Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

New Price: $11.79
Used Price: $1.26

Mentioned in:

Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

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

Drizzly November in My Soul

-
Because Robert Burton used astrology to forecast the date of his death with exact accuracy—January 25, 1640—even some skeptics in that credulous age suspected that he may have assisted the prediction's veracity. To accuse anyone of suicide was a slander; for Burton's contemporaries such a death was an unpardonable offense. A half-century later, and the antiquary John Aubrey noted in his 1681 Brief Lives that ''tis whispered that… [Burton] ended his days in that chamber by hanging himself." There are compelling reasons to think this inaccurate. Burton would not have been buried in consecrated ground had he been a suicide—though, of course, it's possible that friends may have covered for him. Others point to the historian Anthony Wood, who described Burton as "very merry, facete, and lively," though seemingly happy people do kill themselves. And finally, there's the observation that within his massive, beguiling, strange, and beautiful The Anatomy of Melancholy, first printed in 1621, Burton rejected suicide—even while writing with understanding about those who are victim of it. As it actually is, the circumstances of Burton's death remain a mystery, just as self-destruction frequently is, even as etiology has replaced astrology, as psychiatry has supplanted humoral theory. That such a rumor spread at Christ Church, where Burton had worked for years in the library, compiling his vast study of depression, is not surprising. So identified was Burton with his subject—called "history's greatest champion of the melancholy cause" by Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression—that his readers simply expected such a death. Within The Anatomy of Melancholy Burton gives overview of Greek and Roman biothanatos, while still condemning it. And yet Burton empathetically concludes that "In such sort doth the torture and extremity of his misery torment him, that he can take no pleasure in his life, but is in a manner enforced to offer violence unto himself, to be freed from his present insufferable pains." Burton was also frank about his own suffering. White Kennett would write in his 1728 A Register and Chronicle Ecclesiastical and Civil that "I have heard that nothing at last could make… [Burton] laugh, but going down to the Bridge-foot in Oxford, and hearing the bargemen scold and storm and swear at one another, at which he would set his Hands to his sides and laugh most profusely." Such a man, it was imagined, was the sort who may have dreamed of wading into that cold water in the years when the rivers of England still froze over, walking out into infinity until he felt nothing. Who is to say? We don't have a complete record of Burton's thoughts, especially not in his last moments (we don't have those things for anybody), but The Anatomy of Melancholy is as comprehensive a record as possible, a palliative for author and reader, an attempt to reason through the darkness together. "Burton's book has attracted a dedicated rather than a widespread readership," writes Mary Ann Lund in Aeon, "its complicated branching structure, its Latin quotations and its note-crammed margins resist easy reading." Though clearly indebted to the humanism of Erasmus and Montaigne, The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of those books that's almost post-modern before modernity, like the novel Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne shamelessly plagiarized from Burton). The book is encyclopedic but open-ended, erudite but curious, expansive but granular, poignant but funny; never doctrinaire, never judgmental, never orthodox, but gleefully self-referential even while contemplating sadness. Burton combed history, poetry, theology, travelogue, philosophy, and medicine for case studies, across five editions during his lifetime (and a sixth based on posthumous notes) in three separate sections printed as a folio that ballooned to half-a-million words. In the first section he enumerates accounts of melancholia, in the second he offers up cures (from drinking coffee to eating spiced ram's brain), and in the third Burton presents taxonomies of insanity, including love madness and religious mania. The contemporary edition from the New York Review of Books Classics series is 1,382 pages long. Within those digressive, branching, labyrinthine passages Burton considers King Louis XI of France's madness whereby everything had the stink of shit about it, an Italian baker from Ferrara who believed that he'd been transformed into butter, and the therapeutic effects of music on elephants. Lund explains how subsequent editions, rather than cutting verbiage, fully indulged Burton's favored rhetorical conceit of concierges, whereby words are piled upon words in imitation of the manic mind, a quality that has both endeared and frustrated his readers. And yet as William H. Gass observes in his introduction to the NYRBC edition, "the words themselves are magical; you cannot have too many of them; they are like spices brought back from countries so far away they're even out of sight of seas; words that roll… words even more exotic, redolent, or chewy." Sales of Burton's monumental work, which readers felt free to dip in and out of rather than reading cover-to-cover, easily outsold Shakespeare’s folio, though by the Enlightenment his acclaim had dimmed, the work interpreted as a poorly organized baroque grotesquerie based in outmoded theories. During the optimistic 18th century, The Anatomy of Melancholy had not a single printing. Despite that, it still had readers, including Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Johnson, who told Boswell that it was the "only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise." Romantics were naturally drawn to it; both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats had underlined copies, with the latter