What Do You Do With an Idea? — New York Times best seller

New Price: $9.39
Used Price: $1.82

Mentioned in:

Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

-
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 Year in Reading: Mira Assaf Kafantaris

- | 1
The through-line coursing through this year is the sad familiarity of loss. My mother is often on my mind; Lebanon is often on my mind; my children are often on my mind. Trumpism that will outlive Trump is on my mind. I think of endings a lot, all the people I loved and lost, the griefs I have grieved. I think of what I take for granted, what I ignore, what I carry with me. I think of this Eavan Boland line a lot: The ache of things ending in the jasmine darkening early. January: The Lebanese uprising choreographs my joys and disappointments. You see, in the fall of 2019, massive protests broke out over the impossibility of life in a state that suffocates the living. So much is at stake, but most urgently for me, the promise of a feminist breakthrough. I feel a hunger to learn “the wreck and not the story of the wreck,” as Adrienne Rich tells us, to connect to my Arab heritage, to learn the work of protofeminist Arab women writers. I read Layla Baalbakki’s second novel al-Aliha al-mamsukha (The Deformed Gods, 1960); I savor the rhythm and cadence of my mother language, my internal language, carrying me into the rich and deep world of my ancestors. In its essence, this novel disrupts the model of virtuous, submissive Arab womanhood as intrinsic to the welfare of the umma, or the commonwealth, in the aftermath of coloniality. In the protagonist Mira’s rejection of patriarchy--she says at one point, “I’ve had it up to here with fathers. If he weren’t dead, I’d wish he was”--I sense a groundswell of desire for feminist liberation billowing, unfurling. The more I read, however, the more dejected I become; Mira’s quest for subjectivity and power can only be imagined, called forth, made possible, at the expense of Black and brown migrant workers. In the Arab world, as elsewhere, hierarchies of race and gender work together to oppress those who are farthest away from whiteness. I devour the trenchant words of Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, which exfoliates, among other topics, the racialization of Asian Americans as model minorities. Perhaps prophetically, she telegraphs the pernicious sinophobia in the months to come as the novel coronavirus spreads like wildfire in the US. Derisively, the outgoing president calls COVID-19 the "kung flu" and the "China virus" to make a point about Asia’s threat to America’s exceptionalism. I am enthralled by “Portrait of an Artist,” the essay on the avant-garde artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s classic work Dictee. In addition to chronicling Cha’s achievement as an experimental artist, Hong recounts her tragic rape and murder days after the publication of Dictee. To fully understand the impact of Cha’s remarkable work, its reception and afterlife, Hong tells us, we need to consider it alongside the sexual violence and brutal death she endured as a Korean-American woman living in a world that has yet to create a place for her in it. I spot Such a Fun Age in the new acquisitions display at my local public library and remember listening to a National Public Radio interview with its author, Kiley Reid. I marvel at Reid’s ability to create racially illiterate white characters who act by the playbook of white supremacy: white innocence, white tears, white rage. For example, Alix, the bourgeois white woman who employs Emira, the Black nanny, to care for her little daughter, is incapable of seeing Black girlhood and womanhood outside the optics of white saviorism. Alternatively, the babysitter is a young woman who experiences the uncertainties and mistakes of early adulthood in all its glorious contradictions. She falls in and out of love, enjoys sex, is ambivalent about her career, and worries about money. In social media parlance, she is #LivingHerBestLife. I believe this is the novel’s sharpest achievement: to unsettle white America’s love affair with the white savior narrative and turn it on its head. I remember a reading I attended in the past--remember those?--when a well-meaning white man asked the poet Ross Gay about the place of racial struggle in his poems. And Ross Gay, in the sweetest and most generous Ross Gay fashion, said something along the lines of “I just wish to write about curling my toes in the grass or eating a loquat,” and that white readership’s expectation of oppression is itself racist, because they cannot see Black people as existing outside these violent and victimizing frameworks. In the same vein, I appreciate Reid’s development of Emira as a young Black woman who exists in the quotidian; alternatively, the white characters cannot translate Emira’s being and embodiment without employing harmful stereotypes. And Reid’s scrupulous peeling away of the white characters’ racism is truly a masterclass in storytelling. At a poetry reading, my beloved friend Zoë Brigley Thompson reads from Hand & Skull. I’m so viscerally moved by her words, her passionate and powerful evocation of gender violence and environmental degradation as inextricably linked to the same power dynamisms. I cry in public. “My Last Beatitude,” an elegiac commentary on the heartbreak of miscarriage, shreds