Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

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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]

Jay-Z is Not a Proudhon of Hip-Hop

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1. Everybody loves a train wreck.  This one started when Jonathan Lethem came barreling down the tracks with an essay in Harper's called "The Ecstasy of Influence," in which most of the lines were cribbed from other sources and then ingeniously stitched together to argue in favor of appropriation and against the tired old 20th-century notion that an artist owns what he or she makes ­– that dinosaur known as copyright.  Then right behind him on the same tracks came David Shields with last year's sensational freight train of a book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, an expanded echo of Lethem's themes made up of a pastiche of Shields's own words and the words of many other artists.  Among Shields's words: "Reality-based art hijacks its material and doesn't apologize." Then suddenly – watch out! – along came the little engine that could, Marco Roth chuffing down the tracks in the opposite direction with an essay in the journal n+1 called "Throwback Throwdown," in which he set out to derail the two speeding locomotives.  He called Shields's book "an authentic act of copying" that fits snugly into the "pervasive and growing fantasy of the writer as hip-hop DJ."  Roth added, "To a certain kind of white writer, engaged in the increasingly professionalized and seemingly 'nice' work of churning out novels, poems, essays and reviews, the rapper DJ comes to stand for this brazen, unapologetic appropriator, regardless of whether actual rappers think of themselves as heroes of 'copyleft,' Proudhonists of the ghetto." Once the collision took place, as you can imagine, there was a lot of twisted metal on the tracks.  But before the smoke cleared, an actual rapper, the superstar Jay-Z, plowed into the debris with a book called Decoded that cleverly turned the train wreck upside-down by showing how a master of an art form built on appropriation uses old-school literary techniques and a quaint thing called imagination to write lyrics that bristle with originality and socially potent meaning.  For good measure, Jay-Z tells the story about the time he stabbed a rival for stealing his music.  Train wrecks don't get any more perfect than this. Which brings us to the fun part.  Now we get to sift through the wreckage, counting bodies and looking for survivors. 2. I just found a survivor.  It's Michel Houellebecq, the baddest bad boy in French lit today.  All this racket about copyright and appropriation (or bricolage, sampling, collage, poaching, rip-off, homage, plagiarism, call it what you will) – it bloodied him a bit but he's actually in excellent shape.  His latest novel, The Map and the Territory, was an instant smash – until someone pointed out that Houellebecq had lifted several uncredited passages almost verbatim from Wikipedia and other websites, including an entry on how flies have sex.  The bad boy went ballistic when the word "plagiarism" was uttered.  "If those people really think that (this is plagiarism), they haven't the first notion of what literature is," he fumed.  "This is part of my method.  This approach, muddling real documents and fiction, has been used by many authors.  I have been influenced especially by Perec and Borges...  I hope that this contributes to the beauty of my books, using this kind of material."  The novel wound up winning France's prestigious Prix Goncourt. Sitting next to Houellebecq, also battered but in remarkably good shape, is a German teenager named Helene Hegemann.  Her novel about Berlin nightclub kids, Axolotl Roadkill, was a best-seller in Germany last year and was nominated for a major prize at the Leipzig Book Fair.  Then word got out that she had lifted passages from several other sources.  After admitting to "thoughtlessness" and "narcissism," an unrepentant Hegemann told Die Welt newspaper: "But for me personally, it doesn't matter at all where people get their material.  What matters is what they do with it.  If my novel is interpreted as representing our times, then it has to be recognized that the novel was created in accord with what we saw in the last decade – that is, with the rejection of all those copyright excesses and the embrace of a right to copy and to transform."  The newsmagazine Der Spiegel agreed, comparing Axolotl Roadkill to Naked Lunch and Manhattan Transfer: "Everything from newspaper articles to ads to all kinds of other texts are embedded in these foundational works of literary modernism."  In a statement released by her publisher, Hegemann added, "There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity." James Frey is slumped in a seat across the aisle.  He's not going to make it.  As far as Shields and Lethem are concerned, his fatal mistake was not that he fabricated much of his "memoir," A Million Little Pieces; it was that he went on TV and apologized for it and, to prove his contrition, allowed Oprah to pillory him publicly.  He forgot the First Commandment of the 21st Century: "Reality-based art hijacks its material and doesn't apologize."  Frey is toast. 3. Jay-Z came through without a scratch, of course, which brings us to this train wreck's central irony.  The makers of popular music have been brazen and fruitful plunderers for many years because, let's face it, there are only so many ways to arrange a simple melody and only so many ways to say "I love you" or "It's over" or "You tore my heart out and stomped that sucker flat."  While blues and jazz artists and practitioners of other more saccharine forms of pop music have been borrowing for years, hip-hop DJs were perhaps the first to revel in their piracy, though they made a point of dressing it up with the lofty word "sampling."  Being a pirate, an outlaw, a gangsta has always been central to the rapper's pose.  