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A Year in Reading: 2024
Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose.
In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it.
Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.)
The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger.
Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small
Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love
Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor
Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Zachary Issenberg, writer
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves
Nicholas Russell, writer and critic
Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
Deborah Ghim, editor
Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety
Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship
John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things
Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Exposing Murder Rings and the Realities of McCarthyism: A Deep Dive into FOIA
1. Taking Another Look
One morning last October, a middle-aged man named Francisco Letelier stepped to a microphone in Washington, D.C.’s Sheridan Circle, surrounded by light Sunday traffic, and spoke to a gathering of maybe a hundred people. Introducing him, the head of the watchdog Institute for Policy Studies said Letelier represented “the power of persistence.” Letelier is an artist and the son of murdered Chilean activist Orlando Letelier. The gathering to commemorate his father had become an annual event; this was the 41st year since the murders of Orlando Letelier and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt.
Orlando Letelier was killed at this traffic loop by a car bomb planted by Augusto Pinochet’s henchmen. The car exploded in front of the Irish Embassy. There under the hard gazes of assorted international statues around the circle (Ataturk, Sheridan on his horse, Korean and Greek diplomats) stood a small, foot-high monument to Letelier and Moffitt. The stone said, “Justice, Peace, Dignity.”
Francisco, his voice breaking, recalled the abuses of power that led to his father’s murder. By gathering that morning, the group was calling attention to the importance of “showing up, speaking up, resisting, and engaging in dialogue.”
I was there that morning because Scott Armstrong, a former Washington Post reporter, told me about the Letelier murder. It was a case, he said, where a Freedom of Information request had made a difference and sent ripples far beyond the United States.
They didn’t have much hope of making a difference when they started. But Letelier’s widow asked Armstrong to help. Working with a pro bono lawyer, Armstrong agreed to investigate what U.S. officials knew about Letelier’s murder. He submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the State Department, the Justice Department, and the FBI. Then they waited. In time, their requests unearthed evidence of a conspiracy behind murders throughout the western hemisphere yet beyond the reach of justice.
After Letelier’s son concluded his speech that October morning, everyone present was invited to take a flower across the circle to the small memorial stone. We placed them—yellow, red, striped, violet blossoms—to honor Orlando and Ronni.
Back in my car, I flipped the ignition. As the engine fired, my heart skipped a beat as I realized that would have been the last sound they heard.
2. My FOIA Journey
FOIA (pronounced foya) is an odd acronym that can seem obscure and inconsequential. A small proportion of Americans submits Freedom of Information requests. As a freelance writer, I’ve submitted relatively few FOIA requests to different government agencies. For one project, I requested public records identifying the five biggest exporters in a secretive industry trading an endangered medicinal plant. It wasn’t exactly the Watergate break-in, but the request yielded information that pointed to high-value players who preferred a low profile.
Then for a book project, I began chronicling what happened when a 1940 factory fire in Baltimore triggered a series of events that caught three families up in the war in dangerous ways. The fire consumed a half-million dollars worth of cork. (Quick backstory: Back in our age of plastics, bottle caps and many other products used slivers of cork, which was a crucial sealant in gaskets of all kinds, including the defense industry’s bomber planes and artillery. Cork came from the cork oak forests of Spain and Portugal—so the U.S. industry relied heavily on those imports. The factory fire stirred rumors of Nazi sabotage, and suddenly the cork industry and its workers were in a national security searchlight.) FBI agents combed the scene for days afterward. But besides a few catastrophic photos in Baltimore newspapers, there was little reporting about the investigation. Nothing about it as sabotage in the public record. So I sent a FOIA request to the FBI, and a few more to the CIA and the State Department. My searches took longer than I expected, and the results came piecemeal. Three years later, I know more about the magic and limits of a FOIA request.
