Bored of the Rings: A Parody

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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]

The Lowest Form of Humor: How the National Lampoon Shaped the Way We Laugh Now

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1. Storming the Castle In the fall of 1999, my junior year, I decided to try out — in the Harvard parlance, to “comp,” short for either “compete ” or “competence,” an abbreviation that neatly captures the atmosphere of repressed striving and insecurity on campus — for my college’s quasi-bimonthly humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon. (Or, as the rivalrous Harvard Crimson newspaper habitually refers to it, “a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine.” Repressed striving and insecurity, with a split infinitive!) It was only my third semester in Cambridge; the fact that I’d transferred in as a sophomore may mitigate — slightly — the inescapable annoyingness of stating I went to Harvard. In any case, the wit and intellect of the Lampoon had consistently impressed me in the meantime. I had a yearning to write satire, but hadn’t yet approached it in any disciplined fashion. It seemed to me that joining a 123-year-old publication that counted John Updike, George Plimpton, and Robert Benchley among its alumni would put me on that path. More importantly, it would bring me into contact with the culture that had birthed the vaunted National Lampoon (NL), whose dominant run of comedic films in the late ’70s and ’80s, from Animal House to the National Lampoon’s “Vacation” series, was responsible for a high percentage of the catchphrases heard in my youth. I attended an orientation session in the Lampoon Castle, a stout, puckish building opened in 1909 that resembles a human face in a helmet. One upperclassman described the style of the humor pieces the Lampoon hopefuls — mostly nerdy white males — would have to write to come aboard. At one point he made accidental reference to “a phonograph player.” He caught his minor error (he meant, simply, a “phonograph”; a phonograph is already a “player,” so “phonograph player” is right up there with “ATM machine” for redundancy). “A phonograph player,” he said as he laughed. “It plays other phonographs.” Soon after, another writer observed, “Some people think we’re exclusive or snobby...But we’re not. I mean, look what we look like.” He may or may not have had a point — they were, indeed, in the archetypal comedy writer’s schlubby getup — but these two moments, in their ironizing and even lacerating self-consciousness, served notice as well as anything in the magazine itself for the kinds of deeper drives that turn ordinary mortals into Lampooners. People rarely become conspicuously funny because they’re satisfied with themselves. The writers who had gone on from Harvard to make their mark at the National Lampoon — the people whose cinematic offerings I’d consumed throughout my childhood, and whose casting of Beverly D’Angelo and Christie Brinkley in the first “Vacation” film surely had a profound impact on my adolescent sexuality — were outsiders at Harvard and outcasts in high school. The targets they vengefully skewered were usually social microcosms, high school and college very much included. Underscoring this fixation was a deep-seated inferiority complex. The funny guys and girls who are confident (it was dawning on me, there at that orientation) are the ones who hold court at parties. The funny guys who are diffident become comedy writers. Or, as I once read in an interview with an Onion writer speaking about the makeup of its staff — the closest thing we have to the National Lampoon in its heyday — they’re the guys who are outside the party, making fun of the guy inside telling jokes. At its peak, the NL produced some of the bleakest and most controlled furious humor in American letters. Yet in the twenty-nine years between its inaugural issue and my own fumbling attempts to breach the castle walls, these outsiders’ inside jokes had become the lingua franca of the educated classes. The National Lampoon’s creators played a role in or held sway over nearly every major comedic movement in the country over the last forty years. And now, thanks to Ellin Stein’s assiduously researched and comprehensive book That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick: The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream, we can trace the Lampoon’s evolution from the margins of Cambridge to the mainstream of Hollywood, covering a cast of characters ranging from lesser-known luminaries to the extroverts telling jokes at the party (John Belushi, Bill Murray). Had I read it that night after the Lampoon Castle, when I went home to begin writing my first piece — had I had a fuller understanding of how insecurity and striving could be harnessed — it might have made my work easier. 