Search Results for: Tin House

This Week In Books: I Bought Some Books

Soldiers read books while maintaining social distancing due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic at Foca Transport and Terminal Unit in Izmir, Turkey on April 29, 2020. (Photo by Mahmut Serdar AlakuÅ/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

My concentration is pretty much shot. So I have to confess I haven’t gotten very far into A Distant Mirror. I’ve mostly been playing Unciv on my phone and watching Devs and making curry and cleaning out the closet and periodically tweeting at A24 that I would really like to watch First Cow now and feeling slightly removed from my body. But that hasn’t stopped me from ambitiously and somewhat compulsively ordering even more plague books: The Great Mortality (about the black death) and The Great Influenza (about the 1918 flu, of course) from The Book Table in Oak Park, Illinois; Asleep (about the mysterious pandemic of “sleeping sickness” that followed on the heels of the 1918 flu) and The Ghost Map (cholera) from The Bookstore at the End of the World; Pox Americana (smallpox) and Epidemics and Society (all of them!) from Community Bookstore in Brooklyn. (I also ordered Joan of Arc In Her Own Words from Split Rock Books in Cold Spring, New York, but that’s related to an entirely different phase I’m going through.)

I’m not sure what I feel like all these plague books will achieve. Will I read them all? Probably not. Will they all sit on my desk talismanically protecting me from getting sick? Of course, but that goes without saying. Will they make me feel more or less anxious? TBD, I’ll let you know.

Ordering the books was a circuitous choice for me because I’ve been having some trouble coming to grips with the fact that the American lockdown fell so short of what it should be; that we began talking about reopening before we ever, it seems to me, fully closed. All these bookstores I ordered from are places I used to work or are owned by friends of mine, and I know they’re doing their best to keep themselves and all their employees safe and paid (though The Bookstore at the End of the World is a Bookshop site begun by a group of bookstore employees who were covid-furloughed by their employers). What that means, practically, is that because none of these stores have employees on site, all of these orders were fulfilled “direct,” which, in the rarefied parlance of bookselling which I know from my years in the business, means they were shipped directly to me from one of the wholesaler’s warehouses (the bookstores get a cut of the sale, although a smaller cut than normal). The wholesaler in this case — in all cases, as far as I know, including orders placed through Bookshop — is Ingram, the behemoth book distributor rivaled in reach only by Amazon and owned by the billionaire Ingram family. Early on in the pandemic, as lockdown began rolling across the country, I thought for certain that the warehouses themselves would soon close — not just Ingram and the smaller regional wholesalers, but the publishers’ warehouses as well, not to mention the printers! I thought the whole industry would have to, at least momentarily, pause. But while many publishers have pushed back the release dates for their spring titles and laid off employees (so that’s not going well) and one major printer has closed (while another has filed for bankruptcy, so that’s not going well), the major publisher warehouses themselves, as far as I can tell, have stayed open — with social distancing measures in place, of course. (The situation at the Big Five publishers feels a little opaque to me, but smaller publishers/distributors such as Small Press Distribution, a longtime distributor of micro presses, have been clear about their need to raise money.) Ingram, meanwhile, has been considered essential throughout the country during the pandemic and its warehouses have remained open and shipping direct to customers (as well as, of course, to stores in states where things like curbside pickup and receiving/shipping in and out of the store are still allowed — Point Reyes Books in California made an excellent video of what that looks like).

And so, what I’m trying to get at is that in the beginning of the pandemic I thought the best way to support bookstores was to order gift cards and donate to fundraisers (special shout out to Unnameable Books in Brooklyn and The Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago) or maybe order audiobooks or ebooks if that is your thing (though independent bookstores earn somewhat slim percentages of those sales, when they are able to offer them at all), convinced as I was that any sort of physical shopping would be tantamount to forcing warehouse and postal workers to endanger themselves, and that those warehouses would soon close down anyway! But I suppose that lately, despite few if any tangible signs that the spread of the virus has begun to decline in America, I let the growing narrative that “corona is nearly over now” and “the country is reopening soon” seep into my brain. And so, to be frank, I ordered some extremely nonessential stuff.

I guess I stopped expecting that the book warehouses would shut down. I stopped expecting the peak and have settled for the plateau.

But I’m sitting here staring at this copy of Epidemics and Society, which has already arrived and which I have set in a “decontamination pile” because we’re running low on disinfectants in my apartment, and I’m wondering, if I’m afraid to touch it, should I really have had someone send it? It’s a ghoulish feeling.

