Brandi Wells’ unnamed protagonist sweeps, mops, wipes down, and disinfects an office while its daytime workers sleep. “I know them all,” The Cleaner tells us. “I’ve seen the grossest things about them, their half-eaten and molding snacks, their vaguely sexual doodles.” Wells gives us the depressing realities of The Cleaner’s invisible labor, beginning with shit smears on toilet seats to abandoned sandwiches in desk drawers. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly states, “Rarely has cubicle culture been depicted in such griminess or with such glee.”

Because of the nature of her work and her schedule, The Cleaner is only apparent if she fails to clean something well—and, as fastidious as she is, she never fails. At one point she describes how she takes her time between window scrubbings so the new clarity will be a “shock.” “Once everyone notices how clean it is, they’ll realize I exist,” she tells us. “They’ll be so embarrassed they hadn’t thought of me before.”

Throughout her shift, The Cleaner digs through employees’ desks to figure out who they are (Mr. Buff uses protein powder, Yarn Guy is a knitter), and to determine who deserves help—or punishment. At one point, The Cleaner throws away a self-help book in the desk of The Intern. By its description, the book sounds awful (“a man on the cover, pointing accusingly at the reader”). So, at first, one might think, “Good! Expel whatever misogynist crap that might lie between those covers!” That is, until The Cleaner explains her reasoning: if she leaves the book, more people will start to read and heed self-help texts, take dubious supplements, go full woo-woo, and “That kind of atmosphere isn’t conducive to productivity.” She doesn’t exploit her proximity to these people through their stuff—and emails and search histories—for fun or to stick a thumb in the eye of capitalist hacks.

Instead, The Cleaner’s efforts are to keep the place humming like a well-oiled machine. Her mind, access, and inconspicuousness are her sharpest tools. “It’s not a crime to care about other people,” The Cleaner tells her one coworker, a security guard named L. L., slapdash in her approach to her job, isn’t convinced. “‘It very nearly is,’ she says. ‘The way you do it.’”

What might feel like a monotonous story about a monotonous job—a person comes and cleans, has one coworker, briefly talks to the delivery person—Wells manages to give us a page-turner plot with biting, grander implications. Here we have a person who has arguably gone whole hog on the enterprise of her career and its capitalistic value. When one’s job is their sole purpose—arguably one of America’s loudest directives—the potential threats toward life’s meaning are rampant.

When The Cleaner realizes the CEO of the company is engaging in nefarious acts that risk the health of the company, the stakes are undeniably higher for her than anyone else. While she does much to control her environment, fantasizing about the narratives she shapes through her exploits, the reality is that The Cleaner remains invisible to those she feels she knows best. The dark commentary Wells builds regarding capitalism and work is undeniable.

Wells tells us of their to-read pile, “Because of migraines, I do so much of my reading via audiobooks. I considered sending you a photo of those—most of them are new releases. But I still can’t help myself in a bookstore, love to carefully pick through their catalogue, and also peruse their staff picks. I love seeing what booksellers recommend.”

Lisa Tuttle, A Nest of Nightmares
This is the first short story collection by the fantasy and horror writer Lisa Tuttle. Tuttle famously refused the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1982 because another author had disseminated his story to Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America members and Tuttle found the “campaigning” distasteful.

In an interview in the defunct Fantastic Metropolis, Tuttle was asked of about her genre of choice. She explains, “I’m attracted to the intellectual aspect of SF—I like fiction which deals straight-forwardly with ideas, fiction which is intellectually stimulating and questioning. I like the idea of SF as ‘thought-experiment’—although mostly in a social and personal sense. I like trying to figure out what it would FEEL like to be immortal, for example, or to live in a society with dramatically different values and ideals than our own.”

George Eliot, Romola
The historical novel by Eliot is set in Renaissance Florence, just after Christopher Columbus has left Spain. There is a blind scholar, his titular daughter, an estranged brother who is a Dominican friar, a shipwreck, enslavement of adopted fathers—the works. Eliot apparently spent a year and a half researching for the book. She often went to Florence in order to capture the story. While she received £7,000, the book apparently didn’t sell well. This despite the fact that Eliot herself said of writing Romola that she did “swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood, such as it is, and with the most ardent care for veracity of which my nature is capable.”

Kristen Ringman, I Stole You: Stories from the Fae
In its review of I Stole You, Publishers Weekly states, “Ringman (Makara) has woven her recollections of personal experiences with ‘fae creatures’ into these 14 lyrical, disturbing first-person tales, all told to victims by vampiric shape-shifting beings drawn from various mythological traditions. Ringman, who is Deaf, postulates telepathic fae-to-human connections as well as signed communication with emotional overtones that no auditory vibrations can match… Ringman successfully brings readers a few steps out of everyday reality.”

Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers
Otsuka’s novel introduces us to a group of people who know one another through their routine of swimming. The NPR review of The Swimmers explains, “When the pool is shut down for safety reasons, the collective daily rhythm of the swimmers’ lives abruptly stops. One swimmer is particularly affected by this rupture in the pattern of the everyday: her name is Alice, ‘a retired lab technician now in the early stages of dementia.’ We’re told that, ‘even though [Alice] may not remember the combination to her locker or where she put her towel, the moment she slips into the water she knows what to do.’ Untethered from the practice of those repetitive daily laps, Alice’s mind floats free. The Swimmers is a slim brilliant novel about the value and beauty of mundane routines that shape our days and identities; or, maybe it’s a novel about the cracks that, inevitably, will one day appear to undermine our own bodies and minds.”

Maru Ayase (trans. Haydn Trowell), The Forest Brims Over
The first of Ayase’s works to be translated into English, The Forest Brims Over fights the usual gender tropes in myth and storytelling when Nowatari Rui turns herself into a forest to avoid her husband using her as inspiration for his novels. As the jacket copy states, “With her privacy and identity continually stripped away, [Rui] has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband’s art. When a decade’s worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a hospital, her husband keeps her in an aquaterrarium, set to compose a new novel based on this unsettling experience. But Rui breaks away from her husband by growing into a forest—and in time, she takes over the entire city.”

Noor Hindi, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.
Hindi’s poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” made rounds when it was first published in Poetry in late 2020 and is understandably being posted on social media again and again since Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. “I want to be like those poets who care about the moon,” she writes. “Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.” The intensity of this poem seems to be the general tone of the forceful collection. Viet Thanh Nguyen says of Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow., “Noor Hindi wields her poetry with passion and righteous anger in this powerful, striking collection that touches the heart and the head, the body and the mind.”

Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy
Becky Spratford in her starred review of Khaw’s book in Library Journal, states, “What if the Little Mermaid laid eggs and her hatched children’s hunger laid waste to her prince’s land? Khaw’s (Breakable Things) latest novella tackles this question with a brutally visceral but seductive opening sequence.” Spratford’s verdict? “With this brilliantly constructed tale that consciously takes on a well-known story and violently breaks it open to reveal a heartfelt core, Khaw cements their status as a must-read author. For fans of sinister, thought-provoking, horrific retellings of Western classics by authors of marginalized identity like Helen Oyeyemi and Ahmed Saadawi.”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
Cha was an artist and author whose book, Dictee, while receiving only tepid responses upon its publication in 1982, resurfaced in the 1990s and had continues to have an enormous impact on writers, readers everywhere. In her book Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong writes extensively about Dictee. She states, “Although it’s classified as an autobiography, Dictee is more a bricolage of memoir, poetry, essay, diagrams, and photography.”

In 2022, the New York Times published an obituary for Cha as part of its “Overlooked No More” series. In it, Dan Salzstein writes of Dictee, “Through chapters named after the Greek muses, the book jumps from one protagonist to another: Cha herself; Joan of Arc; the early 20th-century Korean freedom fighter Yu Gwan-sun, who, at 17, was tortured and killed; and, perhaps most poignantly, Cha’s mother, who hovers over the book like a protective spirit. Through her, Cha explores a traumatic era of Korea’s history, including a decades-long Japanese occupation, a war that divided the country, a series of dictators and an ensuing diaspora, of which the Cha family was a part.”

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Born in 1960, Jeanette Winterson was adopted by a couple in England. By her own description, her parents were working class, with a father who was a factory worker and her mother a home maker. “There were only six books in the house, including the Bible and Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments,” Winterson’s site states. “Strangely, one of the other books was Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and it was this that started her life quest of reading and writing.”

Winterson’s parents were raising her to be a Pentecostal missionary, and, by the age of six, she was writing sermons and preaching. Ten years later, Winterson came out as gay and left home. She worked at a “lunatic asylum” to make ends meet, before going to Oxford and studying English Literature. By 23, she had written Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about her young life.

Cleo Qian, LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO
Qian’s debut short story collection has received a heap of praise, including being longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence. In an interview with A. Cerisse Cohen in BOMB, Qian explains, “I wrote these stories from 2016 to 2022. In my own life, I was experimenting and testing out new identities all the time. I thought a lot about subject matter. There are many people who find literary fiction insular and narrow. I think part of the writer’s duty, in addition to being good at your craft, is to live and think broadly. Otherwise, who are you writing for?… My stories are often about characters who feel disembodied, which I also feel. I didn’t realize that until I started doing yoga and the other physical activities I mentioned. We’re glued to our phones. I write and read a lot, which is also all in my head. I have friends who are cerebral and intellectual and so fun to talk to, but we’re not very connected to our bodies. That’s unnatural. We should all be more in touch with our bodies.”

Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads
Gregory E. Rutledge, in his review of Hopkinson’s book, writes, “The Salt Roads features three mortal protagonists—Mer the Ashanti-born, Santa Dominque-enslaved healer, Jeanne Duval, the mulatta lover of Charles Baudelaire, and Thais, a sex slave of ancient Alexandria, Egypt—who are bound by the bitterness of life and the salutary potential of the meandering, salty flows of the earth, which a fourth immortal protagonists represents.

Just as former Black fantasy author Charles R. Saunders recognized in Butler a true raconteur in 1984 (Bell 91), the label easily applies to Hopkinson, who manages some powerful storytelling here. What author wouldn’t when she expertly excavates the ancient Roman empire located in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Holy Land of Jerusalem, walks readers through Napoleon’s empire in France and the West Indian French colonies, and includes a fist fight, of sorts, between two West African deities of fire and water?”

James Tiptree, Jr., Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
For the uninitiated, James Tiptree, Jr. was in fact Alice Bradley Sheldon, a woman who invented the name based on a marmalade brand after years of unsuccessful attempts at publishing with versions of her own name. “A male name seemed like good camouflage,” she said. “I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.” This is because Sheldon had a wild life—she eloped, had to drop out of unmarried-women-only Sarah Lawrence College, took classes at Berkeley and made art, divorced, joined US Air Force and was promoted to major, met second husband in Paris, joined the CIA, finished college, got a doctorate. Whew! Her pseudonym successfully kept her anonymous for about a decade.

John Self writes in The Guardian, “Tiptree’s status as one of [science fiction’s] leading practitioners is justified, as is the critical cliche that each story contains enough to fill a novel. That’s not unqualified praise: Tiptree’s techniques of defamiliarization through jargon… and dropping us in medias res means the reader has to remake the world with every new story. But in the darkness of space no one can see you scratch your head and given that most of the stories require two readings to be properly absorbed and appreciated—and they merit that attention.”

As I mentioned in the earlier December post, during the often-dread-inducing/dreadful time of year when publications are putting out there “best of the year” lists, I’m glad to shine a light on a book I loved and think deserves more attention than it seemed to receive. This is always a hard task.

So, aside from this post’s guest, I would have loved to see the to-read piles of these authors and written about their books: Camille Dungy’s Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, Etaf Rum’s Evil Eye, Rita Chang-Eppig’s Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, Julia Fine’s Maddalena and the Dark, Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky, J. Michael Martinez’s Tarta Americana.

The author whose to-read pile we do get to peruse is poet and writer Sabrina Orah Mark. In her book Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales, Mark quotes the folklore scholar Maria Tatar: “Magic happens on the threshold of the forbidden.” This seems to be a guiding principle of the brief essays in the book, which began as a series in the Paris Review of the same title.  

In “Happily,” as in the book, Mark attends to motherhood and fairy tales (those two seemingly often-entangled experiences), as well as what Maggie Nelson calls the “unsolvable ethical mess of autobiographical writing.” In Happily’s pages, Mark meditates on the stickiness of writing about family and friends who are potentially hurt by it. About her stepdaughters, her husband’s two ex-wives. When she tells him she’s writing about Bluebeard, his response: “Oh fuck.” The connections between life’s confusions and those of fairy tales seems more and more apt as the book goes on.

In response to reading a fairy tale about a spider and a flea and brewing beer in an egg shell that culminates in scalding, terror, weeping, a flood, Mark writes, “I can’t figure out if this is good news or bad news, and then I remember I am reading a fairy tale, not a will or lab results.” One might say the same thing of a pebble living for months in a child’s ear and, upon its extraction, his saying, “Oh, there you are. I was looking for you all over.”

But the purpose of fairy tales, other than exposing the dark underbelly of how humans think and express what we’re afraid most of is to, ideally, entertain children (but also maybe to terrify them and/or teach them a lesson). Regarding the involvement of her children in this whole enterprise, Mark explains in her interview with David Naimon: “I found myself raising my kids in a place far away from where I came from and suddenly, there’s one school shooting after the next and my kids are Black, and Jewish and I thought, ‘How are we going to all be okay?’ That was the impulse behind the essays, was to remember and to protect…the idea inside of a fairy tale is that the danger comes later, so what happens when you begin in the dangerous place? Can a book protect my kids? Can I turn the essay inside out and wrap it around my kids like some kind of wool, overcoat, bubble, cocoon-type garment?”

