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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 Year in Reading: Lincoln Michel

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My first book, Upright Beasts, came out this year. As I answered the standard interview questions about influences, I realized that many of my biggest influences are writers whom I actually haven’t read in many years. So I decided to dedicate much of my year in reading to revisiting two authors who are central in my own personal canon: Italo Calvino and Kōbō Abe. My Calvino revisiting was actually prompted by an article I was assigned, a reader’s guide to the great Italian fabulist for the (now sadly defunct) Oyster Review. Calvino is an author I read extensively in high school and college. He was one of the first authors who taught me that fiction could be both artistic and just plain fun at the same time. There were a couple of his works I’d never gotten around to, and this year I read them. The best of these previously unread books were Marcovaldo and The Nonexistent Knight. The former is a collection of interlinked stories about a poor laborer in an industrial Italian city. It features everything I remember loving about Calvino. The book is at times truly hilarious and at other times philosophical. His style is honed, but doesn’t overwhelm the stories. And the book is conceptual -- the chapters are organized by seasons -- without being gimmicky. Most of all, it was just a joy to read. The Nonexistent Knight is a short novel that is sometimes grouped with two other short novels, The Baron in the Trees (my personal favorite Calvino) and The Cloven Viscount, as a book called Our Ancestors. All three are historical fables that take a simple but absurd premise and run with it until it becomes something magical. The Nonexistent Knight, as its title implies, tells the tale of a knight who doesn’t really exist, but appears in reality as an empty suit of armor out of pure faith in the holy cause of Charlemagne. This premise could be a great four-page Donald Barthelme or Jorge Luis Borges short story, but Calvino’s wizardry somehow makes it work as a novel. Kōbō Abe is an author who utterly floored me with his existential and absurdist novel The Woman in the Dunes. It immediately became one of my favorite novels, and I also devoured the bizarre science fiction nightmare novel Inter Ice Age 4. This year, I read three novels -- each unique and fantastic -- by the author commonly dubbed the Japanese Kafka: The Box Man, Secret Rendezvous, and The Ruined Map. Like Calvino, I felt he held up, with one caveat: the female characters in those first two books were too often overly sexualized and underdeveloped. That problem aside, Abe’s novels really do have the dark humor and nightmarish reality of the best of Franz Kafka’s work. I was also impressed by the genre range that Abe displays across these three books. The Box Man is a philosophical mystery about a man who lives inside of a giant cardboard box before his box is stolen. It has an inventive metafictional structure where the words you read are allegedly written -- in different pens and pencils -- by the narrator…or possibly multiple narrators. Secret Rendezvous is the most straightforwardly Kafkaesque of the three, with a character trying to find his wife in a labyrinthian hospital controlled by an absurd bureaucracy. It also has some bizarre body horror elements, such as a man who turns himself into a horse by stitching another man’s legs and penis onto his body. The Ruined Map is a hardboiled detective novel, albeit one still taking place in an off-kilter, absurd world. Both of these authors remind me that you can truly do anything in fiction as long as you have the willingness to let your eye look at whatever it wants to gaze upon, no matter how bizarre. For contemporary books, I started the year reading the novel that was perhaps the best literary novel of 2014: Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper. Zink’s prose is totally fearless and alive. I loved every page. More from A Year in Reading 2015 Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

The Scientifically Surreal, Eerily Erotic Novels of Kobo Abe

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1. Kobo Abe's misshapen world accommodates the corny tropes of thriller, adventure and detective fiction. It accommodates lengthy philosophical ruminations on identity, self-image and the loss or fragmentation thereof. It accommodates an impotent hospital director who grafts the severed lower half of a well-endowed underling to his own back in order to transform himself into a sexually superpowered centaur and thus better pleasure a blob-like thirteen-year-old girl bedridden by her slowly dissolving bones. Already, the mind reels. If Abe's body of work has room for an image like that, where exactly are its boundaries? If you're unfamiliar with the man's books, I'd forgive you for imagining the heaving epics of an undisciplined maximalist, novels where ridiculousness piles upon grotesquerie until both text and reader collapse. What's more, Abe would seem to replace the relative asexuality of those books with grim, elaborate perversion. But Abe's are relatively slim, aesthetically spare volumes, untainted by baroque language and puerile impulses toward fantasy. His novels, at least the eight currently available in English translation, mix a pinch of weirdness into a grayish medium of the mundane, the concrete and the scientific. But Abe's flavor of weirdness, which nobody has yet replicated, is pungent indeed. 