uncle Toby. The movie they're fitfully making is at times surprisingly faithful to Sterne's novel. We get Tristram's botched conception, his botched birth, his botched nose, his botched, nearly disastrous circumcision. Also, as in the novel, we get countless throwaway lines, such as when Coogan tries to gently fend off the advances of a horny crew member with this left-handed compliment: "Your knowledge of German cinema is second to none." There are snide swipes at Kevin Costner's interpretation of Robin Hood and a moment when Coogan looks at a copy of Sterne's novel and marvels, "Can you believe that a book as thick as that doesn't have an index?" But the best of the lot is when Coogan, who knows how movie stars act and who obviously hasn't read the novel, describes it to an interviewer as "a post-modern classic written way before there was any modern to be 'post' about." Sterne surely would have approved. After all, he offers this defense of his tendency to digress, to talk to the reader, to leave pages blank, to write chapters out of chronological order and otherwise break every rule of conventional novel-writing: "All I wish is, that it may be a lesson to the world, 'to let people tell their stories their own way.'" While spoken in jest, Coogan's remark about "post-modern classic" backs up my beliefs that this 18th-century novel is indeed one of the earliest exercises in post-modernism, that Don Quixote was the first, and that Flann O'Brien, not Joyce or Beckett, was the 20th century's first practitioner of the form. In other words, the novelist's willingness to expose the creative process, play structural tricks and be shamelessly self-aware was not an invention of the 20th century. Virginia Woolf believed Sterne "is singularly of our own age" and "the forerunner of the moderns," while Italo Calvino anointed Tristram Shandy as "undoubtedly the progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century." Along with the David Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch and Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I say Winterbottom's brilliant Tristram Shandy is final proof that the overused word "unfilmable" should be banished from the lexicon. Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me Jim Thompson's noir novels and stories have been turned into more than a dozen movies. Most filmmakers have latched onto the obvious cinematic allures of Thompson's fiction – the intricate plots, the stunning double-crosses, the lavish violence – while shying away from what goes on in the dark recesses of the human mind, which is where Thompson did his real work. Maybe this is to be expected since fiction has an unfair advantage over film in this regard. It isn't forced to rely so heavily on images; it's freer to explore interiority; it is, in a word, more psychological. Just the sort of material for a filmmaker as smart and literary as Michael Winterbottom. And yet, this time he stumbles. In 2010 Winterbottom directed a second version of Thompson's breakthrough 1952 novel, The Killer Inside Me. The first version, a half-baked disaster directed by Burt Kennedy and starring Stacey Keach, came out in 1976. While Kennedy and his screenwriters, Edward Mann and Robert Chamblee, blithely butchered Thompson's novel, Winterbottom and his screenwriter, John Curran, remain almost slavishly faithful to the text. It's a lesser sin, but still a sin and not at all characteristic of Winterbottom, as we have seen. It's hard to tell if he was suffering from a surfeit of reverence or a rare failure of imagination and will. But what's on the screen is far too literal – more transcript than interpretation, more homage than distinctive work of art. As a result, the movie feels frozen in amber, oddly lifeless considering what the characters are doing to each other on the screen. As the story unfolds, we learn that a small-town Texas deputy sheriff named Lou Ford is fighting not to have a relapse of "the sickness," an adolescent sexual fascination with little girls that morphed into a scandalous, violent liaison with a much older woman. Lou's step-brother took the fall for Lou years ago and ended up getting murdered for it. Lou has waited six years to get back at the killer, the construction tycoon Chester Conway, because he understands that revenge is a dish best served cold. He'll exact his by murdering his prostitute lover, then luring Conway's son to the scene and shooting him, making the mess look like a double murder between illicit lovers. The Conway family name will be ruined. We're deep in Jim Thompson country here: the novel is less a straight crime yarn than an unflinching tour of a sick mind. Lou Ford himself serves as tour guide, speaking in the first person to the reader in a voice that gives new meaning to the word unreliable. Sometimes he stands in for Thompson, who enjoyed his first big success with this novel but never apologized for his lack of highbrow aspirations. Here's Lou Ford delivering a very Thompson-esque piece of literary theory: In a lot of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He'll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can't