Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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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]

Losing My Grandma and Finding the Words for It in ‘The Sandbox’

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I have a deep bond with the literature that was recommended to me by the man I used to love. Some of the books he passed along I rejected out of hand—books such as Never Let Me Go and The Cement Garden and Child of God. Knee-jerk reactions to literature are one of my bad habits, then and now—but my beloved was patient with me. He enjoyed playing tricks on me, and he used tricks to encourage me to read. These tricks were clever and varied. It would begin with finding ways to put me in a story’s situation, such as that of Jenny in An Education. Or he would suggest that we watch a film adapted from a book he thought I should read, such as The Danish Girl. My beloved would sometimes make me terribly jealous by mentioning his female friends, who had read the books he liked. I like best authors who are honest with their readers, so let me be honest with you. There were times when my jealousy got the best of me, and I became stubborn. And that is why I didn’t read Edward Albee’s The Sandbox until after my beloved had died, when one of my professors introduced it to our class as one of the most popular texts in 20th-century drama classes in Iran. The play’s harsh portrayal of the American dream was the first and last reason for its popularity in our drama classes. These kinds of anti-American-dream texts could please the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, although if they had known that Albee was gay they would never have let professors teach it at all. Or, who knows, maybe they wouldn’t have cared, because the only thing that matters to the SCRC is criticizing the dreamland. Albee’s The Sandbox can be considered something of a “lost text,” both because Albee died in September 2016 and because the play wasn't ever well-received in the U.S. In 1960, the late New York Times theater critic Arthur Gelb dismissed the play as “most disappointing” and a “trifle.” In a 1966 interview, Albee said, “I’m terribly fond of The Sandbox. I think it’s an absolutely beautiful, lovely, perfect play.” The Sandbox was written in 1959 and was first produced the following year, offering harsh criticisms of capitalism and the breakdown of moral values among generations. My reading of Edward Albee began one morning in my drama class, a couple months after my beloved’s death. As a depressed girl in those days, even a funny joke would make me cry. So reading The Sandbox was a tragic experience. The play is a black comedy about a middle-aged couple who take their mother to the beach to bury her alive. It borrows its characters from Albee’s earlier play, The American Dream. In my class, I was always chosen to recite the text. Reading The Sandbox out loud in my class felt like I could be any of the characters—Mommy, Daddy, and the poor Grandma. Oh, Grandma, poor Grandma! Albee dedicated the play to his own grandma. Although The Sandbox was very obscure to me at first, his other works, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Play About the Baby, and The American Dream, were my favorites. The school of absurdist theater was one I had learned well, including works such as Jean Genet’s The Maids, Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe, Harold Pinter’s The Lover, and Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson. The last of these was highly influential on Albee’s plays, and I read somewhere that Albee had described Ionesco’s impact on both The American Dream and The Sandbox. As I was reading it out loud in class, the atmosphere of the play and its minimalism reminded me of Beckett. The connections of characters, the irrational dialogue, and also the repetition of words made The Sandbox seem Pinteresque. Mommy and Daddy call each other by their given names. Mommy was more powerful than Daddy—even physically, she is bigger. The power of Mommy was undeniable. She was Grandma’s daughter but was very cruel to her; Mommy was willing to kill her. Daddy might be the most fragile man I’ve ever seen in a literary text, and he does his best to unconditionally obey Mommy. This gave me an image of some Iranian men, so it wasn’t just an American thing—it felt like something universal. While reading the play, I never thought of American grandmothers; I thought of many Iranian grandmothers who shared Grandma’s fate. I attempted to imagine Iranian mommies and daddies trying to murder Iranian grandparents and found it tragically absurd. Grandma in the play could have been my own grandma, and I thought of her and her death. Here’s what happened: She died at the age of 75, but the cause of her death was always vague to us. We were told that she died of a heart attack, but later on we realized she had a stroke and was taken to the hospital after 12 hours, which was very late and dangerous for someone of her age. After two days in the intensive care unit, she passed away. The doctors said she would have lived if she had been taken to the hospital sooner. My grandma didn’t live alone. She lived with my wealthy aunt, the eldest child in their family. After my grandma’s death, some relatives, siblings, and also my parents stopped talking with my aunt because although she had discovered my grandma’s stroke early in the morning, she did not take her to the hospital. She claimed my grandma was too old and sick, and she couldn’t enjoy her life, and so it made no difference for her to live longer. I never understood her logic and so I stopped talking with my aunt as well, even though she had been like a mother in my life. She helped raised me, and it was hard to believe that the woman who combed my hair and taught me kindness and love was the one who killed my grandma. In protest, I didn’t attend my grandma’s funeral. The loss was too big. Those days, I was with my beloved and our relationship was in its best shape. He did his best to help me recover from this trauma. It wasn’t easy. My beloved and I were philosophical about such issues and could talk about it for hours. There were questions which remained unanswered. We often had these discussions at Milad Tower in the west of Tehran. Milad Tower is the sixth-tallest tower in the world. It took almost a decade to construct, from 2000 to 2009, and it is considered a symbol of the new Tehran. My beloved didn’t like Milad Tower. “See, Shohreh!” he said. “Our society is ruined by modernism. This tower has nothing to do with Tehran. It is very ugly. They say it is a symbol of modernity, but we have gotten very ugly things from modernity and this tower would be one of them.” “Pseudo-modernity, sweetheart,” I said. “Our society is ruined by pseudo-modernity. We picked ugly things from modernity. We became ignorant of our traditions. Do civilized people let an old woman die of stroke just because she is too old and poor?” My beloved told me it wasn’t my fault. We walked for a while and he gave me one of those starry looks and asked me, “Have you started the modern drama class? What did your professor recommend to read? Shohreh, please read The Sandbox.” In the classroom, I paused in my reading. The professor asked me if I was tired of reading out loud. I started crying. I had nothing to say but I wished I had read it sooner. I shared the story with the class. My professor thought there was still hope when someone feels regret and cries. We talked about how the situation of The Sandbox was similar to what is happening in Iran today. One of the students believed that it wouldn’t always be the issue of money, and it could happen in upper classes, too. Others thought it was not only our society facing the trauma; it would happen in other developing societies, too. It would be a big and traumatic problem that any country would encounter. I told my parents about the class discussion. They claimed that in the 1970s and 1980s, our society wasn’t like this. Postwar Iran quickly changed from a ruined country to a developing one. People moved from villages and small cities to the capital. City life and its problems appeared, such as people working two and sometimes three jobs, and bit by bit they got used to a lifestyle in which people don’t have that much time for each other and meet their relatives only once or twice per year. This could be true even of your own parents. Through all these changes, some valuable traditions were lost. Albee was trying to criticize the America of 1959; ironically, he produced a better criticism of Iran today, where the older generation is always in danger of being buried in the sandboxes of forgotten values. In this way, Albee is correct—The Sandbox is perfect. A successful piece of literature can be understood across borders and between societies, even when a work is “lost” in the home of its creator.

