Search Results for: Review

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 04: An estimated 10,000 people gather in Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza Park for a memorial service for George Floyd, the man killed by a Minneapolis police officer on June 04, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Ibram X. Kendi, Wesley Morris, James Baldwin,Betsy Morais and Alexandria Neason, and Josina Guess.

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1. The American Nightmare

Ibram X. Kendi | The Atlantic | June 1, 2020 | 10 minutes (2,595 words)

“Either there is something superior or inferior about the races, something dangerous and deathly about black people, and black people are the American nightmare; or there is something wrong with society, something dangerous and deathly about racist policy, and black people are experiencing the American nightmare.” One is a racist myth; the other, antiracist truth.

2. The Videos That Rocked America. The Song That Knows Our Rage.

Wesley Morris | The New York Times | June 3, 2020 | 6 minutes (1,700 words)

“Awash in the ghastly video mosaic shot by black people’s cameraphones, I found myself doubled over the kitchen sink. Then a lyric gave me strength.”

3. How to Cool It

James Baldwin | Esquire | July 4, 1971 | 32 minutes (8,214 words)

“I’m questioning the values on which this country thinks of itself as being based.” James Baldwin’s landmark 1968 interview about race relations in America.

4. The Story Has Gotten Away from Us

Betsy Morais, Alexandria Neason | Columbia Journalism Review | June 3, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,600 words)

“Six months of life and death in America.”

5. The Sound and The Fury of Jericho Brown

Josina Guess | The Bitter Southerner | June 2, 2020 | 18 minutes (4,712 words)

“His poetry deftly names the forces — be it cop, disease, or addiction — that would have him dead, while he celebrates the beauty, be it in a flower, in a lover’s embrace, or in anything that helps him thrive in this burning world.”

This Week in Books: Bullets and Gas

A protester reads a book with the title "Why i'm no longer talking to white people about race" during a spontaneous Black Lives Matter march at Trafalgar Square to protest the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and in support of the demonstrations in North America on May 31, 2020 in London, England. (Photo by Hollie Adams/Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

The books newsletter seems a little irrelevant at the moment; it’s Monday night, and I’m pretty sure the president just pulled a reichstag. Ah, but ok, books, yes, that’s my job. So, first of all, I think you should read Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning and his follow-up How to Be an Antiracist. The former is a harrowing intellectual history of antiracism in America, and the latter is a how-to manual for antiracist living today.

Over at Jacobin, Robert Greene II wrote about how this moment feels like an echo of the Red Summer of 1919, which was a series of pogroms against blacks perpetrated by whites, and which also followed on the heels of a global pandemic. His article reminded me that we ran an interview with Eve Ewing last year about her book 1919, a collection of poetry written in response to the Red Summer attacks. “These kinds of violent histories are all around us,” Ewing said in the interview. “We have to take the time to stop and seek them out if we’re ever going to have any hope at social reconciliation.”

Another book that’s come to mind these last fews days is Anna Feigenbaum’s Tear Gas, which we excerpted a couple years ago. The book tells the story of the “full-scale multimedia marketing campaign to promote ‘war gases for peace time use’” that a few retired military grifters cooked up to pitch local governments on gassing their own citizens. And man did those local governments sure love the idea!

1. “What’s Happening?” by Elvia Wilk, Bookforum

Elvia Wilk surveys post-apocalyptic novels like Doris Lessings’ The Memoirs of a Survivor, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker in an attempt to imagine the post-covid world. “What will ‘after’ the pandemic look like? In some ways it is the wrong question to ask, because… giving it an after implies that there was a true before. Yet as writers of dystopian novels know, there was no before, there was only a time when ‘it’ wasn’t quite so unavoidably visible.”

2. “Brit Bennett’s New Novel Explores the Power and Performance of Race” by Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

While reviewing Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Parul Seghal dwells on the “uniquely American” genre that is the “passing” story; she writes that Bennett subverts the narrative’s expectations. “Brit Bennett brings to the form a new set of provocative questions: What if passing goes unpunished? What if the character is never truly found out? What if she doesn’t die or repent? What then?”

3. “Wartime for Wodehouse” by Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker

I never realized that P.G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves novels, was persona non grata in the UK after the Second World War. Apparently he made a deal with the Nazis to do a little propaganda work for them in exchange for release from the camps. Rivka Galchen dives into the controversy, trying to get to the bottom of whether Wodehouse was just so irrepressibly upbeat that he couldn’t understand why his work for German broadcasters would be seen as propaganda.

4. “You Shall Also Love the Stranger” by Max Granger, Guernica

Max Granger effusively reviews John Washington’s The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond, a book that Granger says “reads like a novel… It is a beautiful and grievous tangle of history, reportage, philosophy, and testimony…” Focusing on the story of one migrant family, Washington also spins his tale outward and inward, touching on the history, philosophy, and future of migration.