Jay-Z didn't need to do a lot of posing, it turns out, because he was an industrious purveyor of cocaine long before he transformed himself into a one-man corporation. The source of Decoded's fascination, for me, is not the author's projects-to-the-penthouse biographical arc, nor his tales of hustling drugs and hobnobbing with Russell Simmons and Bono and starting his own clothing line and helping turn Cristal champagne into a bling brand.  The book's fascination comes from three very different and very surprising sources. First, it's beautifully made – lavish illustrations, clever layouts and ingenious use of fonts, quality paper, plus a Warhol on the cover.  Second, and most importantly, the book allows us to peek into the tent of Jay-Z's creative process.  He begins with his epiphany, the day he heard a kid named Slate rhyming couplet after couplet before a rapt, clapping audience at the Marcy projects in Brooklyn.  Jay-Z writes that he "felt like a planet pulled into orbit by a star."  That day he started writing rhymes feverishly in a spiral notebook and poring over the dictionary to expand his vocabulary.  (This brings to mind Lewis Hyde's contention: "Most artists are converted to art by art itself.") Decoded illustrates its author's creative process by laying out song lyrics on one page, then on the facing page letting Jay-Z deconstruct (decode) the sources and meanings of the lyrics through elaborate footnotes.  It's a revelation.  On one drug-selling run to New Jersey, for instance, here's how he describes his crew watching television while they work – Watchin Erik Estrada baggin up at the Ramada.  In the corresponding footnote he writes: "There are a lot of motel references in my songs.  Hotels are where a lot of our work got done, where we bagged our powder." There's a telling reference to the made-up selves of rappers.  The lyric "They're all actors" is limned like this: "When I say that rappers are actors, I mean it in two ways: first, a lot of them are pretending to be something they're not outside the booth; second, it also means that those who are being real often use a core reality as a basis for a great fantasy, the way a great method actor like DeNiro does." Street slang is dissected.  "Spike Lees" are "the best seats in the house – in this case whether it's at the arena or in the jet."  "Sprees" are "custom rims that have internal discs that spin when the car stops, named after Latrell Sprewell...  Fun for kids, but for grown-ups, a sign that you might be trying too hard."  Sometimes the reader absorbs the method without aid of footnotes, as when the words "breakfast," "Lexus" and "necklace" cozy up to each other in a single couplet.  Jay-Z freely acknowledges that he plundered his parents' vinyl record collection, floor-to-ceiling stacks of Motown, pop, R&B, soul and funk, but the act of plundering led to his creative birth, not to mere mimicry.  “We were kids without fathers," he writes, "so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift.  We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves... Rap took the remnants of a dying society and created something new.  Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced, but we took their old records and used them to build something fresh.” The book's elaborate footnotes demolish twin misconceptions: that rappers are merely brazen, unapologetic appropriators with nothing original to say; and there's no longer such a thing as originality, just authenticity.  Jay-Z, for one, does not see himself as a hero of "copyleft" or a Proudhonist of the ghetto.  As he puts it, "I'm not a businessman.  I'm a business, man."  He's also a writer in the purest, oldest sense of the word – that is, he's someone who uses his experiences, his influences and his skill with language to say something original and new. I agree with what Michiko Kakutani wrote recently in the New York Times: "In the end, Decoded leaves the reader with a keen appreciation of how rap artists have worked myriad variations on a series of familiar themes (hustling, partying and 'the most familiar subject in the history of rap — why I’m dope') by putting a street twist on an arsenal of traditional literary devices (hyperbole, double entendres, puns, alliteration and allusions), and how the author himself magically stacks rhymes upon rhymes, mixing and matching metaphors even as he makes unexpected stream-of-consciousness leaps that rework old clichés and play clever aural jokes on the listener ('ruthless' and 'roofless,' 'tears' and 'tiers,' 'sense' and 'since')." 4. To say that rappers possess originality and that they rely on traditional literary devices is not to say that they don't – or shouldn't – borrow from other sources.  And it's not to say that writers of prose and poetry shouldn't borrow from other writers of prose and poetry and, for that matter, from rappers and jazz musicians and newspaper reporters and advertising copywriters and absolutely anyone else.  All art comes from art.  To admit this is not to concede that there's no such thing as originality any more than it's a license to borrow without attribution and then call it your own.  William S. Burroughs freely admitted that he cut up texts and re-arranged them and inserted the results in his novels.  Michel Houellebecq is free to be influenced by Perec and Borges and Burroughs (and anyone else), but I think he's making a mistake if he thinks copying from Wikipedia adds to the beauty of his books.  He's too good a writer to make such a lazy claim.  And while I agree with Helene Hegemann that what matters is not where artists get their materials but what they do with them, I believe all artists need to give up the cheap crutch of claiming that since it's all been done before, all they can hope to do is rearrange the familiar in some unfamiliar way and then call it "authenticity."  That trivializes art.  And it's stupid and wrong. Back in 1992 Cormac McCarthy told an interviewer: "The ugly fact is, books are made out of books.  The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written."  That's not to say that writers do nothing but steal from other writers; it is, rather, to admit that literature comes to us not through a writer's unfiltered experience of life, but through that experience as filtered through the things the writer has read, as well as the things the reader has read. In "The Ecstasy of Influence" Lethem writes, "The kernel, the soul – let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances – is plagiarism.  