She goes on to say that, “If we better understand the world we live in, the things that came before us, and the things that came before that, then before that, will we have better tools to navigate? I think so. Or at least, we’ll have a little bit more light when it gets really, really dark.”

Regarding her to-read pile (note the amazing Writing Ink Made from Guns!), Mark tells us, “My nightstand stack is often more tower than stack, but here is a good representation. Leonora Carrington’s THE HEARING TRUMPET (I’ve read it 100 times) is always at the top to protect the others, and a Golem is always at the tippy top to protect Leonora. My two mystical guards. I have been writing a new book about my house burning down (two winters ago), which is slowly becoming a book about possession and knots and fairy tales and spells and the body and exile and Jewishness. Many of the books on this pile are giving me new ways of thinking about ruin and repair. As Daisy Hildyard writes, ‘What does all this have to do with you? Everything.’”

Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
If you do not know of the British-born Mexican creator Leonora Carrington’s art, writing, or tarot cards, may this be an invitation to scope out any (all) of the above. To give a sense of her as a figure, this is how Merve Emre opens her profile of Carrington in the New Yorker: “When asked to describe the circumstances of her birth, the Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington liked to tell people that she had not been born; she had been made. One melancholy day, her mother, bloated by chocolate truffles, oyster purée, and cold pheasant, feeling fat and listless and undesirable, had lain on top of a machine. The machine was a marvellous contraption, designed to extract hundreds of gallons of semen from animals—pigs, cockerels, stallions, urchins, bats, ducks—and, one can imagine, bring its user to the most spectacular orgasm, turning her whole sad, sick being inside out and upside down. From this communion of human, animal, and machine, Leonora was conceived. When she emerged, on April 6, 1917, England shook.”

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (translated by Aryeh Kaplan), The Lost Princess & Other Kabbalistic Tales of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
Nachman, an 18th/early 19th-century man born in modern-day Ukraine, was meant to follow the Hasidic tradition and become a leader within the movement (the movement is a hereditary dynastic one, and his grandfather was an important Hasidic figure). Nachman refused—but years later founded the Breslov sect of Hasidic Judaism.

His teachings stated anyone could become a holy person (it wasn’t only delineated by lineage), as well as suggested people sing, clap, and dance while praying. Nachman wrote a series of parables, as in this collected text, many of which are influenced by Eastern European tales. These were to impart stories that connect culture of the area and culture of religion. He died at the age of only 38 from tuberculosis and was buried in Poland. His followers began an annual ritual of visiting his grave on Rosh Hashana, which people did in the thousands. The Russian Revolution made that nearly impossible, and very few attempted to do so while Poland was in the USSR. Only some 70 years later were people able to continue the practice. Roughly 25,000 people went in 2008.

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace
Considering what Mark states about her own work-in-progress regarding losing her home in a fire, it makes sense this book is in her pile. Also, as a writer, can anyone not relate to Kingston’s impulse here? From Publishers Weekly: “In September 1991, Kingston (The Woman Warrior; China Men; etc.) drove toward her Oakland, Calif., home after attending her father’s funeral. The hills were burning; she unwittingly risked her life attempting to rescue her novel-in-progress, The Fourth Book of Peace. Nothing remained of the novel except a block of ash; all that remained of her possessions were intricate twinings of molten glass, blackened jade jewelry and the chimney of what was once home to her and her husband. This work retells the novel-in-progress (an autobiographical tale of Wittman Ah Sing, a poet who flees to Hawaii to evade the Vietnam draft with his white wife and young son); details Kingston’s harrowing trek to find her house amid the ruins; accompanies the author on her quest to discern myths regarding the Chinese Three Lost Books of Peace and, finally, submits Kingston’s remarkable call to veterans of all wars (though Vietnam plays the largest role) to help her convey a literature of peace through their and her writings.”

Michael Dumanis, Creature
Dorothea Lasky says about this collection: “Michael Dumanis’s Creature is the poetry book this year you have to read. Steeped in issues of morality, mortality, plasticity, and existence itself, Dumanis paints a picture of life that is as breathtakingly beautiful as it is terrifying. Just as Dumanis writes, ‘There’s more beyond / but not too much,’ the book asks us over and over again what it means to be a living thing and the answer we are given is not simple or easy to swallow. Each poem’s landscape of perfectly chosen and placed language is a land to wish upon. For just as ‘Everything will be taken away before it’s handed back,’ Creature tells us there is hope after loss, even if it is fractured. There is hope in this book, too, as it speaks: ‘I forget my life, but then I remember my life.’ After all, there is poetry still to write which replaces the silence of death: ‘When I grow up, I do not want to be a headstone./ When I grow up, I want to be a book.’ There’s no doubt that Creature contains the real poetry we have been waiting for for a very long time. Read it and feel your spirit cleansed with the truth of our present and our future—‘we, who are about/ to steer our dinghy/ into the open sea.’”

Caren Beilin, Revenge of the Scapegoat
I know I’ve brought up this podcast already in this post, but in her interview on Between the Covers, Beilin talks about the fact that her estranged father sent her painful letters he had written her in childhood. She explains her rage in response, and how she thought, “‘I will never burn these letters. I will burn them into a novel. This is my revenge.’ I felt full of anger and an incredible tenderness, and all these things, but then my horror was nobody can ever see these letters because if anybody says anything besides that they are horrible, then I will die. It’s such an attachment to what they did to me psychically at that age, that it was very hard for me to imagine sharing them. But I guess, as an artist, that’s one of the things I try to practice, like doing things that are very terrifying. I want there to be stakes in the things that I do and I care about that, so I just knew that was one of the things like, ‘I had to do this terrifying thing’…it was like exposure therapy. It really was. I went from these letters searing into my body, like feeling so tender, I went from that to, I don’t know, just going back and forth over however many emails with Danielle [Dutton editor of Dorothy] being like, ‘Let’s change this word here.’”

Nina McLaughlin, Winter Solstice
This seems like a great book to read as the days get shorter. Heather Treseler in the Los Angeles Review of Books writes, “In her new book, MacLaughlin slides a knife edge under the circadian rhythms of our fall into winter, tracking our inchoate urges—to feast and imbibe; to retreat into cozy hibernacula; to skate, ski, and sled, reveling in the dangers of ice and snow; to press naked skin tenderly against skin; and to ‘honor the dark with festivals of light.’ Drawing on poets and singers from Kobayashi Issa and Emily Dickinson to Will Oldham and Mary Ruefle, MacLaughlin reveals how our responses to the solstice, which means ‘sun-stilled,’ are patterned, ancient, and explicable, related to our deepest fears and yearning for survival.” You can read excerpts of Winter Solstice in the Paris Review.

Itzik Manger (translated by Robert Alder Peckerar), The Book of Paradise
The jacket copy for this recently published translation states, “Witty, playful and slyly profound, this story of a young angel expelled from Paradise is the only novel by one of the great Yiddish writers, which was written just before the outbreak of World War II. As a result of a crafty trick, the expelled angel retains the memory of his previous life when he’s born as a Yiddish-fluent baby mortal on Earth. The humans around him plead for details of that other realm, but the Paradise of his mischievous stories is far from their expectations: a world of drunken angels, lewd patriarchs and the very same divisions and temptations that shape the human world. Published here in a lively new translation by Robert Adler Peckerar, The Book of Paradise is a comic masterpiece from poet-satirist Itzik Manger that irreverently blurs the boundaries between ancient and modern and sacred and profane, where the shtetl is heaven, and heaven is the shtetl.”

Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body
The premise of The Second Body is that all human beings have two bodies,” writes Gavin Francis in The Guardian, “the one they have immediate autonomy over, made of flesh and bone, and another which is more diffuse. Hildyard struggles to define exactly what she means by the second body, but in one place calls it ‘the global presence of the individual body’. Elsewhere it is imagined as an entity shared and distributed across every aspect of the biosphere impacted on by humans.” In the book, Hildyard describes how a flood destroyed her home. Francis goes on, “The flood was part of this second body – an elemental retribution brought about not just by her, but by all the collective bad decisions of Homo sapiens: ‘My second body came to find my first body when the river flooded my house.’”

Lars Horn, Voice of the Fish
I saw Horn read and immediately bought, read, and loved this book. For anyone who loves detailed facts or histories and their potential to connect and make meaning of the moment, it is for you. Corinne Manning writes in the New York Times, “The book’s underlying narrative, layered with histories, myths and vignettes about sea life, is [a] serious injury: In 2014, the author tore the muscles from their right shoulder to their lower back while weight lifting, leaving them unable to speak or read for months — a forced stillness and quiet. They had endured such deathly stillness many times before. Horn was the only child of a single mother, an artist who posed Horn to appear dead for photographs and installations and had them sit for full-body plaster casts. The body always adapts, the book argues. As fluid as gender, as a changing tide, it shifts in response to pressures, which are detailed in vivid accounts here: transmasculine rebirth, transphobic locations in Russia and Florida, violence and injury, and the inevitability of disability. Horn wants ‘language and narrative to carry more physicality.’ ‘Voice of the Fish’ meets this desire with a narrative that swells and recedes, with intimate depictions of the writer’s life as well as more distant tales of Pliny the Elder, a 100-year-old manuscript found in the belly of a codfish, and the history of tattooing.”

Clifford W. Ashley, The Ashley Book of Knots
If you have read and know Moby Dick, you know New Bedford, Mass is one of the most important towns for whaling in the United States. This is where Ashley was born thirty years after that book’s publication. In the early 1900s, Harper’s had Ashley go on a whaling expedition, which he wrote about for the magazine. One of the officers of the boat said of the essays, “The illustrations are so true to life that even the Old Barnacles here cannot find fault with them.” Ashley became a whaling historian and wrote two books on the topic. Ashley worked for over a decade on his book of knots, which includes almost 4,000 knots and roughly 7,000 illustrations. He was the second person to ever receive a patent for a knot of his own making (and he has a couple with their own Wikipedia pages.) While just reading a bit about Ashley and knots, I discovered that “bitter end” is a nautical term for when the end of a rope is tied off—a likely source for the phrase “to the bitter end.”

During the often-dread-inducing/dreadful time of year when publications are putting out there “best of the year” lists, I’m glad to shine a light on a book I loved and deserved more attention than it seemed to receive. This is always a hard task, especially for small press books. I would have loved to see the to-read piles of these authors and written about their books: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Negative Money, Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa, Azo Vauguy’s Zakwato & Loglêdou’s Peril (tr. Todd Fredson), Amanda Montei’s Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, Daphne Kalotay’s The Archivists: Stories.

I’m happy to have an opportunity to write about the poet Rachel Zucker’s The Poetics of Wrongness, a series of pieces she wrote as a Bagley Wright Lecturer in 2016 and was published by Wave Books this year as well as selected prose. Lectures are a relatively ancient form (dating to medieval times at least), and one we associate with instruction—a person with intellectual authority imparting their genius on their audience in a way that might change them.

For someone like Zucker for whom taking up power isn’t a comfortable experience, this wasn’t an easy task. At one point in The Poetics of Wrongness she writes, “In order to write [poetry] ethically… I need to think about who I am as maker and what I gain by my writing—understanding, money, notoriety, pleasure, power?” In her podcast Commonplace, Zucker spoke with fellow poet and Bagley Wright Lecturer Douglas Kearney (who won the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism for his own amazing published lectures Optic Subwoof!) about many things—including their experiences writing lectures on craft. For Zucker, it was deeply fraught.

At one point, she tells Kearney, “Part of my drama was about authority. For sure, that comes from being a woman, being an only child, coming out of a very patriarchal religion, coming out of a heterosexual marriage, having only male children, having a male editor—wanting to prove myself and get the gold ring. At the same time I knew that my deepest most authentic work in life was about trying—you know, I can’t live outside of capitalism, but can I, instead of going after this power that I think will protect me or, I dunno, make me a man! Can I dismantle this within myself—the need for it, the addiction to it, the desire for it—and still speak?”

These inquiries are emblematic of Zucker’s approach to writing—she will point directly to the part of herself most would do much to hide from themselves and, failing that, likely the world. The rigor and expansiveness of her lectures and prose surprised me again and again. The ways in which she adheres to lectures in the format we know and generally accept—and then pushes back, breaks, flees from it. The vulnerability of the process and her thinking throughout was radically generous.

In her lectures and prose pieces (“An Anatomy of the Long Poem,” “Why She Could Not Write a Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood”), she references poets from past and present while simultaneously interrogating her experiences as a poet and person. Throughout, Zucker interrogates what “confessional” means, writing about yourself entails, what one’s limits should be (or not). These pieces stirred up so much inside me regarding power, the lecture form, writing, teaching, feminism, the ethics of writing about the self and those in your life. Anyone who is touched by these concerns should read Zucker’s work in all its forms.

Zucker tells us about her to-read pile, “My real to-read pile is actually many piles (all over the house) and includes pdfs books in a folder on my computer called ‘Books to Consider’ (I’m currently reading a pdf of Tanya by Brenda Shaughnessey) and audio files of books and lectures I’m listening to (recently finished Smile at Fear by Pema Chodron, Also A Poet by Ada Calhoun) or am about to listen to (Fully Alive by Pema Chodron). The pictured pile contains an unpublished manuscript by my father, Benjamin Zucker, several books I’m reading with a group as part of ‘Reading with Rachel,’ a live-virtual book group, books I’m reading but haven’t finished, books I haven’t started yet and a few that I’m re-reading.”

