Wall Street (20th Anniversary Edition)

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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]

Ethical Vampires, Part II

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Part I of this essay explains how the vampires of our historical moment--exemplified in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels--have had a crisis of conscience and changed their ways. They've become more human (wearing Grateful Dead t-shirts, driving Mustangs) and more humane (not murdering people to feed on them). This reformation means different things for Harris and Meyer. Harris uses it to explore the dark, vampiric side of human nature, while Meyer, mistakenly, thinks that she can vanquish the vampiric altogether (she can't and doesn't, though possibly she doesn't realize this). Through her contact with vampires, the danger and intrigues and moral conundrums they bring into her life, Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse discovers her own primitive, uncivilized self—and a capacity for violence. Sookie may be friendly, hard-working, kind, and generous most of the time, but when she drinks from vampire Bill a second time, she begins to feel her own vampiric longings and potential: A little ripple of madness went through me . . . I drank and saw visions, visions all with a background of darkness, of . . . going hunting, the thrill of the run through the woods, the prey panting ahead and the excitement of its fear; pursuit, legs pumping, hearing the thrumming of blood through the veins of the pursued. In later books this "primitive self, the truer me," as Sookie calls it, rises to the surface when she's threatened. Several times she kills in self-defense without remorse. She is attracted to several men at once, and acts on these desires without feeling ashamed of them. Twilight's moral universe is rather different. The wariness of fixed, inflexible human characters and easy moral absolutes, continually apparent in Sookie's world (in which the only consistently demonized social group is the fundamentalist, occasionally terrorist anti-vampire church, The Fellowship of the Sun) is absent in Stephenie Meyer's. This is in part because Meyer's heroine, Bella Swan, a sheltered, self-absorbed teenage girl, narrates the majority of the Twilight novels.  Kenneth Turan, reviewing the first Twilight movie in the Los Angeles Times, argued that the film succeeds, "because it treats high school emotions with unwavering, uncompromising seriousness. Much as you may not want to, you have to acknowledge what's been accomplished here." Turan is right: the movie succeeds because, like the novels, it takes adolescent emotions—in all of their naive absolutism and world-consuming intensity—very seriously. Bella certainly believes, as only young lovers can, that no one has ever loved as she does, that her love will be eternal and absolute, that no man before Edward has ever been so deserving of love. And Meyer's plot allows this to be true. From the first time she sees Edward, Bella is filled with a fascinated reverence for his beauty.  He and his family are all "devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful." Edward in particular, has "the face of an angel," and his face, Bella insists, is the outward sign of transcendent, spiritual beauties: “Edward had the most beautiful soul, more beautiful than his brilliant mind or his incomparable face or his glorious body." Bella feels this—without qualification, without doubt—through all of the two thousand and some pages of her saga, and Meyer seems fully invested in her teenage heroine's worldview. Edward becomes like a drug to Bella: "Edward's lips were like a shot of some addictive chemical straight into my nervous system. I was instantly craving more." When she's away from him, "each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise." In order to enjoy the Twilight novels, you have to be willing to enter into this intense emotional and hormonal fundamentalism, the twin of the moral fundamentalism apparent in Meyer's refusal of nuance and ambivalence in favor of an either/or approach to good and evil. You have to believe that Edward and Bella's love is eternal, unqualified, rare, imperturbable—that it will never waiver or end. Meyer's plot never calls these teenage certainties into question. The final pages of the novel find Bella more certain than ever of her love for Edward: "No one's ever loved anyone as much as I love you."  