Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

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

An Essay About Nothing

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"Nothing will come of nothing: speak again." —William Shakespeare, King Lear (1606) Amongst the Adirondack woods outside of Hurley, New York is the Maverick Concert Hall, built from unadorned timber and topped with a wood-shingled and corrugated metal roof. On an evening in late August of 1952, an audience gathered here for the premier of nine works, including Pierre Boulez's polyrhythmic "First Piano Sonata" and Henry Cowell's The Banshee, in which the pianist must manipulate the instrument's strings. The organizers had used the I Ching to ascertain the program's order. By fortuitous coincidence, the most notorious composition was performed last. Written by John Cage, already among the most daring of American composers, it would be performed by David Tudor, a brilliant Swarthmore-trained pianist. Louis Menand writes in The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War that Tudor "was an indispensable figure in postwar avant-garde music because he was one of the few people in the world who could play it," a prodigy adept in discordance and atonality, but whose most challenging performance was at Maverick. Sitting down at the piano, Tudor opened his sheet music, started a stopwatch, and closed the fallboard. He then sat silently for 30 seconds while simply turning the score's pages. Tudor repeated these actions for the second movement, this time for two minutes and 23 seconds, and then for a third movement of one minute and 40 seconds. The score was nothing but a rest lasting for four minutes and 33 seconds. During the premier of 4'33", Tudor recalled that the audience was "incensed." Murmuring in the crowd, some shuffling, then sighing, and finally people getting up to leave as Tudor sat there. Though Cage was the composer of strange and incandescent music—Imaginary Landscape No. 1, which relies on using a phonograph as an instrument; Credo in Us, which uses a radio; and the minimalist and sanctified String Quartet in Four Parts—4'33" is the piece with which he became most associated. Ironically, beforehand Cage most brought to mind noise. The son of a Los Angeles inventor, he made his own instruments from hubcaps and brake drums, and pioneered the prepared piano wherein he placed utensils, screws, and bolts on the strings to produce a jarring cacophony. This was the man who in his 1937 manifesto The Future of Music had written, "I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase," accurately predicting the advent of electronic music, "which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard." And now the composer would forever be linked with silence. From Cage's perspective, however, that night Maverick was resplendent with beautiful noises. In a Saturday Evening Post interview from 1968, he recalled, "You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering on the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out." Sometimes the composition is reduced to gimmick, a pretentious stunt, but Cage had steadfastly worked at 4'33'', using tarot cards rather to decide the exact length of each movement. He would go on to say that it was his favorite piece. Menand explains that this work was "committed to a traditional view of art as a transformative experience, and [Cage and Tudor were] highly disciplined," with the latter counting out the exact length of each rest. Like much of experimental classical composition or modern art, if taken on its own terms 4'33'' is beautiful, a song that can be performed by anyone, anywhere, at any time. If you were at Maverick, you would have heard the cool wind of primordial autumn through the Hudson Valley, the summer's last crickets singing, the gentle patter of soft rain on a corrugated metal roof. Only the Western suspicion of nothingness causes some to dismiss the composition as joke or flatulence; such is the inability to countenance the absent, the silent, the void, whether in art and music, or nature and mathematics. Drawing from his own fascination with Zen Buddhism, Cage had become enraptured by the possibilities of silence—of nothingness. "It was at once a head-spinning philosophical statement and a Zen-like ritual of contemplation," writes Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, "a piece that anyone could have written, as skeptics never failed to point out, but, as Cage seldom failed to respond, no one else did." * On the hard rock of the ninth-century Chaturbhuj Temple in Madhya Pradash there is an otherwise inauspicious symbol chiseled as part of a calculation of the dimensions for a garden that grew flowers for ritual garlands: "0." Not the earliest instance of the number zero, but the most tangible of such antiquity, a little circle holding its emptiness within. Indian mathematicians had been using zero for 600 years by this point, for as early as the third-century the Sanskrit Bakhshali manuscript records a black dot inked onto birch bark as representing the strange number of complete absence. Zero had been gestured towards by mathematicians in other places, in earlier centuries: The Egyptians, for instance, used a numeric placeholder for nothing in their base 10 system, a symbol tellingly identical with the hieroglyph for "beauty," while the Babylonians, within their cumbersome sexagesimal system, signified zero as a merely a gap within numbers, as if something illicit and unspeakable. The Chinese mathematical treatise Sunzi Suanjing deployed a version as early as the first century, and even Ptolemy understood that nothing was often the result of arithmetic. To