Mary Ruefle, The Book
Every time Ruefle puts out another book it’s hard not to get excited. I recommend watching her reading with Rae Armantrout. If you want a real treat in less than 5 minutes, one of the most amazing portions is an old letter she found and from which she read aloud—a wild mind-dump on anxiety surrounding gift giving. Publishers Weekly says of The Book, “The generic title of this beguiling compendium of prose from poet Ruefle (Dunce) belies the richness and variety within. The fragmentary entries touch on an eclectic array of topics and range in length from a few lines to several pages, but they all demonstrate a poet’s eye for brevity and language. The title piece celebrates the intimacy of reading books that feel as if they were ‘written especially for me.’ In ‘The Photograph,’ Ruefle describes a photo of an anonymous ancestor of hers from unknown generations past and rhapsodizes about the bond that photos enable between viewer and subject. Ruefle turns from amusement to melancholy on a dime, best exemplified in ‘The Perk,’ in which the author describes throwing her 50-year-old husband a ‘child’s birthday party,’ complete with a clown who later, after losing his job as an entertainer and trying to kill himself, turns up at the hospital where her husband, a doctor, works.”

Nicole Sealey, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
Kevin Young writes of Sealey’s work in the New Yorker: “Nicole Sealey’s breathtaking sequence ‘The Ferguson Report: An Erasure’ reimagines the Department of Justice’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department following the tragic and galvanizing events that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Redacting the report line by line, word by word, letter by letter, Sealey excavates larger and deeper insights from its account of systemic racism and violence. These are declarations of a different sort, telling a tale, if not of two cities—Ferguson and St. Louis—then of what can feel like two nations. Sealey identifies a ‘they’ and a ‘we,’ divided along lines of power: ‘They say stand in line, / so we stand in line.’ Obedience, conflict, contradiction: all lead to the kinds of conflagrations that Ferguson saw in response to the killing of the unarmed teen-ager Michael Brown by a police officer who saw Brown’s very body as a weapon…‘There’s a pause between wails / in which you hear your shut / eyes dilate,’ Sealey’s transformed poem declares. ‘The Ferguson Report: An Erasure’ at once illuminates truths of our fraught time and seeks radical possibilities within all-too-familiar narratives. As the poem implores us: ‘Listen.’”

Philip Metres, Sand Opera
“Philip Metres’s poetry collection Sand Opera is complex, an untamable polyvocal array of clipped narratives in post-9/11 (if we are to believe such historical markers) America,” writes Solmaz Sharif in The Kenyon Review. She goes on, “The book explores classified redactions, erased testimony, and US-controlled secret prisons, or ‘black sites,’ renderings of which are included in the book. And like state-sponsored erasures, the silences in Sand Opera are multiple in source and purpose. An unpredictable structure of white spaces, grayscale, and black bars interrupt a multiplicity of speech. A series of vellum pages superimposed over lyrics, diagrams of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah’s renderings of cells he was held in, a curious facsimile of Saddam Hussein’s fingerprints, and pages of complete black also disrupt the narrative, preventing closure or easy cohesion. There is not only one sort of palimpsest, not only one kind of haunting here. The visual experience makes the reading synesthetic—I kept thinking of the turning cylinder in a music box, the visual floods and silences as musical braille, my eyes the instrument.”

Joy Harjo, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years
Half a century of writing is a feat so remarkable that it fights language. May we all aim to be so dogged and capable (even a drop) as Harjo. The starred review of Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light in Library Review by Herman Sutter states, “Powerful, personal, and deeply spiritual, these are the poems of a prophet, and as with the words of the greatest prophets, they transcend both category and culture, speaking with an awe-inspiring authority as they draw on Harjo’s heritage as a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. ‘i want to go back / to New Mexico// it is the only way i know how to breathe’ says the opening poem, while the closing poem observes ‘We will find each other again in a timeless weave of breathing.’ Here are poems that have inspired readers and poets to see the world anew and listen to the unheard stories all around them.” And in its (to me) stressful “verdict” section? “Harjo is a national treasure, perhaps even a national resource, and this important book is an essential addition to contemporary poetry collections everywhere.”

Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool
The jacket copy of DeWitt’s novella states, “Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton (‘bad taste’ loses something in the translation)…[T]his and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?” John Domini in The Brooklyn Rail writes, “The English Understand Wool offers another spin snowball of a narrative, gathering weight as it slaloms the hills of Dewitt’s imagination. That trick gave us most of the brainy, bonkers collection Some Trick, in 2018, also delicious reading, by and large. Still, this new story delivers a deeper thrill, barbed yet sweet.”

 Megan Fernandes, I Do Everything I’m Told
A book I feel I have seen everywhere and have yet to get my mitts on! A nudge to go out and get it. Rebecca Morgan Frank writes here in LitHub of I Do Everything I’m Told, “Megan Fernandes sets the tone for her third collection by opening with a love poem titled ‘Tired of Love Sonnets.’ Whether the speaker is having an ‘ugly cry’ before ‘hopping along’ at a K-pop dance class in Shanghai or asking a grocery store clerk whether they sell dignity, the conversational, playful movement of these poems bounces successfully off a formal control that extends to a ‘Fuckboy Villanelle’ in which ‘Eurydice’s tomb / was lousy with my amours.’ These aren’t simply poems about fisting films and exes–breast lump ‘debris,’ toxic masculinity, and ‘[losing] a job at a woman’s college to a dude’ bring different kinds of mourning center stage. As the speaker says, ‘One must look for signs / to believe in them.’”

Kristen Radtke, Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness
Named one of the best books of the year by over half a dozen venues such as Kirkus and the New York Public Library, Radtke’s graphic novel interrogates loneliness in a series of its manifestations. “Loneliness is a silent epidemic in America,” writes Gabino Iglesias at NPR. “It affects people in variety of ways and has adverse effects on our physical and mental health, but we collectively refuse to talk about it — and our understanding of its consequences is not as complete as it should be. Now, the lockdowns brought by the pandemic have made it worse. In Seek You, Radtke’s cuts to the marrow of our inner lives as well as our online lives and public selves to explore the ways in which community, interaction, and even touch affect us, especially when these elements are missing. Looking at everything from technology and social media to art and her own past, Radtke draws on a plethora of stories and personal experiences as well as scientific studies, writers, and philosophers to investigate how we interact with each other and what those interactions ultimately mean for our emotional, physical, and psychological wellbeing…The beauty of Seek You is that it feels like a communal experience. Reading this book is reading about ourselves and our lives.”

Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day
What new thing can I say about this incredible feminist, maternal, epic text? (Also, sidebar, how does this book not have its own Wikipedia page?) For the uninitiated, Mayer decided to write a long poem chronicling a single day—December 22, 1978—when her then-husband, Lewis Warsh, was being interviewed regarding his poetry. Their children were crawling all over Mayer when the interviewer turned to the remarkable poet and asked in a patronizing way, “So what do you do?” Or maybe it was “So you watch the children?” (Perhaps this is apocryphal—I can’t find it anywhere online—but a professor I trust told me this chronicle during my MFA.) Appropriately galled, Mayer decided to write something simultaneously ancient (an epic poem) and novel (about a single day in the life of a mother of small children). Mayer and Warsh had left New York for Western Massachusetts. The fact it was about family, the quotidian, in a relatively rural area made the work radical and enduring. Fanny Howe interviewed Mayer in 2019 about Midwinter Day in which Mayer stated, “So now it’s become for a lot of people, I think, a replacement for Christmas. So they don’t celebrate Christmas, you just have a gala reading of Midwinter Day, it’s so great. I love it, I never realized that it would be popular in that particular way.”

Hafizah Augustus Geter, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin
A winner of the PEN Open Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award and with glowing words from Hanif Abdurraqib, Meghan O’Rourke, Alexander Chee, I’m wondering why The Black Period isn’t in my to-read pile. In its starred review, Kirkus writes, “In this elegiac text, a Nigerian American poet pays homage to her family while considering Black origin stories. ‘I’d been living inside the story begotten by white America,’ writes Geter, ‘but I’d been born into something else—what was it?’ She names this the Black Period, in which ‘we were the default.’ Born in Nigeria, the author grew up in Ohio and South Carolina. Having parents who ‘centered Blackness and art,’ she explains, ‘meant my sister and I were reared in a world that reflected our image—a world where Blackness was a world of possibility.’ Geter grapples with chronic pain and history (‘that thing that white people had gotten to write, but we had to live’) and culture in the U.S., ‘where I had so much in common with the enemy’s face America painted—African/Black, queer, a woman, child of a Muslim mother.’”

Bernadette Mayer, Milkweed Smithereens
Zucker conversed with Mayer in 2016 for her amazing podcast Commonplace and you can feel Zucker’s anxious energy while meeting a living legend who has had an enormous impact on her writing. At one point, she asks a question Mayer doesn’t like (“What is it like to be a crone?”). Zucker is feminist and reclaiming in her intention, but Mayer doesn’t feel it that way. As I listened, all I could think was a sympathetic “Oh no. Oh no oh no” as Zucker tries to clarify, save face, be honest with the last person perhaps on the planet she wanted to insult. The fact that Zucker kept the exchange in the episode illustrates her remarkable impulse to share moments most of us would hide from the world. Without artists like her—and Mayer who cut many of the paths Zucker follows—we would all be in trouble. Published just a few weeks prior to Mayer’s death, Milkweed Smithereens is the last poetry collection published during Mayer’s life. Mandana Chaffa at NBCC writes that Milkweed Smithereens “offers further proof of her importance in the contemporary American poetry landscape. Mayer’s poetry has always been an exuberant embrace of quotidian life—from the justly celebrated Midwinter Day to decidedly unstuffy sonnets, trenchant commentaries on politics, and gorgeous chronicles of nature—in ways lyric, funny, arch, multitudinous, and always true. There’s no loftiness in Mayer’s work and world.”

Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea
Lucy Barton, a recurring narrator of Strout’s work, makes a quick move from New York City to Maine because of the pandemic. Hamilton Cain reviews Lucy by the Sea for the New York Times, stating, “In Strout’s delicate, elliptical new novel, ‘Lucy by the Sea,’ Barton struggles with disbelief as SARS-CoV-2 vectors into the city, infecting — and in some cases killing — acquaintances. She’s mourning her second husband, David, a Philharmonic cellist who’d died a year earlier, when her first husband and close friend, William Gerhardt, a scientist, evacuates her to a rented house on the wind-cradled, sea-bitten New England coast…Strout writes in a conversational voice, evoking those early weeks and months of the pandemic with immediacy and candor. These halting rhythms resonate: Physically and emotionally Lucy is all over the map. Her feelings swing, pendulum-like, stirring up discord. When she upbraids William about a petty offense, he confesses that he had prostate cancer, sparking anguish and self-recrimination. Lucy begins to worry that she’s out of sync, a tension that Strout mines subtly. There’s no escape from the claustrophobia of Covid or family.”

Susan J. Elliott, Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You
Elliott’s book has landed on a handful of “What to Get Divorcées for Christmas” and “The Best Breakup Books.” It seems the book is built from her blog giving advice on the topic that makes up about 90% of all music, literature, and, it seems, general angst. Kathryn Schulz wrote in New York Magazine on the self-help genre, providing some history, “The expression ‘self-help’ comes from a book of that name, published in 1859 by the great-grandfather of the modern movement, one Samuel Smiles. (I kid you not.) These days, the phrase is so commonplace that we no longer hear the ideology implicit in it. But there is one: We are here to help ourselves, not to get help from others nor lend it to them. Unlike his contemporary Charles Dickens, Smiles was unmoved by appalling social conditions; on the contrary, he regarded them as a convenient whetstone on which to hone one’s character. As a corollary, he did not believe that altering the structure of society would improve anyone’s lot. ‘No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober,’ he wrote. ‘Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy, and self-­denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights.’ Smiles was Scottish, but it makes sense that his ideas received their most enthusiastic and enduring reception in the United States: a nation founded on faith in self-governance, belief in the physics-defying power of bootstraps, and the cheery but historically anomalous conviction that we all have the right to try to be happy.”

Rodrigo Toscano, Explosion Rocks Springfield
An excerpt of Explosion Rocks Springfield was in PEN Poetry Series. Brian Blanchfield, the guest editor, “Rodrigo Toscano’s forthcoming Explosion Rocks Springfield consists of eighty iterations of a kind of book-length system, a machine—as I read it—that runs class and labor and collective anxiety and grief through a single disastrous urban American incident, an event frequent enough to be generic, a lesser item in any news cycle. ‘The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care,’ the journalistic title of each poem, resets the operations of an inquiry that moves in and around the news of a violent blast. These are five of the books’ poems, continually combustible at the limits of our untenable pressure.”

Sharon Olds, Balladz
In an interview Olds explains how, just after earning her PhD in literature, she yearned to return to writing poetry. “I said to free will, or the pagan god of making things, or whoever, let me write my own stuff. I’ll give up everything I’ve learned, anything, if you’ll let me write my poems. They don’t have to be any good, but just mine. And that is when my weird line came about. What happened was enjambment. Writing over the end of the line and having a noun starting each line—it had some psychological meaning to me, like I was protecting things by hiding them. Poems started pouring out of me and Satan was in a lot of them. Also, toilets. An emphasis on the earth being shit, the body being shit, the human being being worthless shit unless they’re one of the elect.”