For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.  Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment.  There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.  By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote." Of course we all quote.  But if quoting is all we do, then we don't do very much.  Shields and Lethem seem to acknowledge this without fully admitting it, because they do so much more than merely quote in Reality Hunger and "The Ecstasy of Influence."  As Roth put it in his essay in n+1: "Art may be theft, as Shields likes to quote Picasso, but it doesn't follow that theft is art.  Art is not ex-nihilo, but neither is it all 'ready-mades.'"  Precisely. Lynne McTaggart, who won a plagiarism lawsuit against Doris Kearns Goodwin, acknowledged in the New York Times in 2002 that all writers are "relentless scavengers."  Then McTaggart added, "Writers don't own facts.  Writers don't own ideas.  All that we own is the way we express our thoughts... But it is important not to excuse the larger sins of appropriation.  In this age of clever electronic tools, writing can easily turn into a process of pressing the cut and paste buttons, or gluing together the work of a team of researchers, rather than the long and lonely slog of placing one word after another in a new and arresting way." I think she's right.  Shouldn't we expect novelists to do more than cut and paste Wikipedia descriptions of how flies have sex? 5. The third and final source of Decoded's appeal is the revealing story Jay-Z tells about what happened the night of December 1, 1999 at New York's Kit Kat Club.  His album Vol. 3, Life and Times of S. Carter was not due to be released for a month, but bootlegged copies were already selling on the street.  This infuriated Jay-Z.  After all, he's a business, man.  He believes that he – and he alone – should get paid for the music he makes.  When a rival record producer showed up at the club and admitted that he was behind the bootlegging, Jay-Z stabbed him twice. This violent outburst left no doubt about Jay-Z's opinion of people who hijack his material and don't apologize – and take money out of his pocket while they're at it. You might argue that bootlegging is more invasive than sampling, and that it goes way beyond the relatively benign forms of plagiarism Lethem and Shields so ingeniously espouse.  In fact, Lethem admits as much in the closing lines of his essay: "Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions.  The name of the game is Give All.  You, reader, are welcome to my stories.  They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you.  If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing." It's a seductive bill of goods, but you simply can't have it both ways.  You can't say Pay me for what's rightfully mine and feel free to rob me while you're at it.  Jay-Z, who understands the workings and the worth of originality, isn't buying this bill of goods.  Neither is Marco Roth.  Neither am I.

Will You Beat Hagiographers Please Be Quiet, Please?

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1. To get to the movie theater that's playing the new documentary about William S. Burroughs, I had to pass a six-story tenement at 170 E. 2nd St. on Manhattan's Lower East Side.  A plaque by the building's front door reads: ALLEN GINSBERG (1926-1997) Internationally acclaimed poet and Member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters lived here from August 1958 to March 1961. His signal poem Howl (1956) helped launch The Beat Generation.  Kadish (1961), a mournful elegy for his mother Naomi, was written in apartment #16. The documentary, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, taught me several things about the author of Naked Lunch and other scabrous novels that, along with Howl and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, got the Beat Generation off the launch pad.  I learned that Burroughs was fascinated by poisonous snakes, particularly when they were feeding, and he almost died when he rashly positioned a live mouse within range of a Gaboon viper's fangs.  I learned that Burroughs was a gun nut who liked to get liquored up before he started blasting, and that his beverage of choice was vodka and Coke.  (This, surely, helps explain the "accident" when Burroughs shot his wife in the head during a drunken game of William Tell in Mexico City in 1951.)  I learned that Burroughs was not much of a father either; his only son died of acute alcoholism at the age of 33.  I learned that the poet-rocker Patti Smith, who recently won a National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids, used to have a crush on Burroughs and that the cult filmmaker John Waters considers Burroughs a "saint" and that Burroughs had a hard time expressing love because he was terrified of rejection and so he usually turned to young gay hustlers for sex and finally I learned that the poet who wrote Howl and Kadish was the great unrequited love of Burroughs's life.  Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997 and Burroughs died less than four months later and A Man Within suggests, not very convincingly, that Burroughs died of a broken heart. Whew.  That's a lot of learning to get from a 90-minute documentary.  But now the question must be asked: Am I better for knowing these things – richer, wiser, closer to some essential truths about Burroughs's literary output?  Not at all.  I'm just a bit more stuffed with useless information because Yony Leyser, the writer-director of A Man Within, is a foot soldier in the army of Beat hagiographers who operate under the illusion that dissecting the personal lives of writers is essential to – even preferable to – understanding their writing.  Burroughs's writing is barely mentioned in the movie, just a quick note about how he appropriated his "cut-up" technique from the artist Brion Gysin.   For the Beat hagiographers, not only is the work never enough, it's almost beside the point.  They're in the business of erecting a cult, after all, and all cults need icons.  