be out of flax seed, devoid of sorghum, empty of wheat—ancients could understand that. But to have nothing, in a deep, fundamental, elemental, metaphysical way, was contrary to the imagination. And yet nothing is what we got. It wasn't that the Egyptians or Greeks couldn't imagine zero—none of these cultures were mathematical slouches—but as Charles Seife writes in Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, the concept was so "abhorrent… that they chose to live without it." Having no pomegranates or dates left over is one thing; having nothing is something else. To the Greeks and Romans it was disorienting, abhorrent, ungodly. As Lucretius would bluntly state in his poem “On the Nature of Things” from the year 50 BCE, "We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing." What the Indians discovered was different from what the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks had used. Hindu mathematicians posited that nothing is in fact something. For the Egyptians, the universe was born from the Nile; the Babylonian Enuma Elish described a primordial domain of "waters comingling as a single body," but the Hindu Rig Veda descends into a time before time, when even the "non-existent was not," a nothing so complete that it can consume even itself. By the seventh-century, 200 before the carving at Chaturbhuj, the mathematician Brahmagupta would confidently write in the Brahmasputha Siddhanta that "Zero divided by zero equals zero," among other correct arithmetical principles. Whether born from Vedic metaphysics or not, Indian mathematicians discovered that zero is convenient as more than mere placeholder; it is the invisible regent of the base 10 numeric system. Despite their repugnance at a vacuum, even Westerners would eventually accede to zero's practicality. By the ninth century, the Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī was using Hindu numerals, which were transmitted to Al-Andalus in the south of what is today Spain, where they then migrated into Latin Christendom, known forever as Arabic numbers. The Italian polymath Fibonacci, of the famed sequence, was responsible for popularizing Arabic numbers and zero, gushing in his Liber Abaci of 1201 that the "nine Indian figures are 987654321. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0, any number may be written." A marked improvement over Roman numerals, zero and its nine siblings were a paradigm shift. Nothing, nil, nix, nada, zed, zero. Perhaps because of its similar pronunciation to the word for the mythic Western wind zephyr, Fibonacci used the Italian neologism zefiro, itself a bastardized translation of the Arabic sifr, which in an evocation of the endless, expansive eternity of the desert means "empty," itself borrowed from the Sanskrit sunya or "void." Even "empty" conveys something, but a void is the most abject darkness. What makes zero fascinating—and troubling—is that despite its unsettling abstraction it's extremely useful. Zero makes it possible to contemplate the deathless eternity of non-existence, as well as to make change at Starbucks. Robert Kaplan writes in The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero that the "disquieting question of whether zero is out there or a fiction will call up the perennial puzzle of whether we invent or discover the way of things." Numbers are the most elegant of objects, for only they remain true while being not real, none of them more so than zero itself. What that in turn forces us to confront is whether or not nothing can ever truly mean anything, or if a vibrant thisness must ever float back in, like the sound of crickets on an upstate New York evening. * Critic James Fitzsimmons, appraising an exhibition at the Stable Gallery in Manhattan in the fall of 1953, succinctly described the nothingness of 26-year-old painter Robert Rauschenberg's White Painting series as a "gratuitously destructive act." No neophyte himself, Fitzsimmons saw Rauschenberg as trading in cynical gimmicks, found objects from boulders to bicycle seats repositioned and given the aura of art, something done by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray a generation before. "How dull they seem 25 years after Dada," wrote the critic. Yet it was White Paintings that particularly incensed Fitzsimmons. The series comprises five paintings, each of them with various numbers of panels. (Specifically: one, two, three, four, and seven panels.) Rauschenberg had applied commercial paint—the same sort produced by Sherman-Williams—and coated it in varying degrees of thickness across his canvasses. As with the ambient noise in the background of 4'33'', the White Paintings manifest differences of shade and darkness, and the compositions appear altered in various lights throughout the day. Hubert Crehan of Art Digest wasn't buying it; at an exhibition held a year later, he wrote that since Rauschenberg was "[d]etermined to avoid the responsibility of an artist, it is better that he should show blank canvases rather than the contraptions that he has hung in this side show." Rauschenberg, the son of fundamentalist Texans, painted the series in 1951 while at the Black Mountain College, an experimental institution in rural North Carolina that had also attracted such luminaries as choreographer Merce Cunningham and engineer Buckminster Fuller. Writing to his friend Betty Parsons that year, he described these "canvases organized and selected with the experience of time and presented with the innocence of a virgin." For Rauschenberg, it is "completely irrelevant that I am making them—Today is their creator." To immerse yourself in their monochromatic totality is to experience a paradox of nothingness. "Zero