2. Baby’s First Words American humor was, like the nation itself, in a radically transitional state in the 1960s. Light comedy ruled the early part of the decade, but after President Kennedy’s assassination and the domestic and international turbulence that followed, the genteel Harvard Lampoon that had nurtured Updike and Benchley began to broach social issues more often, and with a finer point — even while maintaining the generally apolitical stance of the detached humorist. (The contradictions were sometimes potent: Lampooners mockingly toasted, in black tie with champagne, departing Freedom Riders in 1963; the next year, they devoted an entire issue to civil rights.) As the decade deepened, the Lampooners targeted inequality and injustice less frequently than they did mainstream conformity — as if the gray flannel suits of the ’50s were still in fashion, not tie-dye and love beads. The two linchpins of the Lampoon Castle in the mid-’60s were Doug Kenney and Henry Beard. They would go on to create “the characteristic tone of the National Lampoon,” Stein writes: ...assuming all actions are the result of greed, malice, or sheer stupidity; promiscuously interweaving icons from high and low culture; snobbery; and ironic distance from everything (including the work itself), all made palatable by sheer mastery of the traditional techniques of comic writing. Beard was the hardworking, stable center of the organization, cranking out consistently solid material at all hours. A thrill-seeking WASP manqué from Ohio, Kenney comes off, by contrast, as the most tortured figure of all the Lampooners. Working in sporadic fits of genius around late-night gourmet-food fights, he affected, like most of the staff at the Harvard Lampoon, a preppy look and demeanor. Unwilling to accept the essentially insecure identity and origins of the comedy writer, Kenney had a lifelong desire to be the guy telling jokes at the party. A few profitable parodies, including a Tolkien take-off called Bored of the Rings (which continues to pull in royalties for the Harvard Lampoon), made the notion of a national magazine look attractive financially, as well as conceptually. In 1969, Kenney, Beard, and business-minded classmate Rob Hoffman formed National Lampoon Inc. with two New York magazine publishers, Len Mogel and Matty Simmons. Issue one of the National Lampoon appeared in April 1970. The group soon added other Harvard alums as well as a standout non-Harvardian, Michael O’Donoghue, who came from a working-class background, was several years older than his more affluent colleagues, and had made a name for himself as an underground satirist of black-hole humor. The Lampooners always prized craft above politics, and O’Donoghue himself wasn’t above the Lampoon’s affection for reflexivity, as in his classic treatise “How To Write Good,” which advises writers to conclude their stories with “Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck,” then wraps up its ten lessons with the sentence, “There are many more writing hints I could share with you, but suddenly I am run over by a truck.” Stein writes that one of the other founding members described his peers’ affection for parody as “the natural art form for people who have been shaped by a meaningless iconography” — specifically, TV commercials. Yet the bohemian O’Donoghue’s reimaginings of that iconography were nothing if not meaningful. In January 1972, he penned one of the most memorable pieces in NL history, the scathing “Vietnamese Baby Book” (baby’s first word: medic). Congenial chuckles were not O’Donoghue’s goal. “I’ve always considered comedy what you use to get people to swallow the pill, not the pill itself,” he said, along with this deathless epigram: “Making people laugh is the lowest form of humor.” He considered himself a moralist, and a livid one at that — who was still able to exert mastery over his feelings: “Rage is only interesting when it’s controlled. When you repress those emotions, you always get something artistic and interesting.” His highest-profile heirs today are Chris Rock and Louis CK, whose moral anger fuels their comedy without stepping (in Rock’s case, barely so) over the threshold of Lewis Black’s or Sam Kinison’s exhausting fury, and for whom the point is often less to get a laugh — let alone self-congratulatory applause — than to provoke thought. With O’Donoghue’s influence, and Vietnam’s escalation, the National Lampoon couldn’t help but become more political than its ivory tower predecessor, attacking both the right and left for their conservatism and hypocrisy, respectively. And, as with the response to The Onion today, people loved being reminded of their flaws. 3. Throwing Spitballs in Homeroom But the NL’s ascent, in Stein’s telling, also contained the seeds of its demise. As the magazine expanded in the mid-’70s, the writers of the Lampoon came to embody as much as anyone the historical tension running through American comedy of its being written by, if not always the smartest, then certainly the quickest guys in the room, for the consumption of the lower-velocity masses. Not only did this gulf prompt a timeless conflict — whether to write for niche quality or mainstream success — but it was itself a source of the writers’ essential contempt for conformity and mass culture. Such an anxiety also placed under further pressure the NL’s volatile admixture of politics, linguistic virtuosity, and vicious, high-concept irony. But, for the time being, this pressure produced a bright, controlled burn. Many of the National Lampoon’s obsessions and talents and scars coalesced in the 1964 High School Yearbook Parody, published in 1974. Its