Nicole Callihan, This Strange Garment
Nadia Colburn in Harvard Review writes of the recently published collection by Callihan, “This Strange Garment is written from the perspective of someone navigating breast cancer through the pandemic, and there are poems about tests, treatments, a mastectomy. But it is not a book about cancer; it’s a book about being alive… For Callihan, a poem becomes the space to hold all the strange contradictions of life, including, perhaps most importantly, the contradictions of the body itself, which is also ‘temporary.’ The book is ultimately a tribute to the female body, a body with breasts, even those that have been cut off, with nipples, even those resewn, with a belly button, and menstrual blood—all of which are described with a mix of specificity, respect, beauty, and humor.”

Katie Farris, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
“In the face of medical vulnerabilities and the march of sudden illness, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Katie Farris’ full-length debut) embraces grief and wit, counters beauty with cruelty, and pairs eroticism with nostalgia,” writes Elisa Rowe in The Massachusetts Review. “Farris is a poet, translator, fiction writer, and Pushcart prize recipient. Her piece ‘An Untitled Collection of Generalizations that Mobilize the Eye’ was published in volume 60 number 3 of the Massachusetts Review and is included in the collection under the title ‘I Wake to Find You Wandering the Museum of My Body.’ A self-titled memoir in poems, the collection travels through the milestones of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, moments of pause, episodes of wonder, the concept of a corrupt country, and a global pandemic. Farris’ breast cancer is a seemingly central theme in the collection, but what propels the book forward are her body’s yearnings and her mind’s questions.”

Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life
A BOMB Editor’s Choice, Suzan Sherman writes for the magazine of Thomas’ third-person memoir: “This is the story of Thomas’s life: she married at 18, had three children, and divorced eight years later. Then she moved home and lived in her parents’ basement. She explains, ‘It was 1968, but she was a child of the fifties, she needed a man. And not just any man, a husband. A husband who would provide her with a center. She has none of her own.’ So what does she do? She marries again, has another child, divorces, and marries the man whom today she is still married to. Thomas is now a grandmother and a teacher; she bakes apple cakes and chickens; she feeds. I gobbled this book down, all in one sitting. And then I did it again, wishing there were more of it. Thomas’s life, riddled as it is with complexities, births and deaths, promiscuities and regrets, swells on the page with warmth and authenticity.”

Douglas Melville’s book, Invisible Generals: Rediscovering Family Legacy, and a Quest to Honor America’s First Black Generals, is, in part, defining in its title. Four generations ago in his family leads Melville to America’s first Black general, Benjamin Oliver Davis, Sr. Three generations back? His great-uncle Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr.—American second Black general. The inspiration for Melville, beyond the trailblazing progenitors who “utilized systems designed to hold them back” was he went and saw the film Red Tails. The dramatization about the Tuskegee Airmen left Melville shocked—his great-uncle had been scrubbed from the narrative. This essentially is the inciting incident for Melville to begin his journey in restorative history work regarding his military family members. Kirkus writes of Invisible Generals, “Melville traces the travails his ancestors faced while building records of excellence in a military that, it often appeared, only grudgingly accepted them. Moreover, he recounts his own efforts to be sure they are properly recognized and honored. ‘I can see how the quest never ends,’ Melville writes, and one aspect of that quest is for his military ancestors to be thought of as they wished: Americans, period.”

It just so happens I have found myself encountering several texts and installations on this subject. I recently read Chad L. Williams’ The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War, and, some months ago, Steven Dunn’s excellent water & power based in part on Dunn’s experiences in the Navy. This fall I paid a visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which has an extensive exhibit on the long legacy of Black people fighting for the U.S. military. (It goes back further than you think.) While all, along with Melville’s book, were powerful examples of the complicated and often downright fraught history of Black military service for a racist country, one letter from Williams’ text stuck with me most. It was penned by William Hewlett to Du Bois during World War I, just before the soldier’s return home. Hewlett writes:

If democracy in the United States means—disfranchisement; jimcrowism; lynch-law; biased judges; and juries; segregation; taxation without representation; and no representatives in any of the law making bodies of the United States; if that is the White American of true democracy—Then why did we fight Germany; why did we frown [on] her autocracy; why did black men die here in France 3300 miles from their homes—Was it to make democracy safe for white people in America—with the black race left out.

Melville tells us about his to-read pile, “My nightstand pile is an intersection between inspiration, personal growth, the past, the future and business. I have a habit that I call ‘checklisting’ where I let my mind wander and write down the words, thoughts and subjects that come up. This practice inspires the subjects for my reading habits. Being a diverse author, I like to read, and re-read a wide range of perspectives and hear a variety of voices to ensure I’m open minded and fine-tuned personally and professionally. For me, it’s important to either wake up or go to bed—with daily thoughts that help set my dreams and my reality.”

*

Todd Moye, Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II
In its review, Publishers Weekly writes of Moye’s book, “Despite official skepticism and occasional hostility, the Tuskegee Airmen successfully demonstrated ‘that racial segregation of troops was inefficient and… hindered national defense.’ Their record helped persuade the air force—largely for ‘reasons of operational self-interest’—and President Harry Truman to seek the immediate desegregation of the military after the war. The author directed the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project and mined some 800 interviews for his exhaustive research. Moye’s lively prose and the intimate details of the personal narratives yield an accessible scholarly history that also succeeds as vivid social history.”

Charles Francis, The Tuskegee Airmen: The Men Who Changed a Nation
As Melville’s book attends to the Tuskegee Airmen, it’s not a surprise we see a few books on the historical group. In World War I, Black men hoped to act as aerial observers (no ammunition), but were denied because of their race. One went as so far to serve for France air force during that time as his own country rejected him. It wasn’t until World War II that Black men were able to fly, albeit in segregated units. The Army Air Corps (now US Army Air Force) created remarkable restrictions for what allowed them to select potential Black pilots, believing there would hardly be enough to scratch together a squadron. Unbeknownst to them, many went through the government-sponsored Civilian Pilot Training Program (specifically made in order to help bolster military numbers in the war). By 1941, the 99^th Pursuit Squadron was the first all-Black flying unit in the United States.

Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
Rachel Boccio, in her review of Benjamin’s book in Configurations, writes, “That digital code—the interminable combination of binary numbers underwriting our high-tech age—can be apolitical, unbiased, and colorblind is a techno-utopic fantasy undercut by decades of data-driven and encrypted inequities. In Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin analyzes the mechanisms behind a digital caste system that she calls the ‘New Jim Code’: the reproduction of historical forms of discrimination by modern technologies that are perceived and promoted as objective or progressive. Benjamin considers the ambitions and methods of a wide range of programmers and initiatives, including some with democratic aims. And yet, as she argues, even ‘technical fixes’ to systemic inequalities in housing, education, healthcare, and policing lead, very often, to more insidious forms of racism, insidious in that the perpetrated wrongs become harder to recognize.”

Kim Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
Erin Vanderhoof, in her Vice review of Scott’s book, writes, “With little hierarchy, institutional memory, or bureaucracy beyond ideas, start-ups begin their lives in disarray. Anybody who has seen The Social Network can tell you that, and Scott affirms this stereotype when she mentions that she was generally older than her managers at Google and Apple. She seemed to be the person you called when you needed an adult in the room.” Vanderhoof goes on to say, “[Scott] assumes that everyone who isn’t good at overseeing a schedule, working with others, setting priorities, and managing workflows never becomes a boss. Anyone who works in the real, mediocre world knows that is not the case. In Silicon Valley, your ability to be a founder is based entirely on your ability to have an idea, convince investors to give you money, and attract media attention. None of these qualities ensures that you will be even a passable manager.”

Danyel Smith, Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop
In her book, Smith attends to the known and not-so-known great singers such as Cissy Houston, Sister Rosetta Sharpe, Janet Jackson, and many others. Smith’s book received a starred review in Library Journal, where Lisa Henry writes, “This book is the culmination of years of interviews, research, and personal appreciation for the music that shaped the author’s own life. Smith explores famous musicians as well as those who may have been forgotten… Smith interweaves heartfelt stories of her own life as she provides evidence of the continual erasure of Black women’s contributions to the evolving music industry, even as they upended all cultural norms and created unprecedented sounds.”

Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt, The Gift of Forgiveness: Inspiring Stories from Those Who Have Overcome the Unforgivable
Schwarzenegger Pratt interviews a series of famously wronged people including Elizabeth Smart, who Margaret Talbot describes as “a member of a tiny sorority of women who have escaped from modern-day Bluebeards and shared their stories.” There is also Sarah Klein, who on her law firm’s page is profiled as “an advocate for victims of sexual abuse, and a former competitive gymnast. Sarah is also one of the first known victims of former Olympic Women’s Gymnastics Larry Nassar, and in July 2018, at the ESPYs, Sarah accepted the Arthur Ashe Courage Award on behalf of herself and the hundreds of other survivors of Nassar’s sexual abuse.” And, also, Sebastián Marroquín who, Paul Imson explains, “At just 17, Mr. Marroquin, who changed his name from Juan Pablo Escobar, was effectively heir to the largest drug trafficking empire in history.” In short, all the people interviewed have had remarkably horrible things done to them by specific people and who, as survivors, have written about it and/or do lectures. Some, it seems, are more successful than others.

Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
Chouinard reentered more American minds recently when he announced in 2022 that his family’s company Patagonia, worth $3 billion at the time, was put into a trust so that the entirety of its $100 million annual profits go toward fighting climate change. This isn’t the first time Chouinard or Patagonia engaged in serious activism, but it certainly raised its fair share of money-havers’ eyebrows. Chouinard was famously a climber who ended up wildly wealthy—and apparently uneasily so—as the subtitle of this memoir tells us—because of the success of his business. What got Chouinard into rock climbing was actually his love falconry as a youngster and his desire to find falcon nests. He eventually started to make his own climbing equipment, teaching himself how to so, then starting a company specializing in climbing gear. Check out this amazing photo of him on Mt. Hood in 1975. It’s clear from the start Chouinard’s activism was part of his approach from the start. In 1970, he discovered the pitons he sold—and comprised 70% of his income!—was harming Yosemite. He and his business partner created new tools and advocated for “clean climbing” to avoid further destruction in Yosemite and elsewhere.

Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause
In John Reeves’ review of this book in the Washington Post, he writes, “Seidule tells the story of his transformation from a believer in the Lost Cause to a critic. Growing up in Virginia and Georgia, he worshiped Lee. It was only later, as the head of the history department at the U.S. Military Academy, that he discovered the truth about Confederate myths. Seidule writes: ‘I grew up with a lie, a series of lies. Now, as a historian and a retired U.S. Army officer, I must do my best to tell the truth about the Civil War, and the best way to do that is to show my own dangerous history.’ Seidule has written a vital account of the destructiveness of the Lost Cause ideology throughout American history. He shows how films, textbooks and memorials promoted white supremacy by glorifying traitors and enslavers like Lee and other Confederate leaders.”

Rob Schwartz, 52 Fridays
Melville explains this one: “One of the books—the all-black spine fourth from the top—is titled 52 Fridays. It’s an independent book written by Rob Schwartz, 2016. Upon becoming CEO of Madison Ave Agency TBWA\Chiat\Day NY in January 2015…each week he wrote a sometimes funny, sometimes inspirational, often quirky creative email to keep the week, advertising and our culture in perspective.”

Erwan Rambourg, Future Luxe: What’s Ahead for the Business of Luxury
“Luxury” is a word we have in English, like so many, from French because of the Norman Invasion. In Old French, luxurie meant “debauchery, dissoluteness, lust.” So, in the 13^th century, in Middle English, luxure or luxurye specifically described sex. By the mid-14^th century, it became “lasciviousness, sinful self-indulgence.” It is derived from the Latin lūxus, or excess—this derives from luctari (“to struggle”). In the OED, it states “In Lat. and in the Rom. langs. the word connotes vicious indulgence.” It didn’t become the word we think of today until the 1700s.

I’m excited to shine a light not only on a new book of poetry but also on a new small press: Winter Editions began publishing titles in May of this year varying from titles that are five decades old but out of print to debut collections of poetry. While “big 5” publishers get books in the hands of people across the planet in meaningful ways, the tireless yet rewarding work of small press publishing allows for voices and aesthetics we might not otherwise encounter. The ethos of Winter Editions is that it “supports writing which pursues an ‘other’ way—opposing generic constructs and codified forms, or offering unfamiliar, outsider, or marginalized perspectives…Dreaming of social and aesthetic engagement beyond commodity, hierarchy, and exclusion, WE publishes for readers who desire intimate, unquantified relations.” It doesn’t have social media—it focuses instead on making great books and gets them in bookstores and libraries.

Ahmad Almallah’s second collection, Border Wisdom, is among them. We’re at a stunning moment in the world—but also the world of literature. The Frankfurt Book Fair cancelled an award ceremony for Adania Shibli; the 92NY disinvited Viet Thanh Nguyen for his signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, among other things. It’s urgent we heed voices of the historically and systematically unheard—especially Palestinian authors like Almallah (who has lived in the United States for some years). Border Wisdom thoughtfully incorporates of Arabic, English, prose-poems, a variation of fonts to illustrate a multivocal or at least multitonal text. The latter varies from somber to jokey or satirical. One of the most moving portions of the collection is a series of poems that acts as a loving paean to his mother—“You clung to my hand like I was / that small body you made / and named.” This terrible loss (which he calls again and again a “disappearance”) and its previous looming inevitability are made even more fraught for Almallah due to his distance—and where his mother lived. Palestine was and is a place often defined by danger and violence. While living in Lebanon, Almallah resorts to witnessing this on the news:

Sometime in May, another war in Gaza is on its way—
in the room we save for the living, I watched the buildings
leveled to the ground             dust and some more dust
rising in a cloud

Addressing his mother in the intimate “you,” he goes on:

I was in Beirut             calculating my next move: should
I go back and wait for your eventual
disappearance…I thought you’ll wait for me, for us,
time and again—         I was wrong.