drawing the plot for his vampiric Lamia from Burton. In the 20th century, the existentialists saw something modern in Burton, with Samuel Becket a lover of the book. The Canadian physician William Osler, a founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, thought it the greatest medical text by a layman, and was instrumental both in increased interest as well as the bibliographic tabulation of Burton's personal library at Oxford. Despite the pedigree of his fans, Burton hasn't had a wide readership for centuries, as The Anatomy of Melancholy has never been easy. An assemblage of disparate phenomena, a hodgepodge of unusual examples, a commonplace book of arcane quote and complicated exegesis, none of which is structured in a straightforward way, with Burton himself apologizing that "I had not time to lick it into form, as a bear doth her young ones," though as it became even more formless over the next two decades that would belie his protestation.                The Anatomy of Melancholy feels unfinished, just like life; it's contradictory, just like a person; and it encompasses both wonder and sadness, just like a mind. On its quadricentenary it's abundantly worthwhile to spend some time with Burton, because though he can't speak of neurotransmitters, he does speak of the soul; though he can't diagnose, he can understand; though he can't prescribe, he can sympathize. Beyond just depression, Burton considers ailments like anxiety, obsessions, delusions, and compulsions, Sufferers "conceive all extremes, contrarieties and contradictions, and that in infinite varieties." To paraphrase Tolstoy, the happy are all the same, but Burton's depressives are gloriously different. "The Tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as this chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms." The second thing that is important to note is that Burton distinguishes between everyday emotions—the occasional blues if you will—from the more punishing. He explains that "miseries encompass our life," that everyone suffers grief, loss, sorrow, pain, and disappointment, and that it would be "ridiculous for any mortal man to look for a perpetual tenor of happiness." If somebody is suffering from physical pain or a loved one's death, grief and sadness are rational; for a person facing economic ruin or an uncertain future, anxiety makes sense, but a "melancholic fears without a cause…this torment procures them and all extremity of bitterness." For those whose humors are balanced, grief is the result of some outside torment, for the melancholic grief is itself the torment. Furthermore, as Burton makes clear, this disposition is not a moral failing but a disease, and he often makes suggestions for treatments (while just as soon allowing that he could be entirely wrong in his prescriptions). "What can't be cured must be endured," Burton notes. In the depressive canon of the late Renaissance, Burton would be joined by Thomas Browne with his similarly digressive, though much shorter, Religio Medici, wherein he writes, "The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in; I sometimes feel hell within myself;" John Donne’s sickbed, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, where he concludes that "Man, who is the noblest part of the earth, melts so away as if he were a statue, not of earth, but of snow;" and, of course, Shakespeare's famed soliloquy from Hamlet that wonders if "by a sleep to say we end/The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to." And that's just relatively High Church Englishmen; with a broader scope you'd include the Catholic Frenchman Blaise Pascal, whom in his Pensées defines man as that who is "equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed," and the 15th-century Florentine Neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino who wrote in his 1489 The Book of Life that the condition was "conducive to judgment and wisdom," entitling one chapter "Why the Melancholic Are Intelligent." None of them, however, is as all-encompassing as Burton, as honest about his own emotions and as sympathetic to his fellow sufferers. Within his book's prologue, entitled "Democritus Junior to His Readers," ironically written under a pseudonym adapted from the pre-Socratic thinker known as the "laughing philosopher," Burton explains that "I had a heavy heart and an ugly head, a kind of imposture in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of," and so his scribbling would act as therapy. Across denominations, countries, and continents, the contemplation of a fashionable melancholia was encouraged, with even Burton confessing to sometimes enjoying such abjection as a "most delightsome humor, to be alone, dwell alone, walk alone, meditate, lie in bed whole days, dreaming awake as it were." Noga Arikha explains in The Public Domain Review that melancholia could be seen as "good if one believed that a capacity for strong passions was the mark of a fine soul that recognized beauty and goodness… the source of sonnets, the harbinger of creativity," while Darin M. McMahon notes in Happiness: A History that this is a "phenomenon that would have a long and robust future: the glamorization of intellectual despair." A direct line can be drawn from the goth teen smoking clove cigarettes in a Midwestern high school parking lot through the Beats in their Manhattan lofts eating hash brownies and masturbating to William Blake through to the Left Bank existentialists parsing meaninglessness in the post-war haze and the Lost Generation writers typing on Remingtons in Parisian cafes back to the Decadents and Symbolists quaffing absinthe and the Romantics dreaming opium reveries until interrupted by the person from Porlock through to Burton, and Browne, and Donne, and Shakespeare, and Pascal and Ficino and every other partisan of depression. As Burton notes, "melancholy men of all others are most witty." More than a pose, however, and even if Burton agreed that melancholy could sometimes be romanticized, he never lost sight of its cost. Tabulating the price of anxious