figure out whether the hero's laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff – a lot of book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I'm not lazy, whatever else I am. I'll tell you everything. Atmosphere is critical in any noir, and Winterbottom tries to capture the novel's moral aridity through verbatim dialog and voice-overs from the novel, but it never quite gels. Much more successful at capturing atmosphere is the movie's cinematography – those bleached colors, stark stretches of desert, and brooding mountains. It's an extreme place where extreme things seem almost destined to happen. Another strong point is a killer soundtrack that includes works ranging from Enrico Caruso and Gustav Mahler to Hank Williams, Charlie Feathers, and the Western swing fiddler Spade Cooley. (Cooley, in an apt twist for these surroundings, was convicted of beating his wife to death in 1961.) Best of all is the cast. Elias Koteas, who always looks like he was just dipped in dirty motor oil, plays a deliciously smarmy union boss. Ned Beatty is serviceable as the porcine tycoon. Bill Pullman has a nice little cameo as an unhinged defense attorney. Jessica Alba as the doomed hooker and Kate Hudson as Lou's doomed fiancee both do fine jobs of living hot and dying (or appearing to die) hard. But the key gear in the works is Casey Affleck's deadpan portrayal of Lou Ford. His smooth cheeks, lidded eyes, monotone drawl. and correct manners are a mask, his way of convincing the world he's decent and a little slow, no threat to anyone. Affleck is not capturing the banality of evil; he's uncovering the evil that can hide behind blandness. He did the same thing in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. This is true creepiness, and true art. So creepy that Lou is capable of beating two women to death with his bare hands while murmuring, "I'm real sorry...I love you...goodbye." Many viewers and critics had a hard time watching this graphic violence, which begs the question: Is domestic violence supposed to look pretty? Only if you're in the fetishistically stylized world of a Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino movie, where getting your head blown off can look so cool. Thompson – and Winterbottom – are making the point that such violence is both horrible and horrible to look at, and, what's way worse and way more important, there's a bit of Lou Ford inside every one of us. The only person who doesn't get this is Lou Ford. He believes, rightly, that he's sick, but he also believes, wrongly, that this sets him apart from the rest of humanity, that he's one of the evil "us" who live in the midst of the sane and good "them." As Lou puts it, "If the Good Lord made a mistake in us people it was in making us want to live when we've got the least excuse for it." Later he adds, "Our kind. Us people. All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad." Winterbottom's portrayals of violence in this movie have been called everything from "misogynistic" to "feminist." They're neither. They're valid artistic representations of an abiding fact of human life, especially when the humans are damaged goods. Thompson and Winterbottom never exalt Lou Ford or other monstrous characters, the way, say, Oliver Stone did in the execrable Natural Born Killers. I watched The Killer Inside Me with a friend who is a staunch opponent of the Guantanamo Bay prison and the death penalty. Unable to watch Lou Ford beat a second woman's face into hamburger, my friend muttered, "I'd like to torture that sonofabitch to a slow death." Then she stormed out, halfway through the movie. I took her revulsion to be a barometer of Thompson's and Winterbottom's success. They loosed my friend's monstrous yearning to torture and kill the monstrous Lou Ford. In doing so they proved that there is, indeed, a bit of Lou Ford in all of us. It wasn't until I'd re-read all three novels and watched Winterbottom's adaptations that I came to understand what ties these three movies together and what sets them apart. First, of course, they were all directed by a man with a high literary sensibility who is a master at casting actors and drawing quality performances out of them. Production values are uniformly high. Marcel Zyskind served as cinematographer on all three films, giving each a look appropriate to the story's mood and message. Then came the realization why these movies are so uneven: each had a different screenwriter. In Trishna, Winterbottom's script shrewdly updates a story about a rural society's traumatic urbanization; Boyce's script of Tristram Shandy perfectly captures the antic, self-referential spirit of its source material; and The Killer Inside Me falls flat because Curran's script treats Thompson's novel as a blueprint rather than a springboard. In other words, the hardware of a movie – its direction, acting, cinematography, editing, makeup, music. and wardrobe – can carry it only so far. It turns out that in movies just as much as in books, the writing is, always and forever, the thing.

