Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years

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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]

A Prologue to the Literary History of the First World War: War Poets at the Ballet

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1. Much reading of personal history — whether it’s a memoir, a history, even poetry — evokes an awkward mixture of feeling: good writing affords pleasure, yet when it records real pain and despair we may feel guilt at our own pale, vicarious suffering. No human experience has produced such a rich literature of commingled aesthetic gratification and sympathetic misery as the Great War. Up and down Britain in August 1914, thousands upon thousands of literarily inclined young men volunteered, their heads filled with rousing warlike poetry and dreams of leading a heroic charge, only to be mowed down by machine guns, or else survive years hunkered in the mud, shells bursting overhead, to produce the first great anti-war poetry. Or so the traditional narrative, bemoaned by historians but enduringly popular, goes. Yet the soldiers’ responses to their experiences were diverse, complex, and — for the first time — profusely and skillfully recorded. History is in constant danger of being smothered under its own weight, the known course of future events squeezing the life from earlier moments that had been lived with possibility, the familiar story retold until we only remember the parts that fit its conclusion. But how did those idealistic fools become those bitterly wise poets? And did they all, really? With the centennial of the war almost upon us, wouldn’t it be interesting to re-read the war from the beginning, rather than looking back down upon it from the height of all of our learned interpretations? What if one were to read heaps of personal histories all together, following perhaps a few dozen of the most rewarding writers from the beginning of the war to the end, at a distance of exactly a century? It could be a chorus of many different voices, a symphonic literary history. This idle thought became a big project, acenturyback.com, a blog that will slowly build into a new way of reading — or re-experiencing, in real time — the Great War: every day a piece of writing produced a century ago, or a description of events befalling one of the writers on that day. Hard on the heels of the idea came a dirty little ambition: I wanted to discover a previously unrecognized coincidence. If I was going to read a hundred memoirs, I should find two poets passing in the night on some doomed trench raid, and no scholars yet the wiser. Perhaps I still will. But it turns out — although it’s only June and Franz Ferdinand is still safe and sound—that the centennial of a poetic overlapping is already upon us. A century ago tonight, June 23rd 1914, was the London premiere of the Ballets Russes’ La Légende de Josephe at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Amongst the throng of aristocrats, Gilded Age millionaires, and society hangers-on were — unbeknownst to each other and, apparently, to historians — three men with poetic aspirations. Each had some idea that they needed to make a change, but none knew that this was one of the last gorgeous, oblivious nights before old Europe tore itself apart. All coincidences are “mere” coincidences, but this one can be put to good use. Read together, the three stories become a sort of prologue in a minor key to the guns of August, a rare composite view of that Last Summer — and of how it was remembered, and written. Portrait of the poet Siegfried Sassoon by Glyn Warren Philpot (1917) 2. As a matter of good history — history as it really was — the summer of 1914 was a time like most others. People went about their pleasure and their business, and most believed that common sense and the profit motive would keep a lid on international tensions. Siegfried Sassoon, who had recently rented a flat in London, was preoccupied with nothing more momentous than his stalled personal progress. He was twenty-seven, had left Cambridge without a degree, and never held a job, and he had lost money on each new volume of flowery and outdated verses — a gentleman flâneur, or, in plainer contemporary idiom, a slacker. He now planned to live off of family money while working hard on his poetry, yet he was so unproductive and so short on funds that he would give up the flat in July and return home to Kent. Poetry remained a calling, but, until Sassoon’s muse awakened under fire, literature was far from a career. Strangely, the war would transform Sassoon first into an aggressive fighter — he won the military cross “for conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches” — and then into the author of now-canonical protest poems. But it was his public refusal to return to action — motivated by his belief that soldiers were needlessly suffering for unworthy and ill-defined political goals — that would bring him an unusual fame. Instead of being punished, Sassoon was treated for “shell-shock” and eventually chose to return to combat. In June 1914, however, none of this had yet come to pass. Sassoon was adrift, but he had found his way under the wing of Eddie Marsh, private secretary to Winston Churchill and ubiquitous fixer-and-connector of London’s young painters and poets. Marsh bought or published their work, fed them, even put them up in his spare room — come August, his day job would make him all too useful for poets in search of a military commission. By day, then, Siegfried mooned about London, pretending to work or taking aimless strolls (he was mortified to run into a lonely, elderly friend at the zoo...two days in a row). As for the evenings, he had scant acquaintance with opera and none with the ballet, but he could follow directions. On the afternoon of June 23rd, as Sassoon later wrote: I had now reached what appeared to be the zenith of my London season. For I was hurrying home to boil myself a couple of eggs and thereafter to emerge in full evening dress to attend a Gala Performance of the Russian Ballet... ...What the Russian Ballet would be like I had no notion… [I had said to Eddie Marsh] that I wasn't particularly keen about ballets because nothing much ever seemed to happen in them...His pained and reproachful retort — ‘But it's simply the most divine thing in the world!’ had given me the needed stimulus, and I'd made a start by securing a central stall for the London première of The Legend of Joseph. This I obtained by luck — the box-office chancing to have a returned ticket when all the seats had been sold. Richard Strauss, who had written the music, was to conduct, and a youthful dancer named Léonide Massine would be making his début. This is impressive ignorance, given that the Ballet Russes, under Diaghilev, were scarcely a year removed from that quintessential succès de scandale, Le Sacre du Printemps.  Although Sassoon was soon hooked on ballet, his account of the evening focuses (as much of his memoirs do) on his inexperience and his anxiety about his social position. It was rather as if I had arrived uninvited at an enormous but exclusive party. Borne along by the ingoing tide of ticket-holders, I seemed to be surrounded by large smiling ladies with bejewelled bosoms who looked like retired prima-donnas and whose ample presences were cavaliered by suave grey-haired men who might possibly be successful impresarios. They all seemed to know one another... Sassoon goes on to describe the post-performance posing of London’s glitterati: Eddie Marsh being the only person among the scintillating audience whom I had any likelihood of knowing, I now set out on a self-conscious cruise in quest of him. Before long I caught sight of him standing at the top of a flight of steps. He was in monocled conversation with a couple of brainy-looking young men in dowdy dinner jackets, to whom I was introduced without quite grasping their names. One of these young men, “in that see-saw intonation which has since become known as ‘the Bloomsbury voice’” snarkily opined that the “décor was surely Berlin-Veronese at its most meretricious.” Poor Sassoon! Out of his depth among such cognoscenti, he “duly assimilated the word ‘daycore’” and went home “feeling a bit lonely.” The funny thing is that one of those names he couldn’t quite grasp may have been “Osbert Sitwell.” Osbert Sitwell as Apollo in Boris Anrep’s “The Awakening of the Muses” (1933) 3. Osbert Sitwell was then only twenty-one, another aimless scion of moneyed country gentry with a troubled family history. This family was both much grander — Osbert would eventually succeed his father as the fifth baronet Sitwell — and more comprehensively screwed-up: Lady Ida had recently been imprisoned for fraud, and Sir George, was so thoroughly eccentric that he exceeded even the standards of the English aristocracy in off-hand cruelty toward his children. Yet privilege has its privileges, and Osbert knew many of the “best” and richest people in society, who provided him with a smooth entrée into the world of high art. For Sitwell, 1914 marked his personal discovery of avant-garde art. By the time June rolled around he had spent his allowance and gone deeply into debt, but he was no longer aimless — he knew that he wanted to make a career in Modern art. The one thing he didn’t want to be was a soldier — which, of course, he was. His father had decided, several years before, that Osbert needed what we might now call “more structure.” So, naturally, he arranged an army commission, without — in Osbert’s telling — his son knowing a thing about it. Which is very hard to believe. In any event, the younger Sitwell was now an officer in the Grenadier Guards, a position that did indeed provide structure, just not quite enough: his occasional changing-of-the-guard duties before Buckingham Palace left plenty of time for artistic exploration and social mountaineering. When the war begins, then, Lieutenant Sitwell will see combat much sooner than most. He, too, was moved to verse by his months on the Western Front, although his war poems are few and relatively slight. Still, as uniformed literary gadflies, it was natural that he and Sassoon would (again) cross paths, and they did indeed became friends. In the summer of 1918, Osbert will even host a lavish lunch for Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Sitwell and Sassoon worked together on anthologies and journals after the war, but Osbert and his siblings (the future Dame Edith and their younger brother Sacheverell) soon fashioned themselves into central figures of the Modernist movement. This all became too outré for Sassoon, who broke off the friendship. But all this, again, lay in the future. Right now — a hundred years ago — Osbert was playing the Misfit Subaltern by day and gorging on high culture by night. Sitwell was, both naturally and deliberately, a huge snob. He was also a self-mythologizer and a name-dropper. His memoirs are, therefore, very amusing to read, although as an entertainment rather than as capital-L Literature — they provide nothing like the carefully composed ruminations on memory and loss that make Sassoon worth lingering over. When