Nor does Meyer's saga question the goodness of the Cullens—though other than Carlisle, the doctor vampire, they don't do any useful work in their community, aren't particularly friendly or generous, and generally seem to live only to satisfy their own material desires (for cars, clothes, travel). And even by the generous standards of fantasy, there's something obscene about Twilight's happy ending. It denies its heroine nothing and asks nothing of her. No major characters die in Twilight; no one has to sacrifice or lose anything they love, especially not Bella. Meyer suggests repeatedly that Bella's determination to be made a vampire so that she can be with Edward forever will require heavy sacrifices on her part: that she will not be able to see her parents or her best friend again, that she will not be able to have children, that, when she gets pregnant with Edward's vampire baby, carrying it to term will kill her. But none of these sacrifices are required. The final book, Breaking Dawn, promises that most sacrosanct of fantasy conventions, an epic battle between the Cullens and the Volturi (evil vampire royalty who still feed remorselessly on humans and who believe that Edward and Bella's half-vampire/half-human child, Renesmee (a name Bella invents by combining her mother's name and that of Edward's mother), presents a threat to the vampire community as a whole). However, when the good and bad vampires finally gather on the field of battle, Bella's new vampire talent--the ability to shield all she loves with an invisible, impenetrable force field--immobilizes the enemy. The battle's over before it starts. And so begins happily ever after "forever and forever and forever" for beautiful, rich, immortal Bella Cullen, who will spend eternity with her beautiful, rich, immortal family, eternally in love and in lust with the god-like Edward. It makes Harry Potter, with its dead parents, friends, classmates, teachers, and relatives, look like brutal realism. Reading Meyer against Harris is a lesson in the varieties of fantasy. Meyer's fantasy is total—as much a fantasy about human nature and love as it is a generic fantasy.  In Twilight, perfect happiness and love, perfect goodness, and perfect material satisfaction are all bestowed on the heroine. Harris' fantasy, by contrast, is temperate, self-aware. Sookie is a waitress; she's never been to college; she has no health insurance. In between her forays into the luxurious and exciting world of vampires, she worries pretty constantly about money—medical bills, her need for a new car, a new roof. Harris' characters are also readers of genre fiction. We see a Tami Hoag suspense novel tucked into Sookie's coworker's apron; Sookie's grandmother reads Danielle Steele; Sookie repeatedly professes a love of romances and mysteries. In True Blood, we catch a glimpse of Sookie's grandmother reading a Charlaine Harris novel. These images of escapist reading in Harris' own novel series don't allow her reader the sort of total immersion fantasy that Twilight demands. Harris' novels show you yourself engaged in fantasy (Look! That's me! That's what I'm doing—reading vampire-romance-mystery novels, just like Sookie's granny, trying to forget about being unemployed/bored senseless by work/behind on the mortgage!).  And through Sookie's incessant money worries Harris incorporates into her fictions the mundane oppressions that create the need for escapist literature. In this, Harris' books offer a metacommentary of sorts on their own social and emotional function and that of genre fiction more generally (and please forgive me for using the word "metacommentary" about the Sookie novels--I know it's at least silly, possibly profane). Sookie dates and goes to work for the vampires just as I might pick up one of Harris' vampire mysteries: to leave the real world and all of its tedious, squalid hassles behind. Harris knows what her books are and what they do and she won't let her readers forget it. She forces you to see yourself trying to escape your own life and in so doing she refuses you the total fantasy that Meyer offers—she reminds you that escapism and fantasy are just that—fantasy and escapism: They are not real, they are not ultimately the solution to the oppressions of daily life.  Like Sookie, I always have to go back to the hassles of real life (unemployment, health insurance, family drama)—have to close the book, leave behind the vampires in all of their impossible glamour and titillating danger. Harris is also keenly aware that class as much as race is at the heart of our cultural myths about vampires. Sookie works for vampires because she's poor and they are wealthy (through long lives and disdain for human laws, circumstances the Harris vampires are unapologetic about). They pay well and she can't afford not to, despite the dangers this work inevitably entails. And Sookie's unabashed about how dazzling and tempting the luxuries of vampire wealth are to her as a small town barmaid, though the money's not so intoxicating that it keeps her from being regularly revolted by the machinations and violence that vampire business usually entails (Harris' vampires are engaged in business or work of some kind, unlike Meyer's).  