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5. “Les Goddesses” by Moyra Davey, The Paris Review

A sly and delicate essay from photographer Moyra Davey that skips between the lives and letters of various literary luminaries, never quite settling before it hops again. “Sitting on the floor in sunlight and reading through eight small notebooks going back to 1998, looking for a phrase about Goethe… I never found the reference; it was something I had stumbled across on the internet, but it led me to The Flight to Italy, Goethe’s diary (recommended by Kafka, in his diary), in which G. abruptly takes leave of a turgid existence in Weimar and travels incognito to Italy for the first time in his life.”

6. “On the Many Mysteries of the European Eel” by Patrik Svensson, Lit Hub

An excerpt from Patrik Svensson’s charming Books of Eels. “This is how the birth of the eel comes about: it takes place in a region of the northwest Atlantic Ocean called the Sargasso Sea, a place that is in every respect suitable for the creation of eels. The Sargasso Sea is actually less a clearly defined body of water than a sea within a sea. Where it starts and where it ends is difficult to determine, since it eludes the usual measures of the world… The Sargasso Sea is like a dream: you can rarely pinpoint the moment you enter or exit; all you know is that you’ve been there.”

7. “A Brief History of the Codpiece, the Personal Protection for Renaissance Equipment” by Dan Piepenbring, The New Yorker

Dan Piepenbring reviews Michael Glover’s Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art, which is, yes, a pictorial history of the codpiece. “Historians… not[ed] that it was ‘so voluminous it could serve as a pocket.’ And indeed it did, offering convenient storage for one’s hankie or a stray orange, in addition to ‘ballads, bottles, napkins, pistols, hair, and even a looking glass,’ as the scholar Will Fisher has written. With great size comes great decorative responsibility, and men of means rose to the occasion. They brocaded, damasked, bejewelled, embroidered, tasseled, tinseled, and otherwise ornamented their codpieces until they became like walking Christmas trees.”

Stay safe out there,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Queens of Infamy: Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia Borgia
Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | May 2020 | 33 minutes (8,371 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.

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* * *

Mention the Medieval period and people free-associate themselves right into visions of plague, violence, and shit-covered peasants. The term “Renaissance,” on the other hand, conjures up stuff like humanism, science, and paintings of people that actually look like people. But late 14th-, 15th-, and 16th-century Italy consisted of more than just painters with Ninja Turtle names wanking their way from one Tuscan villa to another; it was also full of intrigue, murder, and complex intergenerational family drama. If there was one family that featured heavily in some of the most violent and licentious stories of the period, it was the Borgias — even today their name is a by-word for depravity. And at the center of many of the wildest Borgia stories was the beautiful, wily, thrice-wed Lucrezia.

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People have called Lucrezia many things over the years: seductress, murderess, femme fatale of the Borgia cabal. The attributes assigned to her didn’t come out of nowhere; as we shall see — and as Lucrezia noted herself — many of the men around her came to unfortunate ends. In portrayals where she escapes the villainess role, she’s often made out to be another hapless aristocratic daughter traded off into various political marriages, someone with no agency or ambitions of her own. The reality, of course, is much more nuanced. While Lucrezia was indeed married off several times to further her family’s agenda, as an adult she proved herself to be a skilled ruler loved and respected by her subjects.

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This Week in Books: Pale Horse on the One Hand, Pale Rider on the Other

Opening of the fourth seal : Death riding the pale green horse. Miniature from an Apocalypse of Cambrai illuminated by the French School of the 13th century. Ms. 422. Muncipal library, Cambrai, France (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

The pandemic is a boundless set of small sad stories crescendoing into an incomprehensibly large and terrible story. Here’s one of the small sad ones: my nana’s coronavirus test came back positive on Friday. They quarantined her and the other residents who tested positive in their rooms at the assisted living center, but nana has short-term memory loss and couldn’t remember what was going on, that she was supposed to stay put, that she couldn’t go to the dining room and play cards with her friends. She kept leaving her room and walking through the facility, knocking on doors. She’s always been a sociable person.

The staff wanted to sedate her, but the doctor on call wouldn’t answer their phone; I find myself fixating on this detail, wondering why the doctor didn’t answer, wondering if my nana’s sad story is rubbing up against the edge of a different sad story. Perhaps the doctor was also sick. Perhaps the doctor was just afraid; that would be a sad story, too.

So they sent my nana, who has covid, to the hospital. But not to be treated for covid. To be sedated.

I tried to identify a silver lining to this. I said to my mom, “Well maybe it’s better that she’s in the hospital now? Shouldn’t sick people be in the hospital anyway?” Nana had a cough for several days before the test came back positive. She is a sick woman. But mom seemed certain that they would be transferring nana back to the assisted living facility soon. Maybe even today, as I write this, on Memorial Day. I guess that’s the plan. I guess that’s what they want. I don’t pretend to understand, or to believe that I know what’s best. It doesn’t sound great, but all I know for sure is that it’s sad.

I know other people who have covid too. The rest of them are young people, people in their 20s and 30s, who have recovered but are still suffering from unsettling neurological issues. Or who just started feeling sick and got tested this week. The everywhere-ness of the disease is astonishing. Difficult to comprehend. It’s as though I sometimes forget that it’s all the same thing. Pale horse on the one hand, pale rider on the other.