Ultimately, she died in the hospital where Almallah was born. At one point, Almallah ironically writes, “that’s how Palestinians lose their battles. Their suffering is so detailed and absurd that when they try to tell it to the world, they step into a critical defeat: the overdramatic!” To read an excerpt of the collection, you can access Jerome Rothenberg’s selection of poems from Border Wisdom in Jacket2. Divya Victor says of Border Wisdom, “Ahmad Almallah observes the dust that rises when war and grief collide in the rubble of brief existences made briefer by geopolitical devastations. These poems honor the daily trembling and unexpected questions that accompany the losses of one’s spaces of origin—one’s mother, one’s land, one’s language.”

Regarding his to-read pile, Almallah tells us, “Before putting Border Wisdom together, I hit a dead end trying to write a novel. My way out now is to read much prose by some of my favorite poets. I also left room for other interesting and urgent prose out there…here I especially point out the new translation of one Palestine’s literary and political icons, Ghassan Kanafani (might his voice and vision bring some attention to Palestinians and their struggle for dignity and life since their land was promised to the Zionist Federation by the British colonizers in 1917).”

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Whenever a canonical/famous text comes up in a guest’s pile, I like to dig for random factoids about it. Early titles for Plath’s sole but remarkable novel were The Girl in the Mirror and Diary of a Suicide. Apparently, she hewed so closely to the reality of the students that populated The Bell Jar that people were able to identify themselves, each other—to such a degree it created scandals and busted up marriages. The Bell Jar came out just weeks prior to Plath’s death, obviously coloring how people read it. It sold wildly well, going into a third printing in just a month. It remained on the bestseller list for almost half a year. I’m sure Harper & Row had to sit and think about the fact it was promised to them but they rejected it, saying, it was “disappointing, juvenile and overwrought.” Some of the poems that Plath wrote in the posthumously published Ariel were scratched out on the clean sides of Bell Jar draft pages.

Sylvia Plath, Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom
This is a story Plath wrote when she was only twenty, recently published for the first time. It follows the titular Mary as she rides on a train, initially caught up in the opulence—only to realize there’s something dark about the train’s final destination. Heather Clark at Harvard Review writes of the piece, “[Plath’s] structure was Dantean—she had been reading Dante in November 1952—yet the story’s real subjects are depression, suicide, and rebirth. Plath had been writing short stories since she was a child, but ‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’ marked the first time she had faced, albeit obliquely, what she called her mental ‘difficulties’ in fiction. The story shows Plath already grafting an allegorical trajectory onto her psychological struggles—mining them, even in the depth of her depression, for creative potential.”

Zbigniew Herbert, Barbarian in the Garden (tr. Michael March & Jaroslaw Anders)
In 1983, Bogdana Carpenter wrote of Polish writer Herbert’s use of the image of “the barbarian” in his work. Carpenter explains, “The barbarian is a savage, the inhabitant of a country at the periphery of the civilized world…[T]he concept of the barbarian suggests a straightforward system of values based on a cultural hierarchy and implying inferiority on the one hand (the barbarian) and superiority on the other (civilization, the garden). However, a deeper reading of Herbert’s work undermines this simplistic conclusion, revealing the ambiguity in his use of the term and the complexity of his attitude toward the West. This represents one of the most original and striking features of his writing. It challenges many of the commonly held attitudes about civilization—about what it is and what it is not—as well as the values we associate with it.”

Zbigniew Herbert, The King of the Ants: Mythological Essays (tr. John Carpenter & Bogdana Carpenter)
Herbert was lauded for his work throughout his life, and was one of the most well-known post-WWII Polish writers who opposed communism. His work has been translated into dozens of languages and, when he died, Richard Eder in the New York Times says Herbert was “perhaps an artery or two away from a Nobel.” And here we have a scholar of his work (as quoted above) also acting as his translator! Eder’s review of the collection states, “‘King of the Ants’ is 11 prose variations on Greek myths, most of them speaking out for the underdogs. There is a nice sketch of Atlas forced to do the drudge work of holding up the heavens. As the gods—read the privileged—would say, ‘Someone must do it.’ It is minor Herbert, on the whole, though the poet’s wit and moral bite are evident.”

Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose (tr. Georgina Kleege)
The beloved writer and visual artist’s novel fictionalizes the death of Marie Rose Boulos, a Syrian immigrant in Lebanon—Adnan’s home country—who coordinated welfare services for Palestinians and also acts as instructor for deaf-mute children during the Lebanese Civil War. The Christian militia executed Boulos. Sitt Marie Rose attends to this death from the perspectives of seven different people, allowing Adnan to comment on misogyny and Lebanese xenophobia. As a side note, reading about Adnan, I saw she was a member of an art movement I was otherwise ignorant of called the Hurufiyya movement. This was a 20^th century Muslim art movement grounded in traditional Islamic calligraphy in conjunction with modern art.

Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things
Auster is known for many things, including his work for PEN American Center. In 2012, Auster’s work was to be published in Turkey. He vowed in a Turkish newspaper never to go to the country “because of imprisoned journalists and writers…How many are jailed now? Over 100?” Wildly, the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan responded to this statement with, “If you don’t come, so what? Will Turkey lose prestige?” Auster published a response, which reads, in part: “All countries are flawed and beset by myriad problems, Mr. Prime Minister, including my United States, including your Turkey, and it is my firm conviction that in order to improve conditions in our countries, in every country, the freedom to speak and publish without censorship or the threat of imprisonment is a sacred right for all men and women.” If you haven’t read In the Country of Last Things, you can find an excerpt of it here.

Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
James Wood in his review of Lerner’s debut novel in the New Yorker writes, “Adam Gordon, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel, ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’ (Coffee House; $15), is a descendant of those frustrated Russian antiheroes. He is a young American poet who, in 2004, is spending a fellowship year in Madrid; his project is “a long, research-driven poem” exploring the legacy of the Spanish Civil War. If that “research” sounds like the boxed-up confection that people present in order to get fellowships abroad, that’s because it is: Adam knows little about the Civil War and not much about Spanish poetry. In Madrid, like one of Herzen’s young men in a dressing gown, he spends his time reading Tolstoy, Ashbery, and Cervantes, going to parties, downing tranquillizers, smoking spliffs, trying and largely failing to love and be loved by two Spanish women, Teresa and Isabel, and dodging the head of the foundation that has funded his sojourn.”

Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha
I realize it’s hard for me to make a compelling argument that Brooks is one of the most overlooked geniuses of American literature—she was the first Black American to win the Pulitzer Prize. But I didn’t learn about her work until I was almost 30. Her writing is out of print save for a recently published selected works (assembled by Elizabeth Alexander, Brooks’ contemporary champion). Alexander says of Brooks’ poetry, “Her formal range is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso.” Maud Martha, however, is Brooks’ sole novel—but it continues to trace the predominant concerns Brooks returned to with acuity throughout her oeuvre along with its undeniably brilliant language. Asali Solomon says of the novel on NPR, “[Maud Martha is] the story of a girl who becomes a woman in 1940s black Chicago, told with minimal drama and maximal beauty. The plot here resembles your life or mine: good days and bad, no headlines. But Maud Martha‘s riotous parade of human feeling will make you wonder what Brooks could have done with your life story.” To give an example, Maud sees her husband openly flirting and dancing with someone. She thinks of attacking this woman, but then decides, “if the root was sour what business did she have up there hacking at a leaf?”

Ghassan Kanafani, The Complete Works of Ghassan Kanafani (volume 4)
Kanafani was a Palestinian author and activist who helped lead the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine. He was assassinated in Beirut at the age of 36 in 1972 by Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad. This volume contains Kanafani’s critical work, including “On Zionist Literature,” which is now also available in English translation by Mahmoud Najib. The publisher of Najib’s translation states of the work, “Translated into English for the first time after its publication in 1967, Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature makes an incisive analysis of the body of literary fiction written in support of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Interweaving his literary criticism of works by George Eliot, Arthur Koestler, and many others with a historical materialist narrative, Kanafani identifies the political intent and ideology of Zionist literature, demonstrating how the myths used to justify the Zionist-imperialist domination of Palestine first emerged and were repeatedly propagated in popular literary works in order to generate support for Zionism and shape the Western public’s understanding of it.” Considering the active silencing of Palestinian voices and pervasive ignorance surrounding the context of what is happening in Palestine today, this seems like required reading.

Christina Heatherton, Arise!: Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution
In an essay, Heatherton that writes that her book “was born of family lore. Many of my Okinawan relatives, including one great-uncle, came to the United States via Revolutionary Mexico. Morisei Yamashiro became a farmworker and labor organizer in the fields of Southern California’s Imperial Valley. There, Okinawan, Japanese, Chinese, Black, Filipino, South Asian, Indigenous, poor white, and Mexican workers labored together… This story was provocative for several reasons. I knew of the world of the Revolutionary Atlantic and the radical currents which produced what Julius C. Scott calls the “common wind” of abolition. I first wondered if there might be a story to tell about the Revolutionary Pacific and the influence of the Mexican Revolution upon it. The story further challenged my understanding of Asian American radical history. Instead of resistance to nativism and exclusionary laws, I wondered how to make sense of a possible solidarity between Okinawans and Japanese migrants with Indigenous peasants during the Mexican Revolution and its influence upon radicalism in the United States.”

Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Thought of Karl Marx
In its review of this doorstop of a book Kirkus writes, “‘It is the Marx of the nineteenth century, not the twentieth, who can attract the people of the twenty-first,’ [Liedman] writes, meaning that despite the deformities introduced to Marxist doctrine by way of the practical—and totalitarian—politics of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, there are still good bones in the house that Marx built. Liedman examines the man and his ideas alike, sometimes finding unpleasant moments in both… Some readers may wish that Marx had gone with his earlier desire to become a poet instead of a philosopher of such matters, but this book makes clear that Marx’s ideas, going on two centuries old, still have meaning in the present. Outstanding. Not the book for a budding Marxist to start with, but certainly one to turn to for reference and deeper insight.”

In K-Ming Chang’s Organ Meats, two girls, Anita Hsia and Rainie Tsai, live in a drought-ridden unnamed town in the United States. Anita has a boundless imagination that connects with the otherworldly. Rainie is more staid, rational—or, perhaps, inclined to give into the dull life society provides. They are linked by red threads they both wear around their necks so they can be collared dogs.

This allows them to connect to the neighborhood strays that lounge near a sycamore. Anita’s mother once told her human women used to be dogs. “Men want a dog,” she explains as the reason. “They want someone who will need them, you know, who will never refuse them….Dogs will take anything you give them.”

Ultimately Anita and (eventually) Rainie work to turn these expectations on their head, instead providing loyalty only to the deserving. They access dog-women elders throughout and largely gain wisdom and guidance. This is alongside some distressing ideas about girlhood and womanhood. “Don’t forget: A tree without fruit is only good for firewood,” Chang writes. “A daughter who doesn’t bear children must burn.” At another instance: “girls should have ears but not mouths if they wanted to survive.”

Fantastical and chaotic, it’s hard to tell what’s real, dream, or the girls’ invention in Organ Meats—or if those delineations even matter. Chang employs a variety of forms and povs: dialogue, letters, from Anita’s perspective, an omniscient—but also the mythical dogs/women elders that oversee the girls. Recurring images throughout include: pearls, trees, hair, dogs, red thread, bones. Family stories, myths, experiences, and invention circle each. Violence is often at the heart of these tales. “Our scars are a map back to each other,” Anita tells Rainie.

When Rainie goes unconscious for two weeks after she’s bitten by a dog and one of its teeth is embedded in her wrist, Anita marks her forehead to ensure she can find her. Their queer love of one another and wild appraisal of the world around them is something Anita is confident in while still a child—but Rainie often finds herself resisting both. Rainie’s family moves when they’re ten. Soon after, Anita disappears from her body in a dreamscape where she learns of her origins, entering what Rainie might call a coma.

Ten years later, Rainie returns. “The distance between their bodies felt planetary,” Rainie realizes as she looks at her friend whose body has begun to disintegrate with the help of ants and mushrooms. “[Rainie had] once been Anita’s accomplice, corroborating her truths and lies, wearing the same collar of red, but now their histories had splintered.” Thus begins Rainie’s journey to enter Anita’s approach to the world—of dreams, imagination, and the dog guides they turned to as children.

Men are (blessedly) rare in this book. When any fathers pass through, they’re barely present. Brothers are allowed to exist, but sometimes they are killed by their sisters via women ghosts stuck in trees. At one point, Anita’s cousin Vivian gets pregnant from someone they call “Mr. McDonald’s” (where he and Vivian go to hook up in his car). After Anita’s mother and Vivian go steal the vehicle, Vivian gives birth to a girl, expanding their cadre of women. “Men are digressions,” Vivian says at one point, and the book’s plot certainly illustrates that feeling.