Comfort Food: The Importance of Reading Aloud as Adults

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1. When I was in the third grade, my neighbor, Mrs. Cris -- a 60-year-old woman with grown children -- invited me and two other girls to form a weekly reading club. On Wednesdays, Mrs. Cris would serve us buttery Danish cookies, and juice in fancy punch glasses. We would sit on the floor while Mrs. Cris settled into the high-backed chair in front of the fireplace, and she would read out loud to us. We would lie about it to other kids, what we did on Wednesdays. It wasn’t because I was ashamed, it never occurred to me that a reading club might be considered uncool. I lied because I didn’t want my other friends to be envious, and because I didn’t want anyone else to be added to the club. It was our secret, my favorite day of the week. Over the next few years, we read The Hobbit, Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Secret Garden. At home, I read books almost exclusively about horses or dogs -- Black Beauty, Misty of Chincoteague, Lad a Dog, The Red Pony, Shiloh. There’s no shortage of great books about horses and dogs, but Wednesday reading club was first a lesson that books didn’t have to be about a topic you liked to be enjoyable. My mother had spent many years reading aloud to me, but this club was not bedtime reading, it was not something designed to wind us down, put us to sleep. It was a weekly afternoon party, with a certain level of formality that I enjoyed: Mrs. Cris was the only adult in the neighborhood who went by Mrs., we were expected to always sit quietly, and the snacks she served were not advertised on Nickelodeon, instead it was always the Royal Dansk cookies in the round blue tin. It also never felt like we were being babysat. I was keenly aware that Mrs. Cris was not being paid, and I felt she was not doing this as a favor for our parents (although, of course, I know my mother appreciated the time off), instead I was sure that Mrs. Cris was doing it because she wanted to spend time with us. She was not a teacher, not a relative; she was my first adult friend. 2. Reading club fell apart somewhere in middle school, when soccer practice and clarinet lessons and trips to the mall took up all our after school time. But I still liked to be read to, and I liked to read aloud, even during the awkward, moody teenage years to come. I loved when we read plays in English class, because we’d do a read through of the whole thing. I was too shy to audition for the high school play, but I thought I was a very memorable Martha when our senior English class read Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. When I got to college, my roommate, Jessica, was my only friend for a good chunk of the year. We had the kind of friendship where it felt like you didn’t need anyone else in the world but each other, so we didn’t go looking for other friends until the first year was almost up. Often, before bed, I would read Jess poems from my Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Of course, it seems a little pretentious to me now, except that I wasn’t doing it as any kind of performance. It was just something I’d learned that friends do for one another, something that brings you closer. 3. Years after college, I visited Jessica at her studio apartment in Virginia, both of us adrift in our mid-20s. After a few glasses of wine, I read her and her new boyfriend a story I loved -- "Sea Oak" by George Saunders. “I didn’t really like your friend until she read us the story,” Jess’s boyfriend would tell her later, and she’d pass that on to me. “I wasn’t sure if I liked him either,” I teased. But I have a theory on why her boyfriend liked me by the end of "Sea Oak:" in order to understand a story that is read aloud, you must listen intently. Your mind cannot wander, you must concentrate on the words. Listening to someone read out loud is like that experiment where you stare into another person’s eyes for four minutes and by the end, you’re in love with that person. It’s too intimate an experience to share with someone you dislike. 4. During those adrift 20s, I worked in a small bookstore for two years, and listened to upwards of 50 readings. There were authors I was extremely intimidated by (Mary Gaitskill) and authors who were easy to talk to (Laura van den Berg liked my glasses and told me about her dog; Rachel Kushner complained about missing her husband while on tour, Jim Shepard hugged me). There were some great performances, some droning voices, and a few authors with overinflated egos, but I never tired of listening. Even books that I didn’t like on the page came alive during a reading. I think that’s a common experience, many of us are much more generous listeners than we are readers. There were only two times my co-booksellers and I ever liked the author less after a reading: an extremely racist travel memoir, and a local author whose crowd trashed the store. Most times, when authors left the store after a reading, I felt like they were a new friend, even if I’d barely spoken to them. Every time I hand-sold one of their books afterwards, I felt a sense of personal pride, as if my distant cousin had written the book I’d recommended, as if I was keeping the royalty checks in the family. 5. More recently, my husband and I went through a rough patch -- our beloved dog had died. I was growing more and more depressed, the election results didn’t help -- and we’d been coping by zoning out in front of Netflix with a bottle of wine. Then, I spent one night reading aloud to him, just on a whim. I plucked Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris from the shelf, since I knew I could count on Sedaris for humor. My husband lay on the floor underneath the loveseat where I perched (someday, when we’re rich, I always say, we’ll buy a full-sized couch that fits both of us) and he listened as I read. He didn’t play around on his phone. When we went to bed that night, I felt like we’d solved something. I didn’t feel so sad, and somehow life didn’t feel as meaningless. It was a way to connect that I’d forgotten about. It launched something healing for me, like a heaping serving of a comfort food. It was a bonding tool I’d been taught when I was young, back when it didn’t matter what size couch you had, because we always sat on the floor anyways, legs criss-cross applesauce. 6. When Mrs. Cris turned 80 a few years ago, our neighborhood threw a lobster bake. We blocked off the dead-end street my parents live on, we rented folding tables and set up the party on the street. We all wore ridiculous hats that night, at someone’s specific request. During the time for speeches, I stood up in my wide-brimmed Kentucky Derby hat, and talked a little bit about the reading group that Mrs. Cris started 20 years before, and what a profound effect it had on me as a reader and as a writer, and what’s more -- as a person. The Reading Club taught me the importance of careful, concentrated listening, and taught me that I could find friends outside my immediate peer group. It taught me reading a story aloud is a way to take care of someone, a kind of care-taking that isn’t overbearing or smothering, and doesn’t feel like babysitting. As adults, reading aloud to one another is something we think we might have grown out of, but that’s only because we’ve forgotten how intimate and cozy it is to be read to, or to read aloud to someone who listens. It’s a simple, low-maintenance way to connect. And if you can tell a good story, I now believe, you can win anyone over, even the most skeptical of listeners. Especially if you serve cookies. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Those Who Left Us: Select Literary Obituaries from 2016