1. “My Lighthouses” by Jazmina Barrera, The Paris Review

In this dreamy excerpt from Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses — a memoir of an obsession — she visits the little red lighthouse on the Hudson, the one made famous by the children’s book. “I have no memory of how I knew of the existence of this building: I woke up one day recalling that there was a lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge, with no idea of who had told me, or if I’d read about it somewhere. I had to find it.”

2. “The Rest Is Silence” by Mark Polizzoti, Bookforum

Mark Polizzoti reviews Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde, a catalog of a recent exhibition at MoMA, which “tries heroically to craft an in-the-round picture of the man, [but] falls short of conveying just how deeply weird and singular Fénéon was, even for an age that produced its share of great eccentrics.” An art-promoter, critic, and anarchist bomber, Fénéon is probably known to English-language readers, if at all, for Novels in Three Lines, a collection of enigmatic unsigned police-blotter–style news fillers he wrote for a Paris daily.

3. “Pandemic Narratives and the Historian” by Alex Langstaff, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Alex Langstaff interviews “an international group of leading historians of public health, epidemics, and disaster science” and “ask[s] them to reflect on how history is being used in coverage of COVID-19, and how they themselves are responding to the virus in their research, reading, and work life.” It’s a long, dense, fascinating conversation that focuses in part on the way storytelling is shaping the pandemic; how certain narratives, once they gain a foothold, can direct the course of events.

4. “Death of a Radical Rewilder” by Joanna Pocock, Lit Hub

Joanna Pocock eulogizes Finisia Medrano, a radical rewilder who features prominently in Pocock’s Surrender: The Call of the American West. “Finisia traveled on foot, in covered wagon, and by horseback through Nevada, Utah, and portions of Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, California and Washington state. For 35 years she followed a lifeway practiced for millennia known as the Hoop, a seasonal migratory way of living by following one’s food source, hunting, gathering roots, fruits and nuts, while planting seeds and propagating en route….It is against the law to plant seeds on public lands, and Finisia was jailed twice for doing so.”


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5. “Picturing Climate Crisis in Miami” by Monica Uszerowicz, The New York Review of Books

Monica Uszerowicz reviews FloodZone, a collection of photographs by Anastasia Samoylova that revels in the beauty and precariousness of Miami. “In FloodZone, the ongoing destruction isn’t explicitly documented, only portended through signs of the porousness between our man-made world and the natural one surrounding it. It is always the calm before or after the storm: a child wading through a flooded garage, a bird stoically surveying an unusually high tide, the constant, always visible construction of condos for the wealthy—as familiar now in the city’s landscape as the water itself.”

6. “Waiting for Fascism” by Morten Høi Jensen, The Point

Morten Høi Jensen surveys recent arguments for and against analogizing Trump’s America to the Weimar Republic. “Sometimes, it can seem we are watching the historians’ version of Waiting for Godot, in which the fascist menace is expected at any moment but never arrives.”

7. “The Only Successful Coup in the US Began as a Campaign to Curb Black Voting Rights” by Lawrence Goldstone, Lit Hub

An excerpt from Lawrence Goldstone’s On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights, in which Goldstone describes the events leading up to the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. “Although the white press would later term the events in Wilmington a ‘race riot,’ it was in fact the only violent overthrow of a local government in United States history.”

8. “Sounding It Out” by Ryu Spaeth, The New Republic

Ryu Spaeth writes about teaching his daughter to read during lockdown, something he never imagined doing on his own. “All parents learn a lesson about good writing by reading aloud: Charlotte’s Web, for example, rolls beautifully in the mouth; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, not so much.”

9. “Horace’s How-To” by Gregory Hays, The New York Review of Books

Gregory Hays reviews Jennifer Ferriss-Hill’s Horace’s Ars Poetica: Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living, in which she “argues that the Ars Poetica is not really about poetry at all. It may masquerade as a guide for would-be writers, but its real concerns are larger: human behavior, family relationships, friendship, and laughter.”

Stay safe,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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This Week in Books: Anarchist Ice Cream and Other Dairies

Belen Bardon, owner of Bardon bookstore, waits for costumers at her shop in Madrid on May 18, 2020. (Photo by OSCAR DEL POZO / AFP)

Dear Reader,

When compiling the reading list this week, I was struck harder than I have been so far by the sensation that time has compressed, or flattened, or leveled out, or I’m not entirely sure what the right spatial metaphor is here, but what I mean is that the time I inhabit feels in no way appreciably different from other times that other people have inhabited. When I read about George Washington fleeing Philadelphia to escape the yellow fever, that doesn’t feel meaningfully different from now. When I read that Emma Goldman co-owned an ice cream parlor in Worcester, Massachusetts, it doesn’t feel uncanny, it just sort of feels like, “Yeah, well, one has to make a living! Anarchist or not, the rent is always due!” Or when I read in A Distant Mirror about the general dismay caused by the corruption and dumbing down of the clergy that resulted from the selling of church appointments to the highest bidder in the 14th century, I feel like I am on the exact same wavelength as Henry of Hereford, who wrote, “Look… at the dangerous situation of those in their charge, and tremble!” They had child bishops; we have Jared Kushner. It’s all one; it’s all bad.