Sitwell writes of 1914 he is seeking not to rediscover his callow younger self but rather to portray the young artist — and all of his famous artist friends — on the first rungs of their climb to greatness: On June 23rd, I was present at the initial appearance of a great new dancer... Massine...in after years a valued friend of my brother and myself. La Légende de Josephe, in which he first danced, had been designed as a spectacle, rather than a ballet, to the music of Richard Strauss. In it, figures costumed by Léon Bakst, and such as might have been portrayed by the brush of Paolo Veronese, feasted in an enormous scene, pitched, at a hazard, halfway between Babylon and Venice... That very same comparison to Veronese! Could Sitwell, then, have been the languid blueblood that overawed Sassoon with his description of the “daycore”? It certainly sounds like him. Or could this be a clue to a literary conspiracy? Is Sassoon referring to Sitwell without using his name, twitting his pretensions with a memory dating from before their friendship? It would be tempting to think so if it were not so completely out of character for Sassoon — or, rather, so against the grain of the polite, fervently inward personality of the narrator of his memoirs. Did Sitwell, then, remember meeting Sassoon? He should have: Sassoon came from a disinherited branch of a famously wealthy family. He considered himself more a Kentish Thornycroft than an exotic Jewish Sassoon, but new acquaintances often assumed that he was one of those high society Sassoons. How could Sitwell fail to mark a man with such a noteworthy name? Yet, by the same token, if he had remembered it he surely would have dropped it for us. So, alas, they were probably not introduced that night. And yet they may have come very close indeed. Bear with me for a moment. Sitwell is at pains to tell us that, while he immediately recognized these new geniuses, most of the true artists in London were not yet clued in to the ballet. (This is a silly claim, since we can now put two other poets there that night, and it is likely that Rupert Brooke came to the next performance.) Nor did “the nodding tiaras and the white kid gloves” who did attend — and pay for — the spectacle understand what they were seeing. But, since the rich do throw great parties, Osbert Sitwell, who spans both worlds like a foppish colossus, will now jauntily slide from lecturing us on Important Art to gossiping about the biggest after-parties of the season, affairs hosted by the likes of Lady Ripon, Lady Cunard, and Lady Speyer, at which Debussy and Diaghilev rubbed shoulders with London’s elite. It was to Lady Speyer’s vulgar nouveau riche mansion (oh yes indeed — the description is Sitwell’s; he also calls Lady Speyer “lacking...in the power of self-criticism” and fails to mention that she had been an accomplished professional violinist) that Strauss brought a Tyrolean band, to the annoyance of her neighbors. Let’s return now to Sassoon, lonely and headed home: On my way out of the theatre it had seemed as if everyone except me must be ‘going on somewhere else’. In the foyer there had been a conspicuous group of young people… one of them had rapturously exclaimed that ‘the party was sure to be marvelous fun and food’. Handsome and high-spirited, they had made me wish that I were going with them, even though they were behaving as if they’d bought the whole place. If I were a real rich Sassoon I should probably have been one of them, and should have talked to titled ladies in tiaras and bowed to ambassadors in boxes. Even the tiaras! And why wouldn’t the ambassador attend a premiere conducted by a famous German composer? And what could be more natural than that Lady Speyer — titled, surely tiara’d, and, though American by birth, the daughter of a German officer and the wife of a financier of German-Jewish ancestry—would later play host to both? When Siegfried, then, is home alone, reflecting that “somewhere in that London summer night a grand party was being given in honor of the famous German composer to whose applause I had contributed my clapping,” it’s likely that Osbert is hanging about that very party. If he was, the coincidence is so sharp that it seems like a new sort of historical irony, an actual historical accident that out-writes the best writers. Instead of two separate stories of a young man and the ballet, we now have a stereoscopic image of two poets nearly colliding, then going on their way, one borne off with the society swells, the other headed home to wallow in loneliness and think of poetry. This is even better “Last Summer” spin than Sassoon’s song of his own innocence or Sitwell’s clever invocation of Venice and Babylon — cities famous, respectively, for over-decorated decline and ruinous fall — as he segues from disappointing ballet to uproarious party. And yet: the very end of Sassoon’s chapter pulls us back to this moment. What is his younger self thinking, lying in bed that night? “Better for youth to be falling asleep with a snatch of Papillons still dancing in his head than to be acquiring disillusionment in that dazzling limbo of the coldly clever, the self-seeking, and the faithless.” Was this thought thought in 1914, or placed in an innocent 1914 mind by the experienced, memoir-writing man more than a quarter-century later? By then Sassoon had long been committed to writing in a backward-looking pastoral style that can be read as an extended rear-guard action against the onslaught led by the Sitwells, a fighting retreat in defense of the traditional decencies of English poetry. Damn those cold, self-seeking