When the pandemic was starting, my feed was full of people tweeting about buying Nintendo Switches, so I mean, I’m aware that I’m not the only person in the world to buy something nonessential during the pandemic. I guess it’s possible I’m just being overwrought, here.

But it still seems like something is fishy about all this. I still feel like a ghoul. I feel like we have settled for a rolling epidemic until (purely theoretically!) herd immunity is reached, but we are doing it without admitting that that’s what we are doing— or acknowledging who will suffer for it (prisoners, warehouse workers, grocers, nurses!). And business owners are being forced into this mass casualty scheme because federal and local governments refuse to provide financial relief.

So, yeah, I have no idea where I’ve landed here. Am I ghoul for buying all these plague books? I mean, ok, yes; we all know the answer is yes.

I’m a ghoul with just enough plague books to tide me over until the second surge.

1. “The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction” by Charles Yu, The Atlantic

Sci-fi writer Charles Yu weighs in on reality. “Years ago, I started writing a short story, the premise of which was this: All the clocks in the world stop working, at once. Not time itself, just the convention of time. Life freezes in place. The protagonist, who works in a Midtown Manhattan high-rise, takes the elevator down to the lobby and walks out onto the street to find the world on pause, its social rhythms and commercial activity suspended. In the air is a growing feeling of incipient chaos. I got about midway through page 3 and stopped. I didn’t know what it meant.”

2. “What Rousseau Knew about Solitude” by Gavin McCrea, The Paris Review

Novelist Gavin McCrea writes about Rousseau’s lonely years, noting that the thinker’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker are haunted by the society they seek to avoid. “Looking at himself through the eyes of society, he is ‘a monster,’ ‘a poisoner,’ ‘an assassin,’ ‘a horror of the human race,’ ‘a laughingstock.’ He imagines passersby spitting on him. He pictures his contemporaries burying him alive. Rumors about him are, he believes, circulating in the highest echelons: ‘I heard even the King himself and the Queen were talking about it as if there was no doubt about it.’” This version of Rousseau sounds, to me, pleasantly like a morose Twitter poster. It just feels very familiar. I feel like I could scroll through Twitter right now and see some defeated soul posting that if they ever walk in public again, they will be spit on and the Queen will hear about it.

3. “Creation in Confinement: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” by Nicole R. Fleetwood, The New York Review of Books

An excerpt adapted from Nicole R. Fleetwood’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, in which she surveys art created by incarcerated people or made in response to incarceration. Fleetwood describes the unique challenges of documenting prison art: “…many of the artists, whether currently or formerly incarcerated, do not have possession of their art, nor any documentation of their work, nor knowledge of how and where their art has circulated… art made in prison may be sent to relatives, traded with fellow prisoners, sold or ‘gifted’ to prison staff, donated to nonprofit organizations, and sometimes made for private clients. There are people I interviewed who described their work and practices to me but had nothing to show.”

4. “The Exclusivity Economy” by Kanishk Tharoor, The New Republic

Author Kanishk Tharoor reviews Nelson D. Schwartz’s The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business, an exploration of the byzantine hierarchies that have emerged in all manner of consumer-facing industries to separate the wealthiest customers from the chaff. “What these changes augur, in [Schwartz’s] view, is the crystallization of a caste system in the United States and the birth of a new aristocracy.”


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5. “Gay Literature Is Out of the Closet. So Why Is Deception a Big Theme?” by Jake Nevins, The New Yorker

Jake Nevins surveys recent queer fiction and finds that deception is a major theme, even when it’s not explicitly the deception of the closet. “For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, from Dorian Gray to Tom Ripley, the lie of the closet was the hinge upon which queer literature would pivot, reflecting what were then the often judicial or mortal costs of being openly gay. Insincerity, ‘merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities,’ as Dorian Gray put it, was the mode of congress gay men had been taught to adopt for the sake of self-preservation…”

6. “The Surreal Stories of ‘Lake Like a Mirror’ Show How Power Distorts Reality” by YZ Chin, Electric Literature

YZ Chin interviews Chinese Malaysian author Ho Sok Fong about her short story collection Lake Like a Mirror, recently translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce. Ho says her stories try to reflect the way the exercise of power distorts reality. “I think a surrealist style can twist the surface of a reality that presents as neutral. Then we can see reality as a screen that has been yanked askew, and its seemingly solid surface starts to be pulled apart. Through this we realize that reality can be distorted by power. This isn’t something realism can achieve.”