Most FOIA requests come from regular citizens requesting information that isn’t necessarily stamped secret, but the government hasn’t made public. In 2016 the Department of Justice received over 73,000 FOIA requests. Some people think FOIA is in the Constitution, buried in the First Amendment. But the Freedom of Information Act is much younger than that, born during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Johnson signed the law grudgingly, recalled Bill Moyers, his press secretary: “LBJ had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of the Freedom of Information Act…” If information is power, giving it away is giving away power, and LBJ never willingly signed any away.
Today journalists regard FOIA as a slow-drip source that rarely pays off in time for their deadlines. Government agencies often manage to avoid the law’s requirement to make information free, deploying nine exemption rationales built into the law. But for people with time to wait for responses, FOIA can be powerful.
3. A Needle
In the National Archives, I pored over cables, memos, blue-ink index cards, web-thin carbons and mimeograph copies, declassified time sheets and information trees for wartime intelligence agency the Office of Strategic Services. Eventually I stumbled across a declassified OSS memo of an interview between an OSS recruiter and Herman Ginsburg, a manager for Crown Cork and Seal. A second memo identified another Crown Cork worker as a possible OSS undercover informant. But then I hit a wall. I needed to submit more FOIA requests.
The protocol of a FOIA request varies depending on which agency you’re asking for information. The Department of State, the FBI, and the CIA each had their own different ways to process requests—some by email, some via web-based form. I submitted FOIA requests to those three agencies for information about Ginsburg and another spy recruit who had also come to the U.S. in their youth. The response time to FOIA requests varied widely. I kept a folder of my requests.
4. A Canary
Scott Armstrong’s first FOIA experience came even before he became a Washington Post reporter 40 years ago. Armstrong was working for the Senate Watergate investigation committee. As an investigator, he saw congressional staff having to submit FOIA requests to the Nixon administration to get information they should have had access to, since it wasn’t classified—but the administration had stonewalled. Armstrong learned that agencies used all kinds of maneuvers to withhold information. Through the 1980s for the Post, he found FOIA good for casting light on obscure government behavior, often indirectly. Memos often opened a window to the decision process. Armstrong said the cc line often showed who was involved in national security decisions, for example. That’s how you might learn about circles of decision makers, information that could be even more valuable than the memo’s content.
At first, Armstrong’s FOIA requests only turned up benign-looking cables. But eventually they led to the discovery of a network of Latin-American secret police agencies in a half-dozen countries. The network, dubbed Operation Condor, emerged from a secret meeting in 1975 of intelligence chiefs from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay (and later Brazil). Operation Condor allowed member countries to send death squads across borders to kidnap or murder political exiles. Condor was a shadowy ring for extrajudicial murder. Pinochet used the ring to silence his critics even beyond Chile.
5. Packing Tape and Glomar
The CIA is notoriously resistant to information requests. But the CIA was the place to go for the legacy of wartime intelligence. They replied to my FOIA request with an old-school hard copy and extreme discretion. First they sent a crisp letter that politely denied my request. Several journalist friends suggested I appeal. So I did. I gave a twofold rationale for my request: that 1) any national security issue in a 1941 file was almost certainly moot, and 2) my intention was to foster a broader awareness of national issues and history among the public. I even mustered a congressman’s support for my appeal.
Almost a year after my first request I received another letter in the mail with the CIA’s reply. This time the letter-sized envelope was sealed with a bold, three-inch-wide strip of brown packing tape. Were they sending a message? The letter inside stiffly declined my appeal, stating memorably that they could “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request.”
Puzzled by the redundancy of “existence or nonexistence” and amused by the packing tape, I contacted a FOIA expert. Corinna Zarek explained that the CIA’s reply had a name:
it’s called a Glomar response and it has a long history and is fairly commonly used by intelligence agencies when admitting the existence of information (even if the information is non-public and can't be released under FOIA) could compromise security interests of the U.S.