This points to the most exciting thing about this novel to me—how sparingly yet compellingly Chang demonstrates that a world where patriarchy and the ordinary thrive is an obvious affront to life. After she returns, Rainie meditates on how Anita’s absence from her body reminded Rainie of something she has also felt. “When her mother spoke to her about marriage,” writes Chang, “Rainie could see the outline of her life but without her body inside it.”

The prose in Organ Meats is knockout—but what makes the novel revolutionary is that within its pages two girls are allowed to transform their lives through mischief and devotion. In its glowing starred review, Publishers Weekly states, “Chang’s hallucinogenic prose is wild and alive, a savage yawp of liberating beastliness in the face of all that would seek to yoke her heroes to the dreary laws of man.”

Chang tells us about her pile, “My to-read pile is like a north star for my writing life—I love navigating my way toward themes, language, and brilliant writers whose work inspires me and who I want to be in conversation with. I especially love reading fiction in translation and how they expand the possibilities of language on the page. I owe so much to queer novels in translation, and I’m constantly feeling regenerated and invigorated and awakened by them. I try to let myself be guided by instinct and joy when I choose what to read next, rather than making strategic plans. This helps make it feel like play and pleasure rather than reading as work, which can sometimes happen. I find that whenever reading no longer feels like a refuge, rereading favorites and revisiting influential childhood books always returns me to that sense of giddy excitement and urgency.”

*

Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle (tr. Sophie Lewis)
An excerpt of this 1968 novella is in Asymptote, which includes a translator’s note from Sophie Lewis. Lewis writes, “Thérèse and Isabelle has been multiply blocked, suppressed, and censored, ostensibly due to its sexual content. Its story is simple: the account of a passionate relationship between teenage girls in a convent school during one school term. And it’s true I found it hard work translating the sex. The English don’t have many options between the poles of smut and surgery. I began intending to match Leduc’s aim to describe everything precisely, including “the flower, the meat of a woman’s open sex,” but found that sometimes, so as not to draw more attention to that meat than Leduc had intended, I could only take refuge in saying, rather than her sex or her vagina or her labia, more simply and yet evasively, her.” Lewis goes on an quotes Leduc: “I am trying to render as accurately as possible, as minutely as possible, the sensations experienced in physical love….I am not aiming for scandal but only to describe the woman’s experience with precision.”

María Fernanda Ampuero, Human Sacrifices (tr. Frances Riddle)
A recently published collection of short stories from the Ecuadorian author Ampuero describes by Kirkus as “Terrifying stories lay bare the brutality of patriarchy and the violence it metes out on women and children.” The review goes on: A sense of claustrophobia dwells in these pages. A few stories in, the reader begins to prepare for the horrible thing (or things) that will inevitably happen. Page after page, women and children are brutalized and raped. Confronted by one monstrous scene after another, the reader becomes almost inured to the collection’s representations of violence. The stories are strongest when they avoid relying on the shock value of human cruelty and experiment with the possibilities afforded by the form of the short story.

Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Happy Stories, Mostly (tr. Tiffany Tsao)
Happy Stories, Mostly was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. The Booker committee writes of the book, “Powerful blend of science fiction, absurdism and alternative-historical realism that aims to destabilize the heteronormative world and expose its underlying rot….Inspired by Simone Weil’s concept of “decreation” and drawing on Batak and Christian cultural elements, in Happy Stories, Mostly Pasaribu puts queer characters in situations and plots conventionally filled by hetero characters. In one story, a staff member is introduced to their new workplace—a department of Heaven devoted to archiving unanswered prayers. In another, a woman’s attempt to vacation in Vietnam after her gay son commits suicide turns into a nightmarish failed escape. And in a speculative-historical third, a young man finds himself haunted by the tale of a giant living in colonial-era Sumatra.

Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead
I quoted from Lou Cornum’s essay about Almanac of the Dead when the book was on Myriam Gurba’s TBR pile (and I recommend people do give that a read!). It’s funny, now, to read the hatchet job PW attempted on this enduring and totemic work: “there are virtually no decent nor likable characters here; even those of indigenous American descent have been corrupted by modern culture and ancient hate. Despite its laudable aims, this meandering blend of mystical folklore, thriller-type violence and futuristic prophecy is unwieldy, unconvincing and largely unappealing.” Luckily readers have an enduring interest in unlikeable and indecent characters (no matter their identity markers), as well as “unwieldy” narratives that combust the usual tropes. As Cornum notes, “In 1991, a book like Almanac had never been produced in Native American literature, and nothing like it has been produced since. Many mainstream critics struggled with how to relate to it.”

Agustina Bazterrica, Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (tr. Sarah Moses)
In her New York Times review of Bazterrica’s short story collection, Kate Folk quotes the book from the start: “She was horrified by the traces of monstrosity in everyday life.” Folk goes on that this “could be read as a unifying principle for all twenty stories.” Folk states of Nineteen Claws and Black Bird, Moses’ translation from the Spanish captures the playful gruesomeness of the Argentine writer’s prose. Misogyny and its knock-on effects are an animating force throughout….Endings come with a twist as characters sanguinely accept their fates, as if to concede they should have seen it coming. Bazterrica takes big swings throughout, and while not every punch lands, these stories are fresh and unnerving.

Oksana Vasyakina, Wound (trans. Elina Alter)
Wound was one of the most anticipated books of the year for Electric Lit, where Michelle Hard writes, Late last year, ten months after the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government passed a law banning open expressions of LGBTQ identity, which they deemed “propaganda.” The voices of queer Russians are necessary now more than ever, to be broadcast loud and proud, so it feels particularly special to have this moving and wonderfully witty work of autofiction about a lesbian poet traveling from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia to inter her mother’s ashes.

______________________________

Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang is available via One World.

While I don’t have this technology in my home, so often I visit friends and hear “Hey, Alexa,” followed by some relatively basic command to play a song or album. The AI associated with the Amazon Echo allows it to listen for this cue (to which it responds in the often-feminine voice) and deliver data people request. Poet and performer Catherine Chen once transcribed data for the Echo and thus has had a good amount of time to meditate on technology, its trajectory. In an interview from a few years ago, Chen explains, “Every poem is a negotiation of self, the lyric I. In my understanding, the lyric I feels very far away from who I actually am and the poem is the lyric attempt to process this distance. Do I approach this self? Do I leave it alone? Do we awkwardly ignore each other? A poem offers a model for reconciling distance and tension in ways that I see as generative.”

Chen’s recently published debut collection Beautiful Machine Woman Language was published by Noemi Press, for which I am a Poetry Editor (I didn’t work on this manuscript). At one point in Beautiful Machine Woman Language, Chen writes, “Every technology reflects the desires of its creator.” We’ve seen this in films such as Her (though, arguably, not as insightfully), Ex Machina (pointedly). Often the creator’s desire is connected to feminine characteristics. This can hardly be a surprise considering the position women often hold and have held in the majority of the world—caretaker, doer of nettling tasks. The poems chronicle an unnamed data worker (“I was responsible for helping organize the oral archives of voice recognition technology”) falling in love with the femme AI people talk to—these are the utterances they are meant to catalog. As Chen writes of the AI, “Sometimes her worth is condensed to the size of ‘You are dumb.’ ‘You’re welcome slut.’” Even if it is “just a robot,” why treat it with cruelty? Where and when else have we had that impulse as creatures? Has it ever been a good one? Douglas Kearney says of the debut poetry collection, “Beautiful Machine Woman Language is the crash site of individual and empire, the smoke still twisting before the poet’s eyes; fire deep in their throat.”

Regarding their to-read pile, Chen tells us, “Mythic landscapes lying horizontal: what system is buried here.”

The Classic of Mountain and Seas / Shanhai jing
If you love a literary squabble, how about a book that’s been around for 2400 years, give or take, and people are still arguing over who wrote it? Sima Qian, the “father of Chinese historiography” from the 2^nd and 1^st centuries bce, started the debate—and it’s never stopped. It’s a text that, because of its age alone, has had many different hands in its existence over time. The illustration of a phoenix was colored in during the Qing Dynasty (between the 17^th to early 20^th centuries). Overall, The Classic of Mountain and Seas / Shanhai jing attends to a wide variety of concerns, largely the geographical, natural, medicinal, religious, and mythical. The landscape of mountains and water are given equal attention as Nüwa and Nine-Tailed Fox.

Ronaldo V. Wilson, Virgil Kills: Stories
Roberto Tejada says of Wilson’s collection of stories, “A novel, a dream book, a study in self-formation, a concert of surface, sex, and underswell…. Ronaldo Wilson’s ingenious Virgil Kills guides us, in the style of collage and choreography, through a netherworld where the “the act of the body in the turns of its written emissions” can connect memory to the real and the fictive. Wilson’s portrait of Virgil—mixed-media invention; composite persona—is in equal parts riotous and intimate. In scenes of sexual acts, social kinship, family attachments, and racial marking; in narratives of loss, defiance, escape, and exile, Wilson refutes ‘sorrow as the route to freedom,’ defining what it means instead to render ‘temperature and thought’—that is, to amaze, abrogate, and amplify the attributes of embodied life.”

Sarah Aldridge, Tottie: A Tale of the Sixties
Sarah Aldridge is the pen name for Anyda Marchant. Her legal name was Anne Nelson Yarborough De Armond Marchant—she began to use its acronym for her name. Marchant’s life is a wild one, and I highly recommend diving into this article on her if you’re inclined. She was of first women in the US to pass the Bar Exam in 1933. Not only did she practice law and have a celebrated career for 40 years, she reached high positions of power including in the Law Library of Congress. She attained a particularly choice post when the man who held it was drafted during WWII. When he returned and resumed his job, rather than settle for a lower position, Marchant left the Law Library of Congress. She met her life partner Muriel Inez Crawford while practicing in 1947 at a time when the hint of homosexuality could destroy one’s life thanks to McCarthy. They remained closeted for 40 years, until Marchant publicly came out in 1990. In 1973, Marchant, Crawford (Marchant’s partner), Donna McBride, and Barbara Grier founded Naiad Press for lesbian literature. Naiad published Marchant’s novel The Latecomer under her pen name Sarah Aldridge—largely considered the first lesbian romance novel that ends happily (it was published in 1974). The jacket copy for Tottie reads like a description from Marchant’s life: “Connie Norton is 27, an associate in a good law firm, and scheduled to marry an arrogant young man who bores her without her quite realizing why. She meets Tottie, a young runaway from a wealthy family, who is apparently involved with violent student activists.”

David Wojnarowicz, Memories that Smell Like Gasoline
Wojnarowicz is largely known for his paintings and art practices, as well as his AIDS activism. He writes, “It is exhausting, living in a population where people don’t speak up if what they witness doesn’t directly threaten them.” His writing and art feel no less urgent today, decades later, considering the exponential legislation and threats against queer people in the United States. There was an event at the Whitney from 2018 to highlight Wojnarowicz’s work that you can access here. As the site states, “Organized in collaboration with Visual AIDS, this evening devoted to Wojnarowicz’s written work includes readings and performances by artists who were engaged with Wojnarowicz during his lifetime, or who have been inspired by his example. Taking its title from his final collection of stories Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (1992), this program highlights the passion and rage of Wojnarowicz’s singular voice.”

Charles Chace, Fleshing Out the Bones: Case Histories in the Practice of Chinese Medicine
Chace began studying acupuncture in the mid-1980s and continues to take seminars on classical Chinese language and thought to gain greater knowledge on pre-modern Chinese medical texts. I was able to locate an interview with Chace (aka Chip). Some of those questions and answers are particular to acupuncture specialists, but I appreciated Chace’s answer to the question “What do you do if your prescription doesn’t work?” Chace states, “If what you prescribe doesn’t work, or makes the patient worse, that should tell you something about the diagnosis. You have to ask yourself, ‘why didn’t that work?’ You should be able to retrieve some piece of information that points to a positive outcome. It’s inevitable that you will make diagnostic mistakes, and you should use those mistakes to your advantage in a systematic sort of way. What doesn’t work should be as informative as what does work.”

Robert Ford Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China
The jacket copy for this book states, “Between the Han dynasty, founded in 206 B.C.E., and the Sui, which ended in 618 C.E., Chinese authors wrote many thousands of short textual items, each of which narrated or described some phenomenon deemed ‘strange.’ Most items told of encounters between humans and various denizens of the spirit-world, or of the miraculous feats of masters of esoteric arts; some described the wonders of exotic lands, or transmitted fragments of ancient mythology. This genre of writing came to be known as zhiguai (‘accounts of anomalies’).” In an academic review of this book, Stephen F. Teiser writes, “Anomaly accounts (zhiguai) are tales written in literary Chinese that relate the appearance of category-busters such as pygmies and giants, fishes shaped like oxen, weeping icons, dragons, immortals, the dead returned to life, elusive jade maidens, and ferns that turn into worms. First recorded perhaps as early as the third century B.C.E., these narratives continued to be written until recent centuries.”