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This year we lost a Nobel laureate, several Pulitzer Prize winners, many writers with wide readerships, and many more who never achieved the acclaim or the audiences they deserved.  Happily for them all, their books live on. C.D. Wright C.D. Wright’s poetry was grounded in her native Arkansas -- she called her early style “idiom Ozarkia” -- but her work broke so many boundaries and wandered so freely that she belonged, in the words of the poet Joel Brouwer, “to a school of exactly one.”  Wright, who died on Jan. 12 at 67, wrote that her poems were about “desire, conflict, the dearth of justice for all.  About persons of small means.”  Some of those persons were inmates she interviewed in Louisiana prisons, who inspired these lines: AC or DC You want to be Westinghoused or Edisoned Your pick you’re the one condemned Tennessee’s retired chair available on eBay. In an autobiographical prose poem from 2005, Wright, a MacArthur fellow and winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, wrote this of herself: “I poetry.  I write it, study it, read it, edit it, publish it, teach it…Sometimes I weary of it.  I could not live without it.  Not in this world.” Read: Several Millions Year in Reading contributors on Wright's work. Umberto Eco Umberto Eco, who died on Feb. 15 at 84, was a semiotician by training, a scholar who studied signs and symbols -- religious icons, clothing, words, musical scores. When he turned his hand to writing novels, Eco achieved superstar success on a global scale, never more so than with the first of his seven novels, The Name of the Rose, a yarn about murderous monks in a medieval monastery.  Though it was larded with descriptions of heresies and Christian theology, it succeeded as a page-turner, a shameless whodunit that sold 10 million copies and was made into a big-budget Hollywood movie starring Sean Connery.  Eco’s runaway popularity won the scorn of some critics and more than a few disgruntled academics, but he was unapologetic about wearing two hats. “I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels,” he said.  In a postscript to The Name of the Rose, he added, “I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it.  I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.  Man is a storytelling animal by nature.  I began writing in March of 1978, prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk.” Read: An account of an in-person Eco sighting or our review of Confessions of a Young Novelist.  Harper Lee Harper Lee, who died on Feb. 19 at 89, spent most of her long life claiming she was perfectly content being a one-hit wonder.  No wonder.  To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize and has been branded “America’s most beloved novel,” with more than 40 million copies in print and a permanent place on every high school reading list in the land.  The love was enormous but not universal.  Flannery O’Connor dismissed the novel as “a child’s book,” which strikes me as neither unkind nor unfair. In 2015, Lee's lawyer talked her into publishing a “lost” novel, Go Set a Watchman.  Reviews were mixed, to put it kindly, and many fans were dismayed to learn that Atticus Finch did not always walk on water, that he was capable, in fact, of being a card-carrying south Alabama peckerwood racist.  Of course Watchman became an instantaneous #1 bestseller, but that doesn’t dispel the fact that some books should have the decency to stay lost and die a quiet death. Read: An account of a visit to Lee's hometown; an analysis of Lee's symbolism; or our review of Watchman. Jim Harrison When I heard that Jim Harrison had died on March 26 at 78, I immediately reread Revenge, my personal favorite of his many magnificent novellas, a form at which he had few peers. This one has it all: vivid descriptions of the twinned geographies of the natural world and the human heart, a torrid affair between a former fighter pilot and a dangerous friend’s wife, which leads to rococo violence, which leads to more violence during a long campaign for revenge. The novella runs just 96 pages, yet it contains worlds. Jim Harrison’s world was a moral place, as finely calibrated as a clock. Violence begets violence; violation demands vengeance; every act has its price, and that price must be paid. Harrison was also a prolific novelist, essayist and poet, author of a memoir, a children’s book, and some very funny writing about food. A shaggy Falstaffian from the wilds of northern Michigan, Harrison was a man with boundless appetites for food and wine, hunting and fishing, literature and life, a man who adored antelope liver and detested skinless chicken breasts, a man who once flew to France to take part in a 37-course lunch that featured 19 wines. French readers revere him, though his American readership is smaller than it should be.  No matter. Jim Harrison lived and wrote his own way, the only way -- all the way to the brim. Read: A personal account of a decades-long friendship with Harrison. Michael Herr Many books have captured the physical horrors of our Vietnam misadventure, but only one captured its psychedelic, rock 'n' roll absurdity.  That book was Dispatches, a bombshell piece of reporting by Michael Herr that appeared in 1977, nearly a decade after his tour of duty as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine, covering an unwinnable orgy of carnage the only purpose of which, as he put it, was “maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever encroaching Doodah.”  Herr, who died on June 23 at 76, made no secret of his respect for what the grunts went through, or his disdain for the officers and politicians who put them through it. John le Carré called Dispatches “the best book I have ever read about men and war in our time.”  A decade after it appeared, Herr co-wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.  He also wrote a book about his friendship with Kubrick, and a fictionalized biography of Walter Winchell. But in the last years of his life, Herr took up Buddhism and gave up writing. Read: Our look at war books and the work Herr inspired. James Alan McPherson James Alan McPherson was the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his 1977 story collection Elbow Room.  After attending segregated schools in his native Georgia and graduating from Harvard Law School, McPherson took a sharp detour into the writing life, earning a master of fine arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he wound up teaching from 1981 until his retirement in 2014. Though his short stories, essays, and memoirs didn’t flinch from the evils of Jim Crow, McPherson strove to embrace the one thing he felt could possibly bestow greatness on America: its cultural diversity. An acolyte and occasional collaborator with Ralph Ellison, McPherson wrote in a 1978 essay in The Atlantic: “I believe that if one can experience its diversity, touch a variety of its people, laugh at its craziness, distill wisdom from its tragedies, and attempt to synthesize this inside oneself without going crazy, one will have earned to right to call oneself a citizen of the United States.” Speaking of the characters in his first collection of short stories, Hue and Cry, McPherson said, “Certain of these people happen to be black, and certain of them happen to be white; I have tried to keep the color part of most of them far in the background, where these things should rightly be kept.” Read: A note on McPherson's skill as a eulogist. Edward Albee George and Martha --- sad, sad, sad.  It’s unlikely anyone will ever write a more acidic portrait of an American marriage than Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.  