through my heart. The woman on my left offers me a Kleenex. On my right, a friend caresses my arm. Had I known lockdown was around the corner, I would have savored this last communion more intentionally, lingered in this intimate physical contact with a friend and a stranger. February: I fall deliriously sick. Have I contracted “the Corona,” as my children come to call it? The doctors have no idea; I have no idea. Twice I get tested for the flu; twice my results are inconclusive. My body aches. My head aches. I cry for my mother. No books, please. Only self-pity; and a prayer for a national mass testing program. Ding Dong. Bill of Mortality: 10 people die of COVID-19 March: A deluge of job rejections descend upon me and crush my brittle spirits. My ego hurts. My heart hurts. I crawl back to bed, but with a stack of steamy romances this time. I enjoy Bringing Down the Duke for its protofeminist fantasy, hot sex scenes, and a brooding, class-conflicted duke. Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine lifts my spirits. In Lebanon, my grandmother Yvonne dies, alone. She is buried alone. It is a story that would permeate the months to come, as deaths by Corona, in isolation, become a daily reality. She speaks to me through a fugue of food, poetry, and music. For most of her adult life, Yvonne lived in the border town of Baalbek, where I spent many summers in the shadows of the Roman ruins. The sensorium of these summers--their taste, smell, and feel-- returns to my body as a summoning. I crave my grandmother’s Damascene pumpkin preserves and her makdous, or stuffed aubergines cured in oil. Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart, a memoir of and homage to her mother Elvira, is a balm to my longing for a life long gone, in that borderless geography of community and care. It is a book I love and return to when I miss my mother and all the women who mothered me. I find solace in the essays in A Map Is Only One Story, edited by Nicole Chung and Mensah Demary, that contemplate the meaning of family, memory, and immigration. Jamila Osman’s “A Map of Lost Things,” about rootedness and uprootedness, loss and memory, devastates me. So does Lauren Alwan’s “Arab Past, American Present.” Ding Dong. Bill of Mortality: 3,169 people die of COVID-19 April: The magnitude of the coronavirus is impossible to grasp. My husband and I slouch towards indefinite confinement with two little children. I cherish the whimsical and compassionate world these children’s books create: Salma the Syrian Chef, Grimelda the Very Messy Witch, Diary of a Wombat, Frog and Toad, What Do You Do with an Idea, and Amos & Boris.  I feel a camaraderie with Anne Enright, whose Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood is an exhilarating portrait of motherhood in all its euphoric highs and wretched lows. I want to love Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, but my own struggle with motherhood makes it impossible to appreciate the lyricalization of bad mothers. Likewise, Anna Burns’s brilliant fictionalization of the Troubles in Milkman is too close for comfort. It triggers the ambient sound of unease--the foreboding hum of civil strife--that coursed through my childhood. Days come and go. Bill of Mortality: 15,454 people die of COVID-19 May: My friend Annie recommends Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, about gifted teenagers in an elite arts school and the charismatic teacher who abuses them. I’m engrossed in part one of the novel, but when the narratorial point of view shifts in part two, I lose interest. Rattled by the uncertainties of COVID-19, I do not have the mental and emotional bandwidth to put my trust in an unreliable narrator. I yearn for comfort; I lose myself in Ross Gay’s book of sparkling vignettes: The Book of Delights. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble, about a sometimes self-loathing and a sometimes megalomaniac middle-aged white straight man who libidinizes women, does not hit the mark. I am enthralled by Nikki Grimes’s Ordinary Hazards, a harrowing and triumphant memoir in verse. Days come and go. Bill of Mortality: 6,128 people die June:  The racist murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd unleash convulsions of rage, public and private, and an upswell of racial reckoning with the ever-present brutalities of white supremacy. Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other is a fabulously exquisite, expansive tour de force on womanhood from multiple perspectives, multiple histories, and multiple networks; on Black queer love; and on Black feminist everlasting movement towards the commune and the communal. Days come and go. Bill of Mortality: 3,795 people die of COVID-19 July: Black feminist scholars, artists, and activists respond to the conjoined violence against Black lives: violence as the carceral state; violence as the health system; violence as low-paying jobs; and most brutally, violence as law enforcement. Saidiya Hartman’s essay in Artforum evokes the poetics of refusal and activates an abolitionist imaginary. Dionne Brand’s “On Narrative, Reckoning and the Calculus of Living and Dying” rejects the fantasy of “a return to normal”--a fantasy only afforded to those who benefit from the after-effects of coloniality, the brutalities of slavery, and the tyranny of border imperialism. I am inspired by Black feminist ethics of compassion and care, where people make space for each other, keep an eye on each other, elevate each other. Carmen Maria Machado’s ground-shifting memoir In the Dream House is like nothing I’ve read before. Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward’s elegiac memoir about loss and mournfulness, brings back buried memories of a good friend who also died a young and violent death in my senior year of high school. In Tommy Orange’s There There, I learn about a historical act of Native American reclamation that representations of the counter-cultures of the 60s have erased: the Native American occupation of Alcatraz from 1969-1971. I love how Orange braids the utopic dreams of Native resistance with the brutal realities of executing such an ideal, from securing food and shelter, to sexual violence, to death. For a personal essay that sutures my border-crossing story during the Lebanon-Israel War to a critique of the movie Sérgio, I revisit Edward Said’s Orientalism, a magisterial classic that deconstructs white European power over the stories of the Global South. In joy, I read Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer in one sitting on a hot summer afternoon while my children splash around in the plastic paddling pool. It is hilarious from beginning to end, but also astute in its telling of sibling rivalry and the creative ways in which women join forces--here in the form of sororial solidarity--to disrupt patriarchy’s sway over their lives. I laugh whenever I see copies of My Sister on display at my local library. I welcome the escapist distraction of Libba Bray’s The Diviners. Days come and go. Bill of Mortality: 8,151 people die of COVID-19 August:   The catastrophic explosion in Beirut shatters me. The words of Souad Labbize in Je Franchis les Barbelés (I cross the barbed wire) telegraph the intense alienation I feel in America sometimes, when my heart, mind, and soul are preoccupied with Lebanon. This dual existence is so seamlessly woven into the fiber of my life that it goes unnoticed in my everyday life. But when a thread rips or loosens, when a cataclysmic, man-made disaster kills 200 people in one blow, my entire sense of self rips open, lays bare, comes undone. Jericho Brown’s poems in The Tradition are a daily tonic. Mohsin Hamid’s incantatory Exit West dwells on the meaning and effect of displacement, statelessness, vulnerability, and loss; on doors that open, and doors that close; those who cross our paths and those we leave behind; on the staying power of love. I recall the Warsan Shire line: No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. The passages describing Saeed’s praying rituals are the most beautiful evocation of a person’s congress with the cosmic I have ever read. Mexican Gothic is a suspenseful treat--a latinx variation on the southern gothic genre where the master’s house--the plantation house or the mine mansion--molts and then burns to the ground as a symbol of purification and excision. What remains is the regenerative promise of love; and a sassy heroine with an impeccable sense of style. Bill of Mortality: 5,584 people die of COVID-19 September: Unthinkable rage and disillusionment after a Louisville Grand Jury exonerates the police officer who killed Breonna Taylor in her sleep. In Citizen: An American Lyric, I dwell on Claudia Rankine’s power to bring Serena Williams’s righteous anger to the page. Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half is the book of the summer for me. It is beautiful imagining of queer kinship and Black futurity throws into sharp relief the stagnation and toxicity at the heart of white heteropatriarchy. Similarly, Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom is a stunning and devastating novel about border crossing, from Ghana to the US to Ghana again; about the movement between the elusive borders of faith and science; and a précis on the overwhelming, debilitating sway of grief; our hunger for human connection; and for the life-affirming promise of love. Themes of loss and grief find me again in Lily King’s beautiful Writers and Lovers. I love it and look for other books by King. Quite predictably, I pick up her award-winning Euphoria. I’m a sucker for stories of unrequited love, but the ethnographic spectacle of indigenous inhabitants of Papua Guinea as backdrop to the tempestuous love triangle between the American anthropologist, her Australian husband, and her British lover does not sit well with me. Bill of Mortality: 4,003 people die of COVID-19 October: My friend Emer recommended Fiona Mosely’s Elmet, which is set in a damp and brooding Yorkshire and has a gothic flavor to it. It is a tense and unnerving read. It stays with me for days. Brandon Taylor’s Real Life articulates with such subtlety and such tenderness the alienation of a Black gay man living in a white world. In the novel, this punitive dynamic plays out in a postgraduate lab where white characters claim racial innocence and cognitive superiority while Wallace is subjected to the insidious stereotypes that many of my Black colleagues have experienced in majority-white universities. Steve Mentz’s Ocean is both a lyrical and scholarly ode to the sea, encrusting and fluid. Mentz’s meditation on the ocean and its valence in our cultural imagination wake so many memories of my amphibious childhood in an industrial seatown by the Mediterranean. Mine wasn't a pastoral, Cousteau-esque experience, however. My family, along with our neighbors, swam in waters infested with sewage, industrial run-off, and on occasion, the carcasses of butchered animals. We witnessed dynamite fishing and the aftermath of dead fish floating everywhere at dusk. We also saw the first signs of war from that same coast, when Syrian and Israeli warships sailed too close to the shore. Despite all this, my relationship to the sea is still one of perpetual longing--what the Portuguese call saudades--of fragile, fragmented memories that follow the movements of the waves. Bill of Mortality: 5,409 people die of COVID-19 November: The lead-up to the presidential election grips me for weeks. Poetry becomes a lifeline, particularly Joy Harjo’s An American Sunrise.  