Making money is bloody, dangerous work—a truth that Alan Ball's True Blood makes queasily literal. On her first assignment for the Viking vampire and nightclub entrepreneur, Erik Northman, Sookie gets a Carrie-style blood soaking when she (using her telepathic powers at Erik's behest) discovers that Erik's vampire partner has been embezzling. The vampire embezzler is staked and erupts into a fountain of blood--gasp and guffaw-inducing in its abundance. Anna Paquin, who plays Ball's Sookie and wears a lovely white dress in this scene, ends up as red and slick and gooey as Erzsébet Báthory after one of her blood baths (see Part I of this essay for more on her).   And this pretty much sets the tone for all of Sookie's vampire work: she ends up bloody, battered, sore, almost dead.  It's working for the man—er, vampire. It's another day in the salt mines. Harris doesn't have any illusions about what it means to be socially vulnerable, to live somewhere around the poverty line. While part of Sookie's motivation in accepting the vampires' lavish payments for her telepathic services is definitely the allure of their world of beauty and intrigue and money, sometimes, even when she'd rather not, Sookie feels like she doesn't have much of a choice—as a single woman with no college education or health insurance whose day job is waiting tables and whose savings are dwindling. Meyer, on the other hand, attempts to obscure the workings of class and money in her books, but she acknowledges these even as she try to hide them. The first vampires, Vlad the Impaler and Erzsébet Báthory, fed on the lives and labor of their subjects. The Cullens, Meyer's enlightened vampires, don't literally feed on human beings—and yet their whole monied way of life is the product of a different sort of feeding on others, a metaphorical but nonetheless illicit sort of feeding. The Cullens' beautiful houses, cars, parties, clothes—their leisured and essentially dilettantish lives (playing cards, hunting, driving Ferraris, composing melodies on the piano, shopping) are all funded by supernatural insider trading: Edward had a lot of money—I didn't even want to think about how much.  Money meant next to nothing to Edward or the rest of the Cullens.  It was just something that accumulated when you had unlimited time on your hands and a sister who had an uncanny ability to predict trends in the stock market Vampirism, in its most basic structural form, is not a collection of campy trappings (pale skin, pointed canines), but the ability and willingness to appropriate the life, work, property, and livelihood of others. Edward's sister Alice is psychic and while Meyer never shows Alice having visions of the future of the stock market, here Meyer rather unapologetically reveals insider trading as the source of the Cullen's unbelievable wealth—this, and an unlimited time in which to wait for investment returns.  The Cullens, for all of their virtuous vegetarianism and pangs of conscience, are no better than the arch-villain Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, no better than the host of "vampire capitalists" who, by some accounts, who brought the global financial system to its knees in December of 2008. Bella is wary of the Cullens' money while she is human, and she claims that this is because she has nothing to give in return: Edward didn't seem to understand why I objected to him spending money on me—why it made me uncomfortable if he took me to an expensive restaurant in Seattle, why he wasn't allowed to buy me a car that could reach speeds over fifty-five miles an hour, or why I wouldn't let him pay my college tuition…Edward thought I was being unnecessarily difficult. But Bella, as usual, has it wrong. She's wary because she knows it's bloody money (never mind Edward's condescending paternalism—which, creepily enough, is appropriate given that he's around 100 to Bella's 18). Bella's wariness here is motivated by the same horror that made her recoil from her brief glimpse of a Volturi (i.e. evil, human-eating vampire) feast: a flock of unsuspecting tourists are ushered into the turreted throne room of the Volturi's Italian castle and happily begin to snap pictures. In horror, Bella watches the doors close and lock on the unsuspecting lambs; she hears their screams as the feeding begins. Intuitively, she recoils from the Cullens' money for the same reason (at least while she's human—once she's a vampire she revels in it). The "vegetarians" no longer suck blood from human bodies, but they suck money from the labor of others through illegal means.  It's not quite as physically repulsive or terrifying but it's still not quite in line with Bella's insistence that Edward and family are spiritually radiant individuals. And so we're back to the beginning, to Erzébet Báthory, Vlad the Impaler: remorseless aristocrats taking blood and life and labor from their poor.  Meyer's vampire is no more enlightened for his vegetarianism, no better and no different than he ever was.  But Meyer doesn't understand the difference.  The Cullens' "vegetarianism" and its patina of moral evolution is enough for her—just so long as they don't bite anyone outright, literally.  Harris knows better and uses her fantasy to teach as much: We're the vampires, the vampire collaborators, now and we always have been—but vampires can be people too.