portrait of a fictional Ohio high school offered the Lampooners the chance to return to a personal and national era of irretrievable innocence: “Doug and I figured that 1964 was the last year before the sort of hipness explosion,” said P.J. O’Rourke, co-editor of the parody with Kenney. The pre-counterculture epoch remained the moment they related to best, when they could rail against conventionality before nonconformity became its own form of subservience. The humor was granular; hand-scribbled notes by and to a generic student, Larry Kroger, covered the margins. And it was focused on the Midwest, the home turf of most of the Lampooners and the incubator of their sensibility. The equation was something like: more orthodoxy equals more quiet desperation to ridicule. While we now take for granted the comic mining of high school, it wasn’t as obvious a move in 1974; American Graffiti had come out the year before and Happy Days premiered that fall, but most pop-culture depictions until then had been sober and had divided students into the facile binary of greasers and preppies. In researching real yearbooks, O’Rourke and Kenney had discovered the more nuanced taxonomy John Hughes (a future Lampooner) went on to highlight, and attempt to debunk, in The Breakfast Club: that everyone was a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, or a criminal. The Yearbook alone may not have catalyzed the wave of ’80s and ’90s comedies about high school, but it certainly anticipated it and their taxonomies. It was a total triumph; sales and acclaim were outsized, with Harper’s hailing it as “the finest example of group writing since the King James Bible.” 4. The Comedy of Antithesis Norman Mailer said that J.D. Salinger was “the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school,” and that backhanded compliment might also apply to the Lampooners. Their neoteny became more apparent as the ’70s wore on and the NL drifted into non-print media. There, they couldn’t rely as easily on luminous writing or assume the audience — always a schizophrenic mix of comedy geeks and frat boys, equally enticed by the mathematically precise wit and the art department’s illustrations of females with proportions more out of Russ Meyer films than Ms. magazine — was as literary. They released both studio and live comedy albums, bringing Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest to prominence, and a nationally broadcast radio show that lasted a year. The 1973 stage show Lemmings, a parody of Woodstock, also led to collaboration with Chicago’s Second City improv-comedy troupe and its most charismatic performer, John Belushi. Second City embraced its director Del Close’s philosophy: action over language, physicality over concept, concreteness over abstraction. The NL was all brain, no body; Belushi’s characters had never heard of the superego. Improv also relies on the “yes and” rule: never contradict your fellow performers’ creative inspiration, but continue their suggestion to absurd heights. Prose satire, however, derives much of its energy from dialectics. From “Frontline Dentists,” by O’Donoghue, a comic strip relating the brave exploits of our military dentists: CAPTION: “The war against tooth decay is waged on every front...” ATTRACTIVE, HALF-NAKED WOMAN ON STEET: “Hey Joe! You got Hershey bar?” VIRILE DENTIST STRIDING PAST: “Certainly not, young lady! Sweets are the number-one cause of cavities!” The closing negation here would derail or arrest an improv scene that might have cooperatively spun out into unforeseen territory (the dentist shills for Hershey to boost his business, he’s an ashamed chocolate addict himself, etc.). On the page, however, where a solitary writer is in control of the material, refutations don’t deny another’s ideas. (There are, of course, also plenty of examples of prose humor that engages in the “yes and” rule.) One could argue that, medium aside, the comedy of antithesis permits a more sophisticated, analytical form of humor. Instead of the classic onstage or onscreen method of overstuffing a gag to its exaggerated conclusion — think of the crowded cabin scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, reprised to humiliating effect in the bathroom scene in the Farrelly Brothers’ There’s Something About Mary — the prose humorist can wend his way around a central conceit from all angles, even those that seem to undercut it. In the NL’s “Tell Debby,” a parodic advice column in which letter-writers send in stories about their miserable lives, Debby responds with callous one-liners, such as, to a boy from a dysfunctional home, “Young Man, you spelled my name D-e-b-b-i-e. My name is spelled D-e-b-b-y.” (See the echoes in The Onion’s “Ask a...” columns, in which a character unsuited to dispense advice provides his own running monologue that has nothing to do with the question.) Not “Yes and,” but “Whatever; which reminds me...” Over many columns, though, the obtuse eponym of “Tell Debby” begins to reveal the limits of Lampoon humor. In the writers’ eyes, any hint of vulnerability could be cruelly exploited for laughs. And this is where Stein’s book is revelatory in its own right. Since dissecting or retelling a joke out of context invariably leaches it of