2. The Nature of This Weirdness Recalling the time he read Abe's The Box Man, young lit figure Tao Lin writes: "I think after 80 pages the book becomes some kind of 'meta' thing that focuses on 'sexual fetishes'/'narrative reliability issues.'" Of a set of Abe novels that includes Secret Rendezvous, the province of that boneless girl-loving horse-man, David Auerbach writes: "They don't seem like successes, and it's not easy to say that they succeed on their own terms, because they don't appear to have their own terms. Calling them pretentious is besides the point, since the books don't have a pretense towards anything in particular. Psychological and and political intimations turn out to be complete blinds; what mostly flows out of the books is deep, total sickness." I'm no academic, but my approximation of an academic definition of the Abean sensibility would be "the realistic, rational observation of banal settings and banal personalities gradually drained of logic and thus dissolved into absurd decadence." The Typical Abe Protagonist (TAP), perhaps a shoe salesman or a schoolteacher, gets swept up, by little fault of his own, into potentially alarming circumstances. Maybe he's importuned to find an unusual missing person; maybe he misses the last bus home; maybe leaves begin growing from his flesh. Unflustered, and indeed unflusterable, he calmly formulates hypotheses meant to solve his problem. As the TAP methodically tests, rejects and reforumulates these hypotheses, the problem worsens, grows less comprehensible and forks off into a bouquet of new obstacles. By the end, he's made peace with his situation, become too psychologically fragmented and untethered to respond, found himself in a world that's lost its own bearings or experienced some combination thereof. This crude boiling-down admits exceptions — some specific Abe protagonists get themselves into trouble, for instance, or fail to take the obvious action to circumvent the whole mess — but its broad strokes align with the actual work. I can't overstate the Scientific Method rigidity of the TAP's thought process. Whether laconic hired investigator, obese survivalist or the cardboard-clad bum, Abe's narrators all possess a quasi-Aspergian attention to detail and unshakable faith in causality. Yet the mechanisms of causation in Abe's world don't merit the kind of trust we've given those in ours, though the TAP offers it, generously. "Even in the world of the absurd," David Keffer writes in his study of Abe, "the scientist persists. He attempts to make sense of his surroundings using logic and scientific reasoning. Of course, it is hopeless to think that the irrational can be described in terms of the rational, but this thought never dawns on the protagonist." 3. The Extent to Which Kobo Abe's Tone is "Wooden" Keffer points out a "heaviness intrinsic to Abe's work" which "takes the form of detailed and laborious description of the psychological mechanisms by which a brain, properly trained, perceives and reacts to the world." As Proust steps us through all the subjective details of recalling the memories evoked by that cookie, the TAP steps us through the subjective details of every major decision and observation he makes — and a lot of the minor ones, too. The effect is at once deeply familiar and pretty damned alien. Part of this could have to do with translation, conceived as all of Abe's novels were in Japanese. As such, they're almost entirely devoid of U.S.-style irony — one of the few Western innovations Japan, blessedly, never got around to replicating — and possess the simultaneous economy of words and slight excess of formality you hit in other translated texts of all well-known 20th-century Japanese novelists except maybe Kenzaburo Oe. Whether this commonality of voice comes from the mechanics of Japanese-to-English translation, the customs of Japanese fiction or the Japanese language itself I'm not equipped to determine. What I can tell is that, when you express the equanimous, analytical mindset of the TAP through such distanced language, what you get is aesthetically polarizing, writing that either compels you in a way you can't pin down or stokes discomfort somewhere deep in your viscera. Abe's detractors mutter "Something's very wrong here — but what?" Abe's fans mutter "Something's very right here — but what?" 4. Relatively Sane Works "You ever see that movie Woman in the Dunes?" asks Kenny Shopsin, the intense, foul-mouthed New York restaurateur in Matt Mahurin's I Like Killing Flies, the documentary that profiles him. He compares his own days, spent filling customers' orders that only pile up again, and the "hero" of the film's, spent shoveling sand that only piles up again. Abe's stories tend to provoke a great deal of talk about symbol, allegory, metaphor and suchlike, about which more later. This particular story has reached surprisingly far and wide, more so than anything else in his bibliography. If someone knows the name Kobo Abe, chances are they know Woman in the Dunes, published in Japanese in 1962 and English in 1964. Much of this surely owes to Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1964 film adaptation, the vehicle by which it made its way to Mr. Shopsin. Identification must also play a role: so many of its readers and viewers seem awfully quick to point out the resemblances between themselves and the hapless insect enthusiast who travels to a remote seaside village only to find himself imprisoned in a shack at the bottom of a pit, doomed to perpetually remove the ever-falling-in sand at the behest of the widow who lives there. Comparisons to modern