scrupulosity, Burton notes that "Our conscience, which is a great ledger book, wherein are written all our offences…grinds our souls with the remembrance of some precedent sins, makes us reflect upon, accuse and condemn ourselves." In the millennium before Burton there were contrary perspectives concerning melancholy. It was interpreted by theologians as a sin—an indolent sloth called acedia—as opposed to the position of doctors who diagnosed it as an imbalance of elemental substances called humors. One thing that Burton is clear on was that melancholy wasn't simply feeling down. To be melancholy isn't to be "dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved or displeased," Burton writes, and that clarification is still helpful. For those blessed with a brain chemistry that doesn't incline them towards darkness, depression might seem an issue of will power, something that can be fixed with a multivitamin and a treadmill. Reading Burton is a way to remind oneself—even as he maintained erroneous physiological explanations—that depression isn't a personal failing. And it's certainly not a sin. McMahon explains that by "reengaging with the classical tradition to treat excessive sadness and melancholia as an aberration or disease—not just the natural effect of original sin—Renaissance medicine opened the way toward thinking about means to cure it." That was a possibility more than anything, for the rudiments of mental health were still mired in superstition. Such an emotion was identified with an overabundance of black bile in the spleen, and a deficit of yellow bile, blood, and phlegm, a condition associated with a dry coldness, so that some of that metaphorical import still survives today. Arikha writes in Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours how the "experiences of joy, pain, anguish, and fear each had their temperature, their match in some sort of stuff in the body whose motion modulated the emotion." In a broader way, however, there is something to be said in how the humors emphasized embodiment, the way it acknowledged how much of the emotional was in the physical. We now know that melancholy isn't caused by problems with our humors, but rather in our neurotransmitters—I am not cutely implying that this is equivalent, accurate science is the only way that pharmacologists have been able to develop the medicine that saves so many of our lives. Yet there is an enduring wisdom in knowing that this is a malady due to something coursing in your veins, whatever you call it. "We change language, habits, laws, customs, manners," writes Burton, "but not diseases, not the symptoms of folly and madness, they are still the same."     Depressives have always existed because there have always been those of us who have a serotonin and dopamine deficiency, even if we're not lacking in yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. How culture interprets mental illness is entirely another thing, though. As Burton's popularity demonstrates, there was a surprising lack of stigma around melancholy. In an abstract way, during the 17th century this a reaction to how eternal verities no longer seemed so eternal. Gass explains that "people were lifting their heads from canonical books to look boldly around, and what they saw first were errors, plentiful as leaves. Delight and despair took turns managing their moods." Even while The Anatomy of Melancholy used Galen's humoral theory that dominated medicine since the second century, the English surgeon William Harvey was developing his book Anatomical Account of the Motion of the Heart and Blood, which would dispel the basis for the four bodily humors (it would take two more centuries to die). There were more practical reasons for melancholy as well. On the continent, the Thirty Years War started three years before Burton's book was completed and would end in 1648, eight years after he died. As many as 12 million people perished, a death rate that dwarfed all previous European wars, with one out of five people on the continent dead. Writing in the early '20s, Burton's native England was headed towards inevitable civil war, disunion clear in the political and religious polarization. By its conclusion, 200,000 people were dead, fully 2.5 percent of the population. By comparison, that would be as if 12 million contemporary Americans were killed. Disease could be just as deadly as the New Model Army; over the course of Burton's life the bubonic plague broke out in 1603, 1625, and 1636, with close to 1000,000 deaths. Depression can come from an imbalance within the body, but sometimes insanity is also a sane reaction to an insane world. You still have to bear it, however.      Burton is good humored, he may even have been jovial from time to time, but he's resolutely a partisan of the sighing angels. Not that Burton didn't advocate for treatment, even while he emphasized his own inexpertness. Solomon explained that Burton recommends "marigold, dandelion, ash, willow, tamarisk, roses, violets, sweet apples, wine, tobacco, syrup of poppy, featherfew, Saint'-John's-wort…and the wearing of a ring made from the right forefoot of an ass." We are, it should be said, fortunate to have refined our prescriptions. Despite the fact that Americans hunger for painkillers both helpful and deadly, The Anatomy of Melancholy isn't a particularly American book. If the English malady is glum dampness, then the American affliction is plucky sociopathic optimism. A can-do-attitude, pulling-ones-self-up-from-the-bootstraps, rugged individualism, grit, determination, cheeriness. We were once inundated by snake oil salesmen and medicine men, now we have self-help authors and motivational speakers. A nation where everybody can be a winner in seven easy steps and there are keys to a new car under ever guest's seat. "Americans are a 'positive' people," writes Barbara Ehrenreich in Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, this "is our reputation as well as our self-image…we are upbeat, cheerful, optimistic, and shallow." Some crucial points: optimism is not