And it seems like a lot of critics are in a similar headspace. Over the weeks, I feel like I’ve watched essayists dig deeper and deeper for “moments to which this moment compares” and what they’ve inadvertently proven is not just that this moment can be compared to so many others, but that all those moments can also be compared to each other as well! George Washington’s enlightened 18th century, Camus’ disastrous 20th, Barbara Tuchman’s calamitous 14th: they’ve all got one thing in common. The secret history of the world rears its ghastly head to reveal what we almost forgot: disease is king.

1. “Pandemics Go Hand in Hand with Conspiracy Theories” by Frederick Kaufman, The New Yorker

Frederick Kaufman writes that when yellow fever hit the newly united States in the 1790s, it led to the development of a new literary style — the American gothic, pioneered by the grieving Charles Brockden Brown in “a million words [that] poured from his pen” from 1798 to 1800, including Wieland, a book about a disembodied voice that drives people insane — as well as a new political style, the much written about “paranoid style” of American politics. Just after the fever ravaged New York in the late 1790s, conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, which had formed in Bavaria in 1776 and been officially banned in 1784, began to proliferate, building into a sort of public panic. Charles Brockden Brown likewise contributed to this new trend; his novel Ormond; or, the Secret Witness, sounds like a Bourne Identity for the 18th century, with the Illuminati playing the global-conspiratorial role of the CIA — or, in this year’s paranoia parlance, the WHO.

2. “Graciliano Ramos and the Plague” by Padma Viswanathan, The Paris Review

Padma Viswanathan writes about coming to the realization that Graciliano Ramos, the giant of Brazilian letters whose novel São Bernardo she recently translated, was motivated to return as a youth from Rio to his remote hometown of Palmeira dos Índios not by disappointment in his lackluster career in journalism, as she originally assumed, but because plague had broken out at home, killing four of his family members in a single day. This insight led Viswanthan to consider how the rest of Ramos’ life’s work — in local government and in literature — was driven by notions of good hygiene, including his translation of Camus’ The Plague.

3. “The First State-Approved North Korean Novel in English” by Esther Kim, Lit Hub

Esther Kim interviews Immanuel Kim, translator of Friend by Paek Namnyong. Immanuel Kim made it his mission to find and translate a popular, non-propagandistic (as in not state-related) North Korean “bestseller” (as in widely read, not widely bought — in North Korea, print runs are limited, but worn copies of Friend, first published in 1988, continue to be passed from hand to hand). “When I started my PhD at UC Riverside in 2000, I was reading South Korean literature minus the colonial period [1910-1945]. All of my colleagues were doing the same, and I wondered, What more can I add to this field? What about North Korea? It was a crazy jump. All my friends were like You’re crazy, man….I started making a personal database of authors that moved me….Then I started looking for stories that were more relatable to the English-speaking world. I read almost a thousand.”

4. “The Fearless Invention of One of L.A.’s Greatest Poets” by Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

Dan Chiasson writes about the life and work of poet Wanda Coleman. A new volume of her selected poems, Wicked Enchantment, was published last month. “Coleman…was one of the great menders in American verse: she found the extra wear in old forms like the sonnet and rummaged for new forms in everyday material, like aptitude tests, medical reports, and want ads. Poets sometimes brag about their fearsome powers of transformation; Coleman, beset by hardship for much of her life, kept her boasts closer to the bone. ‘I scrape bottom,’ she wrote…”

5. “Food for Thought: Ben Katchor’s Paradise Lost” by J. Hoberman, Bookforum

Ben Katchor’s books are exquisite in an old-timey way that books generally aren’t anymore, sometimes to the point of baroque bewilderment. In this review, J. Hoberman gamely attempts to explain what this latest one, The Dairy Restaurant, is “about.” As with many of Katchor’s books, the gist is that Katchor uses his deep knowledge of niche histories — in this case, Jewish-owned dairy restaurants in New York City and all tangential topics (for instance, did you know Emma Goldman was in the ice cream business?) — to create an almost-alternate history: as in, you’re pretty sure everything Katchor says is true, but the emphasis, the rhythms of history, become fixated on something so deeply unusual — radical dairy consumption — that you become possessed by an alternate vision of what has already transpired.


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6. “At the Clinic” by Sally Rooney, The White Review

A perfect short story by Sally Rooney, which was originally published in The White Review in 2016, and features characters from her novel-cum-show-cum-thing-people-love-to-hate-for-clout Normal People. The Review made the story available online for the first time last week. “People love all kinds of things: their friends, their parents. Misunderstandings are inevitable.”

7. “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?” by Jodi Dean, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Jodi Dean contemplates a question posed by McKenzie Wark in Capital Is Dead: “What if we’re not in capitalism anymore but something worse?” Welcome to neofeudalism, fellow serfs!

8. “We’re All Preppers Now” by Heather Souvaine Horn, The New Republic

Heather Souvaine reviews Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse, a book about prepper subculture, and finds herself understandably more sympathetic to the preppers than the author probably expected the reader would be when he was writing the book. “How do you decide what response is ‘too much,’ when everything we’re currently doing would have been considered too much a few months ago?”