Ethical Vampires, Part I

Vampires figure the anxieties of their cultural moment. They come out at night—and during periods of social and political turmoil, and their habits and looks mutate to personify the fears of the age in which they appear. Bram Stoker's Dracula dramatized Victorian fears of sex as morally corrupting and fears of English culture as threatened by invading foreigners.  The vampires of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, published primarily in the 1980's, shared a certain kinship with the ruthless, amoral financier characters of the age, Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone's Wall Street and Patrick Batemen of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, but their most striking feature was their homosexuality. Rice's vampirism as blood-borne pathogen also came to seem a metaphor for AIDS—a taunting metaphor, since her beautiful men could not die. So what about our vampires—the vampires of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels or those of Stephenie Meyer's ubiquitous Twilight?  Our vampires seem a domesticated, morally evolved breed. Meyer's vampires have been defanged altogether (Meyer only agreed to sell the film rights with the caveat that the Cullens could not be depicted with fangs in any film version), while the vampires of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels (better known as HBO's True Blood) have discretely retractable fangs. Both authors' vampires are committed to humane, sustainable diets. Indeed, if Michael Pollan wrote for vampires, he might recommend the diet devised by the vampires of Meyer's Twilight. The members of the Cullen household, the forward-thinking vampire "family" at the center of the series, forswear feeding on humans. "I don't want to be a monster," Edward Cullen, Meyer's teenage vampire hero explains to his human beloved, Bella Swan, when she asks him about his diet. Turning from the gruesome practices of most of the rest of the vampire community in Meyer's alternate version of contemporary America, the Cullens feed only on wild animals they hunt in the woods around their home on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. And even in this (by some standards) less murderous diet, they take a sustainable approach, carefully alternating their hunting grounds so as not to decimate the local populations of deer and cougars.  Carlisle, the patriarch of the Cullen clan and the originator of what they refer to as their vampire "vegetarianism," goes even further in his determination to be good. Through hundreds of years of practicing this vegetarianism, Carlisle has perfected his self-control to such a degree that he remains seemingly unmoved in the presence of human blood. His control is so great that he can practice human medicine. Not only does he not kill human beings—he heals them and saves their lives. The vampires of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, which are also known as the Southern Vampire Mysteries and are the basis of Alan Ball's  hit HBO series True Blood, share with Meyer's Twilight a kinder, gentler vampire whose physical beauty seems the outward sign of his moral improvement. Gone are the days of the repulsive and remorseless Count Dracula, with his hairy palms and rank breath, his insatiable hunger for blood. Like Twilight, Harris' series presents a morally enlightened vampire. Set in an alternate version of the contemporary American South, the Sookie novels depict a world in which vampires have declared themselves publicly, sought and won some civil rights, and live openly amongst humans. Their emancipation from the shadowy world of myth and legend is possible because a synthetic blood developed by the Japanese allows them to refrain from feeding on humans. Living only on bottled blood, however, doesn't satisfy like organic warm-from-the-body human blood. Fortunately for the vampires and humans who occupy the Sookieverse, Harris' mythology also revises the nature of the vampire bite. Unlike Meyer's vegetarian Cullens, Harris' vampires still feed on humans, but do so more considerately and in moderation. In the Sookie novels, being bitten by a vampire isn't normally lethal, nor does it turn one into a vampire. In fact, the vampire's bite, a quintessential symbol of sex (penetration, exchange of fluids), becomes pleasurable for human and vampire alike rather than damning or damaging: "I felt Bill's teeth against my neck, and I said "Yes!" I felt his fangs penetrate, but it was a small pain, an exciting pain," Sookie says of her first bite, given to her by the prosaically named vampire Bill Compton. ("I thought it might be Antoine, or Basil, or Langford!" Sookie responds, laughing, when Bill first tells her his name.) But the point of vampire Bill's prosaic name is that he's one of us—that vampires are people too. Harris' and Ball's versions of Sookie's world are full of such prosaic details of modern vampire life. Their vampires play Wii Golf, serve Fresca to guests, shop at the mall, wash their hair with Herbal Essence shampoo, wear Dockers, renovate their homes. For Ball and Harris, vampires are people too, both materially and morally. And while the melodramatic pitch of Twilight makes Edward and his kin seem like they couldn't possibly do such grubbily vulgar things as shopping or styling their hair, their artfully tousled locks and well-cut leather jackets tell another tale.  