7. “What if, Instead of the Internet, We Had Xenobots?” by Garth Risk Halberg, The New York Times

In his review of the long-awaited second novel from Adam Levin (author of the 1,000-page widely lauded high school bildungsroman The Instructions), Garth Risk Halberg writes that “Levin can make the kitchen-sink ambition of (mostly white, mostly male) midcentury postmodernism feel positively new.” His latest book, Bubblegum, is about “a novelist-cum-memoirist-cum-unemployed schlub named Belt Magnet, of the fictional Chicago suburb of Wheelatine, Ill.” who can “hear the suicidal pleas of certain inanimate objects through a telepathic ‘gate’ above his right eye” and was one of the first patients therapeutically paired with a “botimal” aka “a mass-produced… velvety soft, forearm-length, ‘…flesh-and-bone robot that thinks it’s your friend®!’”

8. “No Sleep till Auschwitz” by Jeremy M. Davies, The Baffler

New fiction from Jeremy M. Davies, author of The Knack of Doing, presents a fictionalized publishing industry that is — purely fictionally speaking, of course! — terrible. “Drucksteller saluted the long con of literature by way of the time-honored method of stealing a ream of copy paper and not flushing the toilet on his way off the estate.”

Stay well,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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O! Small-Bany! Part 4: Fall

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | April 2020 | 22 minutes (5,474 words)

The first time I get rear-ended is at a stoplight on the corner of Central and North Lake, around 4pm. One minute I’m on my way to school pickup, the next minute I’m disoriented and sobbing. The at-fault is a 19-year-old dude in a Jeep full of friends. He is nonplussed. He asks, without affect, whether I am okay.

“No!” I scream. “What the fuck?”

My car is badly damaged. I can’t stop sobbing. No airbags deployed. I am worried the dude will get back into his car and flee, so I photograph his license plate in haste, and call the cops. I cannot for the life of me stop crying. My rage and fear and shock and sadness are a tangle. The Jeep doesn’t have a scratch on it. It’s raining. The dude and his friends huddle under a shop awning, laughing.

The cop tells me to calm down: “It’s not that big a deal, ma’am.”

Later, when I call the cop oversight office to suggest that this particular cop go fuck himself, the oversight officer will watch the body cam footage and promise to speak to the cop in question about sensitivity in traumatic situations.

For some reason, I refuse an ambulance. (“Some reason”, ha: I am more terrified of institutional health care than I am of getting back into a smashed up car and driving away with whiplash and a concussion.)

I spend days in bed, in the dark, alternating heat and ice. A haze of phone calls from insurance agents, a hailstorm of Advil, rivers of CBD hot freeze.

You can get rear-ended anywhere. It wasn’t Albany’s fault, per se. But it’s so easy to blame Albany. Fucking Albany! This was God’s way of telling me I’ve done my time in this hopeless shithole of a city, right? Or maybe this was God’s way of punishing me for never utilizing public buses. Or maybe this was God’s way of shaming me for having my kid in private school. The thinks you think when you’re stuck in bed, in the dark, without distraction, for days on end! Meditation is a billion times harder than crossfit, and constructions about “God” are tough epigenetic habits to break.
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Secret Museums

Christian Ohde/McPhoto/ullstein bild via Getty Images

B. Pietras Creative Nonfiction | Summer 2019 | 16 minutes (4,291 words)

 

I was a freshman in high school when my religion teacher faced the class and asked, with a knowing smile, “How many of you have seen pornography?”

There were about twenty boys in the classroom that day, and until then, we probably weren’t paying full attention—some of us were thinking about lunch, others about the quiz next period. But when the question came, everything in the dusty room seemed to go still; the air itself seemed to thicken, to prickle against our skin. Tense, wary of a trap, we watched one another out of the corners of our eyes. Did he really expect us to answer honestly? And what would happen if we did?

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Grieving, but Calmed by a Different Kind of Storm

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Stephanie Land | Longreads | April 2020 | 12 minutes (3,059 words)

 
Almost a month into COVID isolation, I curled up on my bedroom floor under the window I’d opened to rid the room of my children’s lunch aromas — the ketchup and chicken nugget smells that relentlessly crawled up the stairs every day before noon. John Prine’s “Souvenirs” drifted out of my laptop’s speakers, drowning out the blaring screens full of TikToks and my youngest’s kindergarten Zoom meetings that were even more ridiculous to see in real time. On my own screen was the ever-faithful blank document, its cursor drumming, reminding me of my inability to produce, my failure to do my job that day. At least I showed up. Kind of.