After his 1959 debut, The Zoo Story, which opened in Berlin on a bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Albee went on to write some 30 plays that shone light into the darkest precincts of well-to-do lives, where the regrets and the lies and the self-deception dwell. Though Albee, who died on Sept. 16 at 88, won two Tony Awards and three Pulitzer Prizes, he was not always embraced by critics or audiences. One reviewer dismissed Virginia Woolf as “a sick play for sick people.”  Its film adaptation, starring Richard Burton as George, a bitter alcoholic academic, and Liz Taylor as Martha, his bitter alcoholic wife, captured the essence of Albee’s output. He described his work this way to a New York Times interviewer in 1991: “All of my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done, as opposed to things done.  I find most people spend too much time living as if they’re never going to die.” Read: A personal account of someone who got his mail from Albee (really). Gloria Naylor With her 1982 debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor hit the trifecta: a National Book Award, a TV adaptation by Oprah Winfrey, and a wide and devoted readership. Naylor, who died on Sept. 28 at 66, spun her best-known novel around seven African-American women, straight and gay, who live in a shabby housing project plagued by sexual predators and poverty.  Naylor said she regarded those seven women “like an ebony phoenix, each in her own time and with her own season had a story.” The Women of Brewster Place won the National Book Award for a first novel in 1983. A New York native and one-time Jehovah’s Witnesses missionary, Naylor said she left the church out of frustration over its limited role for women, a break that sent her into a deep depression. Like the "ebony phoenix," she rose and was saved by her writing. William Trevor William Trevor wrote extraordinary fiction about the most ordinary of people -- mechanics, priests, and farmers who lived in small English and Irish towns. Trevor, a native of Ireland who died on Nov. 20 at 88, wrote nearly 20 novels, many of them prize-winners, but he considered his true form the short story. Few would argue. “I’m a short story writer who writes novels when he can’t get them into short stories,” he said, adding, “I’m very interested in the sadness of fate, the things that just happen to people.”  Like the evening a lovelorn Irish mechanic named Cahal, in the short story “The Dressmaker’s Child,” is driving a pair of Spanish lovers back from a visit to a bogus religious pilgrimage site -- and the girl of the story’s title hurls herself at the passing car. Cahal is tortured by uncertainty over what happened to the girl and what will happen to him -- until the dressmaker offers him a twisted form of absolution. Things just happen to people, and suddenly their ordinary predicaments are transformed into something startling and new. Read: Lionel Shriver on reading Trevor. And let’s not forget these notables, in alphabetical order: Anita Brookner, 87, was an accomplished art historian when she started writing novels in her 50s, many of them about women mired in gloom.  Her fourth novel, 1984’s Hotel du Lac, won the Booker Prize. Read: A detailed exploration of of Brookner's considerable charms. David Budbill, 76, worked out of a remote cabin in rural Vermont for more than 40 years, writing stripped-down poems about the Vermont mountains and the “invisible” people who live there, in all their beauty and ugliness.  A workmanlike writer who detested artsy pretension, Budbill was once asked about the source of his inspiration.  “I don’t know where it comes from,” he replied, “and I don’t care.” Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, 74, was the author of an autobiography, but he’ll be remembered as the brash mayor who breathed new life into his tired old hometown of Providence, Rhode Island -- only to be undone by some nasty habits.  He assaulted a romantic rival with a fireplace log, an ashtray, and a lit cigarette, which cost him his job as mayor.  After serving a suspended sentence and winning re-election, Cianci was convicted of racketeering for accepting envelopes of cash in return for city jobs.  After serving a federal prison sentence, he made a third run for the mayor’s office in 2015, but lost.  His autobiography was called Politics and Pasta. Read: A personal account of meeting Cianci. Pat Conroy, 70, may have written his share of prose dripping with Spanish moss and Low Country hokum, but he attracted an army of devoted readers.  he son of an abusive Marine fighter pilot, Conroy turned the horrors of his childhood into the novel The Great Santini, then followed it with The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides, all made into hit Hollywood movies, all gobbled up by his fans.  Asked to describe his son’s readers, the ever-charming Donald Conroy said, “That’s easy: psychiatrists, homosexuals, extreme liberals and women.”  He forgot to add: and lots of them. Read: Conroy's reaction to having his books banned. Warren Hinckle, 77, was the swashbuckling, hard-drinking editor of Ramparts and other magazines who railed against the Vietnam War, published Che Guevara’s diaries and Eldridge Cleaver’s letters from prison, and helped birth gonzo journalism by publishing Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal article “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” along with Ralph Steadman’s volcanic drawings. American journalism was changed forever. Thom Jones, 71, was a recovering alcoholic working as a high school janitor when he mailed a short story called “The Pugilist at Rest” to The New Yorker.  The magazine published the story in 1991, and it won the O. Henry Prize for best short story.  It was a stunning beginning to a career of writing semi-autobiographical stories about soldiers, boxers, janitors, crime victims -- “people,” as Jones put it, “you don’t want living next door to you.” Read: A Year in Reading on Jones. Imre Kertész, 86, survived internment at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, then spent years writing semi-autobiographical novels about the Holocaust and its aftermath. The books, remarkable for their lack of sensationalism, languished in obscurity until 2002, when Kertesz became the only Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Read: A Year in Reading on Kertész. Florence King, 80, was one of the last of a breed that is all but extinct: the misanthropic curmudgeon. In columns for the conservative National Review and several books, most notably Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, King skewered liberalism, feminism, and anything that smelled remotely of political correctness.  Nobody could possibly agree with all of her opinions, but just about everybody admired her ability to lacerate and enrage, which, after all, is what misanthropic curmudgeons are supposed to do. She once wrote: “Feminists will not be satisfied until every abortion is performed by a gay black doctor under an endangered tree on a reservation for handicapped Indians.”  Wow. Read: A detailed look at King's work and life. W.P. Kinsella, 81, wrote 30 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, much of it infused with his intertwined love for magic realism and the game of baseball.  His best known book is the novel Shoeless Joe, which was made into the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, in which Kevin Costner plays an Iowa farmer who carves a baseball diamond into his cornfield to attract Shoeless Joe Jackson and the rest of the disgraced Chicago “Black Sox” back from the grave. One viewer dismissed the movie as “Field of Corn,” but it produced a line that lives on: “If you build it, he will come.” Read: A piece on the great writers of baseball. Image Credit: Public Domain Pictures.