work, marriage, etc. hang low, but the particularities — the joint on a beetle's leg, the sadistic villagers' ragged edges, the omnipresent sand grains themselves — hinder generalization by being drawn so closely and so objectively. Following two years on in the English as well as the Japanese, The Face of Another presents three notebooks — scribbling in notebooks being a very, very common pursuit among Abe narrators — of a scientist who, badly disfigured by a liquid oxygen explosion, labors over an advanced mask he believes will grant him reintroduction into society. The broader goal narrows to the specific one of using his newly unfamiliar appearance to seduce his own wife. The majority of the text comprises the scientist's thoughts, which he thinks hard and often, about his disconnect with humanity, the function of faces themselves, and what happens to identity when you alter the surface. He's not nuts, exactly; just kind of obsessive and pedantic, but you get the feeling that the intersection of his training, situation and inclinations may actually warrant it. On Japanese shelves three years before Woman in the Dunes but held until 1970 elsewhere, Inter Ice Age 4 is as close to the mainstream as the English-translated Abe gets. Ostensibly a science fiction novel about the consequences of future-prediction machines — the wider the knowledge of a prediction, the more the actual future deviates from the prediction, and thus the greater the necessity for an additional prediction, and then another, and another — it feels much more Abe-like upon introducing an emotionless race of biologically engineered aquatic human children, gills and all. As something less than a fan of sci-fi, I consider this Abean take on its clichés somewhat "above" the genre. Considered only within the Abe oeuvre, it's hard to say whether it's underappreciated or just minor. 5. Less Sane Works At first, 1967-in-Japanese and 1969-in-English's The Ruined Map seems, like Inter Ice Age 4, to be a genre exercise. It's told by a loner private eye in search of a distraught, hard-drinking dame's missing husband, and though a host of noir icons surface, it soon becomes evident that the novel will swerve, and hard, out of the well-worn grooves of detective fiction. His clues, a coffee shop's matchbook and the title's incomprehensible map, prove fabulously unhelpful. Only by coming assuming the vanished man's identity does he get on what may or may be the right track, leading straight through his grimy urban Japan into the core of a menacing sex ring. But by that point, he's well into the process of forgetting who he is or is supposed to be, let alone who he's after. Here we have two variables that, through Abe's novels, tend to rise inexorably and together: bizarre eroticism and the dissolution of identity. Though Abe is rarely topical, it makes sense that he'd seize the 1980s aftershock of Cold War panic and/or apocalyptic resignation to throw a TAP into the culture of fallout shelters, stockpiling and the post-nuclear winter Earth. The Ark Sakura's slovenly, illegitimately born central character, who goes by the equally undesirable nicknames "Pig" or "Mole" but prefers the latter, has converted an abandoned quarry into a well-supplied "ark" meant to ferry its inhabitants safely through mutually assured destruction. Lacking friends or family — he compares himself to the eupcaccia, a fictional self-contained bug that feeds on its own feces — he simply recruits a local merchant and a couple of his shills. Predictably, a power struggle develops, sublimated for one hilariously extended period into a tacit competition between the men over who can most powerfully slap the female shill's rump. By the book's final sentence, it's clear — as clear as Abe's endings get — that Pig/Mole has released his grip on reality or else never had it in the first place, but this is less the story of psychological and plain old logical breakdown than that of a high-minded mandate's bloat into farce. The later scenes of the book get Pig/Mole's leg stuck in his futuristic toilet, seemingly inextricably, as his "crew" looks on and debates just flushing him down. 6. Insane works I don't how what happened in the 1970s, but something made it the decade when Abe would write a trio of novels eccentric by even his own standards. The Box Man, published in Japanese in 1973 and English the next year, presents itself as the notebooks, natch, of a man who withdraws from proper society to live in a cardboard box, thus joining the ranks of the "box men." These aren't garden variety winos huddled inside refrigerator boxes for nighttime warmth but enterprising voluntary recluses who trick out their cardboard shells, which they remain inside at all times, with stabilization devices, equipment racks and viewing windows. What begins as a detailed how-to on the construction of an ideal box's man home and a treatise on the unique challenges and advantages box manhood subtly transforms into a disorienting narrative kaleidoscope. There might not just be one box man narrating; maybe there are a bunch. And maybe one of them is you, the reader. Whoever's doing the writing, they have strongly held, difficult-to-understand ideas about what exactly constitutes the identity of a "real" box man and what constitutes the identity of a "fake" one, and how either identity is gained, lost, stolen or bought. Like The Ruined Map, Secret Rendezvous, out in Japanese in 1977 and English in 1979, launches into a hunt for a missing spouse that, starting out futile and growing ever more so, quickly falls into irrelevance. Over the course of (what else