is powerful because it is infinity's twin," writes Seife. "They are equal and opposite, yin and yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling… nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and infinity." Journalists may have been dismissive of the White Paintings, but somebody who wasn't was a Black Mountain College professor who first saw them in Rauschenberg's North Carolina studio, an instructor of music named John Cage who described them in his book Silence as "airports for the lights, shadows and particles." Cage would fully credit Rauschenberg's paintings as the inspiration for his own 4'33''. Part of the enigma of Rauschenberg's paintings and Cage's composition is that although they're concerned with nothing, they're not nothing themselves. They're minimalist, non-representational, and for Fitzsimmons and Crehan they're not very good, but what they aren't is nothing. At best, both 4'33'' and the White Paintings are art which gestures towards nothingness, but it's impossible for them to be nothing. What would art which is nothing even be? Cage composed a song in 1962 entitled 0'0'', the entirety of the score a single sentence which read "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action." A song entitled 0'00'' can by definition never be played while simultaneously played continuously, since every second is equally divisible by zero. "Dividing by zero," writes Seife, "allows you to prove, mathematically, anything in the universe." Cage and Rauschenberg's focus is the same as the apophatic theologians who adhere to an understanding that no positive qualifiers can be applied to anything as ineffable as God, and so a rhetoric of nothing must be used instead. As the third-century Church Father Tertullian argued in Apologeticus, "That which is infinite is known only to itself," which is equally true of God and nothing, because they're the same thing. Literature contends with the apophatic at a slant. When somebody says that a novel is "about nothing," they normally mean that they found it to be boring. That's not what I'm talking about. None other than Carl Jung wrote a blistering criticism of James Joyce's Ulysses in a 1932 issue of the Europäische Revue, complaining that the author had focused on a "day on which, in all truth, nothing happens. The stream begins in the void and end in the void." Respectfully, lots of stuff happens in Ulysses—Leopold Bloom eats offal, he gets attacked by an antisemite, he goes to a brothel. June 16, 1904 is a memorable day. When we try to imagine a literature that's actually about nothing, we are silenced—what one doesn't say is crucial. That's the method which French author George Perec took in his 1969 novel A Void. Perec was a founding member of the Oulipo, the French "Workshop of Potential Literature," which was composed of both writers and mathematicians fascinated by formal constraint. Perec's book is defined by an absence, written entirely without the letter "e," across an astounding 300 pages. Even more amazingly, A Void was successfully translated into English, where the letter "e" is even more common than in the French. "A gap will yawn, achingly, day by day," writes Perec, "it will turn into a colossal pit, an abyss without foundation, a gradual invasion of words by margins, blank and insignificant, so that all of us, to a man, will find nothing to say." As a description of emptiness, and well-crafted; because of the missing letter it's sublime. Still, it's hard to say that Perec's A Void is any more "about" nothing than Ulysses. It's actually a mystery novel: clues are found, leads are investigated, stuff happens. The radical calligraphic tradition known as "asemic" writing more fully skirts the edge of pure being. The term itself was first used in the late '90s by poets Tim Gaze and Jeff Leftwich, with the former writing in the first issue of the journal Asemic Movement that "anything which looks like writing, but in which the person viewing can't read any words," is asemic. The origins of the form are in eight-century China, around the same time that Indian mathematicians began exporting zero. Independent of undeciphered writing, like the ancient Mycenean script Linear B, or the enigmatic fifteenth-century Voynich manuscript that may or may not mean anything, asemic writing is the production of non-existent letters, illusory words, impossible sentences. Peter Schwenger writes in Asemic: The Art of Writing that the "result is a kind of cognitive dissonance: writing is evoked at the same time that we are estranged from it… something that calls for explanation—that is, a stimulus to thought." Arguably the first to produce such works was the master calligrapher and Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Xu, a member of the Chinese poetic group the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. Known for the flourish of his artistry, Zhang would drunkenly produce gorgeous cursive script, all of it meaningless. Along with his student Huaisu, such asemic calligraphy would become a central spiritual practice of Japanese Zen Buddhism, particularly the drawing of the Ensō, a perfect circle produced when the mind is cleared of everything. As with Cage's silence filled with noise or Rauschenberg's absence filled with shadow, so the Ensō has incredible detail, each strand and flourish of the brush producing a slightly different grain each time that the calligrapher draws her perfect circle, which looks exactly like a beautiful black inked number zero. Or, as another example, consider the English occultist, Rosicrucian, hermeticist, and kabbalist Robert Fludd's 1617 account of the universe's creation The Metaphysical, Physical, and Technical