9. “Bournemouth” by Andrew O’Hagan, The London Review of Books

A long, lovely, melancholy essay about the friendship between Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. “I was haunted indeed with a sense that I should never again see him,” James wrote after Stevenson’s death, “but it was one of the best things in life that he was there, or that one had him … He lighted up one whole side of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one’s imagination.”

10. “How ‘Jakarta’ Became the Codeword for US-Backed Mass Killing” by Vincent Bevins, The New York Reviews of Books

An excerpt adapted from Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method, which makes the argument that the mass murder of communists in Indonesia and Brazil in 1964 and 1965 was a decisive turning point in the Cold War (and a turn for the worse in the history of the world, laying the groundwork for many genocides to come) that is little remembered today because “the truth of what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the cold war was, of what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it.”

Every week I make a list on our Bookshop page of all the books and authors mentioned in all of the readings in the newsletter this week. If you feel like taking a look-see, here is this week’s massive reading list.

Stay safe,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Shelved: The Misfits’ 12 Hits From Hell

Patti Ouderkirk / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | April 2020 | 10 minutes (2,607 words)

 

The Misfits have carved a niche in punk rock history. Their 1982 song “Skulls” has everything that defined them: the breakneck tempo, blocky rhythm chords, and the cartoon monster lyric. “Demon I am and face I peel,” songwriter and frontman Glenn Danzig sings.

See your skin turned inside out, ‘cause

Gotta have you on my wall

Gotta have you on my wall, ‘cause

I want your skulls

I need your skulls

As punk rock music with B-movie horror film lyrics, the Misfits are immediately understandable. The music suits a mosh pit as much as a Spotify Halloween playlist. The original incarnation of the band, which lasted from 1977 to 1983, helped establish the “horror punk” genre. “Skulls” appears on Walk Among Us, one of only two full-length albums released by the Misfits during those first five years, and the album is generally considered a classic. With 13 songs clocking in at a total of 25 minutes, it’s punk through-and-through: no time is wasted on bridges and guitar solos.

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This Week in Books: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

Theatrical masks of tragedy and comedy depicted in a Roman mosaic. (Photo By DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini via Getty Images)

[If you’d like to browse all the books mentioned in the newsletter this week, you can do it on our Bookshop page, because I enjoy lists, especially lists about other lists, so I spent a few hours making one. -DS]

Dear Reader,

On Mother’s Day my mom told me that, still, no one in her office is wearing a mask — not when the employees are alone together. She has a public-facing job at a cemetery; through the clientele, as well, calamity stalks her. Grieving families during an epidemic should arouse our empathy, but there is one family that has done its best to test the limits of my pity: a large family of seven, unmasked, who all at once entered the little cemetery office where my mother works, and grew belligerent when asked to leave, and spoke angrily, and spread pestilence and decay upon her, the woman helping them grieve.

Alone together, the cemetery workers don’t wear masks; they do not wear masks unless customers enter; the customers who enter are often unmasked. The masks come on and off like sock and buskin in a Greek play. When it ends, I will know for sure whether it’s been a tragedy or a comedy.

In these inconstant times, I have been thinking of giving up on all these measured scientific and sociological studies of plague times that I ordered a few weeks ago, and which rest on my desk in a talismanic pile to ward off disease, and instead reading only comedies of suffering; well, I guess all comedy derives from suffering, but I mean the very blackest humor written about the very worst of times. It seems to be the only mood that fits as the virus spreads through the White House and the states “open” and my mother masks and unmasks at the cemetery. I could reread Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon, which I’ve mentioned before in the newsletter, although I didn’t mention that it’s funny. (Maybe then it didn’t seem so funny.) I could reread Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, which is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about. You could read them, too, if you’re in the mood to laugh at something that isn’t funny.

Or if not comedy, then horror. A phrase from a book occurs to me when I think of my mother and the mourners at her cemetery. Or when I see anyone without a mask. In R.W. Chambers’ seminal work of cosmic horror The King in Yellow, four of the stories are interlocking; they each reference a play called The King in Yellow that, rumor has it, drives readers insane when they get to the second act. Only two brief excerpts from the play appear in the book, which makes sense: in the book, the play is banned all over the world, but spreading nonetheless.

The phrase that recurs to me is from this fragment of the play:

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed, it’s time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

I’m sure you can guess the part that strikes a nerve. But anyway that’s just me. I’m sure we all have one. Some strange little phrase that keeps coming back, again and again, to our growing horror.

1. “Cooking with Giovanni Boccaccio” by Valerie Stivers, The Paris Review

Valerie Stivers prepares a fascinating spread from The Decameron and consults The Black Death: A Turning Point in History? to find out exactly what kind of turning point one could expect a global pandemic to be. “‘The Decameron’ loathes sanctimony, tramples sacred cows, and punishes corruption. It takes elites less seriously and celebrates a cast of characters much more diverse than would previously have been allowed. By observing humanity and the world more realistically, it ushers in a new era of scholarship and reason—the Renaissance, no less.”