Zarek explained that although the CIA letter said my only recourse for appeal was a lawsuit, I did have one other option: a FOIA ombudsman at the National Archives. However, it probably wasn’t worth trying. Rarely would officials set aside a Glomar. Judges usually deferred to the agency. I’d probably have to accept the defeat this time, Zarek said.
Nearly half of all FOIA requests are denied. And the trend is going in the wrong direction. “FOIA is not as effective a tool as it should be,” Armstrong told me, “it’s a canary in the mine.”
6. The FBI Responds
The FBI replied to my request, saying that the file I requested on Herman Ginsburg was available for me at the National Archives, like an interlibrary loan. That, however, was just the start of the retrieval process. When I gave the reference number to a person at the Archives, he said yes, that file might be available—but I’d have to ask the FBI which specific files were there at the Archives. For that I had to submit another FOIA to the National Archives. This second request had to be made by hard-copy letter. So I sent a letter to the National Archives FOIA office, requesting the file and reaching into another thicket for public information. Five days later came an email reply:
Thank you for submitting your Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Act request to the National Archives and Records Administration. Due to the nature of your request, we have forwarded your request to our Office of Research Services, Special Access and FOIA staff, for appropriate handling. …Federal records are transferred to NARA no earlier than 15 years and as late as 30 years from the date the document was created. You will be assigned a new tracking number by that office within the next 20 business days.
They gave me another email address at the Archives for follow-up.
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7. The CD Down the Hall
These exchanges with the Archives’ staff continued through that spring as they reviewed the material I requested, sifting what information could be shared and redacting in heavy marker what couldn’t. Finally, a FOIA official at the Archives wrote that she had completed a line-by-line review of FBI case files and redacted material “exempted from disclosure in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. 552)… The redactions were applied to protect the identities of confidential sources…” Two files, totaling 84 pages, would be available to me at that location. I could “view a sanitized version of 100-HQ-417406, and a copy of 100-WFO-31318 free of charge in our Motion Picture research room in College Park, Maryland,” the message said. At the reading room they would “provide a CD, for use in the Motion Picture research room, containing a copy of the file in PDF format. You may use this CD to download the file to your personal laptop or thumb drive at no cost to you.”
I was lucky: The College Park facility was only 25 minutes from where I lived. What about requesters writing from the West Coast? I tamped down my hopes and made an appointment for July 6, 2016. That morning I drove around the capital beltway to the Archives facility and found my way to the empty stretch of Adelphi Road. I passed through the security process at the entrance, had my pages of scratch paper stamped (to show that I didn’t steal any from the Archives’ collection) and passed through another security stop to get to the fourth floor.
On the surface, the setting looked like a university library. When I presented my email with the FOIA response, the clerk pointed back into the research room past bookcases containing video and film cases. It was like a librarian had pointed me to the reference desk. Except I was being directed back to a security desk to sign for a limited-use CD. I could sit with my laptop and copy the CD’s files onto my computer. But I could not take the CD itself, which had been burned specifically at my request.
Another story Scott Armstrong told me rattled around my head. He learned the CIA kept a database of all the declassified material that it had already released, so he submitted a FOIA request for that database—all of it. “They hemmed and hawed,” he said. “Finally they said they would provide a printout. It was on old computer paper, the kind with holes punched at the edge? It was two stacks of computer paper, each standing six feet high.”
“No,” Armstrong told the CIA, “I want it as a computer file.” Again they delayed. Finally the requested file would be available to him at a reading room in the National Archives—maybe this room where I now sat. Armstrong could read the file on a computer in the reading room, and he could print it out there. But he couldn’t copy the file or take it away. “A ludicrous sham!” he cried.
Still Armstrong goes back to the well, asking for more.
In the Archives reading room, I held the CD with the FBI file on Herman Ginsburg. Following instructions, I took it to a table nearby, opened my laptop and popped in the disk.
The restrictions on the movement of that physical CD struck me as absurd. What was the sign-out procedure protecting? What security was this declassified information securing?