humor, That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick is itself not funny. But deprived of its mask of mirth, the fundamental misanthropy at the core of the Lampoon sensibility is easier to see. Swift wrote that “principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth”; one gets the feeling that the Lampooners hated man and detested John, Peter, and Thomas, too. 5. “I’m better than you and I’m going to destroy you.” And thus we reach the vexed question of empathy — what takes the writer beyond the narrow satirical limits of hatred and detestation. Almost exclusively young, gentile white men of privilege, the original Harvard Lampooners had few socioeconomic chips on their shoulders. Through the nihilistic days of Watergate, the NL maintained its dispassionate, if left-wing, politics, and some of its apathy may derive from its remaining a white boys’ club well into second-wave feminism. There were not many women on staff, no minorities, and, most surprisingly for a comedy publication, a relative dearth of Jews. So, while the writers often satirized racial stereotypes, for instance, Stein points out that they frequently ended up reinforcing them, much as the prurient illustrations of buxom women didn’t quite qualify as subversive feminist humor. The Lampooners thought that women, as a rule, were humor-deficient, and that anyone who didn’t fit their own background was therefore writing from a narrower perspective. It was a prejudice that, Stein writes, partially sprang out of their culture of fear-inducing derision: Bad enough when your NatLamp buddies used their intimate knowledge of your sore spots to assert their mastery through mockery; imagine if your girlfriend started doing it, too. You could never let down your guard. Tonight’s whispered confession might fuel tomorrow’s sarcastic remark. Though there were a few nods to the female experience — mostly from writers Anne Beatts and Emily Prager — the men seemed more engaged by exploring their anxieties over the changing definitions of masculinity, as in an ad for a boy’s doll called T.G.I.F. Joe, an “Action Assistant Sales Supervisor” who could be positioned for a variety of menial tasks. (To be fair, this is likely the kind of humor their readers — also nerdy white males, “reminiscent of the editors’ own younger selves” — preferred.) The lack of Jews, particularly, countered the prevailing winds of American comedy in the ’70s, including Mad magazine’s self-effacing brand, and the Lampooners took special pride in their resistance to Semitic humor. P.J. O’Rourke noted that there is offensive and defensive humor, and that the Lampoon veered strongly to the former: “We used humor as a weapon rather than a shield.” As at Harvard, the WASP mentality, indebted to the tradition of heartless British satire, was their model. In James Thurber’s distinction of comic writers — “The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people — that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature” — the Lampooners were satirists with a nastily witty edge; Alfred E. Neuman was a gentle, schmucky humorist. (The Harvard Lampoon has since become more Jewish, and tapped more of the campus’s women and minorities, as well.) Yet for all its unexamined privilege, the Lampoon’s humor has the strong whiff of overcompensation, a refusal to acknowledge its creators’ former social underdog status. “We take the stance of the white, educated, upper-middle class,” O’Rourke said in 1978. “We are ruling class...our comic pose is superior. It says, ‘I’m better than you and I’m going to destroy you.’” 6. Falling Off a Cliff: Television, Movies, and Cocaine As the National Lampoon entrenched itself as the comedy world’s ruling class, its humor became more watered-down. (O’Rourke’s persona somehow doesn’t play as well in his TV appearances in 2013). A sequel to Lemmings brought Bill Murray and Ivan Reitman into the NL fold, and soon various writers and actors associated with NL — Belushi and Chase, and, as head writer and occasional actor, O’Donoghue — flocked to Lorne Michael’s new comedy variety show, Saturday Night Live. The Canadian producer was inspired by British satire, especially Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but worried that Americans responded better to character-based comedy. SNL steered clear of Python’s absurdist, postmodern devices — intertextuality, self-referentiality — and its esoteric allusions. The result was a show that, despite O’Donoghue’s helming it, was far more “Second City” than National Lampoon: Belushi became a star in a work environment that rewarded physicality and extroversion, and though the climate seemed ripe for political satire, the show’s parodies focused more on the media rather than leaders and institutions. When SNL did attack political figures, they sent up their quirks (Ford’s clumsiness, Clinton’s libido, Bush’s strategery), not their policies. The recurring characters and reliance on catchphrases grated on O’Donoghue (not to mention Belushi and others). The former thought it mainstream and conservative, two decades late to the game. By the mid-’70s, even the Lampoon felt a bit obsolete, said contributor and illustrator Bruce McCall: “It had been a vessel into which the gifts and rage and experience of all those people