It's telling that A Man Within was released shortly after Howl, a documentary-feature hybrid starring the ubiquitous James Franco as the poet from apartment #16.  At least there's some poetry in Howl.  At one point an interviewer asks Franco/Ginsberg, "What is the Beat generation?"  He replies: "There is no Beat generation.  It's just a bunch of guys trying to get published." That may have been true in 1957.  No more.  Today the Beat generation is a thriving cottage industry. 2. What makes A Man Within such a dreary viewing experience is that it's largely a parade of talking heads yammering on and on about what Burroughs meant to them.  In addition to Patti Smith and John Waters, we get to hear from Iggy Pop, Jello Biafra, Laurie Anderson, David Cronenberg, Peter Weller (who played Burroughs in Cronenberg's fine 1991 film version of Naked Lunch and also does this documentary's voice-over), plus assorted lovers, writers, sycophants, enablers, academics, gun dealers, snake handlers and hangers-on. My favorite of the bunch is Regina Weinreich, who is identified as "a Beat generation scholar."  While it's no secret that the academic racketeers can turn just about anything into a "discipline," Weinreich's job description struck me as particularly delicious.  Here is a woman who was canny enough to hitch her professional wagon to the Beat caravan more than 20 years ago.  In 1986 she met Paul Bowles while teaching a creative writing workshop in Tangier, where Bowles had moved in the late 1940s.  His home there became a station of the cross on the Beats' holy itinerary.  The year after she met Bowles, Weinreich co-wrote a documentary, The Beat Generation: An American Dream, that featured archival footage of Ginsberg reading "Howl" and Kerouac reading from On the Road accompanied by Steve Allen on piano.  In 1994 Weinreich and Catherine Warnow co-directed Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider, an hour-long documentary about the author of the proto-Beat novel The Sheltering Sky.  Weinreich also wrote a critical study called Kerouac's Spontaneous Poetics and edited Kerouac's Book of Haikus.  Today she contributes to numerous periodicals, teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, talks into cameras and, for good measure, blogs at Gossip Central. Such industry is exhausting to contemplate but, it turns out, not unusual among the Beat hagiographers.  The critical studies keep coming and the documentaries keep piling up, with titles like What Happened to Kerouac?, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, The Source (a hash of TV and film clips spiced with performances by Johnny Depp as Kerouac, John Turturro as Ginsberg and Dennis Hopper as Burroughs), and One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur.  This last train wreck – people getting weepy talking about Kerouac's crack-up on the California coast – inspired Slant magazine to ask the one question that must be asked: "Who keeps inviting Patti Smith to these Beat docs?"  Writing in The Millions last year, Lydia Kiesling speculated that Smith keeps getting invited back because she's "perceived as having a never-ending fund of 'cred.'"  That must be it.  It can't possibly be that anyone still cares that she used to have a crush on William S. Burroughs. 3. I'm no fan of hagiographers, obviously, but I'm only a bit less distrustful of literary biographers.  Too often their books slide toward what Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed "pathography," which she defined as "hagiography's diminished and often prurient twin."  Its motifs are "dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct." Since we live in an age that's obsessed with personalities and celebrities, it's not surprising that so few readers are satisfied with loving a book and so many insist on knowing as much as possible about the person who wrote it.  While this appetite has inspired literary biographers to produce a long shelf of pathographies and other monstrosities – does the world really need Norman Sherry's three-volume biography of Graham Greene? – it has also resulted in some well researched and finely written literary biographies that did what such exercises do at their best: they led readers back to the subject's books.  Among these I would include Blake Bailey's recent biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever and, strangely enough, Ann Charters's thorough and balanced 1973 bio of Kerouac.  In her introduction, Charters wrote insightfully, if a bit clunkily: "The value of Kerouac's life is what he did, how he acted.  And what he did, was that he wrote.  I tried to arrange the incidents of his life to show that he was a writer first, and a mythologized figure afterward.  Kerouac's writing counts as much as his life." I would argue that his writing counts more than his life, much more.  Eventually Charters seemed to come around to my way of thinking.  In 1995, after she'd edited two fat volumes, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956 and The Portable Jack Kerouac, I interviewed her for a newspaper article.  "I wanted (the book of letters) to be a biography in Jack's own words," she told me.  "His life is in his books, but on the other hand the most essential thing is missing from those novels.  What he tells you in the letters is that the most important thing in his life is writing." At the time The Gap was using Kerouac's image – and images of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and other '50s icons – to sell its khaki pants.  In the face of such shameless hucksterism, Charters's insistence on the importance of Kerouac's writing seemed both quaint and heroic to me.  It still does today, as the hagiographers keep bombarding us with abominations like One Fast Move or I'm Gone and Howl and A Man Within. 4. In the end I must admit that "A Man Within" did teach me one thing worth knowing.  I'd spent years believing that Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote were the Holy Trinity of Shameless Self-Promoters among American writers.  (That, by the way, is not a putdown; it's a compliment laced with no small amount of envy.)  Thanks to this documentary, I now realize that Burroughs was easily their equal as a self-promoter.  