Sitwells: and perhaps the pendulum should begin to swing back from skepticism and coincidence toward credence and conspiracy... Edward Thomas, circa 1905 4. This return to good English nature poetry can carry us to Edward Thomas, whose life was then so different from either Sassoon’s or Sitwell’s that the roles of social butterfly and melancholy poet seem suddenly like child’s play. Thomas was thirty-six, living in a country cottage with his three children and his heroically supportive wife Helen, whom he no longer loved. They had married young — and pregnant — and though each came from the educated middle class, they had been legitimately poor, their lives hard. Thomas struggled for years to support his family with his writing, and although he survived bouts of crippling depression to produce dozens of books of criticism and nonfiction — much of it written in swift, striking prose — he saw this as hack work that had prevented him from writing something lasting. Thomas felt like a failure. Yet when he was reasonably healthy he realized he was lucky not only in his wife but in his friends. These included several of the “Georgian Poets” — their work recently anthologized by Eddie Marsh — who had settled near the village of Dymock, Gloucestershire. Thomas at times participated in their unique version of ad hoc communal living, which seems to have been something like a half-realized William Morris tract: long walks and arguments, spurts of agricultural labor, children and guests running freely through various houses, and many perplexed stares from the locals. Thomas believed that the poetry of the Edwardian age was tired and in need of a new direction, and he found confirmation of this in the poetry of Robert Frost, who had brought his family to England in 1912 and later rented a house in the same area. Frost and Thomas soon became fast friends, not least because of the hand-in-glove match between Frost’s new work and Thomas’s theories about the need for a more natural poetic idiom—later this summer Thomas will be giving Frost’s North of Boston several rave reviews. A few weeks before the night of the premiere, though, he had done something courageous, considering his personal demons: he had confessed, in a letter to Frost, that he, too, wanted to be a poet. Thomas had only dabbled in verse before, but he too was close, now, to turning away from a disdained career and rededicating himself to poetry. It took a few months, but by early 1915, even as he began to feel crippling pressure to enlist, poetry was flowing freely from Thomas’s pen. And then he did enlist, and went to war, and was killed by a heavy caliber shell on Easter Monday, 1917. There are scarcely two years between the first poem and the last, but this was enough time for Thomas to emerge as a major poet. Thomas based several of his first poems on observations jotted down in notebooks during the summer of 1914. In fact, the trip to London to see the ballet (though not the ballet itself) ended up providing the kernel of his most beloved poem. Another friend of Thomas’s now enters the story — Eleanor Farjeon, a poet and a quiet sort of free spirit who later became a prolific author, largely of children’s literature. She had met Thomas not long before and fallen in love with him. He, it would seem, valued not just her friendship and critical faculties but something in that love itself. This should be the beginning of a bad story. But it’s not — only a strange one. Eleanor frequently stayed with the Thomases, and her feelings were obvious. But Helen Thomas seemed to believe that, since Edward showed no sexual interest in Eleanor, the disproportionate attraction would strengthen the family bond rather than strain it. Eleanor became a valued reader and editor of Edward’s work, and the two women remained friends long after the death of the man they had both loved, each writing memoirs. In Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, Farjeon includes several of the letters Thomas wrote to her: My dear Eleanor We are just starting for Ledbury and are in a real hurry. Last night by the way we were at the ballet and one of the nicest things in that hot air was Joan Thorneycroft [sic] who transpired. Also Thamar, Papillons and Joseph which I liked in that order… Helen and I are Yours ever Edward Thomas So Edward and Helen Thomas, too, were in the audience at the Theatre Royal that night. And what did he make of it? Well, not much—at least not directly. Who knows if he would have, like Sitwell and Sassoon, re-written a night at a “spectacle, rather than a ballet,” (the words are Sitwell’s) into a prime example of the artistic indulgences of the belle époque. It would have been hard to resist: It included a magnificent banquet which was the most sumptuous spectacle I had ever seen; and altogether I felt that I’d got rather more than a guinea’s-worth of gorgeousness… it is possible that I unconsciously realized that The Legend of Joseph—as was generally admitted afterwards—had been rather a heavy affair—a grandiose failure, in fact. The date of its production subsequently suggested that Belshazzar’s Feast would have been a more appropriate subject for everyone concerned. Many people must have looked back on that evening as ‘epitomizing the end of an epoch.’ This is Sassoon, who, when not focusing on his own experience, inevitably places the performance in the larger context of the Last Summer, alongside the heat, the parties, the preoccupation with Ireland and the Suffragettes, and the indifference, five days later, to news of the assassination of some Archduke somewhere. 