There were exactly two PDF files on the disk. Before opening either, I immediately copied both files onto my computer. Then I started scrolling through the first file. As I scrolled through, my sense of the light in the room shifted and my eyes became hypersensitive to the sunlight from the bank of windows. My pulse quickened. I felt like I was getting something for my democracy.
8. Palimpsest from a Dark Era
When at the end of a long search, the thing that was secret arrives just for you, it feels magical. Novelist John Edgar Wideman captures that feeling in Writing to Save a Life, his book about his investigation into the history of Emmett Till and his father, Louis Till. For Wideman, the journey started with a call to the National Archives to request Louis Till’s military records. Wideman soldiers through a series of voicemail messages and wrong turns. Then the magic: After weeks of calls and putting his request in writing, he receives a package in the mail containing the file of Louis Till’s military trial.
Then, inexplicably, for days after the packet arrives he does not read it. Whether from delayed gratification or from fear of its contents, it’s hard for him to say. But I think I understand. There’s something about how the expectations grow in the months after sending a FOIA request. When the result arrives, you want time to take a breath, rein in hopes (“Surely this piece that was secret will answer my quest”) and brace yourself for disappointment.
When Wideman finally reads the file, it stirs waves of emotion and more questions for him. First, how could this information have been withheld from the public? And then: Did the FOIA staff, in their presentation and sequencing of the photocopies, try to influence how Wideman interpreted the file? Was the transcript of Till’s trial assembled 60 years ago or pulled together “just yesterday in response to my Freedom of Information request”? Had anyone read the government file that he was reading now? Wideman imagines contacting the Archives official who sent him the file, “whose name I tell myself each time I see it I should write down in my notebook for safekeeping. To thank. To pester for more. To hold responsible.”
Like Wideman, I paged through the PDF that I received on my laptop screen in the National Archives, hyper-conscious of the packaging of this information: the inscrutable numeric file names, the cover page’s hodgepodge of fonts, from the calligraphic “U.S. Department of Justice” to the sans serif “Federal Bureau of Investigation” and “Screened by: LM Date: 06-29-2016 FOIA,” the date of the Archives’ reply to my request. The big bold letters: “Use Care in Handling This File.” I tried to decipher the “Confidential” stamp, crossed out, and the photocopied form describing the FBI report from March 1955, Washington, D.C.
Reading the files suggested a dragnet from the nadir of McCarthy-ite anti-Communist hysteria. In 1955, when the loyalty-security mania was at its fiercest, the CEO of an international enterprise became a suspected Communist. This was not what I expected. The files showed the chilling effect of investigations behind the televised McCarthy hearings, that reached into people’s memories and hearsay. Pages of interrogations into Ginsburg’s past—interviews with associates, relatives, classmates, and acquaintances from his youth. Interviews with his ex-wife and his siblings. The grainy black and white of scanned documents, accusations of being a Communist, a traitor. Based on one informant’s testimony, Ginsburg’s life was turned upside down. The FBI sent investigators to find former Communist organizers in rural New Hampshire and grill them. Agents in Baltimore interviewed city police officers about Ginsburg’s arrest record. One February day an FBI agent went hunting in the public library to find the 1928 city directory, to determine Ginsburg’s 1928 address and occupation back then. FBI agents visited the University of Maryland Law School and asked the librarian for the 1927 yearbook to find a photograph of Ginsburg and record his “enviable scholastic record.”
In short, where I expected to find information recognizing Ginsburg’s contribution to the wartime intelligence effort in the 1940s, these files showed me the government’s efforts to destroy him. After Ginsburg had lent his energy and intelligence to defeat fascism, federal agents came and ran down every lead on his youth. They poisoned his past.
The experience of being harassed by the FBI left Ginsburg wounded and paranoid for years. No wonder that a colleague who met him later found him deeply suspicious. Against the taint of federal investigation and humiliation, Ginsburg managed to salvage his life and his second marriage.