Edward Albee Was My Mailman

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When I was an aspiring fiction writer fresh out of grad school, I won a fellowship to spend a month at an artist’s colony in Montauk, at the very tip of Long Island.  Known as the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the colony was founded and funded by its namesake, renowned author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and many other wonderful plays, who recently passed away. The Albee fellowship was the biggest thing that had happened to me early in my career as a writer, a label I still felt uncomfortable wearing. In fact, during my first week at the colony, I happened to overhear another of the artists on the phone, a playwright, who was explaining to a friend who else was in residence: “There’s a poet, a sculptor, a painter from Japan, and a novelist from New York.” My ears perked up. A New York novelist? Where? Who was it? Someone famous? In my head, I started to rattle off the names of my favorite writers. It took me a minute to realize he meant me. I was the novelist. I was a novelist. Besides the sense of validation it brought, one of the perks of being a fellow at the Albee Foundation was how we got our mail. Since the colony had no regular postal delivery, all our letters came to Albee’s P.O. Box in town, which Edward Albee himself, who had a summer home nearby, would pick up and then drop off for us. Yes, for one month, Edward Albee, arguably America’s greatest living playwright, was our mailman. The aspiring playwright I’d overheard calling me a novelist -- let’s call him Joe -- had known even before arriving at the colony about this Edward-Albee-is-our-mailman arrangement, and because of this, he’d ordered everyone he knew to write him letters at the colony. That way, Joe figured, the great playwright would see his name so often on the return address that it would stick in his mind. It turned out that Albee was an elusive kind of mailman.  He’d drive up to our house, quietly drop off the mail on the kitchen counter, and slip away. At first we thought he didn’t like us. Later, we learned from the colony’s caretaker this was because he didn’t want to disturb us at work. When Joe figured this out, he began doing his writing at a picnic table in front of the house, right next to the kitchen, and that’s where he’d sit all day, waiting for Albee to show up. “You should try it,” he told me. “There’s another picnic table out there you can have. It’s a bit further away, but you know, it’s there.” To further cement our bond with Edward Albee, Joe decided that we should host a dinner and invite our benefactor to come join us socially.  We did, and Albee accepted the invitation. I was tasked with making the dessert, which was a challenge because Albee, who had diabetes, did not eat refined sugar. The dinner was a great success.  Albee arrived with his partner Jonathan, broke bread with us, and complimented the sugar-free summer fruit cobbler with a biscuit topping that I’d made especially for him.  Throughout the dinner, he maintained a polite unassuming presence, as if he were just a neighbor we’d happened to invite to join us rather than a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I was astounded when Albee mentioned that he remembered from my application that I was working on a story collection about Prague.  He told me about when he’d visited that city before the fall of the Iron Curtain.  “I attended a party where no one was there,” he said ironically.  All the other guests, dissident writers and artists, had been sentenced to internal banishment, declared non-existent entities by the Communist government. After the great man left, Joe went around high fiving us all, whooping, jumping up and down.  He suggested we all go to the one bar in town that was still open at that late hour and celebrate. So we all piled into Joe’s car:  me, the poet, the sculptor, and the painter from Japan, whose English was not the best, but certainly far superior to any of our Japanese.  Along the way, we were all saying Edward Albee this, and Edward Albee, that.  And suddenly the Japanese painter broke into the conversation because there was something he did not understand.  He said, “Joe, I keep hearing you mention this Mr. Edward Albee.  Who is Edward Albee?” We explained that in addition to being, well, Edward Albee, he was the guy whom the colony was named after, the guy paying for us all to stay here.  The guy who, despite all the fuss we’d made over him, had maintained such a quiet, dignified reserve that our Japanese friend had had no idea of his extraordinary reputation. Over the years, I have thought back many times to my time at the Albee Foundation, and specifically the comportment that Edward Albee had modeled for me, for all of us who want to pursue careers in the arts.  Without words, he was letting us know, I am just like you.  Writing is the work I do, not who I am.  As a writer, he was famous.  As a person, he was just the guy who brought us our mail, another guest at our dinner table.  His calm and quiet good manners seem all the more extraordinary in our current day and age, when writers take to social media with the regularity that most people brush their teeth. Several months after my first book came out, I got a letter in the mail, forwarded to me by my publisher.  It was a handwritten note on heavy cream-colored stationary.  I looked at the return address and realized it had come from Mr. Albee. “Dear Mr. Hamburger:” he wrote, “I just finished reading The View from Stalin’s Head.  Such good work!  Congratulations!  What’s next?  Regards, Edward Albee” I still have that note.  And every once in a while, when I have trouble believing I’m a real writer, I take out that piece of paper and then quietly get back to work. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Keep Trying. Be Content: On Belle Boggs’s ‘The Art of Waiting’

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1. It is an innocent train ride, full of the banal chatter we save for our post-work hours, until my coworker Marthine pulls out her phone and shows me a video of her laughing son. At what she calls the “sweet spot,” those tender months between squalling and teething, Arun (whose name refers to the dawn in Sanskrit) glimpses himself in the mirror and chortles, drool pooling between his lips and chin. He is as smitten with himself as the world is with him. He observes himself; he loves what he sees. We observe him; we love what we see. There is a portion at the end of Belle Boggs’s The Art of Waiting in which, as she’s holding her infant at home, a mason says, “Imagine if there was only one baby in the whole world...Wherever that baby was, we’d put down our things and go see it.” “You’re right,” she says. “I’d go.” At 26, newly struck with baby fever, I would be there in line, craning my neck to behold. I can’t point to the moment that it started, and yet it accrues every day, the inverse of my bank account. The way I accuse men of thinking with their penises, I’ve begun thinking with my ovaries -- sidelined by tiny outfits, ogling at babies on Instagram, indulging vague daydreams about pregnancy clothes worn with wide-brimmed straw hats. I am an unfit mother: a smoker, a shopper, a too-frequent cheese eater, and bill forgetter. I inhabit (with my husband) a tiny one-bedroom in the most expensive city in the country, where we can barely afford our square footage. I’ve over-drafted my bank account buying cat food. I’ve celebrated the arrival of my period in college with cake and champagne, bought anxiety-inducing pregnancy tests at the pharmacy with nail polish and cheap beer. And yet; and yet. 2. “It’s spring when I realize I may never have children,” Boggs opens the first chapter, this forthrightness setting a precedent for the rest of the memoir. The Art of Waiting delves directly into the process of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in all its pre- and mis-conceptions, its prose like a sledgehammer cracking through drywall. She probes beyond the clinical terminology and atmosphere of the doctor’s office and takes as her subjects cicadas and gorillas, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, and Raising Arizona. She sees motherhood everywhere, like I do: it’s inescapable, especially because we do not have it. In a book that could easily become