5. This is why a forgettable ballet can be so memorable: like any collective memory, it can be put to different personal uses. For Sassoon, it was at once an initiation and a confirmation of a wan sort of outsider status; for Sitwell, only one star-studded night among many; for Thomas, the gift of a trip to London—a night out, but also a day away. And yet the ballet caused at least one ripple that did not subside into anecdote— Thomas did look back on that trip to London. They had to get back to the country afterwards, and the letter to Eleanor Farjeon, written from his parents’ house the next morning is perhaps the last thing he wrote before catching the train home. Later that day, stopped at an obscure village station, Thomas scrawled a few lines in his notebook: Then we stopped at Adlestrop, thro the willows cd be heard a chain of blackbirds songs… looking out on grey dry stones between metals & shiny metals & over it all the elms willows & long grass—one man clears his throat—and a great rustic silence. In January, Thomas returned to this notebook and wrote “Adlestrop,” one of the great poems of the English countryside. But it’s a poem of sense-memory, not immediate impressions, a look back from the war’s first winter at a vanished summer. Its four stanzas are the transmutation, by time, of simple observation into elegy. Beginning “Yes, I remember Adlestrop,” the poet recalls that view:  And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky.  Thomas might not have loved his night at the ballet, and he did not live to write a memoir of those last days of peace—but he remembered Adlestrop. 6. There is one final footnote to tack onto the historical record: Sassoon was wrong in thinking that Eddie Marsh was the only person he “had any likelihood of knowing” that night. The Joan Thornycroft mentioned in Thomas’s letter was engaged to Eleanor Farjeon’s brother—and she was Sassoon’s first cousin. Did she go along with Helen and Edward, or is it just possible that she attended with her cousin, “transpired” to say hello, and was later churlishly forgotten or mercilessly written out of Sassoon’s lonely-boy memory-story?  No—there’s no real reason to imagine such an odd omission. Besides, it’s much nicer to believe in the complete coincidence of Marsh, Thornycroft, Sitwell, Sassoon, and the Thomases coming altogether for an evening at the ballet—and in my being the first to notice.  A small world, and a salutary coincidence, a reminder, here at the centennial-season starting line, of the difference between the uncertain angularity of history as it is lived and the voluptuous story-shape of history as it was written up afterward. Looking back on June, what they wrote about was not a mediocre ballet but a last banquet of the doomed, not an ordinary London summer, but rather a lovely, sun-dappled paradise headed all-unknowing for total eclipse. Notes for Further Reading: The first thing to read would be the poetry: all three poets are represented together in many anthologies of First World War Poetry, including the newer Penguin and the Everyman, while both Sassoon and Thomas are published in manageable Collected Works (Sitwell’s verse is not worth sustained reading). As for the memoirs, Sitwell may be a minor poet, but his five volumes of autobiography, beginning with Left Hand! Right Hand!, are certainly lively, if out of print. The third volume, Great Morning!, is quoted from above, while Laughter in the Next Room has several friendly anecdotes, from the post-war years, involving Sassoon. Thomas left no memoirs, but there are Helen Thomas’s, collected in Under Storm's Wing, and Eleanor Farjeon’s Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, from which the Adlestrop-day letter is quoted. The quotation from Thomas’s notebook is found in Matthew Hollis’s excellent Now All Roads Lead to France. All in all, Sassoon’s six volumes of memoirs, which appeared between 1928 and 1945, are the most interesting sustained literary wrestling match with the war. The first three are fictionalized in a very odd way (they can be found as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, and have recently been individually republished), while the next three go back to the beginning in a more open and literary way. The middle volume of this second trilogy, The Weald of Youth, contains the descriptions of the unfateful night at the ballet. For more on Sassoon’s unusual memoirs, see here—there are also short introductions to Thomas, Sitwell, Brooke, and MarshWhile I haven’t found anyone remarking upon the double coincidence of the three poets (Kirsty McLeod’s The Last Summer records both Sitwell and Sassoon’s comments on the ballet, but does not mention the fact that they seem to have gone the same night; I don’t think anyone has noticed that Thomas was there too) the obsession with poets crossing each other’s paths is harbored by many others—there’s even an odd book all about it (Harry Ricketts’s Strange Meetings). The most famous convergence of the poets is that of Sassoon—now playing the grizzled, urbane, and experienced hero/protester/poet—and the shell-shocked and as-yet-unpublished Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital. This became the starting point for Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, an unusually powerful intertwining of history and fiction. For a more careful consideration of the possibility that Sassoon remembers Sitwell’s presence and is covertly mocking him, or for notes on my far-from-exhaustive efforts to find previous references to this coincidence, see today’s entry on the A Century Back blog.