2. “Sleight of Hand: On Meena Kandasamy’s ‘When I Hit You’ and ‘Exquisite Cadavers’” by Stephanie Sy-Quia, The Los Angeles Review of Books

A review of two novels by Meena Kandasamy. The first, When I Hit You, “reveal[s] abusive homes as the absurdist performance sets they are: where everyday objects drift loose from their original uses …. where the players know their parts are a matter of life or death”; the second, Exquisite Cadavers, as reviewer Stephanie Sy-Quia writes, is a clever critique of how the first book was received. Reminiscent of Suki Kim’s complaint that her excellent Without You There Is No Us was labeled a memoir rather than a work of journalism, rendering it ineligible for certain journalism prizes, among other concrete consequences, Exquisite Cadavers reacts to the delegitimizing way in which When I Hit You was received as a memoir rather than a novel; “its content was valorized over its form… all too frequently, the fate of women and people of color.”

3. “When James Baldwin Wrote About the Atlanta Child Murders” by Casey Cep, The New Yorker

In light of a new HBO documentary about the Atlanta Child Murders, Casey Cep revisits James Baldwin’s writing on the case, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Cep looks at how the piece came to be (it was no small feat for a black editor at Playboy to lure Baldwin back to the American South) and how prescient, as always, Baldwin’s argument was. He did not believe that the police’s suspect, a young gay black man, was guilty; he wasn’t sure there was a serial killer at work at all. Instead “Baldwin…. used his coverage of the child murders to argue that the crimes were representative of the way that the city and the country still failed to protect black lives. In the eyes of David Leeming, Baldwin’s biographer, ‘The Evidence of Things Not Seen’ is ‘to the aftermath of the “civil rights” movement what “The Fire Next Time” had been to its heyday.’”

4. “Making a Mess of the World: On Hao Jingfang’s ‘Vagabonds’” by Virginia L. Conn, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Virginia L. Conn writes that Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds may be the first work of Chinese sci-fi marketed in the West that has incorporated the fact that “Chinese sci-fi” is now being marketed in the West (ever since the runaway success of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem) into its social commentary; the story features “an aggressively communitarian Mars” and an Earth defined by “insularity and possessive intellectual property laws,” and it revolves around the ways in which characters from each world seem to misunderstand the alien world as well as their own. Conn says this bifurcated effect makes Vagabonds a genuinely Sino-Western work of sci-fi, written with both audiences in mind.

5. “Annie Ernaux’s Object Lessons: Braiding Identity Through Time” by Mary Hawthorne, Lit Hub

Mary Hawthorne’s review of Annie Ernaux’s The Years seems a little late out of the gate, since the book was first published in translation several years ago, but I found its reflections on consumerism to be really interesting during this time. Like all of us, I’ve been shocked by the spectacle of some (mostly white seems like?) Americans claiming they have a dire need to consume remarkably trivial things (and to be served, but I think that’s a separate, particularly racialized aspect of this uniquely American madness), a need which feels so urgent to them that they think it must be a human right. Hawthrone writes that, in The Years, a novel about a family’s evolution over the course of the 20th century, consumerism is a mechanism which erases the past and the family members’ connection to one another. “….objects, especially long-held ones, contain memories, grounding us implicitly in reality; once discarded, so, too, are the memories, along with the reality. [Ernaux] writes: ‘The increasingly rapid arrival of new things drove the past away. People did not question their usefulness, they just wanted to possess them and suffered when they didn’t earn enough to buy them outright.’” Strange to think that being surrounded by their own memories for too long is driving my countrymen insane.


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6. “The Weight of Certain News” by André Naffis-Sahely, Poetry

Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour “is a page-turner,” writes André Naffis-Sahely, which is always a promising epithet for a collection of poetry. “‘One-Way Ticket,’ for instance, is prompted by the discovery of a bunch of one-way train tickets inside the speaker’s pocket. At first, the poem focuses on the lyricism inspired by this unexpected find: ‘Oh, all the one-way tickets! / I haven’t found anything / more sorrowful than you / in the pockets of the world.’ But then it concludes with this arresting image: ‘—You pound the windowpanes of this train to no avail. / In vain you hurl your voice to the other side of the window. / We / are the actors in a silent film.’”

7. “‘Unless We Make Some Place’: On Andy Croft’s ‘The Years of Anger: The Life of Randall Swingler’” by Robert Chandler, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Robert Chandler reviews Andy Croft’s The Years of Anger, a biography of Randall Swingler, a British poet who Chandler writes has long been erased from the British canon because of his commitment to communism. Swingler is best remembered for the poetry he wrote as a soldier in WWII. Shortly after the war was over, he wrote:

It is only the bone that is dead. The earth is their flesh
And every year grows green in the sloughing of grief.
All they have lost is fear and the crooked bone.

But in me only the bone is alive, must watch
The slow decay of the will, the inch by inch
Retreat of the nerves, the death by shame.