insular, instead the reader finds Boggs’s considered, holistic approach, wherein she covers families of numerous formations and facets -- different races, socioeconomic categories, and world views pepper this intelligent and insightful treatise on fertility, medicine, and motherhood, which spans years of Boggs’s life and years of research on childbearing, its successes, and its failures. Science meets narrative; the global meets the personal; the reader meets the author, or at least feels that way, a knowing closeness that builds with every revelation and dispersal of personal, painful fact. The world of reproduction is hardly beautiful, with its sanitized wands, needles, and oocytes, and yet we’re privy to it, as if standing next to the stirrups. We’re privy, too, to stories that vary dramatically from Boggs’s. There are her mentors, professors, and friends who choose to forgo children in favor of careers and lives of artistry. There is Virginia Woolf, who writes, feeling euphoric after completing The Waves, “Children are nothing to this." There are gay couples facing rampant discrimination. There are her friends who adopt from overseas, and face the harrowing knowledge that their black child will live an entirely different life in their mountain community because of the color of his skin, the story of his origins. Perhaps the most important lesson that The Art of Waiting imparted was its insistence on the long game; that the things worth wanting are worth waiting for, and that impatience is a tax we pay for arriving at our fateful conclusions. There’s a decided sense of fatedness about the entire book, a necessary corollary for a treatise on building a family. Who are we meant to be, and in relation to whom? Is a struggle with infertility a sign that we’re meant to walk a different path? Is resisting the body’s futility an act of bullheadedness, foolhardy? Boggs, who describes herself as non-religious, persists, questioning every phase of intrauterine insemination (IUI), the consideration of adoption, and eventually of in-vitro fertilization (IVF). The result is ultimately a baby -- Beatrice -- but the question lingers, essential to the book: if we’re always in the process of becoming, what are we meant to become? What if that end isn’t the one we had in mind? Boggs aptly describes the arduousness of ART without writing an arduous narrative -- she spares no detail, be it negotiating insurance coverage with a cut-rate pharmacy or injecting herself with one of many medicines each cycle. These details never become drudgery. They’re an inherent and interesting part of the narrative of modern pregnancy. It’s easy to forget, amidst the deftness of Boggs’s prose, that this book depicts a clinical process. The experience of child-rearing, of adoption, of infertility, impacts more than just the person at their center, despite the feelings of isolation they bring about. Mr. Cheek, the aforementioned mason, embodies this knowledge. “He knew something bigger, more profound,” Boggs writes. “Each baby is born not just to her parents, but to the world surrounding her. To neighbors, friends, teachers, enclosure mates. To ex-cons and allomothers and cousins and grandmothers, who will each want a peek and will each have some impact.” The same could be said of unintended childlessness; in the void created by such powerful wanting, whole communities are implicated. I pass babies in their carriages on my street and sometimes we lock eyes, as if my desire is transparent. Round-headed and wide-eyed, taking in the new world, they take me in, and I take them in right back, pining for something I’m too sacrilegious or jaded to call a miracle. Meanwhile, I care for my cats. I love my husband. I yearn, and I scheme, and I imagine what fate will deal me next year, or the year after that. In the present, I am only a collection of wants, imagining what it’s like to shape the destiny of a tiny, malleable being. “Keep trying. Be content. How do you reconcile those two messages?” Boggs writes in her epilogue. She has no exact answers; this is not a textbook. Rather, it’s a primer on waiting and wanting, something we’re arguably always doing, whether it’s for the end of the workday or whatever missing piece we feel might complete us, for whatever unknowable reasons. We’re waiting for the world to adapt, to accept all forms of family; for our bumbling bodies to perform as we wish; for fate to unfurl like a carpet, its threads and fibers as intricately, tightly woven as our own desires.

The Un-Ironist: A Primer on Douglas Coupland’s Novels

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1. Couplândia “I’m not saying that the bulk of novels out there aren’t art — they are — they’re just not modern art.” Douglas Coupland, “Why Write Modern Fiction?” How ironic that Douglas Coupland, the man who popularized the term “Generation X”, turns out to be one of the least ironic novelists of his generation. His novels may, on the whole, be loaded with typographical trickery, brand names of the nanosecond, slacking youngsters, and Simpsons references, but he’s also deep into a suite of timelessly, radically un-hip novelistic themes. At the lightest readerly touch, Coupland’s smirking surfaces and visual bravado give way to a landslide of questions and concerns about, as Andrew Tate put it in his book-length study of Coupland’s writing, “conviction, community, connection, and continuity.” Take Coupland’s work as a whole and his strengths become starkly apparent. He’s especially good when writing in the voice of an actual character, not a neutral, disembodied narrator. (He’s even better when writing as several of them.) Often criticized for peppering his texts with marketing detritus forgotten or best forgotten — Tae Bo, Gap, Pets.com — he deals with the timeless human problems best when discussing them in parallel with things so disposable. His penchant for suddenly dropping protagonists into bizarre scenarios also draws reviewer heat, but when he successfully mixes the very bizarre and the very mundane, there’s nothing quite like it in literature. He’ll often steer away from the norms of plotting and typesetting tradition, and when he does, the harder he cranks the wheel, the better. The less conventionally novelly a novel Coupland writes, in short, the richer it is. He appears to understand this. “It seems the more experimental my work gets,” he writes in the blog post quoted above, “the more people respond to it.” This was borne out during my own immersion in the ink-and-paper world I’ve come to call Couplândia. The author begins his literary career at the dawn of the 1990s, a healthy yen for experimentation governing his watchful eye for the moment. This slowly weakens, bottoming out in the early 2000s. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, it returns with an new intensity, allowing him to produce novels delivering the distilled, unadulterated — and to his fans, annoyingly addictive — essence of Coupland. 2. The generational books The idea and the reality of Generation X, the novel that made Coupland’s name, are surprisingly different. While generation-flavored enough to fit under this heading, it’s only just. More apt is the oft-made comparison to Boccaccio’s Decameron, in that it’s a book of fictional characters who themselves invent fictions. Lacking prospects of a fulfilling career or even a stable identity, Andy, Claire, and Dag each independently move out to a chintzy motel-ish complex of bungalows in the (then even more geriatric-geared) desert town of Palm Springs. There, they work future-free jobs and search for conviction/community/connection/continuity — a sort of makeshift family, even — by telling each other stories. Sure, they drop references to 1960s and 1970s media culture, attempt to build identities by futilely repurposing midcentury trends, and bitterly resent the Baby Boomers, but there’s more to it than that. Take the novel’s ending, in which narrator Andy speeds toward what he thinks is the mushroom cloud civilization has spent the Cold War waiting for. He approaches and realizes that it’s just smoke from farmers burning a rice field. A pure white egret flying in front of the wall of blackness catches his eye. A bus full of developmentally disabled teens stops to watch too. When the egret swoops too low and slashes Andy’s scalp, the kids swarm, all clumsily trying to hug him at once. At first