These vampires, our vampires (whether we like it or not), do and feel human things: They attend high school, practice abstinence and medicine, tend bar, go to the prom, get married, create computer databases, lobby for civil rights. They cry, fall in love, feel guilty, worry about whether they have souls and what state those souls might be in.  Which is why they've gone vegetarian—or at least Whole Foods sustainable. Our vegetarian vampires, I think, are afflicted with the same crises of conscience that we are as first-world twenty-first century humans. We eat too much, we shop too much, we use too much fuel, water, land; we mistreat the animals on which we depend for food and the other peoples whose labor produces for us the cheap abundant goods we have all grown so used to. The vampire's insatiable hunger for blood mirrors our insatiable hungers for food, wealth, property, and possessions. Contemporary vampire fiction mirrors our collective anxiety about our need for self-discipline and a return to a more humane approach to our fellow beings: Now, the vampire, the most appetitive and unrepentantly murderous of our culture's mythic archetypes, restrains himself in our popular fiction. He has become a "vegetarian" of sorts, the vampire version of a Whole Foods shopper, who prefers humanely raised meat, free range eggs, sustainably farmed produce. From the shimmering pâleur of the vampire radiates something new and hardly otherworldly: an aura of white liberal guilt. But being kinder to your food, whatever it might be, isn't the be all and end all of ethical living, nor does it mean you're not a vampire. Harris and Ball's versions of the Sookieverse acknowledge this: that even as we try mightily to live ethically, the dangerous, cruel, and illicit—the side of human character that the vampire has always represented—cannot be vanquished altogether. Vampire Bill, born and raised in the antebellum South, may be an attentive suitor and a perfect gentleman whom Sookie can take home to her grandmother, but he's also a self-professed murderer and his sexual appetite can turn terrifying.  All of the characters in Sookie's world, both human and vampire, have this same moral ambivalence. Harris/Ball's vampire is not all bad, but their human, in turn, is not all good. The world of Meyer's Twilight, on the other hand, embraces Stoker's basically strict segregation of good and evil. The heroes and heroines of Twilight are all understood to be morally exemplary. Meyer often has Bella compare Edward's body and soul to that of an "angel" (and Stephenie Meyer doesn't offer a single sly wink to let you know that she knows it's all a bit over the top—which is really impressive in a way.  I certainly couldn't get through 2000+ pages of treacly teenage melodrama without a single devious aside to my audience). So, in both Twilight and the Southern Vampire Mysteries, vampires do and feel human things--but a crucial philosophical difference between Harris' books (and Ball's series) and Meyer's remains. Harris insists, as Meyer does not, that people are vampires—that people do and feel vampiric things—rape, murder, illicit and subversive sexual desire, manipulation, betrayal. After all, the first vampires, the sadistic historical figures out of whose strange cruelties the idea of the vampire came, were human beings: the fifteenth-century Romanian prince Vlad Dracul (meaning "dragon" or "devil"), whose name Bram Stoker immortalized in Dracula, and Erzébet Báthory (known as the Beast of Csejthe), the sixteenth-century Hungarian countess sometimes referred to as the first female serial killer. Báthory tortured and killed hundreds of young serving girls and bathed in their blood, believing that the blood of virgins had powerful restorative and magical properties. Prince Vlad was known for torturing his enemies and citizens alike, often en masse—usually by impaling them on stakes. He liked to make public spectacles of these executions, sometimes eating meals while watching them. He was also, more mundanely, known for unscrupulous labor practices such as working his peasant laborers to death. Karl Marx refers to this exploitative cruelty of Vlad's in Capital and uses the figure of the vampire repeatedly to describe the behavior of the capitalist—though he never makes the connection between the vampire and his historical forebear (nor does Marx to Vlad by name; he refers to him "a Wallachian boyar," but the practices he describes are Vlad's). This basic connection between human monstrosity and the vampire is explicit in the Harris novels. Harris' vampires have gotten a little nicer, but her humans have picked up the slack. As her vampire characters limit their consumption of human blood, her human characters drink vampire blood in a tidy little economy of gore. Vampire blood heals humans with extraordinary speed, makes them more attractive, sharpens their senses, and enhances their libidos. It is the recreational drug of choice in Harris' fictional world. In the first two scenes of blood drinking in the first Sookie novel, Dead Until Dark, Harris reverses the traditional roles of human and vampire: vampire becomes victim, human becomes blood drinker. In the first, an unsavory trailer trash couple, the Ratrays, begin draining the vampire Bill Compton using needles and medical tubing. They plan to sell his blood as a recreational drug.   