“When Marx wrote that work should be outsourced to ma­chines so the worker could instead write poetry in the morning, who did he imagine changed the diapers?” asks Anna, the protagonist of Olga Ravn’s My Work. This is, in part, the heart of this novel—how to create and also parent? But, also, how to keep sane when you feel yourself splintered into disparate parts after giving birth? As it attends to these and other questions, the book bounces between prose, poetry, play, hospital notes, letter, dialogue, journal entry, essay. It’s largely third-person, but with some first-person. There are chronological leaps. It attempts to describe what explodes form and time: being a new mother. In terms of tone, My Work evokes Sylvia Plath’s poem “Tulips,”  which describes a woman in an in-patient facility who has been given a clutch of the flowers. “The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me,” Plath writes. “Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe / Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.” The unsteadiness of the speaker of My Work, as with Plath, along with her laser-focus imagery, gives My Work an undeniable and unsettling power. Just the bald descriptions of the terrifying ups and downs of caring for a baby feel so rare in literature. “I love the way he smells and the drool around his mouth and his pointy little milk teeth,” Ravn writes—but also that there are “days when I feel like taking revenge, when I want to shake and slap him to make him be quiet.” With of this, along with the uncertainty of what was coming next in chronology, form, and Anna’s behavior (would the next scene be tender between her and her partner? Or would she shove him into a wall for telling her she shouldn’t breastfeed?), I found it nearly impossible to put My Work down.

Early on in the novel, we read, “This book began when the child was six days old and I found myself in a darkness…If it weren’t for my handwriting, I might have assumed it was all written by a stranger.” The beginning of the book explicitly throws it into question whether My Work is about Anna or Ravn—or if who we assume is Ravn (the “I” in the book) is actually an unnamed speaker. In any case, Ravn leaves open the possibility she and Anna are one in the same—that the descriptions of Anna’s experiences feel so foreign that Ravn had to give the “I” of that time a different name. At one point, the unnamed speaker tells us, “To write in the third person was to create someone else to endure the pain. One invents her. Her name is Anna.” In its starred review, Kirkus calls the “I,” the person assembling Anna’s papers into a book, a “curatorial presence.” The Kirkus review states, “The fact that the curatorial presence is likely also the author, that Anna herself is an invention created to preserve a necessary distance between the experience of pain and the arrangement of pain into art, does nothing to lessen the intensity of the intimacy created between the reader and Anna.” If this is feels confusing in description, it’s meant to be (though it isn’t as a reading experience). The muddiness of identity and authorship underscores some of the largest concerns of My Work: one’s personhood after becoming a mother and the ways the earliest months of childrearing are so destabilizing. As Kirkus explains, “what is created is an unflinchingly honest reflection of a woman’s experience of her own body as it becomes a body that belongs also to the child.”

Ravn tells us about her to-read pile, “I am an unfaithful reader, I read several books at once, I rarely finish a book, that doesn’t bother me. If I do finish something it’s usually because I’ll read the book very quickly, and I’ll read with greed, totally consumed.”

Fumiko Enchi, 女面/Kvindemasker (tr. Annette Vilslev)
Fumiko Enchi had a few things that defined her life early on. First, her sickliness—this kept her out of school. Second, her father was a linguist, president of multiple universities in Japan, and made sure she got a stellar education despite her illness (he had her tutored at home). Third, her family clearly had money—to pay for said tutors, among other things. A linguist named Basil Hall Chamberlain, a mentor to Enchi’s father, gifted the family over 11,000 of his books when he left Japan and she was a child, giving Enchi and her family an enormous library. After success as a playwright, Enchi tried to write fiction, but with little success. At this point, terrible life events began to pile on her: cancer, a mastectomy, issues post-operation. During WWII and the horrifying air raids throughout Japan, her home and its contents burned—she lost everything. A year later, she needed a hysterectomy. Are we surprised she stopped writing for a while? It’s amazing she took the pen back up at all. When she did, her novels attended to the war, women, shamanism, eroticism—and received accolade after accolade. This novel, (Masks in English) draws upon The Tale of Genji, which she had translated into modern Japanese years earlier.

Kasper Heiberg, Den Europæiske Palet / The European Pallet
The influential Danish painter’s book is largely a meditation on color in conjunction with his interests. The jacket copy reads, “Republishing of the visual artist, Kasper Heiberg’s book, The European Palette. The book, which was first published in 1972, is a result of Heiberg’s research into color at the Academy of Fine Arts. However, Kasper Heiberg (1928-1984) did not write a work about theoretical color theory, but based on a fascination with the language and world of colors, based on studies of both historical sources and Heiberg’s own contemporaries. In addition to palettes taken from painting and architecture, Heiberg examines, for example, the palette of house sparrows, storks, cars and nail polish.”

Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Kappa (tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell)
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the prolific short story writer, has an enormous impact on the Japanese literary world—his name is associated with its most prestigious prize. This novella was published in the last year of Akutagawa’s tragically short life. The Publishers Weekly review of Hofmann-Kuroda and Powell’s translation reads, “Powell and Hofmann-Kuroda offer a crisp translation of this strange, densely literary 1927 fantasy novella from Akutagawa (1892–1927), presented as the account of Psychiatric Patient No. 23. The patient tells an unknown author and a hospital director of his Alice in Wonderland–esque fall down a rabbit hole to Kappa Land, where Kappas—amphibious, thick-billed, webbed-hand and -footed three-foot-tall creatures from Japanese mythology—live in a city that looks ‘exactly like Ginza-dori, one of the main boulevards in Tokyo.’”

Carlo Ginzburg, Il Formaggio e i Vermi: Il Cosmo di un Mugnaio del ‘500 / Osten og Ormene: Kosmos Ifølge en 1500-Tals Møller (tr. Ole Jorn)
Okay, this may win the best title I’ve seen in a while. The English translation: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos According to a 16th-Century Miller. Even just scraping the very top of the Wikipedia page on this text I’m learning new genres of history—in this case “microhistory” (aka “ask large questions in small places”). Ginzburg’s 1976 historical inquiry regards the miller Menocchio, a literate peasant, who spoke freely about his ideas regarding the world and religion. A tough time to do that if you didn’t toe the line. He didn’t, didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, even—so he had a loose tongue when he was questioned by the Roman Inquisition. Ginzburg gets his title from one of Menocchio’s statements to the Inquisition: “[I]n my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” He also said blasphemy only injured the blasphemer, Mary wasn’t a virgin, the Pope doesn’t hold divine power. His fate was sealed pretty quickly.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof, Djævlebogen
This is the second novel in a series by Nordenhof that focuses on the actual fire on the passenger ferry the Scandinavian Star in 1990—a tragedy that killed 159 people. A convicted arsonist was on board and died, so investigators considered it a closed case (though some specialists contest this determination). While not available in English, its title is The Devil’s Book in translation. The jacket copy reads (via Google translate, apologies): “A grand literary project about money, violence and love. The Devil’s Book is an attempt to answer the question of whether it is possible to love under capitalism. The novel takes us on a journey with businessmen and the devil, who lures, not just with money and sex, but also with the prospect of an iconic death. We will also take a trip to the madhouse to see which devils are hiding in there. Not least we must see if it is possible to write love poetry. Whether we can step out of loneliness and into the new world, which may already be here.”

Cecil Bødker, Silas og den Sorte Hoppe
This is the first in a series of young adult fiction by Bødker, a Danish writer and poet who won several awards in her lifetime, largely for children’s literature. This book (Silas and the Black Mare in English) was published in 1967—and Danish readers followed Silas up until 2001! Silas is a thirteen-year-old boy who is forced by his mother to work at a circus until he runs away, managing to take his beloved horse with him. In the description of Bødker by the Hans Christian Andersen Awards, they state about the Silas books, “The first book of the series appeared at the time when Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking had become a cult figure of the anti-authoritarian revolution taking place in education and in relation to children. The integrity of children and their right to live life on their own terms became important goals in their upbringing…This historical development is reflected in the Silas series.”

Solvej Balle, Om Udregning af Rumfang
This seven-part book series that blew up in Denmark largely by fans telling others to read it. The jacket copy reads, “What would you do if the same day repeated itself over and over again and you were the only person to experience it? This is what happens to Tara Selter, the protagonist in On Calculation of Volume, a novel series about love, existential loneliness and finding meaning in the everyday. Written with intense clarity and precision, we follow Tara in volume I as she attempts to find a way back into time with the help of her husband who remains blissfully unaware of the day’s repetition.” Balle’s book was recently acquired by Faber and will be translated into English by Barbara J. Haveland as On Calculation of Volume.

Kate Zambreno, The Light Room: On Art and Care
“We find ourselves in the age of Covid literature. The publishing cycle, notoriously long, has caught up with the pandemic, and a book on the subject no longer seems like a novelty,” writes Eleanor Henderson in her New York Times review, of Zambreno’s new memoir, “This is a book about the aloneness of motherhood — the limits of maternal attention, the dissolution of self, the mind-numbing tedium of raising small children — as much as it is about the pandemic. It’s a book about a “life inside” — not just inside the home, but inside the mind. Zambreno’s writing is sharpest, most emotionally alive, when it drills into that interior landscape. Sitting on a park bench with her infant in the winter, she writes, “I briefly allow myself a spasm of feeling miserable and contained. Allowing myself that self-pity feels close to freedom.”

Mikhail Bulgakov, Fyra Romaner (tr. Lars Erik Blomqvist)
This is a collection of four novels by Bulgakov (English translation of the title says as much). Ravn explains, “I’m reading The White Guard.” And it makes sense why she would—the novel is set in Ukraine, likely Kyev, early on during the Ukrainian War of Independence in 1918. Four armies clash in the city, creating mayhem and devastation. An intellectual family, the Turbins, finds itself caught up in the chaos. The Turbin family members are generally lifted from Bulgakov’s life—to the point where damning plot twists seemed to implicate a brother-in-law and created a rift in the family. Some (including one based on Bulgakov’s brother and Bulgakov himself) remain loyal to the White Army—those fighting the Bolsheviks. A play version of the novel was a huge success, despite the fact it portrayed officers of the White Army with dimension and humanity (rather than the propaganda and what the government largely allowed). Eventually the Soviet government pressured the theater to stop the production, which it did—until Stalin himself, wildly, intervened. Apparently, he loved the play and saw it fifteen times! The show ran for ten years, and did almost a thousand performances.

________________________

Olga Ravn’s My Work, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, is available now from New Directions.

Myriam Gurba, author, activist, and educator, is likely best known, now, for illustrating to thousands the racist realities of the publishing industry. American Dirt was the flashpoint that, largely because of Gurba’s consistent tweets and the eventual publication of her takedown review, helped #DignidadLiteraria go viral, over 140 authors sign an open letter to Oprah, and Flatiron cancel the AD book tour. Ultimately Gurba and other #DignidadLiteraria activists such as David Bowles and Roberto Lovato met with Macmillan highers up about doing more than promise to diversify their catalogs in the wake of the scandal. In short, this person is devoted to her politics and has the capacity to turn a tank.

That same energy is in Gurba’s writing. It has the intensity of making plain what you likely have felt or experienced, but not put language to. When I first read her memoir/novel Mean in 2017, I was amazed at how she managed to thread what feels like an impossible needle. Moving at a quick clip, the book attends to complex realities such as racism, queerness, intersectionality, sexual violence, and disordered eating. It does more than simply describe what Gurba had endured, but has powerful philosophical meditations on the social structures and thinking that made those struggles happen in the first place. Perhaps most unbelievable of all, it is funny as hell. I teach this book as often as I can and never regret it. (Here’s one of my favorite excerpts.)

Gurba’s new essay collection Creep operates similarly to Mean. In its starred review, Kirkus states, “Gurba’s lyrical prose forces us to face the sexism, racism, homophobia, and other systems of oppression that allow some Americans to get away with murder while the rest of us live in constant fear. Every piece is rife with well-timed humor and surprising conclusions, many of which come from the author’s staggering command of history.” Always hungry for Gurba’s insights and snappy writing, I couldn’t stop reading Creep. Personal experiences spin out into edifying and often hilarious history and language lessons. Gurba also has such specificity in her images that rub against hilarious and sad both at once, as in the description of a teacher: “Her orthopedic shoes made suffering-mammal sounds.” In 2019, Gurba did a few small essays for Paris Review in which she meditated on a word. In one that appears in Creep, “One Word: Striking,” she talks about her terrifying experiences of domestic violence, beauty, the OED, the Wife of Bath, with each link or leap done with precision.

When describing her life with a terrifying, violent, and controlling now-ex, Gurba pins down so much of why people remain stunned and confused at why she would stay (the answer: when people leave domestic violence situations is when they are most likely to be murdered—and this is something they can feel). “The implication is that people who studiously ask questions of people like me could never get stuck in a situation like mine, that people like me are stupid, masochistic, or insane,” she writes. Because she is great at lists and writing paragraphs with the energy of a manifesto, I’ll end with a quote about domestic violence and masculinity from the titular essay.

Every man who rapes, smacks, whips, trips, spits on, gouges, abducts, strangles, and otherwise degrades, dehumanizes, and destroys women is kin to someone. Every badly behaved man is a father or a brother or a son or an uncle or a cousin or a brother-in-law or a godfather or a stepfather or a grandfather or a great-grandfather or a friend or a best friend or a prom date or a next-door neighbor or a favorite teacher. Embedded within these systems of family, friendship, and community, these creepy men may appear harmless, their evil obscured by a benign collective presence, a fog of sorts. This softness swaddles and protect them. This fog abets.

Do you dwell in the fog? Would you admit it if you did?

Gurba’s note about her to-read pile makes me hope for some breadcrumbs on what she’s writing next. She explains, “Some of the books, like Victor LaValle’s and Frederic Gros’s, are for pleasure. Some, like the ones on Lange and Tituba are for research.”

*

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
In her New York Times review of this book in 2014, Lauren Elkin writes, “In chapters on Nietzsche, Rousseau, Rimbaud, Thoreau and others, Gros considers the inspiration they each found in walking. Nietzsche even advised, aphoristically, ‘Do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement.’ Gros takes this to mean that books bear in their very DNA the circumstances of their conception; we can tell when they have been composed entirely at a desk, their authors hunched and squinting over a stack of books.”