8. “The Defender of Differences” by Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books

A lively review of recent books about or featuring Franz Boas, the father of cultural anthropology. It begins, “Franz Boas fought his first duel in 1877, when he was nineteen,” and then the reader discovers, delightfully, that the father of cultural anthropology was more or less ritually scarified all over his face. Because apparently the point of duels was to just slice the other person’s face up. Oh, also he was dueling proto-nazis! (Thought I’d try to end on a positive note this week.)

Stay safe,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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American Tests

Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Jakki Kerubo | Longreads | May 2020 | 13 minutes (3,314 words)

I was afraid I’d be deported. Did the interviewer know about my parking tickets from those days when I hadn’t quite figured out New York City’s alternate side rules? Or that once, after a bottomless brunch, I’d sung loudly on the subway, not caring that someone shouted the suggestion I “stick to shower singing”? My appointment was for noon, and now it was 6 p.m. I hadn’t eaten all day, but my hunger had receded, replaced with anxiety and a thudding headache. All afternoon I’d rocked myself for comfort as people streamed in and out of the interview rooms.

It was 2012 and immigration didn’t feel as fraught as it presently does, but it was nerve-wracking nonetheless. Getting a new appointment would take four to six months.

Finally, I was moved to a small cubicle with overstuffed binders covering every square inch, including the extra seats. Each one held the dense, intricate details of human migrant history — bloody wars, financial catastrophes, the incurable optimism of new beginnings. Behind the desk sat an overburdened federal worker. She was petite like me, but her caramel skin color contrasted my darker one, a hue my mother once described as the green-black color of boiled cowpea leaves.

“I’m sorry for the wait,” the woman told me. “We misplaced your file.”

I was about to take my citizenship exam.
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This Week in Books: Several Nihilistic Frenchmen

Portrait of the French writer Joris Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). (Photo by Leemage / Corbis via Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

I feel like most of my reading this past week was preoccupied by power: who has it, who can get it, and what it looks like. The overall arc of the revelation seems to be that no matter how acutely we are aware of the answers to the first and second questions (1. the rich; 2. the rich), the answer to the third can still feel surprising: what power looks like, in the end, is nothing more or less than the ability to keep buying food at jacked up prices during a food shortage. “Profiteers were taking a hand and purveying at enormous prices essential foodstuffs not available in the shops,” writes Camus in The Plague. “The result was that poor families were in great straits, while the rich went short of practically nothing.” “We’re all in this together” becomes a pipe dream for Camus in The Plague almost as quickly as it did for us in 2020; it turns out maintaining normalcy during a crisis is the ultimate show of elite strength — even, or especially, at the expense of the rest of us. In that vein, I found Samuel Rutter’s manual for living a 19th-century decadent lifestyle, as described in the writings of Joris-Karl Huysmans, to be particularly bonkers and provoking; a perfect covid read. After all, a morose eccentric living alone in the countryside and indulging in simple pleasures may feel relatably disheveled and melancholy during quarantine, but of course by the very fact that he can afford not to work, we know he must be quite rich. Only the rich get to drop out of society with everyman style. Sooner or later, for most of us, the other shoe will drop.

Power didn’t only come up this week in reviews of books by dour Frenchmen, either! It’s there in Maisy Card’s description of the way she felt, while conducting archival research for her debut novel, when she read accounts of enslaved women and girls who found ways to rebel against servitude and sexual violence (“They were victims of course, but it was also comforting to know that, as brutalized as they were, many of them still found the strength to disobey”); it’s there in Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, which explores the twisting violence enacted by “federal language” against Native people during the Termination era, a time when the government tried to eliminate tribal existence through bureaucracy and mandates; and of course it’s the constant thread woven through a New Yorker review of the latest book by Mike Davis, whose City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear seemed to presage the Rodney King Riots and the Woolsey Fire respectively, and whose The Monster at Our Door, about the potential for an avian flu pandemic, apparently scared him so badly that he couldn’t keep a copy in his house. Davis’ latest, the memoir-ish Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, is intended as a guide for young radicals, although its lessons are somewhat crushingly framed as a tutorial on failure: “I realized eight years ago… that the experience of that generation had to be recovered, and recovered in a way that would provide lessons and balance sheets to the current generation of activists… To understand what people fought for and what strategies they used and why, at the end of the day, we were defeated in every important sense.”

The fact that nearly every article in the newsletter this week seems to be about power could of course just be my own preoccupations at work, but I also can’t shake this feeling that a leaf has been turned, and we are on a crash course with something brand new — or perhaps very, very old. So much of what has happened lately has been completely unfathomable (even at the same time that it was totally predictable, if that makes any sense at all) but I simply can’t wrap my head around this thing where people are forced to go back to work when the virus is still widely circulating and untraced. This seems untenable? I know Americans are a surprisingly meek people when it comes to doing the bidding of our bosses, but it seems like a bridge too far, even for us.

I think something’s going to happen to stop it. Or maybe I just hope it does.

1. “A Dandy’s Guide to Decadent Self-Isolation” by Samuel Rutter, The Paris Review

Samuel Rutter scours Joris-Karl Huysmans’ classic of French decadent literature Against Nature for advice on how to live the way we must now — that is, like we are eccentric recluses “[taking] pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude.”