This came home to me as I watched the archival footage of him rolling up his shirt sleeve and shooting dope into his left arm.  The effect on me was very different from the shiver Yony Leyser was surely hoping for.  My first thought was: No man would allow himself to be filmed shooting dope unless he was eager to package and promote his image as an outlaw. It's not hard to see why Burroughs is catnip for documentary filmmakers more than a dozen years after his death.  In his late years he became a weirdly irresistible figure – the bag-eyed, fedora- and three-piece-suit-wearing patrician junkie misanthrope with the deadpan baritone who droned on and on about the rot festering at the core of the American Dream.  He is the closest we've ever gotten to an American Jonathan Swift, and he's to be credited for shunning those who tried to idolize him, including many Beats, hippies, punks and gay libbers.  The only organization I could imagine him joining is the National Rifle Association because, as he put it, "I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed to have guns are the cops and the military."  He shrewdly burnished the Burroughs brand by branching into recording and acting, reminding us that the man who wrote Junkie and Naked Lunch could be caustically funny.  His turn as dope-hungry Tom the Priest in Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy is not to be missed, and one of the highlights of "A Man Within" is Burroughs reciting his "Thanksgiving Prayer" as Old Glory flutters behind him: "Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison...thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes...thanks for the American Dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through..."  Sadly, the documentary does not include any of Burroughs's "Words of Advice for Young People," such as, "Beware of whores who say they don't want money.  What they mean is, they want more money.  Much more." A word of advice for readers and filmgoers of all ages: Beware of hagiographers who tell you a writer's life is more important than the books he or she wrote.  It never is.  It might be diverting to watch a guy shoot dope and shoot guns and feed poisonous snakes.  But the books are more important.  Much more.

A Chiefest Pleasure: Discovering The Sot-Weed Factor on its 50th Birthday

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Some of the chiefest pleasures in a lifetime of reading fiction are those moments when you stumble upon a gem of a book you somehow missed.  This happens more often than we might care to admit because reading fiction is a lot like its distant cousin, the acquisition of knowledge: the more you do it, the less of it you seem to have done.  There's no shame in this.  Lacunae are inevitable for even the most voracious and catholic of readers.  The consolation is that the deeper you go into your life and your reading, the more precious the long-overlooked gems become once you finally unearth them. All this came to mind recently when I picked up a novel I'd been meaning to read for many years, John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor. Reading the opening words was like touching a live wire: "In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke..." I was instantly transported to another time and place, as much by the music of Barth's language – fops, fools, flitch – as by his characters and story, which were at once fantastical, venal, ribald, preposterous, plausible and flat-out hilarious.  Usually a slow reader, I galloped through the 755 pages, mystified by the criticism I'd heard over the years that Barth was a difficult and needlessly long-winded writer.  Here was a masterly act of authorial ventriloquism, a vivid recreation of the cadences and vocabulary, the mind-set and mores (or lack thereof) of English colonists in America's mid-Atlantic region in the late 1600's, when tobacco was known as sot-weed and those who sold it were known as factors.  One such man is Barth's protagonist, Ebenezer Cooke, a feckless London poet in love with his own virginity and virtue, a dewy-eyed innocent who is sent to the cut-throat Eastern Shore of Maryland to tend to his father's tobacco holdings and, in the bargain, write an epic poem about the place.  Ebenezer describes himself as "a morsel for the wide world's lions."  What a gorgeous set-up for a satire. It was only after finishing the novel that I went back and read Barth's foreword, which he wrote in 1987 for the release of a new, slightly shortened Anchor Books edition.  From the foreword I learned that The Sot-Weed Factor was originally published in the summer of 1960, when Barth was just 30, exactly 50 years before I finally came to it.  I also learned that the novel sprang from an actual satirical poem of the same title published in 1706 by an actual man named Ebenezer Cooke.  Much more interesting, I learned that this was Barth's third novel, and he originally envisioned it as the final piece of a "nihilist trilogy."  But the act of writing the novel taught the novelist something: "I came to understand that innocence, not nihilism, was my real theme, and had been all along, though I'd been too innocent myself to realize that fact." This realization led Barth to a far richer one: "I came better to appreciate what I have called the 'tragic view' of innocence: that it is, or can become, dangerous, even culpable; that where it is prolonged or artificially sustained, it becomes arrested development, potentially disastrous to the innocent himself and to bystanders innocent and otherwise; that what is to be valued, in nations as well as in individuals, is not innocence but wise experience." The dangers of innocence versus the value of wise experience.  Here, surely, is a rich theme for any American novelist trying to capture the impulses and foibles and follies of a nation convinced of its own righteousness – in love with its own virtue and virginity, if you will – a nation that historically has had little use for history and therefore has spent several centuries blundering its way, usually uninvited and ill-informed, into the affairs of other nations, beginning with the settlements of native Americans and moving on to the Philippines, Mexico, Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia and, now, Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps no other novelist has explored Barth's theme more surgically than Graham Greene did in The Quiet American.  