9. Sunlight Among the Secrets
During one of my visits to the Archives as I hunted through OSS records, waiting for files to roll out on a handcart, I looked up and saw, in large letters on the screen above the checkout desk, “Happy 50th Anniversary to the Freedom of Information Act! ‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant.’ —U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.”
Then it flashed away and disappeared.
I stood there, surprisingly moved. The Archives was quietly marking LBJ’s little-sung, unloved law. Several dozen Archives visitors like myself glimpsed the salute as they were exercising the right it celebrated.
10. The Car Bomb at Sheridan Circle
Official confirmation can be a small thing, but it has impact. Documented existence of the secret network of police squads known as Operation Condor emerged in the late 1970s from Scott Armstrong’s FOIA requests. Forty years later, those results continue to ripple. U.S. intelligence files declassified in 2015 proved that Pinochet issued the order to kill Orlando Letelier. State Department records also showed that a month before Letelier’s murder, Henry Kissinger attempted to orchestrate conversations by U.S. ambassadors in the six countries involved in Condor to express “deep concern” at possible political assassinations. The U.S. government knew about Condor at least weeks before the car bomb killed Letelier and Moffitt.
In May 2016, judges in Buenos Aires ruled in the first court case brought against Condor conspirators for murders committed in Argentina. Eighteen former Argentinian military officers, including the country’s former dictator, were convicted and sentenced for kidnapping, torturing and “disappearing” more than 100 activists, including citizens of four other countries. The case was a milestone in moving Condor’s existence into the public record as a killing, multinational conspiracy. The real international conspiracy was even more sweeping than the one conjured by Hollywood in the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor. And its unraveling came, in good measure, due to the cumbersome and imperfect process of FOIA, in the hands of someone who cared enough to persist like Scott Armstrong.
A key piece of evidence in that trial was a declassified 1976 cable from an FBI agent that described Condor in detail.
At the courthouse where the ruling was announced, a Chilean woman choked up as she described how Operation Condor had affected her family. Her brother had fled to Argentina, was kidnapped in Buenos Aires, and vanished. “This trial is very meaningful because it’s the first time that a court is ruling against this sinister Condor plan.”
And every fall, the group remembering Letelier and Moffitt gathers at Sheridan Circle—family members, activists, and government officials—to invoke the message of Justice, Peace, Dignity.
FOIA, in that sense, is more of a relationship than it is a bureaucratic transaction. Armstrong says, “We’ve created a situation now where you have to have a long-range view.” He downloads the State Department phonebook every time he finds it available online. He might not know why he needs it until much later, by which point it may no longer be accessible. Who could predict the value of State Department cables for a murder trial four decades later?
In June 2016, President Barack Obama signed a law updating the Freedom of Information Act, making more government memos accessible after 25 years. No friend to FOIA for most of his presidency, Obama had set a presidential record for censoring or denying access to FOIA-requested information. The number of unanswered requests governmentwide climbed past 200,000. Under Trump, FOIA is an even more brittle tool for holding an unpredictable executive branch accountable. As most FOIA experts predicted at the start of his term, access to federal records continues to decline. At 50 years old, FOIA as a tool for accountability could be just getting started, with more longtime users like Armstrong. Or it could be winding down.
Writing Has to Have an Edge: The Millions Interviews John Edgar Wideman
For more than four decades John Edgar Wideman has written novels, short stories, and nonfiction books that have chronicled contemporary American life while considering larger questions—historical, cultural, and existential—that underlie it. His new book is American Histories: Stories, a title could encompass a lot of Wideman’s work. John Brown and Frederick Douglass, Romare Bearden, and Jean-Michel Basquiat make appearances, but the stories are also about suicide and teaching writing, family conflicts, and relationships.