equivalent with happiness, and if anything, it's a mask when we lack the latter. That's not bearing it—that's deluding ourselves. We weren't always like this; we have our counter-melody to faux-positivity, from those dour Puritans to Herman Melville writing of the "damp drizzly November in my soul." But could anyone imagine Abraham Lincoln being elected today, who as a young lawyer in 1841, would write that "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth?" Now, with the ascendancy of the all-seeing Smiley Face, we've categorized talk like that as weakness, even if we don't admit what we're doing. Our 16th president had a melancholic understanding that grappled with wisdom, what Roy Porter in Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul phrased as "Melancholy and spleen, those stigmata of true scholarly dedication." An ability to see the world as it is. Not just as some cankered, jaundiced, diseased thing, but how in the contrast of highs and lows there is a sense of how ecstatically beautiful this life is, even in its prosaic mundanity. Solomon writes that "I love my depression. I do not love experiencing my depression." He explains that the "opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality," and ignorance of this distinction bolsters the cult of positivity. Therapy is honest, unsparing, difficult, and painful. Self-help just tells you what you want to hear. Norman Vincent Peale wrote in Stay Alive All Your Life that the "dynamic and positive attitude is a strong magnetic force which, by its very nature, attracts good results." This, quite clearly, is unmitigated bullshit. Instead of Dale Carnegie, we need Donne; rather than Eckhart Tolle we could use Browne; let's replace Tony Robbins with Robert Burton.   Because, dear reader, if you haven't noticed, we're not at a happy point in history. America's cheery cult of optimism is finally folding under the onslaught of the pandemic, political extremism, economic collapse, and the ever-rising mercury. If you're the sort who'd be chemically glum even in paradise, then if you've already been to hell, you might have a bit of extra knowledge folks could benefit from. Stanley Fish explains in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature how "sober discourse itself is an impossibility given the world," and that for Burton "nothing—no person, place, object idea—can maintain its integrity in the context of an all-embracing madness." Gass is even more blunt on the score: "When the mind enters a madhouse…however sane it was when it went in, and however hard it struggles to remain sane while there, it can only make the ambient madness more monstrous, more absurd, more bizarrely laughable by its efforts to be rational." Burton speaks to our epoch, for depression is both real and there are legitimate reasons to be depressed. As he writes, melancholy is an "epidemical disease," now more than ever. Burton's prescriptions, from tincture of marigold to stewed offal, seem suspect—save for one. With the whole world an asylum, Burton advocates for awareness. There are risks to such hair-of-the-dog though. "All poets are mad," Burton writes, the affliction of "excellent Poets, Prophets, &c," and I suspect, dear reader, that you too may be in that "etcetera." Depression, along with addiction, is the writer's disease. Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, David Foster Wallace, Ann Sexton, Arthur Rimbaud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and so on—all wrestled with the noon-day demon. Many of them died because of it, at least in one way or another. There is no shame here, only sadness that some couldn't be around with us a bit longer, and the genuine, deep, and loving request that you, dear reader, stick around here. As for Burton, he was committed to the principle that "I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy," and it often worked. He gives the most poignant expression to that black veil that shrouds the mind, the caul of the soul that afflicts some from time to time. If writers are prone to depression, then Burton's tome was an attempt to write himself out of it, to "satisfy and please myself, make a Utopia of mine own, a New Atlantis, a poetical commonwealth of mine own." We're lucky that he did, because even if it's not the only thing—even if it's not always the best of things—there is something sacred in that. No matter how occluded, know that somebody else understands what you're feeling. So, blessed is Burton and duloxetine, therapy and sertraline, writing and citalopram, empathy and fluoxetine, compassion and escitalopram. Blessed are those who ask for help, those who are unable to ask for help, those who ask if somebody else needs help. Blessed are those who struggle everyday and blessed are those who feel that they no longer can, and blessed are those who get better. Blessed are those who hold the hands of anyone suffering. Blessed is understanding—and being seen—for what Burton offers you is the observation that he sees you, the reader. "I would help others, out of a fellow-feeling," he writes. Because Robert Burton often felt worthless; as if he was walking at the bottom of the chill Thames. Sometimes it felt like his skull was filled with water-soaked-wool and his eyes pulsated, vision clouded over with gauzy darkness; he knew of listing heaviness and the futility of opening the door, of getting dressed, of leaving the bed, of how often the window of care shrunk to a pinpoint of nothingness, so that he could feel no more than that. This strange book studded with classical allusion and scriptural quotation, historical anecdote and metaphysical speculation—who was it for? He wrote for the person who has had the tab for this article open on their computer for days, but has no energy to read; for the woman who hasn't showered in weeks and the man who can't bring himself to go outside. "Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse," Burton writes. His purpose was one thing—to convey that you have never been alone. Not then, not now, not ever.     [millions_email]