Published at that fateful moment in the mid-1950s when the French disaster in Indo-China was giving way to the blooming American nightmare in Vietnam, Greene's novel tells the story of a world-weary British war correspondent named Thomas Fowler who can't hide his loathing for all the noisy, idealistic Americans suddenly popping up in Saigon.  He reserves special contempt for an American innocent named Alden Pyle, some sort of foreign-aid operative who shows up on Rue Catinat with a head full of half-baked theories and a heart full of good intentions.  Fowler, despite himself, begins to feel protective toward Pyle.  He muses, too late, that he should have known better:  "Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." And therefore, of course, causing all natures of harm to himself and to bystanders, innocent and otherwise.  Alden Pyle is the title character of the novel, and a perfect title it is – because you can't get any more quiet than dead. While Greene set out to illuminate the dangers of innocence in The Quiet American, Barth chose to mine its comic potential in The Sot-Weed Factor.  And so innocent Ebenezer gets captured by rapacious pirates (twice) and murderous Indians, swindled, stripped of his clothing and his name and his estate – only to wind up with his virtue, if not his virginity, intact.  His epic poem even becomes a hit.  It's one of the funniest, raunchiest, wisest books I've ever read. While I believe it's best to let fiction speak for itself, just as I doubt that an understanding of a writer's life sheds useful light on his work, I itched to know more about Ebenezer Cooke's creator and his methods.  A little digging taught me that John Barth grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where much of the action in The Sot-Weed Factor takes place, and as a young man he switched from studying jazz at Julliard to studying journalism at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.  It was there, while working in the library, that he discovered Don Quixote, Boccaccio's Decameron, Petronius's Satyricon and, most tellingly, One Thousand and One Nights. Barth became intrigued with the literary device known as the frame tale, in which a character in a story narrates the story.  For Barth, then, the telling of the story is the story.  This explains why he has called Scheherazade, the character who narrates One Thousand and One Nights, "my favorite navigation star."  She, like every writer, will survive only as long as she keeps coming up with good stories. And Barth's musical background helps explain why he channeled Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, Cervantes, Rabelais, Voltaire and other masters of the picaresque novel to arrive at the narrative voice for The Sot-Weed Factor.  "At heart I'm still an arranger," Barth once told an interviewer.  "My chiefest literary pleasure is to take a received melody" – a classical myth, a Biblical scrap, a worn-out literary convention or style – "and, improvising like a jazz musician within its constraints, re-orchestrate it to present purpose." This got me thinking about my other belated fictional discoveries.  A few stand out, including James Joyce's magisterial Ulysses, which I'd dipped into many times but never read wire to wire until a few years ago.  (What was I thinking to wait so long?)  Another was James Crumley's crime novel, The Last Good Kiss. I broke down and read it after I got tired of hearing fawning references to its immortal opening sentence – "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."  For once, the fawners nailed it. And then there was Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, which was once, according to Richard Ford, a sort of "secret handshake" among its small but devoted band of acolytes.  For better and for worse, the novel forfeited its cult status not long after I discovered it, when Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were horrifically miscast as the disgruntled suburbanites Frank and April Wheeler in the big-budget movie version of Yates's masterpiece.  The movie, for all its many flaws, worked in concert with Blake Bailey's biography of Yates to bring his work to a far larger audience than he ever enjoyed in his 66 years of life.  Even bad movies sometimes do good things for books.  It's a pity Richard Yates wasn't around to enjoy his revival. And finally there was the curious case of Flann O'Brien, an Irish writer who, like Yates, was obscure in his lifetime and will soon receive the posthumous big-screen treatment.  I first heard of Flann O'Brien (the pen name for Brian O'Nolan) when I read that Graham Greene had reacted to the humor of O'Brien's novel At Swim-Two-Birds with "the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage."  That sounded promising.  So did the discovery that Anthony Burgess, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce were also O’Brien fans.  While browsing in my neighborhood bookstore soon after making those discoveries, I happened upon the handsome Everyman's Library collection of all five O'Brien novels.  Books find us as often as we find them.  I bought the volume and swallowed it whole, each short novel more hilariously disorienting than the last.  "A very queer affair," as the author himself admitted of his life's fictional output.  "Unbearably queer perhaps." Or perhaps not.  In the forthcoming movie version of At Swim-Two-Birds, Colin Farrell has been cast as the unnamed hero, a dissolute young Irishman who is writing a novel about a man writing a novel full of characters who come to life when he's asleep (including one he conceived with one of his own female characters).  Frustrated by their maker's iron authority, they set out to destroy him and win their freedom.  On paper this might sound un-filmable, but I thought the same thing about William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, and the director-writer David Cronenberg worked cinematic magic with it.  