I adopt these lines, about the continuity of past and present, as my mantra: History will always find you, and wrap you / In its thousand arms. I follow Audre Lorde’s instructions in A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer “to listen to what fear teaches.” I fear blatant tyranny. I fear unfreedom. I fear a past cordoned off from the present. Meredith Talusan’s Fairest is a poignant, powerful, poetic triumph of a book. Talusan breaks up and remakes her world, expands and contracts time; her childhood in the Philippines as a sensitive child with albinism; her gender transition; her bildungsroman as an essayist; her staggering reflections on race, class, and sexuality. Especially salutary is the incisive final essay, “Lady Wedgwood”--an honest, heartbreaking honoring of a love that ran its course, a love that enfolds and enfloods despite its ending. Recommended by Talusan, Enfance by Nathalie Sarraute is elliptical, raw, and refined all at once; the two-ness of adult and child narratives interlocking, stabilizing and destabilizing memory, punctuating the slipperiness of language. It starts with these brilliant sentences:  “Alors, tu vas vraiment faire ça ? ‘Évoquer tes souvenirs d'enfance...' " (So, are you really going to do this? Evoke your childhood memories?) I talk openly about my desire to write my own memoir of a childhood marked by the Lebanese Civil War. After the election, I gravitate toward the voices of Arab Americans and their place in the American landscape. I’m not on a quest for identity, but the discourse of American exceptionalism touts me, and I find myself mulling over my tenuous relationship with my homeland, my rejection of American military imperialism, its glorification of individualism at the expense of the collective, and my embodiment as a diasporic settler of color living on the traditional lands of the Shawnee, Miami, Lenape, and other indigenous peoples. I end the year with two Arab-American jeremiads: Laila Lalami’s Conditional Citizens and Massoud Hayoun’s When We Were Arabs. How do Arab Americans, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, navigate the aura of suspicion and provisionality that surrounds them on a daily basis? In what ways can Arab Americans tell their unique American story on their own terms? To what extent can we disrupt the one-dimensional narratives of religious extremism, or backwardness, or superficiality that America attaches to our stories? These are some of the questions both Lalami and Hayoun explore in their incantatory meditations on their identities. Lalami’s searing story of migration and American citizenship resonate with mine. Ranging from themes of allegiance, to faith, to borders, she excavates the complex, multilayered, and nuanced story of being an Arab and Muslim woman living in the US. She is a conditional citizen, Lalami tells us, expected to perform her allegiance and gratefulness time and again in a political climate that is always already suspicious of Arabs and Muslims. Most powerfully and righteously, she bursts the myth of American innocence, renders hypocritical those who love the USA unconditionally, who sanitize a past of slavery and ignore the machinery of American imperialist warfare. “I am a Jewish Arab. For many, I’m a curiosity or a detestable thing. Some say I don’t exist, or if I did, I no longer do.” So begins Massoud Hayoun’s memoir--a story of his Jewish family, a story that creates the space to speak about a casually erased and willfully forgotten population of Arabs. It is a beautiful act of resistance, of defiance against erasure, of dreams of ancestors and their desire to build, create, and enact a place for themselves and their descendants in the world. It is truly a thing of beauty and reverence. On and off, I try to read Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind; however, the dystopian end-of-the-world feel pulsating through the first pages makes it impossible to differentiate fiction from the affective texture of our present moment. In the here and the now, the ruling class has abandoned its people. Those in power make hostile, destructive choices daily in favor of personal advancement and capitalist accumulation. COVID has infiltrated our lives, our language, and our metaphors. Our world is rattling, crumbling right in front of our eyes. Ding Dong. Bill of Mortality:  234,264 people have unwillingly left the world behind. More from A Year in Reading 2020 Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now. Don't miss: A Year in Reading 20192018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005[millions_ad]