2. “Pointing the Finger” by Jacqueline Rose, The London Review of Books

Jacqueline Rose revisits Camus’ The Plague and re-examines old arguments about whether it is lax in assigning blame. “Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know too that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him.”

3. “Artforum” by César Aira, Lit Hub

An excerpt from César Aira’s Artforum. And yes, the entire excerpt is about how one man’s copy of Artforum magazine has gotten very, very wet.

4. “Holy Simplicity: On Louise Erdrich’s ‘The Night Watchman’” by Thomas J. Millay, The Los Angeles Review of Books

This review of Louise Erdrich’s latest novel The Night Watchman situates the book in its historical context of the Termination era, when the federal government attempted to erase Native identity and nationhood by “giving” Native Americans citizenship. Reviewer Thomas J. Millay writes that the novel draws a purposeful contrast between the plainspoken language of the story’s protagonists — members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa or Ojibwe Indians — and the deceitful speech of the federal government. “Federal language twists and turns, appearing good on its surface but in fact initiating great evil.”


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5. “Maisy Card: ‘There is this hazy quality to my family history that no amount of research can clarify.’” by Mickie Meinhardt, Guernica

Mickie Meinhardt interviews Maisy Card about her novel These Ghost Are Family, which is based on 12 years of archival research about her family’s history in Jamaica and the legacy of slavery. “I can easily make a character’s anger my own, and I’ll find myself walking around with those feelings after working on the book, as if I forgot that I was writing about fictional people.”

6. “We’re All Living in the Bathroom Now” by Annabel Paulsen, Electric Literature

This reflection on what Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Bathroom (an incredible novella about a man who lives in his bathroom and refuses to ever leave it) can teach us about quarantine is, you may have noticed, the THIRD time a sort of nihilistic Frenchman has appeared in the reading list this week. Which is pretty remarkable considering I haven’t even mentioned the Houellebecq thing.

7. “Mike Davis in the Age of Catastrophe” by Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker

Dana Goodyear reviews Mike Davis’ movement history Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties and asks him, the oracle of L.A. apocalypse, what to worry about next. The answer is less than reassuring for Angelenos, I assume: “Davis kept worrying it over, the alternative ending that might reorder everything again. ‘What if the big one happened now?’ he said. I’ve already plundered my earthquake kits for face masks and hand sanitizer. And now Davis has said my midnight fear out loud.”

8. “The Stages of Not Going on T” by Danny M. Lavery, The New Inquiry

A gorgeous piece of writing excerpted from Danny M. Lavery’s Something That May Shock And Discredit You. “Oh, I don’t want to go on T. That’s not what this is. I can see where you got the idea, I suppose, but I’m afraid hormones simply aren’t for me. I don’t even want the ones I have! I’ll never go on testosterone, but it’s simply wonderful for you. You look great. Better than ever, honestly. If I were stuck in a room for the rest of my life and could only look at one thing for some reason, it would be you (I hope that’s not weird to say), but that’s really not the same thing. I just want you to go on hormones and for me to be able to watch you do it.”

9. “Making My Moan” by Irina Dumitrescu, The London Review of Books

Irina Dumitrescu reviews a very scholarly sounding book of absolutely incredible medieval smut, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. “Gloriously, the poem ‘I pray yow maydens every chone’ features a merchant offering his podynges (‘sausages’) to a group of young women. ‘Will ye have of the puddings come out of the pan?’ he asks, and they reply firmly: ‘No, I will have a pudding that grows out of a man.’”

10. “Are We Seeing a New Movement to Organize Publishing?” by Corinne Segal, Lit Hub

An interview with Amy Wilson, who runs the Twitter account Book Worker Power, which she made as a more direct-action oriented response to the emergence of the popular satirical Publishers Weakly account. (You can read an interview with the anonymous people who run that account on Electric Literature. I believe they gave this interview just before their first two cancelings, which came in kind of admirably quick succession.)

Stay well,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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And Then We Grew Up

Getty / Illustration by Longreads

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | May 2020 | 11 minutes (3,116 words)

“I envy you,” my cousin told me once, as we were sitting on the front porch of a log cabin in the Ohio woods, eating peach pie. “You have a word.” That word was WRITER. My cousin, who’d bounced around jobs in her twenties and thirties, envied the way my word so neatly answered the questions of career and identity, the way it brought me into focus. I may not have had any money. I may not have had any idea if the project I was working on would ever actually be seen by someone other than myself, but I had a word.

Every once in a while, I go through a spell of applying for jobs. Teaching jobs. Tech jobs. Utterly random jobs. I google “how to write a cover letter.” I fantasize with both fascination and horror about showing up at an office and chatting about The Handmaid’s Tale over tepid coffee in a communal space. Then inevitably I imagine that moment when a stranger asks me what I do and I can no longer supply my word as an answer. It is incredibly disarming, even just in my interior dreamscape, not to have that word. It has been an anchor for my personal sense of validation, my identity, my way of relating to the world for so long. What would it mean to give it up? To hand over all my art monster ambitions and renounce the often cruel bargain of personal stability for creative nobility?

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