We can only hope that Brendan Gleeson, the director of At Swim-Two-Birds, is a sharper interpreter of O'Brien's weird proto-postmodernism than Sam Mendes was of Richard Yates's blackly unblinking realism. In the end, these belated discoveries did what all good fiction does: they illuminated the world I live in, enriched its colors, deepened its music.  None moreso than The Sot-Weed Factor, because in addition to its purely literary virtues it helped me see just how different today's world is from the world that greeted the novel 50 summers ago.  Today Americans who write "serious" fiction face what the Dublin-born, New York-based novelist Colum McCann has called "the prospect of irrelevance."  When John Barth was hitting his prime in the 1960s, "serious" American writers faced no such worries.  (I place the word serious between quotation marks because no one seems to know quite what it means as a modifier of writer, unless it means someone who is after something above and beyond the most basic and necessary thing, which is, of course, money.) Among the discoveries during my brief background check on Barth was an essay by a man named John Guzlowski, who, as a grad student in the early 1970s, was drunk on then-current American fiction – not only the mainstream realism of Updike, Bellow and Roth, but all the untamed, unnamed new writing by the likes of Barth and Pynchon, John Hawkes and William Gaddis and Robert Coover, very different writers who eventually got lumped together under a vague and porous umbrella called Postmodernism.  Guzlowski went on to teach at Eastern Illinois University, where he taught a course in Postmodern Fiction half a dozen times over the course of 20 years.  "Every time I teach the class," Guzlowski writes in his essay, "there is just a little less interest in looking at Postmodern novels." He might as well have said serious novels or literary novels or novels that seek to do more than titillate or entertain.  Those things, as Colum McCann knows, are becoming harder and harder to sell to American book buyers, and the people who write them are edging closer and closer to the brink of irrelevance, which is a gentle way of saying extinction. John Barth and John Guzlowski have reminded me that this wasn’t always the case.  There was a time, not so very long ago, when serious – and funny, challenging, mind-bending – fiction was passionately read and discussed, a vibrant part of our national life.  It was a time, in Updike's phrase, when "books were a common currency of an enlightened citizenry."  Those days may be gone, and gone forever, but novels like The Sot-Weed Factor will always be with us.  And as I was happily reminded this summer, it’s never too late to discover them.

Discovering the Luz in The Paris Review Interviews

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I took a writing workshop with Diane Williams, and she had a very distinct style of editing prose. Her method was like pruning a tree: you pare the dead branches in order to let the viable parts flourish. Find the sentences that sizzle, excise them from the masses of empty phrases, rearrange them into a working narrative, and then set to work with that skeleton. At the end, if you’re lucky, the essence of the idea remains, and from this construction a better story may grow. I had Williams’s process in mind as I read the latest volume of Paris Review Interviews, not because I found the interviews lacking. The Paris Review interview remains the gold standard of literary interviews, although the results are often as varied as the authors. Donald Barthelme listed them on his essential reading list for writers, which is now passed from one generation of students to the next, like a family heirloom. Rather, I thought of Williams’s method because the authors often cover similar terrain that doesn’t set them apart. Each writer has developed method for getting the words down, is more inclined to solitude and reflection than most people, and derives a mixture of pleasure and pain from the act of writing. One can read that a writer wakes early and lives by a strict schedule only so many times before beginning to yawn. At the same time, hearing the echo of writers talking of their difficulties and triumphs with writing can provide the consolation and inspiration it takes to toil on, such as knowing that Orhan Pamuk “work[s] like a clerk” or that even Paul Auster feels stupid sometimes. These authors may also incite despair: how does one find the means to write like Pamuk, Maya Angelou, or David Grossman? Angelou rents a hotel room where she never sleeps, Pamuk spends ten hours a day writing in a flat, and Grossman writes in a one-bedroom apartment without a phone. What stands out is an author’s attitude, his sarcasm, her humor, and perhaps even his disposition on the day or days he was recorded--simply put, character. Pruning to the essential parts reveals the essence of the writer’s outlook, and small, concentrated doses can have as forceful an impact as the whole. In David Grossman’s interview, he talks about the uniqueness of a person, or the luz, a word from the Talmud: “It’s the smallest bone in your backbone, which cannot be eradicated. All of your essence is preserved in it, and from that you will be recreated in resurrection.” He sometimes asks people to close their eyes and think for a minute about what constitutes their luz. He says, “I get interesting answers.” Considering the luz, as well as Williams’s editing style--which I’m convinced is an attempt to uncover a story’s luz--I’ve culled a few quotes from the interviews in The Paris Review Interviews IV. They’re the quotes that best express the luz of these authors, at least in these interviews, at least on those days. They may not contain the entirety of each author’s character, but they’re quite revealing. William Styron: “Let’s face it, writing is hell.” “The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.” “I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late. I wish I could break the habit but I can’t. The afternoon is the only time I have left and I try to use it to the best advantage, with a hangover.” Jack Kerouac on typing the manuscript for William Burrough’s Naked Lunch in Tangier: “The first two chapters. I went to bed, and I had nightmares … of great long bolognas coming out of my mouth. I had nightmares typing up that manuscript … I said, ‘Bill!’ He said, ‘Keep typing it.’ He said ‘I bought you a goddamn kerosene stove, here in North Africa, you know.’ Among the Arabs… it’s hard to get a kerosene stove. I’d light up the kerosene stove, and take some bedding and a little pot, or kef as we called it there … or maybe sometimes hashish … there, by the way, it’s legal … and I’d go toke toke toke toke and when I went to bed at night these things kept coming out of my mouth.” “First I met Claude. And then I met Allen and then I met Burroughs. Claude came in through the fire escape… There were gunshots in the alley--Pow! Pow!--and it was raining, and my wife says, here comes Claude. And here comes this blond guy through the fire escape, all wet. I said, What’s this all about, what the hell is this? He says, They’re chasing me. Next day in walks Allen Ginsberg carrying books. Sixteen years old with ears sticking out. He says, Well, discretion is the better part of valor! I said, Aw shuttup. You little twitch. The next day here comes Burroughs wearing a seersucker suit, followed by another guy.” “Is this my wine?” John Ashberry: “...I try to dress in a way that is just slightly off, so the spectator, if he notices, will feel slightly bemused but not excluded, remembering his own imperfect mode of dress.” “It’s rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently where your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about, at least I would like to think so. Ambiguity seems to be the same thing as happiness or pleasant surprise. I am assuming that, from the moment life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible, and pleasant surprise is promoted to the front rank of emotions.” “I was impressed by an Ingmar Bergman movie I saw years ago--I can’t remember the name of it--in which a woman tells the story of her life, which has been full of tragic experiences. She’s telling the story in the dressing room of a theater where she is about to go on and preform a ballet. At the end of it she says, ‘But I am happy.’ Then it says, ‘The End.’” Philip Roth: “I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, Is he as crazy as I am? I don’t need that question answered.” “Nathan Zuckerman is an act. It’s all the art of impersonation, isn’t it? That’s the fundamentalist novelistic gift. Zuckerman is a writer who wants to be a doctor impersonating a pornographer. I am a writer writing a book impersonating a writer who wants to be a doctor impersonating a pornographer--who then to compound the impersonation, to barb the edge, pretends he’s a well-known literary critic.” “I am like somebody who is trying vividly to transform himself out of himself and into his vividly transforming heroes. I am very much like somebody who spends all day writing.” V. S. Naipaul: “Actually, I hated Oxford. I hated those degrees and I hate all those ideas of universities. I was far too well prepared for it. I was far more intelligent than most of the people in my college or in my course. I am not boasting, you know well--time has proved all these things. In a way, I had prepared too much for the outer world. There was a kind of solitude and despair, really. at Oxford. I wouldn’t wish anyone to go through it.” “These careers are so slow--I write a book, and at the end of it I am so tired. Something is wrong with my eyes; I feel I’m going blind. My fingers are so sore that I wrap them in tape. There are all these physical manifestations of a great labor. Then there is a process of just being nothing--utterly vacant. For the past nine months, really, I’ve been vacant.” Naipaul: Do you think I’ve wasted a bit of myself talking to you? Interviewer: Not, of course, how I’d put it. Naipaul: You’ll cherish it? Interviewer: You don’t like interviews. Naipaul: I don’t like them because I think that thoughts are so precious you can talk them away. You can lose them. Haruki Murakami: “Please think about it this way: I have a twin brother. And when I was two years old, one of us--the other one--was kidnapped. He was brought to a faraway place and we haven’t seen each other since. I think my protagonist is him. A part of myself, but not me, and we haven’t seen each other for a long time. It’s a kind of alternative form of myself. In terms of DNA we are the same, but our environment has been different, so our way of thinking would be different. Every time I write a book I put my feet in different shoes. Because sometimes I am tired of being myself. This way I can escape. It’s a fantasy. If you can’t have a fantasy, what’s the point of writing a book?” “I want my readers to laugh sometimes. Many readers in Japan read my books on the train while commuting. The average salaryman spends two hours a day commuting and he spends those hours reading. That’s why my big books are printed in two volumes: They would be too heavy in one. Some people write me letters, complaining that they laugh when they read my books on the train! It’s very embarrassing for them. Those are the letters I like the most.” “I’m not pretending it’s the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through theses scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true relationship. That’s what I want to write about.” Orhan Pamuk: “Early in life I realized that the community kills my imagination. I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work. And then I’m happy.” David Grossman: “If I am going to write about a man joining a shoal of salmon, as in See Under: Love, I have to start by making the reality of the salmon very concrete and credible. So I joined divers, I became a salmon. I was unable to eat salmon for years--really. I felt like a cannibal when I ate salmon… Research is a way to get out of myself and be in the world.” Grossman: There’s even a Hebrew proverb about it: Kin’at sofrim tarbeh hochmah. Jealousy of writers will produce more wisdom. Interviewer: What does that mean? Grossman: It means that competition is good, it forces you to be more creative.