The book comes out less than two years after Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, about the father of Emmett Till. For people of Wideman’s generation, Emmett Till’s story is personal but also universal. Many Americans have talked about growing up with that photo in their houses, and what it meant. Wideman sought to uncover more about Till’s father Louis, who was courtmartialed and hanged during World War II, and to interrogate what his life and death mean for the present moment. That journey and the resulting story, which is ultimately about what our society was–and continues to be–is an example of how Wideman has always balanced the personal with the universal.
I began reading Wideman as a teenager and he was one of the first writers whose work forced me to consider structure and genre in new ways, think about how new narrative structures and ideas can be a valuable way to rethink the past. His work taught me to be conscious of the author, reconsider what a novel could be. These two new books are among the best of his career and I would place American Histories as his very best collection of stories. Now in his 70s, John Wideman’s work is as relevant and timely as ever, and he remains one of our best, most important writers.
The Millions: Some writers think of themselves as primarily novelists or short story writers. Do you think of yourself or your work in that way?
John Edgar Wideman: I definitely don’t think of myself as anything but a writer. Number one, that gives me a lot of license, but number two, that’s really how I think. When I start a piece I don’t start it as a scholar, as a short story writer, as a novelist—I just start writing. I have some things on my mind and maybe I get a couple words down, maybe I get a lot of words down first time through. In a sense, it doesn’t matter. The point is for me to have something that stirs me up enough that I go ahead and start thinking about it and put words down on paper about it. That’s the process. What I come up with, that’s kind of problematic. It depends on where the piece goes. A piece about Nat Turner or a piece about my sister can go in any direction—towards memoir or towards history, and that’s not my choice. I might think I’ve written a piece of memoir and somebody else might think I’ve written fantasy. The labeling is a part of the publication process, the settling in of the work with the public, and I don’t worry too much about that. In fact, I love the freedom of just starting out. That’s the whole point for me.
TM: You might sometimes write a book like The Island, which is a nonfiction book about a specific subject, but otherwise you begin by just sitting down and writing.
JW: I was speaking to the impulse in me. I have ambitions. If I’m working on a book of short stories and I want to have a couple more, then I’m in that mode. I’m thinking about stories and maybe I go back and read some of my favorites like Heart of Darkness, or Benito Cereno—just to get a little humility and put everything in perspective. [Laughs.] I’m working on a novel. Or I think I have a novel idea. I have a couple hundred pages written so I’m thinking like a novelist. I’m thinking this thing has to have some weight and some heft and direction so it’s a different mindset, a different framework. But it’s the work, it’s the doing it, that matters. Not what somebody calls it. Not even what I call it, for a while.
TM: As far as a novelistic mindset goes, I think about your novels and I’ll cite The Cattle Killing, which is both my favorite and I think your best novel, and it does not function and it is not structured the way we think of a novel working.
JW: Well, I would hope not! [Laughs.] One of the criteria for me of almost any work is how is this piece I’m reading connecting to similar kinds of material or similar attempts that I really like. How is it pushing those? How is it talking to those other works? What is it doing to try to talk to me about the tradition that I want to be a part of? It’s a kind of community and I want to see signs that the particular work I happen to be reading is pushing at the limits, opening up new doors, opening up new ways of seeing things. I may be paying attention to transitions in the new work that I’m reading or writing. I may be paying attention to characters. What are the boundaries in terms of chronology, in terms of isolation, in terms of context? Is the work I’m reading shifting these things and making them interesting? If not, then very quickly for me, I lose interest in the new work. Or interest in my own work—for a while anyway—until it begins to come into conflict with the borders, with the tradition, and ask questions about limits and tradition.
TM: You’ve always been interested in that. One of the short stories in American Stories is a conversation between Romare Bearden and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The way that Bearden used collage and the heart of his work, about changing perspective and ways we think about the work, is important for you.