but) several notebooks, the narrator documents his quest for his disappeared wife, snagged in the wee hours by a seemingly legitimate ambulance — except, in perfect health, she hadn't called for one. Abe is frequently compared to Kafka, and this book is Exhibit A: scouring the vast, awkwardly-constructed hospital where his wife was supposedly deposited, he's enervated by layers of meaningless regulation and thousands of hours of excessive surveillance material to sift through. Abe being Abe, the machinations of a clandestine sex-tape racket run out of the complex's hidden wings and there is a climactic, as it were, electronically-assisted orgasm contest for which I lack the word count to do justice. Also written in the 1970s but unpublished until the 1990s, Kangaroo Notebook, Abe's final complete novel, is his most thoroughgoingly surreal. The son of a doctor and a trained physician himself — though he only graduated med school by promising not to practice — Abe never wrote a character who didn't regret his decision to see a health care worker of any kind, for any reason. This was never more the case than with this novel's everyman, who, understandably, seeks medical attention for a patch of radishes found sprouting from his shins. Catheterized and IV'd up at the hospital, the poor fellow wakes up strapped into an animate gurney that propels him through a series of increasingly frightful settings, none connected in any obvious way to the last. He wends his way through locales including but by no means limited to an unsettling sulfur spring, an anxiety-producing department store, and a cabbage patch inhabited only by his mother's ghost. As a last work, it's a fitting distillation of the themes that have gone before: there's a little of The Ruined Map's urban anomie, a little of Woman in the Dunes' utter futility, a little of The Box Man's "narrative reliability issues" (as Lin put it) and a little of all the other books' deep suspicion of doctors and fixation on the loss of identity. Plus, he cranks the absurdity past eleven. Video game designer Hideo Kojima calls Kangaroo Notebook the prime inspiration for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Hmm. 7. What Genre Does Kobo Abe Fit Into, Anyway? Abe's some kind of hybrid between magic realist, existentialist and surrealist. That's a lot of -ists to digest in one sentence, so perhaps it's better put that he drops his characters into nightmarish, often bureaucratic scenarios which often diverge from the general nature of reality are are populated by secondary players who accept and even embrace the non sequiturs and logically-premised illogical conclusions that surround them. This sounds insufferable, but Abe practically always redeems it. He transcends the realm of incoherent nonsense with the very literal, systematic affect mentioned above. The TAP describes the otherwise inexplicable stuff found in Abe's stories in language that defines cool precision. No matter how crazy his situation, the TAP soldiers on, observing and inferring as if in laboratory conditions. More mainstream magic realism lays a similar claim: a character goes about his humdrum life in humdrum terms, but along comes a specter, faerie or supernatural phenomenon — invoked in terms just as realistic as those describing the lampposts and mailboxes lining the street. Abe takes the realism about as far as it can tolerably go, seemingly operating by the formula that every instance of the absurd, the surreal or the fantastical must be balanced by an equal amount of surrounding mundanity. 8. How This Goes on to Save Abe's Novels from the Mire of Straight-Ahead Metaphor and/or Allegory As tricky and exotic as this might sound, it's a variation on the same basic skill employed by, say, Stephen King, whose "ensouled appliances run darkly amok," as David Foster Wallace once put it, "in a world of Fritos, flatulence and trailer-park angst." But King's fabrications, no matter how grotesque or preposterous, unfailingly adhere to well-defined, if simple, internal logic. Abe's creations apparently know no such discipline, but his narrators nevertheless treat them as if they do. What's surprising is how easy it is to go along with the gag. Reviewing The Ark Sakura, Edmund White called it "a wildly improbable fable when recalled" which nevertheless "proceeds with fiendishly detailed verisimilitude when experienced from within." While not what you'd necessarily call believable, Abe's novels nevertheless deliver the kind of reality that bypasses your judgment on that level and simply forces you to process it as-is. Described as wholes, or even described in a piece like this, they sound ludicrous, like narrative stunts — maybe even like wastes of the discerning reader's time. Some enthusiasts like to read them metaphorically or allegorically, but I'd argue that's a far less interesting interpretation than simply taking them straight on. To read the works of Kobo Abe as either accretions of metaphors or of random incidents shouldn't, in my humble opinion, be possible. The amount and type of description Abe always made sure to include would seem to head that off. It's no more sensible to see in these books an archetypal drunk with an absent husband, an archetypal scarred scientist or an archetypal fallout shelter-dweller than it is to draw from them statements about the tenuousness of the individual's connection to the whole, about the dangers of medical professionals or about life's ultimate fruitlessness. These are the sort of books that are about their own particularities — or, in Abe's specific case, about his own peculiarities.