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
Reséndez’s book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2016. The judges’ citation reads, “The Other Slavery upends conventional historiography to show how slavery, more than epidemics, led to the catastrophic decline of Native populations in the Americas. Andrés Reséndez tracks slavers across centuries, digs for evidence in brutal gold and silver mines, and tells stories of real captives to personify a system that enslaved as many as 4.9 million. Neither abolition nor the 13th Amendment brought an end to the other slavery, hidden from much of our history until now.”

Sarah Harmanson Meister, Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother
This slim volume is by a MoMA curator interrogating what she calls “arguably the most famous photograph ever made” of Florence Owens Thompson near a camp for people who were impoverished migrant manual laborers during the Great Depression. Meister writes in an essay about the book (which I recommend perusing if only to see a 1979 photograph of Thompson with three of her daughters over 40 years after Lange’s), “I am just one of many interested in unraveling the mysteries of this photograph and our varied responses to it. It was decades before the public learned that Thompson was Cherokee: we now grapple with how its reception would have differed if that had been known.”

Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America
Deer, a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, is an activist and legal academic who has spent decades on rape victim advocacy. The stunning numbers of Indigenous women who endure or succumb to sexual violence in the United States is undeniable. Indigenous women are 2.5 times higher than women of any other race to experience sexual violence—with 86% of the men exacting this violence being non-Indigenous. Of course, this is just what is recorded—the numbers of those who experience sexual assault are likely higher. Charon Asetoyer, the Executive Director of Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center, says of the book, “The Beginning and End of Rape documents the brutal history and contemporary reality of how rape has been used and continues to be used against Native women by the federal government to create a cultural implosion of destruction for generations. Rape, burn, and pillage continues when Native American women do not have equal protection of the law extended to us.”

Ann Petry, Tituba of Salem Village
Petry cuts an impressive figure if only because she was the first Black American woman to sell more than a million copies of a novel (The Street in 1946). Tituba of Salem Village is a children’s novel published about 20 years later that considers the historical figure of Tituba—an enslaved woman who was perhaps from Barbados, perhaps Indigenous (perhaps both), likely named after her tribe or her hometown. In short: little about her actual life and experience exists in a written record, though there is plenty of conjecture. But she was one of the first people charged with witchcraft in 1692. What was news to me is that she was able to testify against the accusations as enslaved people were legally able to give testimony in court. Despite her forced confession, Tituba wasn’t killed for witchcraft. She did remain enslaved, was imprisoned, and ultimately sold. The archive doesn’t provide anything beyond that. Several writers have found Tituba a compelling figure in the drama of the Salem Witch Trials, including Arthur Miller, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Maryse Condé.

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom
I’m always down to see someone come for H.P. Lovecraft, and LaValle has done just that with this sharp novella. The Ballad of Black Tom retells Lovecraft’s racist short story “The Horror at Red Hook.” In a review for Slate, Tammy Oler writes, “The Ballad of Black Tom couldn’t be timelier, for Lovecraft’s influence on pop culture is more powerful than ever, even as criticisms of his racism and xenophobia have swept through literary and fan circles…[The novella] is thrilling in part because LaValle uses them instead as his starting point, re-imagining Lovecraft’s universe through the eyes of a black man.” Oler goes on to state, “Lovecraft pulled back the veil to show us his racist monsters; LaValle pulls back the veil to show us how the monster of racism dooms us all.”

Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead
Lou Cornum wrote about Almanac of the Dead during its thirtieth year of publication here at Lit Hub. They write, “In its epic-scale narrative of a post-1492 planet, Almanac illuminates some of the reasons the bronze body of Columbus has repeatedly bitten the dust alongside Confederate monuments, almost 60 of which have also been removed, relocated, or renamed in the last year. While Silko has said her first novel Ceremony, written in 1997, explored the connective tissue between the United States and Asia, namely war and nuclear harm, Almanac turns to the entanglements of Africa and the Americas nowhere more obvious than in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The book insists through the unofficial histories voiced by its characters, who exist in the peripheries of dominant society, that the continual violence of life across and in the borderlands has its origins in European conquest stretching back hundreds of years but surely not destined to continue forever.”

The realities of Black Americans’ exposure to toxic chemicals is no secret, with their being 75% more likely than other racial groups to live near hazardous waste producers and sites in this country. It’s ironic (but, sadly, no surprise) that descendants of formerly enslaved people promised 40 acres and a mule through redlining, systemic oppression, and downright menacing often find themselves, in areas that can and do poison the people in their community. This one of the many terrible realities our country has created. (I do recommend reading the New York Times article about the poisoned Philadelphia neighborhood—whose members try to fight back).

Stephen Kearse’s second novel, Liquid Snakes, follows a few threads—but a toxic environment and its impact on Black lives is at its center. This becomes a larger metaphor for the reality of Black Americans and how racist culture in the United States often poisons them, slowly but surely. Kenny Bomar, a biochemist, likely lost a child, a stillborn daughter, due to local toxins. A grieving divorcée, his life seems to tip further and further sideways, as he develops a nefarious app (EightBall), designer drugs, and perhaps something even more terrifying. Meanwhile, two CDC investigators, Ebonee McCollum and Lauretta Vickers, are attempting to trace a death back to its origins—that of an overachiever at Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy. The student drank a fluid “so dark…[l]ight seemed to bend around it.” The result makes her disappear, and puts a dark liquid the investigators think has “gotta be industrial” in her place. Publishers Weekly calls Liquid Snakes “a dazzling pharmacological thriller that dances on the knife’s edge of satire…Written with incisive wit and studded with references to Black popular culture…and troubling incidents from recent history, this entertains even as it deeply disturbs.”

Regarding his to-read pile, Kearse tells us, “The theme is here is the basic now and next.”

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

Before Bourdain loomed large in the food writing (and tv) world, he wrote an essay for the New Yorker called “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” Bourdain’s now-well-known storytelling and voice are immediate and undeniable enough to make it *out of the slush* (my god). An editor snapped him up, had him expand the essay into a memoir, and the rest is history. But what I didn’t know is that Bourdain had actually written two books prior to his meteoric rise—both in the uber-niche genre this reader has never experienced: “culinary mystery.” Bourdain had been writing for years, took a workshop with Gordon Lish, met a Random House editor, and published Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo. Both tanked. Kitchen Confidential was a NYT bestseller when it came out, and claimed that title again when Bourdain died in 2018.

Philip F. Rubio, There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality

One fact I think about a lot is that it became against the law to send postcards of terror lynchings in the US in 1908. (This is because of the Comstock Act—the same one that threatens abortion and contraceptive medication in the mail.) It feels noteworthy to mention it is not illegal to send these violent images in envelopes, which is a larger metaphor for the US and its engagement with racism. Rubio, himself a former postal worker, wrote a book about the intersection between Black postal workers and activism. The jacket copy states, “Black postal workers—often college-educated military veterans—fought their way into postal positions and unions and became a critical force for social change. They combined black labor protest and civic traditions to construct a civil rights unionism at the post office.”

Charles E. Cobb, Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

The well-known leader of the Black Power movement Stokely Carmichael famously said of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts, “His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” It’s surprisingly little-known how gun and gun rights played an enormous role in the Black Power movement, particularly in the efforts of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton, as a law student, studied California gun laws in order to ensure BPP members could arm themselves so as to provide safety to their communities continually menaced by racists and/or police officers. One of the quickest legislative moves toward gun control, especially considering the bleak period we are in now defined, it seems, by mass shootings, was specifically targeting BPP members. The NRA even supported these gun restrictions. If you don’t know about the Mulford Act of 1967, you should.

Devin Leonard, Neither Snow Nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service

Whenever I see recurring topics in an author’s to-read pile it’s hard not to get a little excited. It makes me curious about what they’re working on next. And is Winifred Gallagher’s How the Post Office Created America (a book I’ve been wanting to read) going to be in here? (It’s not, but that’s okay! How much USPS reading can one do, really.) In the New York Times review, Lisa McGirr writes, “[Leonard] offers a host of interesting anecdotes, including one about an ­Idaho family who sent their child 75 miles by parcel post because it was cheaper than going by train…He devotes much of a chapter to Anthony Comstock, the longtime postal inspector and self-styled ‘weeder in God’s garden,’ who banned and prosecuted the mailing of birth control pamphlets, ‘marriage aids’ and ‘indecent’ literary works like Walt Whitman’s poems, lest they pollute public morals.”

Margaret A. Burnham, By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners

This book was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction as well as the LA Times Book Prize for History. It received starred reviews from PW, Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal. While gatekeeping can be an annoying thing to contend with as a writer, with that much love showered on a single book it demands I sit up and pay attention. Living legend Angela Davis says By Hands Now Known “Needs to be read by everyone who recognizes the historic mandate of our time: to interrupt cycles of racist violence…But Burnham goes further, asking us to finally acknowledge the history of ever-present resistance, even under the most insurmountable conditions, and to consider what justice might mean today.”

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

What new thing can I say about this ground-breaking book? Perhaps nothing—but I was shocked to hear Lorde took a pittance of a $100 advance because she felt she had to sign the contract quickly. I teach “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” the first day of every creative writing class I have if only to hear Lorde’s words said aloud as often as possible. Especially: “For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.”

Paulo Freire (tr. Myra Bergman Ramos), Pedagogy of the Oppressed

This book has, for many, created a paradigm shift for educators all over the world, inviting them to consider students as active agents in their own learning (rather than tabulae rasae awaiting knowledge). Apparently Pedagogy of the Oppressed is cited in the social sciences so frequently it holds the #3 spot for citations in that field. What blows my mind, however, is the linguistic journey this book took since Friere wrote it in while in exile in Chile, in Portuguese, between 1967 and 68. But it wasn’t originally published in Portuguese—instead, it was published in Spanish. Two years later, an English version came out. Two more years passed before it was published in Portugues in Portugal. But it didn’t reach Friere’s home country of Brazil until two years later.

Bettye Kearse, The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President’s Black Family

I have no idea if the author of The Other Madisons and Stephen Kearse are related, but it would be extremely cool if two great authors were kin. In her book, Bettye Kearse traces her lineage in connection with the US President James Madison as well as to the Gold Coast, Madison’s plantation in Virginia, as well as archives and cemeteries. Kirkus Review says of this book, “ ‘Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.’ So her mother told Kearse, who opens her account with invocations of the West African griot tradition of storytelling and oral history. That tradition found a place in slavery-era America because most slave owners did not allow enslaved people to learn to read and write. James Madison was different: He allowed his mixed-race son, Jim, to linger within hearing of education lessons.”

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

As I said in my annotation for Anna Moschovakis’ TBR pile, Hartman’s first book is celebrating its twenty-fifth year of informing innumerable minds with a new edition. Since Scenes of Subjection was first published in 1997, Hartman’s impact on academic and non-academic readers alike is remarkable. Through thorough research and powerful writing, she illustrates the legacy of enslavement in the United States and that legacy’s reach far beyond emancipation. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes in the foreword published as a recent New Yorker article, “[If] we think of freedom as a right to move through life with genuine self-possession that can only be rooted in the satisfaction of basic human needs and desires, then Black emancipation in the United States was something altogether different.”

Roger Wilkes, The Mammoth Book of the Mafia: First-Hand Accounts of Life Inside the Mob, Nigel Cawthorne & Colin Cawthorne (eds.)

It’s hard to tell exactly how this book was done, but it seems Roger Wilkes interviewed over two dozen members of the mafia about their lives. The jacket copy reads, “Enter the underground world of organized crime. Get true accounts from the mouths of prominent former Mafiosi and others who have infiltrated the hidden world of organized crime: the American Mafia, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Camorrah, ‘Ndrangheta, and Sacra Corona Unita. This fascinating compilation contains accounts from the likes of Richard Kuklinski, Frankie Saggio, Joey Black, Albert DeMeo, and Donnie Brasco.”

Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
This 1970s picaresque traces the impact of the titular doctor’s attack on an unnamed Latin American country. Hoffman’s “desire machines” allow visual illusions to fall within the gaze of the city’s inhabitants, quickly causing them to lose their minds. The protagonist, a government minister, however, is unfazed by these images. In the original review of the book in the New York Times, William Hjortsberg wrote, “[Angela Carter] builds the foundations of her myth out of hundreds of small observations. We soon forget that the terrain she observes with such care is the interior of her own imagination, for the world she describes becomes as real as any naturalist’s report…It doesn’t matter that none of this is real. The magic of fiction is that the only reality is what exists within the reader’s mind. If a thing seems to be then, for the purposes of fiction, it is. Taken from this perspective the boundaries of literature become limitless, the horizon extending as far as a writer’s imagination will carry him.”

Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

Here I thought I was going to learn early-aughts Tom Cruise movie of the same name was originally a novel, but no. And, actually, this was part of DeWitt’s frustration, one would think, with publication of this book. The novel follows a single mother and her son, the latter being a prodigy polyglot. His mother perpetually puts on Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece (yes, I am a Kurosawa stan) The Seven Samurai, which the child soon knows by heart. DeWitt originally wanted to call the book The Seventh Samurai, in reference to Kurosawa, but the publisher couldn’t get the rights. So The Last Samurai it was—and then the movie of the same name came out two years later! While the book The Last Samurai got glowing reviews, it went out of print for years. New Directions put it back out in 2016, and it’s having what seems to be a well-deserved renaissance.