JW: Extremely important. It appeals to me that Bearden could spend a lot of time just holding a piece of material in his hands and looking at it. A literal piece of material, like part of a quilt made by traditional Southern quilt makers. He could hold that in his hand and live with it, maybe put it on the wall and think about it for a long time and daydream. That seems great. How the hell do you get that thing into a collage? Do you make a cartoon of it? Do you cut a swatch of it out? Do you try to reproduce it with a sketch or a painting? And what was so important about that anyway? What about the smell of it? What about the fingers and hands that made this? Is there a place for them in the collage? Maybe that’s what the collage is all about? Fingers and hands. Are they dark hands? Is that a connection? You go from there.
I want my interests to be piqued. My imagination is restless. I don’t work systematically. That’s not true; I do work systematically because I work hard. I’m very demanding of myself. I read about Bearden—I read a lot about Bearden—I scrutinized his work, I read biographies of Bearden, though not all in the same week or day. That Bearden-Basquiat story had an early form as an essay for a book about Bearden. For that essay I had done a lot of homework and had been back in Pittsburgh and walked some of the streets he walked, talked to some people who were Bearden experts. Reintroducing me to a part of the city that I thought I knew but had changed over time. Learning all that was fun and eventually some of that got into the story that appears in American Histories.
TM: That’s been true throughout your career. There are events and ideas and concerns which you return to in different ways and different forms.
JW: I think it’s been that way from the very beginning. I’ve just become more conscious of how my mind and imagination works. I’ve tried to take advantage of that and also prune it and control it and use it to my advantage. And the advantage of the readers. You mentioned The Cattle Killing and it’s a kind of collage. A very ambitious attempt, maybe, to squeeze into one moment the history of two or three cultures and many individual folks and many stories and many epochs in history.
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TM: You were saying that your mind may wander and be open to possibilities, but you work in a very disciplined way.
JW: Yes, and I expect that in what I read. If not, then very quickly what I’m reading becomes a kind of beach book. All kind of writing is difficult. Any good genre of writing is difficult to do. It takes a certain kind of genius and skill and I respect it greatly. Distinctions are invidious. You read something and it grabs you and you enjoy the hell out of it and that’s that—Thank you, author, thank you, book. You don’t have to put it on the shelf of classics or beach books. It has a lot of qualities that connect it with both classics and books that people read on the beach and have fun with. So I respect good writing, but the stuff that keeps me going, that I want to come back to, has to have an edge. There are certain formulas at work in genre fiction that I get aware of. If you’re in the mood, that’s enough. But I’m more demanding in my reading time. I want to feel I’m pushed. I want to feel that I’m learning something about writing, about expression, when I am taking the time to read books.
TM: American Histories is your second book in less than two years. Writing to Save a Life had a collage quality to it. The book was about trying to look at something from multiple perspectives and approaches.
JW: One side of it is always the personal. My family background, my history. That’s where I come from. That’s the world I write out of and that is a certain kind of language—or many languages. They connect themselves to that world. I feel comfortable when I go there. And then whatever else happens beyond my mind, whether it’s the Berlin Wall or a sonata by Bach or a question about time, what makes some things visible and some things invisible—all that, it all starts from the personal, from the family. That’s what constitutes me. And then where I take that becomes either a good story or not such a great story or becomes a novel or becomes an essay. That’s freedom. I think I earned that freedom to move in many different worlds by becoming more and more certain about where I come from. My specific world even though that world always is changing. Hence collage. Hence at least two very different kinds of elements, the personal history and the larger history, cultural and sociological and political. The context in which I find myself.
TM: Your work has always been very personal. You’re not the narrator of every story in this book or most of your work, but I feel like “you” keep coming up. Are you conscious of that?