was poured. It was molten at the beginning, and now it was finally played out.” It didn’t help that, in 1975, Beard, Kenney, and Hoffman had accepted the lucrative buyouts for which they had shrewdly negotiated. The conservative O’Rourke took over in 1978, guiding the magazine rightward and back toward the Midwest. A few more parody publications — of an Ohio newspaper from the same town depicted in the Yearbook, and Not the New York Times — made waves, and their repercussions can be found in The Onion and any number of Internet-era takeoffs on Times trend pieces. Kenney moved to Hollywood, as was his hedonistic destiny. He nursed a cocaine habit and revived the magazine’s reputation by cowriting National Lampoon’s Animal House, a hugely popular film that, once more, satirized militaristic conformity in the early ’60s. Though the Lampoon creators had a dim opinion of their own parties-and-panties pandering movie, there are several inspired moments that would have appealed to their younger, rule-breaking selves, such as when Belushi spies on undressing sorority girls and raises a fourth-wall-breaking eyebrow to the audience. SNL’s popularity spiked thanks to Belushi’s role in the movie, and Animal House’s success spawned a number of increasingly middlebrow, albeit clever, comedies in the ’80s with Lampoon connections: The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, and the “Vacation” movies, starring Chevy Chase in Reagan-era station-wagon fantasies of returning to, as usual, pre-Vietnam times (written by John Hughes, two were based on his personal essays “Vacation ’58” and “Christmas ’59”). If there had been a long-running debate in the ’70s between privileging quality or money, there was little question which side had won by the next decade. The magazine’s circulation dwindled through the ’80s and published its last issue in 1998, but to most readers, it unofficially ended in 1980, when a vacationing Kenney was found dead at the base of Hawaiian cliff in an apparent suicide at age 32. His death was received by his peers with equal parts sadness and gallows humor; the best line was that Kenney “had slipped and fallen while looking for a place to commit suicide.” The NL ceded its satirical reign first, in the late ’80s, to Spy magazine, which derided the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and then, in the new millennium, to the media-oriented Onion and Gawker, the politicized Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and finally to anyone with a Twitter account and a misspelled opinion. In the last two decades, the surviving brand has pumped out over thirty films, some given the NL imprimatur, many straight-to-DVD and with titles the original Lampooners would have heaved up only for parodic target practice (2007’s Homo Erectus, aka National Lampoon’s Stoned Age). 7. The Apotovian Era There has also been a backlash against the NL’s detached affect. Later generations of prose humorists showed that vulnerability and sentiment could profitably commingle with irony and darkness. The typical McSweeney’s Internet Tendency piece splices in moments of naked emotion among its conceptual, literary jokes. The Onion’s humanity comes most alive when documenting the sad lives of loserish area men or in covering national tragedy (after the Newtown school shootings: “Fuck Everything, Nation Reports — Just Fuck It All To Hell”), and occasionally becomes downright mushy (their eulogy to Roger Ebert, “Roger Ebert Hails Human Existence as ‘A Triumph’”). Arch satirists have finally embraced the sensitive ’70s inner-male the Lampooners were frightened of becoming, part of a wider cultural shift in which the tech-savvy meek have inherited the app-driven earth. In Judd Apotow movies, at least, the funny (and Jewish) dork, far from worrying that he’ll get made fun of for his nebbishy weaknesses, now makes use of them to get the shiksa. Despite or because of these developments, the National Lampoon remains as relevant to today’s young comic writers as it was to the preceding generation. Though the institution has become a caricature of its former self, with a WASPish superciliousness that now feels a bit dated, the National Lampoon’s targets — middle-class convention and inanity, conservative corruption, liberal hypocrisy — don’t feel obsolete, nor do its sentences from its glory days. And if it its jokes don’t land with the modern reader, well, making people laugh is the lowest form of humor. As for me, back in 1999, I was justly rejected from the Harvard Lampoon after writing several mediocre humor pieces. I continued reading the magazine, though, and became friends with some Lampooners. It took a few years after college until I found my comedic footing and began contributing prose humor to different publications. I recently visited the Harvard Lampoon’s website and read some of their current material. My favorite was “Paternity Test,” by Z.E. Wortman, which concludes with this paragraph: “The good news is you are the father. Wait, sorry. I was holding the test upside down. The baby is your father.” There are many more of these I could share with you, and sentences from over a decade ago I could recite verbatim from the phonograph player of my memory, but suddenly I am run over by nostalgia.