In the second scene of blood taking, human Sookie, who has been beaten almost to death by the Ratrays for preventing their attempted draining/murder, drinks vampire Bill's blood at his insistence.  At first, Sookie gags on the blood, but as she forces herself to swallow, knowing it's her only chance of survival, she begins to enjoy it: "Suddenly, the blood tasted good, salty, the stuff of life . . . my hand clamped the vampire's wrist to my mouth. I felt better with every swallow." This human taste for blood becomes the emblem of other vampiric traits. Harris' and Ball's human characters can be arrogant, chilly, and race-proud: murderers, rapists, self-righteous hate mongers, child molesters. Harris' vampires may inevitably have a detached, cool demeanor, an unnerving lack of human emotional response, a disregard for laws and a disdain for human lives, but on balance the people in her books are little better. Her heroine's most potentially devastating encounters come more often at the hands of humans, rather than vampires. Sookie's great uncle molests her as a child; a local man revolted by relationships between human women and vampires attempts to kill her when she starts dating vampire Bill; an anti-vampire church called The Fellowship of the Sun blows up a hotel during a massive vampire conference killing scores of humans and vampires and nearly killing Sookie. Alan Ball's version of the Sookieverse also inverts the traditional structure of the vampire genre (vampires = bad; humans = good) to expose human moral failings, cruelties, abuses of power. In one of True Blood's most socially canny plots, a young woman addicted to vampire blood coerces her boyfriend into kidnapping a gentle, paunchy middle-aged vampire.  They tie him up with silver chains and keep him in the basement, thereby assuring themselves of an unlimited supply of V or V-juice, as vampire blood is called in Ball's series. The vampire starves and becomes weakened in his captivity and his hunger causes him excruciating pain. He senses that his female captor is going to kill him and confronts her about it, as she's milking blood from his tender, weakened arm. She punches him savagely and commands him angrily: "Don't you dare get morally superior on me." She tells him that she gave up a full scholarship to Vassar to work in an impoverished village in Guatamala, helping to bring clean water to the village. She continues, "I am an organic vegan and my carbon footprint is miniscule 'cause I know that ultimately we're all just a single living being. But you are not." The scene indicts Whole Foods piety as morally insufficient—as a frail ethical blind that can obscure and justify monstrous selfishness and cruelty.  By reversing the roles of human and vampire, turning the human into the torturer, the scene suggests that we humans are the vampires now—that we have always been. For Ball and Harris, the essence of the vampire is a ruthless, violent selfishness that characterizes fanged and unfanged characters—humans and vampires—alike. The Sookie Stackhouse novels and True Blood continually pose the question, "Who's the vampire now?"  They repeatedly refuse easy distinctions between good and bad, right and wrong, vampire and human. In another such equivocal scene, an ancient vampire saves Sookie from an aspiring human rapist.  This vampire, it turns out, believes himself damned and intends to destroy himself by walking out into daylight (where the sun's rays will burn him to death). "We take the blood of innocents," he explains, when Sookie asks why he thinks himself an abomination. She counters his claim with the question, "Who is innocent?" He says simply, "children”—the vampire fed exclusively on children for centuries. But Sookie, in gratefulness for his kindness, still decides to bear witness to his self-destruction, a decision that the vampire doesn't understand. "I am an evil creature," he tells her. (A confession that might seem more noble and poignant in light of the Catholic Church's failures this week to take such responsibility for crimes against children.) "But you did a good thing, saving me," Sookie responds. To her own surprise, she cries when the vampire steps into sunlight and begins to disintegrate. Meyer's fiction, on the other hand, scrupulously avoids such subtle moral shading, favoring instead the stark good/evil duality of Victorian vampire fiction—more on this in Part II.