JW: I think what you see is what you get. I don’t want my presence as a narrator to be oppressive. I don’t want to foreground myself in the same manner with the same intensity again and again. I think that the whole idea of a narrative voice telling stories gives me—gives anybody—infinite possibilities. Like singing or like dancing or how you play a particular moment in a basketball game, it’s always changing. I work hard not to be the only character in my fiction or in a particular story, but when you get right down to it, what is a story? It’s a voice recollecting and putting together a narrative. So you start with that voice and how you erase it is just a matter of what, a matter of convention? I guess what I’ve been suggesting is that because I write narratives from my point of view all the time I’m demanding—demanding of other writers and myself—with this infinitely flexible range of possibilities, what am I doing with it? How do I not become overbearing? How can I avoid the kind of cliched methods of disguising my presence that traditional fiction offers? Any sophisticated reader at one level knows, I’m in the hands of a single person no matter what’s supposedly on the page. No matter what’s on the page, there’s somebody telling a story. We all know that. What’s funny is the range and the variety and how we keep coming back to the written word, how we keep coming back to story. The same way we continue to make love with each other. Even though we know where that’s going. [Laughs.] But you don’t, do you? Because it’s Susie this time and George next time or whatever. We know the game at one level, but good art makes it seem like a new game, a different game. One that we’ve never played before.
TM: As you were saying that, I thought of your story "Writing Teacher"where readers might assume the main character is you, but by the end, that doesn’t matter because the story is ultimately about other things.
JW: Whatever voice is telling the story of "Writing Teacher"—and it may be the voice of the writing teacher—is a conundrum. The forever receding thing here is that you cannot get to the end of. That was fun to try to play that out and attempt to make that very complicated set of affairs—writing and who’s listening and who’s doing it and how you do it and who’s explaining—which is always at work in fiction or teaching fiction, seem simple.
TM: I’ve never thought of your books as simple, but I also don’t think of as hard.
JW: Thank goodness. [Laughs.] I want more readers like you!
TM: There was a very nice profile of you in The New York Times Magazine last year and part of it was about you being solitary and alone. Do you feel that way? Or is this what random journalists and essayists say about you for whatever reason?
JW: Who knows? That’s another sort of writing and another set of conventions that people fall into. I enjoyed the writer of that piece. I enjoyed his company. We had a good time. He was a good reader and respectful and I respected him. We had a good walk, we had a good meal. All that was cool. I think maybe that’s why you liked the piece because it was produced from a sincere conversation that we both contributed to and had fun doing. A demanding conversation, however. But to your question, I am a solitary. I spend a hell of a lot of time writing in a room shut up with just myself. And when I’m not doing that I spend a hell of a lot of time walking alone. Hours. At this stage of my life I enjoy it. On the other hand, I depend very much on my wife, I call my family all the time, I travel to see people. But I think it’s inevitable as you age. Your family and friends are both the living and the dead. That’s kind of the hard truth. People are melting away and leaving all the time. So rather than protest too much, I think I’m just trying to accommodate myself to the way things happen to be. We’re born alone and we die alone and that’s unavoidable. But I like to have fun. I like to talk, I like to hang out, I love the company of my wife and friends. If you read a lot of my fiction, it’s about loneliness. It’s about wanting what is not available a lot of the time—a person, a place, a thing. But it’s also I think about sociability, about playing a game, about a crowd of guys on a playground. The ones who are playing and the ones who aren’t create a community and these communities are very, very important to me. Whether they’re in the past or whether I’m living in them right now.
TM: One reason I ask is simply because so many profiles of writers seemed stunned to discover that the job involves being alone so much. There is a lot of loneliness in your work, but as you said, we’re born alone and we die alone.
JW: I think the time I spend alone is more unusual than a lot of the time people spend looking at a phone or listening to a phone and talking with it. That’s not my thing. I’m not that generation. That seems to me a much more deeper kind of loneliness comes out of those sort of interactions. If I grew up that way I probably wouldn’t feel that way. Or feel so alienated from that experience of you and your phone or you and your screen. So I take walks. I don’t have earphones and I don’t keep the phone on. But I’m trying to do the same thing people do when they pick up those phones, I guess. Amuse myself and be in the world.
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