History of the Two Worlds, wherein he promises to reveal the secrets of reality's creation and so presents a black page. As with the White Paintings, Fludd's black square isn't uniform; there are places where the printer's ink hasn't adhered equally, where the darkness is both more and less. As if to underscore the relationship between nothingness and its ostensible opposite, Fludd writes at the border of the page (the thin line which is the only portion of not inked): “Et sic in infintum.” And so on to infinity. Eugene Thacker writes in the Public Domain Review that it was as if "Fludd had the intuition that only a self-negating form of representation would be able to suggest the nothingness prior to all existence, an un-creation prior to all creation." That's all that can be done to approach nothingness outside of mathematics: nothing can only be alluded to, and what better way than to enlist the aid of blackness, for as Fludd described that primordial zero it was "mist and darkness of this hitherto shapeless and obscured region… dark, and dense part of the abyss's substance." Another way writers' approach nothing is by still using superficially comprehensible language, but pushing it to the limits of semantic sense. "We turn over this seeming nonsense with a kind of reflective zest, savoring the difference between what it says and what it means," writes Kaplan in The Nothing That Is. Whether by paradox or pun, nothing is cornered obliquely. Kaons, the paradoxical statements of Zen Buddhism, that tradition the most comfortable to dwell in what's empty, often invoke nothingness. "Nothing exists," says the Zen priest, and the short sentence is nonsensical even though grammatically correct. This sort of statement embodies what's counterintuitive about nothing, it must "exist" (even our mathematics wouldn't work without it), but to apply language to it is absurd. Another early instance of playing with nothing’s semantic confusions appears in Homer’s The Odyssey, when Odysseus blinds the cyclops and tells him that his name is "Noman," so that the poor monster cries that "it is no man that is slaying me." And in the seventeenth-century, the notorious libertine John Wilmot played with the concept in his atheistic lyric "Upon Nothing." Critic Stephanie Burt explains in Poetry that Wilmont "relies on a pun, treating 'nothing' sometimes as if it were the name of a thing, the opposite of some other thing, and at other times, more properly, as the absence of any nameable thing." Both Kaons and Wilmot's lyric show the inadequacies of language: "Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not, /When primitive Nothing Something straight begot;/Then all proceeded from the great united What." A more contemporary example of the same punning is in John Lennon's lyrics to "Across the Universe" from the album Let it Be. "Nothings gonna change my world," Lennon pleadingly sings in the chorus, alongside his own Hindu mantra. This can be read two ways; either as a statement of stasis, or if "nothing" is an ineffable something as an axiom of transformation. The question is whether the lyric is about adding by zero or multiplying by it—or dividing by it—which is integral. Nothingness is a field of potentiality, electric sparks of maybe flittering in and out of reality. Nothing is the greatest literature. As with kaons, this can be read two ways—either that it's impossible to categorize any one work as better than all the rest, or that some ineffable "nothing" is what is literally the greatest work of literature. I err towards the literal, as paradoxical as it might seem. Fiction is sustained through nothingness, it spins elaborate illusions. Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote is a tangible character, but his status is as imagined as those giants. "Thou hast seen nothing yet," Cervantes writes, and it is true, a reader has seen nothing. Then there is the question of where authorial inspiration comes from —from the detritus of scattershot reading and misplaced experience, or from the void itself? In Creation: Artists, Gods & Origins, Peter Conrad asks  "where our ideas come from. The puzzle of origins… is at its most perplexing and enticing when I think about the inception of art. Every time a sentence is written or a line sets out on a journey across a canvas or a row of notes organized into a melody, we see a world being created." Obviously, artists draw inspiration from their influences: there was no Cage without Arnold Schoenberg, no Rauschenberg without Duchamp. And yet there are alternative models as well, for as Conrad writes, "To create… meant to make something out of nothing," for the "creation itself… had no objective existence, no reason to exist at all." Obviously as writers our texts are a tissue of many inspirations, and yet the example of Genesis posits spontaneously generated creation. What would a creation of no influences even look like? It might sound like 4'33'' or look like the White Paintings. For some ancient philosophers, particularly the Stoics and Epicureans, nothing (in the positive sense) was a palliative when confronting death, since nothing isn't to be feared. "Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us," wrote Epicurus, "seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not." (How reassuring this is depends on your disposition.) Nothing and existence are twins in inscrutability, both equally strange and hard to visualize. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" asks William Gottfried Leibnitz in his 1714 treatise Monadology; Martin Heidegger later called this the "fundamental question" in his Introduction to Metaphysics. The earliest form of the query came in the fifth century BCE from Parmenides: "Nothing comes from nothing" was his answer, as good as any response that's been given. * Because the ancient Greeks were so uncomfortable with non-existence, they affirmed that the universe has always been here. Holding to the perennial existence of the universe was dogma in physics until well into the twentieth-century, when both theoretical models and observational data substantiated that there had in fact been a time before time. As early as 1912, astronomers detected a Doppler Shift from distant stars (latter proven by Edwin Hubble to actually be galaxies), the identical phenomenon of wave compression and expansion that explains the change in pitch from a passing car. This alteration in light waves proved that the universe was expanding. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian theoretical physicist and Jesuit priest, proposed that that the universe had once been much smaller— infinitesimally small before it exploded outward creating space and time—and that indeed the universe had first moments. In an article published in a 1931 issue of the journal Nature, Lemaître described the universe's origin from a "primaeval atom," now believed to have happened a little under 14 billion years ago. As a faithful Catholic, Lemaître was excited that the universe had a beginning, something that Genesis allegorically indicated. Partisans of Parmenides were less delighted; astronomer Fred Hoyle emerged as the most steadfast detractor of the hypothesis, with Hoyle having slurred Lemaître's hypothesis in a 1949 BBC interview as being the "Big Bang theory." To explain the seeming expansion of the universe, Hoyle proposed the alternate "steady state theory," which claimed that some unexplained phenomenon continually created new matter which gave the appearance of expansion, even while space and time were eternal. In 1964, however, physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were able to detect the slight cosmic background radiation that was the after-echo of Lemaître's primeval atom, conclusive evidence that the universe had an origin, and that at one point there had been nothing. The faint whispers of that cataclysmic birth permeate all creation, speaking to us of the time when there was no time, even hidden within the sound of radio static. Centuries before Lemaître, the doctrine of Creatio ex nihilo held that God generated existence from nothing, a direct rebuke to Parmenides and the eternal universe of the Greeks. Translations of Genesis are variable—arguably the ex-nihilo rendering is inaccurate—but by the third-century it had become the preferred interpretation. First associated with Theophilus of Antioch in the third century, by the fourth the Church Father Ephrem the Syrian would confidently write in his commentary on Genesis that "it is evident that heaven and earth came to be from nothing." A radical shift in Western consciousness, this embrace of nothingness. That the Rig Veda and Genesis share nothingness is perhaps a clue as to why zero was embraced when it was introduced to Christendom. To imagine that God created the world from nothing is to imagine nothing, and that's to court madness, and also to imagine that the latter encompasses the former. "One may wonder, 'What came before?'" asks physicist Andrei Linde in an interview from Awake! magazine. "If space-time did not exist then, how could everything appear from nothing?" He argues that this "remains the most intractable problem of modern cosmology." In the fourth-century, St. Augustine had an exasperated answer when queried about that question: "[God] was preparing hells for people who inquire into such profundities." Which is hilarious, and also not what he said. Augustine actually offered up this reply an example of the precise answer that shouldn't be given Rather Augustine admitted,as he did often, that "I am ignorant of what I do not know." Nothing, ultimately, exists beyond physics and metaphysics, it's something wholly total, alien, and other, and yet only this non-existence beyond non-existence makes it possible for there to be a something. Sixteen years ago, in a laboratory on the campus of Brandeis University, psychologist Irene Pepperberg discovered that a 28-year-old African grey parrot named Alex could conceive of zero. Able to count groupings of colored blocks, when all of the objects were removed from in front of him, Alex correctly identified the result as "none." Later, when asked what the difference was between two blocks of identical shape, size, and color, Alex responded the same way. Possessor of over 100 words and the only animal recorded to have asked a question (he wanted to know the name of the color grey), Alex had the intelligence of a two-year-old child, according to Pepperberg, though most humans can't use zero until kindergarten. Alex joined a rarefied group of creatures capable of subtracting a number from itself, including crows, squirrel monkeys, chimpanzees, and even honey bees. Zero threads through existence, not-being and being inseparable from each other, as everything is built on a foundation of that which is not. Without the rest, there is no music; without the interior, there is no bowl. To live without meaning is to live for itself, the purest form of equivalence that there is. Both nothingness and infinity are closer than our very heartbeats. On the evening before Alex unexpectedly died, he turned to his guardian and said "You be good, I love you. See you tomorrow," as wise and true as anything ever said. Like all of us, he either merged with nothing or the infinite, but if you've been paying attention, you already understand that there is no difference. [millions_email]