Difficult Books: Richardson, Sterne, Melville

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Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, Or the History of a Young Lady (1747-8): The difficulty of Richardson's masterpiece lies almost exclusively in its length: the outsized Penguin Classics edition (9x5.5x3) is 1,500 pages and weights nearly three pounds. I'm not sure it's the longest novel in English; Richardson's own Sir Charles Grandison might be longer, and surely the likes of Pynchon, Wallace, and Bolaño have overtaken Clarissa by now—but she is certainly among the longest. Other possible sources of difficulty: the eighteenth-century diction and syntax of Richardson's masterpiece may seem a little strange or prim at first, as may the social mores of eighteenth-century England, and some readers find the plot insufficient to the length of the book (“if you were to read Richardson for the story," Samuel Johnson noted,  "your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.”) Many readers, however, are ultimately drawn in by Richardson's hero and heroine and the incredible psychological depth with which he draws them (Johnson again: “the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart"). The nature of the relationship between the beautiful, virtuous, otherworldly Clarissa Harlowe and her lover/tormenter, the aristocratic libertine Robert Lovelace is entrancing. For emotional and psychological complexity, you will not find a more impressive novel in English. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767): In the words of Steve Coogan (playing himself playing Tristram Shandy in Michael Winterbottom's film version of Sterne's seemingly unfilmable novel), Tristram Shandy is “a post-modern classic before there was any modernism to be post- about.” Sterne's 1759 masterpiece is an anachronism—a case of modern, even post-modern, literary sensibility springing up almost two hundred years before either aesthetic became widespread.  The difficulty of the book is primarily structural: the novel's jumbled, non-linear chronology is frequently interrupted by hero/narrator Tristram's taste for digressions, pre-history, and recounting the doings of minor characters instead of his own life story (he does not get around to narrating his own birth until the third volume of the novel). Tristram patches into his text seemingly unrelated tales, letters, and images as he pleases, and (maddeningly) begins recounting events only to stop short of their denouement (a sort of writerly/readerly coitus interruptus). Some readers just don't enjoy the novel’s intense consciousness of the chaos of real "life and opinions" and the near-impossibility of representing them accurately in literary form (Samuel Johnson, for one: "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last."). Sterne’s artful literary approximation of the associative, digressive messiness that is the real mode of human thinking and life plots, his attention to the difference between real time and narrative time, and his constant attention to the author’s determinative and problematic role in the story he tells, are not for everyone. But for those willing to mount their hobbyhorses and give TS a go, I recommend watching Winterbottom's film (a movie about making a movie about a book about writing a book) as a warm-up.  Also, as one of our readers testified in the introductory post for this series, "Tristram Shandy is laugh aloud funny. I picked it up a few years ago with no prior knowledge–just wanted a novel from the eighteenth century. It’s a real treat. At one point, Sterne gets 8 pp. out of a piping hot chestnut falling into a guy’s breeches. This is lofty stuff." Herman Melville, Moby Dick; Or, The Whale (1851): This is one of my favorite books and my choice for the great American novel, but I know others to have found it tough sledding (which, in a Shandian vein, reminds me of Moby Dick's Nantucket sleigh rides…). The trouble with Moby Dick, as I've gathered, is twofold: First, it's structurally odd, an anatomy more than a novel: a mix of novelistic narration and plot, reverie and essay, a quasi-scientific treatise on whether the whale is a fish (the dreaded ceatology chapter—which I recommend skipping altogether the first time through), dramatic monologues and dialogues, technical descriptions of the craft of whaling, a miscellany of quotations. Second, I have a feeling with Melville (as with his sometime friend and contemporary Nathanial Hawthorne) that the allegory at work in the novel is a little out of my league as a contemporary person (the allegorical habit of mind is rarely evident in contemporary culture—perhaps in Lars von Trier's Dogville), that I might not have the wherewithal to construe properly: What does the counterpane represent? The whiteness of the whale? The doubloon? Unlike, say, Pilgrim's Progress whose allegory is totally transparent (Obsinate, Pliable, Worldly Wiseman…), Melville's symbols have an indissoluble ambiguity, a lingering feeling of disparate possible meanings. But this is how it's supposed to be, I think, and speaks more to Melville's genius and his slightly mystical taste for signifiers with multiple signifieds. As with Milton, I recommend hearing this book. Moby Dick is really funny—occasionally verging into slapstick (Ah, the meeting between Queequeq and Ishmael! Oh, the shark sermon!)—and its prose is magnificent from start to finish (though heavy on dialect speech, which can be hard to read). With a recording, someone else (I recommend Frank Muller at Recorded Books) has the trouble of doing the dialect and you just have the pleasure and the beauty. For those averse to audiobooks, I am particularly fond of the Norton edition with illustrations by Warren Chappell and notes and commentary by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. More Difficult Books