Arts and Inspiration in the Collapse

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Perhaps thanks to my day job, which puts me in close proximity to each day's market carnage and keeps my nose in the business section, I've been thinking a lot about troubled economy and what it might mean for the arts.There is an accepted notion that poverty inspires art, and Wikipedia even has an entry for "starving artist," so central is that idea to our perception of the artist (or writer or musician).But there's little use in speculating whether the coming years will inspire more or better fiction; these things are too subjective. Nonetheless, it seems to me that we are at a particularly fruitful moment for the fiction writer, on the cusp of big changes economically and politically and in the country's prevailing mood. Yet we should not look for novels explicitly about what we are experiencing. I argued a while back that the expectation that fiction ought to explicate another great cataclysm in recent history, 9/11, was misguided in that fiction doesn't typically "react" in such an obvious way.I would argue that nearly every serious novel written since 9/11 is a "9/11 novel." Writers, artists, and filmmakers, consciously or subconsciously, react to the world around them some way, and 9/11, from many angles, is incontrovertibly a part of our world.When writers succeed at this they come to epitomize an era because their fiction embodies the prevailing mood seamlessly. Too reach for an obvious example, F. Scott Fitzgerald did this with the 1920s. A more timely example: with Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), John Steinbeck embodied the Great Depression in fiction. It would be a small silver lining if this moment produced an epic on the order of Steinbeck. On the non-fiction side, we would hope that among the flood of books arriving to dissect 2008's historic economic gyrations, there will be another Barbarians at the Gate, perhaps the best business book ever written. The world needs an exhaustive look at what happened in 2008 and why.In the world of film, meanwhile, the calculation is different. Hollywood's approach is to divert rather than to emphasize or illuminate. A recent Financial Times squib suggests we should "expect a new era of movie escapism," but points out that after several years of fare like 42nd Street and King Kong in the 1930s, the movie studios eventually dealt with the Great Depression with more realism. But this doesn't mean that Hollywood will ignore the current crisis altogether. You've probably already heard the news that 20th Century Fox is making a sequel to Wall Street, Oliver Stone's 1987 film whose villain, the rapacious Gordon Gekko, became something of a hero. The working title is Money Never Sleeps, and The Economist engages in some speculation: "If [Gekko] is to be cast once again as a villain, the mind boggles at the possibilities. A mortgage broker? The genius behind collateralised-debt obligations? Dick Fuld? A naked short-seller? (Steady, ladies.)"In the high-stakes art world, bankrolled by billionaire hedge fund managers, the 2008 collapse may prove to be just as severe as the one facing Wall Street. According to Reuters, the art market had stayed frisky despite the foreboding but now it appears that the drying up of millions once earmarked for conspicuous consumption is finally hitting the auction houses. The first stumble in what may turn out to be a free fall happened this month in London, at the annual Frieze Art Fair with "weekend sales that fell well short of the low estimates." Bigger art auctions in the coming weeks are expected to confirm the trend. The extremely cyclical art market has had severe downturns before, most notably in 1990. Art fans will be wondering what rises from the ashes this time around and prospective collectors - those few who have money to spend - may begin seeing bargains previously unheard of.What about music? I don't know - and music is already so fragmented as it is - but one might reductively say that grunge was born out of early-90s malaise and punk out of late-70s disgust.Speculation aside, the arts are both a mirror and a filter. The last few months have felt momentous, and next month will likely be even more so. There's much to be inspired by.