he’s frightened. Then he doesn’t want them to stop. I have come to regard this as a quintessential Coupland moment. It’s also one of the elements missing from Generation X’s 1992 follow-up, Shampoo Planet. Where Coupland’s first novel portrays an age cohort that has effectively opted out of politics and the economy, his second portrays a slightly younger one that has opted out more or less out of politics but opted way in to the economy. Its main character, named and modeled closely after Andy’s clean-living, financially grasping little brother Tyler, dreams of nothing more than heavily gelling his hair, hanging out the mall, and rising through the ranks of a large defense contractor. He’s a representative of what Coupland (and Tyler himself) terms the “Global Teens”. The book satirizes them, but — and perhaps this is evident in the phrase “Global Teens” alone — I’m unsure how well it knows them. Microserfs, however, knows its subjects, and well. Published in 1995, Coupland’s third novel is ostensibly the contents of its main character’s PowerBook. Daniel Underwood, a lowly bug-catcher employed by a Microsoft at the height of its powers, finds himself at the center of a group defection from Redmond to Silicon Valley. The move is as much mental as geographical: first they’re replaceable (but comfortable) drones in a sprawling corporate hive, then frantic (but innovative) paddlers on a leaky start-up raft. Their new company, called Interiority, produces an odd combination of programming language and 3D modeling environment called Oop! Coupland cares about the Microserfs-turned-Interiorites’ relationships with technology, with one another, and how the former and the latter interact. Some find love, some gain and lose ideologies, some get sick, some finally get in touch with their sexuality, and some get really nice shiatsu massages. Yet at the same time, the book is awash in artifacts of mid-1990s technology, geek, and popular culture: laser pointers, “Stop the insanity!”, Gak, the Virtual Boy. It’s the clearest early example of one of Coupland’s primary strengths, a Beatlesque ability to combine extreme datedness and extreme timelessness. Two more strengths are also on display. The text-as-digital-document conceit lets Coupland bust out a typographical creativity that, while glimpsable in Generation X, runs relatively wild here.  Some of the pages represent “subconscious files” in Daniel’s PowerBook, which are haphazardly (or so it seems) covered by disconnected phrases like “Demonize the symbolic analysis,” “Uranium and Beethoven,” “Define random,” and “You’re smarter than TV. So what?” The novel also delivers more abrupt moments of absurdist humor than its two predecessors combined. While these have multiplied in Coupland’s more recent work, I still think none beat this passage from Microserfs: Emmett has 4,000 manga comics from Japan. They're so violent and dirty! The characters all look  as if they're saying unbelievably important things — talking to God and the Wizard of the Universe — but when you translate them, all they're really doing is making belching noises. Maybe you had to be there. 3. The reverse experiments To look at Generation X, with its wonky large format and artistic-informational sidebars, or Microserfs, with its words all over the place at so many different scales, you’d assume they were the work of an avant-gardist with an unusually porous mental wall between literature and visual art. You’d be right, in a sense. Though it’s unclear how much Coupland accepts the “avant-garde” label, he’s a visual artist as well as a novelist. His two personalities aren’t usually compartmentalized, except in 1998 through 2001, when Coupland’s novelistic mind seemed to endure an uncharacteristic bout of traditionalism. Though they’re pretty much devoid of geekdom or other such subcultures, the three novels published in this period don’t suffer from particularly conventional content. They do, however, suffer from conventional form. Girlfriend in a Coma, by far the strongest of the trio, explores with startling directness a few of what have become Coupland’s signature themes. Karen, the titular girlfriend, falls into her titular coma at the end of high school in late-1970s Vancouver. Her circle of friends — and especially her boyfriend Richard, who seems to do a lot of the narration — grind through life, some aimlessly and some with blinders on, until Karen wakes up in the late 1990s. A media circus erupts around the woman, who, if you think about it, is kind of a time traveler. But in the future though she may be, Karen doesn’t like the future she sees. Through her eyes, late 20th-century society is both hardened and dissolute, filled with people drifting unmoored both from absolute values and from one another. Coupland builds toward Karen’s return to the living and confession of disappointment by riding the suspense lever with almost Stephen King-like hand. When an inexplicable, fast-spreading malady kills off everyone but Karen and those close to her, comparisons to embossed-cover types are even harder to resist. But King, Koontz, Patterson, et al. probably wouldn’t have ended a book with the ghost of a notoriously horny high school football player lecturing the characters about their failure to adequately foster the communal sphere and define nobler aims for themselves and each other. Could you call Coupland a moralist? In a sense, you could, though the moralism of a book like Girlfriend in a Coma is very much his own, and thus at least more interesting than most. Unfortunately, 2000’s Miss Wyoming picks easier targets. It tells two stories, non-chronologically and in parallel, though they eventually bend and converge. One is of Susan Colgate, a floundering television actress and former professional beauty pageant entrant. Presumed dead in an airliner crash of which she was actually the sole survivor, Susan seizes the chance to escape her life and high-gloss aspirational harridan of a mother. The other is of John Johnson, a hacky Hollywood producer, sort of a Don Simpson who bottomed out, flatlined, and went on an impoverished Kerouac-style vision quest instead of just dying. Unfulfilled to say the least by his foray into humiliating modern asceticism, he starts to suspect that Susan might be the answer to his questions about existence. Both Miss Wyoming and Coupland’s next novel, 2001’s All Families Are Psychotic, suffer from a plot problem. That is to say, they’ve got too much of it. Miss Wyoming's John and Susan, incomplete searchers both, seem always to be performing the next action in a long causal chain, which itself was a result of whatever falling dominoes happened to precede it. The same goes for the troubled, partially criminal, largely AIDS-afflicted Drummond clan at the center of All Families are Psychotic. If we aren’t watching these characters’ elaborate peregrinations and collisions, we’re on a drip feed of explanatory information about their pasts. This sounds normal, and it is; that’s the problem. It’s certainly not normal by Coupland’s standards. How I longed for the freedom from these standard novel syndromes enjoyed, for instance, by the relatively plotless Generation X. It’s a shame these novels have execution troubles, because Coupland’s interests are still there, and his interests remain, er, interesting. This is mostly true of All Families Are Psychotic, which is in parts driven by cogitation about noble lies, generational incompatibility, the disintegration of the public sphere, and crippled humanistic optimism. Janet, the enervated Drummond matriarch, laments her place as a member of “a lost generation, the last generation raised to care about appearances of doing the right thing — to care about caring.” At some hard-to-define point, she simply “stopped believing in the future,” as so many Coupland characters do, not that they always understand they’ve done so, let alone state it so baldly. Where Girlfriend in a Coma debuted Coupland’s way with multiple narrating characters, Miss Wyoming and All Families Are Psychotic are told in the third person, omnisciently. That the effect is so deadening reveals the inseparability of first-person narration (especially from several persons) from what’s great about Coupland’s fiction. 4. The calm 2003’s Hey Nostradamus!, a textbook example of that most delightful literary genre, the return to form, seems conceived down to its very structure to exploit Coupland’s skill of letting the cast write the book. Its central event is a Columbine-style school shooting. (Or, given Coupland’s Canadian-ness and his proclivity to root his books firmly in his native land from this point forward, an École Polytechnique-style shooting.) Coupland interprets this massacre and its legacy through four different consciousnesses: Cheryl, a teenage victim speaking from a life-death borderland; Jason, Cheryl’s secret husband who subsequently falls into long-term chaotic isolation; Heather, the woman with whom Jason eventually finds some degree of solace; and Reg, Jason’s dogmatically religious, monstrously domineering father. As in Coupland’s other novels, families wield less of an influence than you’d expect over their members, and when they can muster any power, it tends to be of the restrictive or damaging kind. What do the real good and ill are extrafamilial bonds and social units: young Cheryl and Jason’s marriage, made official one surreptitious afternoon in Vegas; their Christian youth group, exerting tremendous pressure and sanctimony even in adulthood; an under-the-table child-fathering arrangement between Jason and his brother’s widow; the doomed, camo-clad three-man shooting squad, their motivations refreshingly never diagrammed. It’s the same way in Eleanor Rigby, Coupland’s 2005 novel and his brief return to single-character-narrated narrative. That character is Liz Dunn, a plain, overweight, middle-aged office worker who, despite having near-unlimited spending power from well-timed Microsoft stock purchases, nonetheless remains invisible to society. Her actual family, resembling a cloud of semi-benevolent mosquitoes, does her no favors. It’s not until her long-lost, terminally ill son turns up that she experiences any real human-to-human connection. Born suddenly and almost unexpectedly twenty years earlier, when Liz was a teenager, the foster-raised Jeremy brings to this near-featureless setting an embattled but enthusiastic engagement with life and a series of apocalyptic pastoral visions about “farmers [who] had lost their belief in the possibility of changing the world.” Loneliness: it’s beyond obvious in Eleanor Rigby, but it’s evident in all of Coupland’s novels so far. Despite usually enjoying each other’s company, Andy, Claire, and Dag all live their desultory lives in response to loneliness. Despite his drive, his 100-percent modern bedroom, and his vast collection of hair care products, Tyler nonetheless finds himself trapped in moments of loneliness. Daniel and his hard-coding coterie beat down their loneliness with technology, a habit they their story overcoming. Thrust into a new and unfamiliar era by her coma, Karen can’t avoid loneliness; dragged into it by time and life itself, her friends can’t avoid theirs. Desperate to fill their own emptinesses but knowing only the frameworks others have thrust them into, Susan and John walk their lonely, (mostly) separate paths. Each of the Drummonds are embroiled in their own lonely crises, until their crises merge into one big family crisis. Lost between the living and the dead, Cheryl is doubtlessly lonely; stripped at once of both wife and belief system, Jason is lonelier still; when Jason disappears, his girlfriend becomes so lonely that she falls prey to a low-class psychic; with one son missing, one dead, and everyone else in his life driven away by control-freakishness masked as religiosity, Jason’s father is lonely indeed. But in Coupland’s oeuvre, Liz is the loneliness queen. 5. The explosions But oh, how even to sketch a context for jPod? Published in 2006, it comes a bit over a decade after Microserfs and is often discussed as an update to it. In that sense, it has a logical place in Coupland lineup of novels, but in another, more immediate sense, it seems to have sprung, spontaneously and without inhibition, straight from the man’s id. It’s 447 pages of three-letter words, classic arcade machine specifics, Chinese characters for concepts like “boredom” and “pornography,” walls of text made up of not quite non sequiturs, love letters to Ronald McDonald, and random numbers. It’s Coupland’s most divisive book, and no wonder. There’s a main narrative in there, somewhere, about a cubicle cluster of misfits at a Vancouver video game firm. (None dare mention the name Electronic Arts.) This “jPod”, so dubbed because of its J-surnamed members, is assigned a thankless task: go back and insert an edgy turtle character based on the host of Survivor into a skateboarding game already in development. Buffeted by the substantial winds blown by his marijuana-growing mom, his philandering actor dad, his nonsensical workplace, his aggressively lazy co-workers, and a threatening yet amiable Chinese people-smuggler who makes his boss disappear — not to mention a spiteful, cynical version of Douglas Coupland himself — narrating jPodder Ethan just tries to cope. Compared to jPod, any book would seem subdued, especially the epistolary novel The Gum Thief which followed the next year. But in its quiet way, it’s the stranger of the two works. Taking his multiple-voice technique to its limit, Coupland composes the book as a series of letters, journal entries, short stories, and novella excerpts passed between Roger, a fortysomething alcoholic divorcée with a dead son, and Bethany, a chunky, disaffected young goth with a dumb boyfriend. Both work at the same branch of Staples. Roger writes to Bethany, Bethany writes to Roger, Roger writes his novella, Bethany reads his novella, and Roger’s wife and Bethany’s mother are contributing their own epistles as well, each small text influencing the others. It’s a hall of mirrors, at some turns: Roger’s novella itself contains a novel whose protagonist seems a lot like Roger himself. But jeez, that novella. Glove Pond is one of the most engaging fictional bad books I’ve ever read. Though at first it simply seems inept, it develops throughout The Gum Thief into a true masterpiece of deep askewness. Something’s badly wrong with this bizarre Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? pastiche’s every sentence, but, like any art rotten at its core, it’s difficult to pin down exactly what: Within minutes, all the cheese and crackers were gone, and Gloria had eaten the two pickles. Now what would they feed their guests? Steve remembered some pancake mix at the rear of their cupboard. Was the mix beweeviled? That’s okay. Heat will kill them. Switching narrators every chapter also forms the structural foundation of Generation A, Coupland’s most recent novel. It sounds like a jPod to Generation X’s Microserfs, which isn’t far from the truth. Coupland once again brings together a group of young people to tell stories for one another, except this time it’s in a slowly emerging future setting where bees have died out as a side effect, as it were, of the production of a drug that stops its users from thinking about the future or their fellow man. The kids, loosely speaking, aren’t just North American this time; they’re from New Zealand, Canada, France, the United States, and Sri Lanka. It’s a more elaborate, international, science fiction-y version of Generation X, then? The assessment sounds dismissive, but the concept that both books share, that storytelling offers the last line of defense against a barren world of social isolation — against loneliness and disconnection — is still relevant. It’s unlikely to get less so. 6. An earnest apocalypse Are we really headed for a such a bleak future? Is it really because we’re ignoring it, because of our willful information bombardment, our mass denial of absolutes, our retreat into our individual selves, and the breakdown in our ability to hear and tell stories? It’s the scenario each and every one of Douglas Coupland’s novels warns us against. Yet somehow that never ends up being the feeling I take away from any of them. I close most Douglas Coupland novels with a mind jazzed on fresh literary possibilities, not just because he breaks so well from threadbare forms and hybridizes so well with foreign ones — especially visual “pop art,” of which his novels are an equivalent — but because he does it in a way that no small quantity of people seem to actually read. Call it a victory of slickness over substance or marketing by minutiae if you must; in experimental fiction, that’s a world-saving feat.