I fingered the carpet inches from my face, watching the dog hairs vibrate as I breathed in and out. It was the hair of our newest dog, the husky. Everything in our bedroom seemed coated with a layer of it. Last fall, my husband and I drove nine hours down to Salt Lake City to adopt her on the same morning the pregnancy test came back positive. The twins would have been somewhere around 24 weeks by now. As big as eggplants. Imagine that.

***

I began 2020, the year of perfect vision, wondering if I’d ever be able to write again. The last time I’d written anything creatively was August, when I realized I wasn’t able to go to the grocery store alone anymore. It happened in that moment between turning off the car and opening the door when the panic attack occurred. This was only a few days after we’d returned from our honeymoon. I was on my way home from the therapist’s office. I’d made a frantic appointment after I woke up to a message from an acquaintance that began, “Thought you might want to know” and continued with the information that my abusive ex was in town. This was the man who’d strangled me and kept me imprisoned in his anxiety for a year after that — yeah, that one. Someone saw him in town the night before at a bar. “He was with a girl,” the messenger said. “They looked pretty cozy.”

I began 2020, the year of perfect vision, wondering if I’d ever be able to write again. The last time I’d written anything creatively was August, when I realized I wasn’t able to go to the grocery store alone anymore.

My panic attack wasn’t about that specifically, though in some way I guess it was. I’d ended the appointment with my therapist by admitting I was too embarrassed to go out in my small town because I’d gained 25 pounds in the past year. “I can’t look people in the eye,” I’d said, “because I just start telling myself what they must be thinking.” My ex’s snide attitude toward anything but his idea of a perfectly fit body was at the root of this. He had been my daily critic of what I wore, ate, and the progress I’d made, through exercise, to shrink my body to the smallest size possible. It was my ex’s words, but in other people’s imaginary voices.

For the six months before that, since people started referring to my first book as “critically acclaimed,” every time I saw myself on a television screen doing an interview with a morning show host, I saw my ex watching it just long enough to turn to the person next to him and say, with arms crossed, “Look at how fat she is.”


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For 15 minutes that August afternoon, I gasped for air with the windows still rolled up, hot tears falling on my bare thighs, before I felt safe enough to drive home. I’d offered to pick up a few things for dinner, and now I’d be forced to admit I hadn’t been able. That I’d had a panic attack in a grocery store parking lot because I couldn’t go inside alone, fearing I’d run into someone I knew, or didn’t know. A lot of people had approached me in that grocery store since my book came out. Some wanted to tell me their story, often with tears in their eyes, then ask, “Can I just give you a hug?” I felt pressured to say yes. Now I’d admitted out loud what I imagined them thinking, and that seemed to make it real.

After that, whenever I had to go somewhere in town, my husband always came with me. He was a good buffer for those situations — something to physically put between myself and the person who wanted to talk to me. Every person who made eye contact became a potential “fan” who’d ask for a hug, only now I saw it as a potential threat. An imaginary mockery of my appearance, an invasion of my private life, the one I kept close since the swarm of interviews started the year before.
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The Bigamist’s Daughter

Steve Chenn / Getty, Photo Illustration by Longreads

Robin Antalek | Longreads | April 2020 | 18 minutes (4,599 words)

In 1964, when my mother was pregnant with my younger brother, she found out that her husband, my father, had married another woman and that woman was pregnant as well. My father’s new wife had left her family and three small children, and then she and my father had created a subset family, making us a complicated algebraic formula, resistant to logic. He and his new wife lived together somewhere in Fairfield County, Connecticut, commuting distance to their jobs in Manhattan, where they had met. For a while they lived in his red Volvo wagon that smelled of his ever present Camel cigarettes.

Once, way before my brother, he drove us in that same red Volvo wagon down the wide tree lined Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn to a pre-war apartment building overlooking Prospect Park for a visit with his parents. The adults gathered in a room with windows that offered a view of the tops of the trees while, at 3, I remained in the kitchen with the housekeeper and a parakeet in a cage in front of a window that looked out onto a brick walled airshaft.

The bird turned its back on us while I ate Milano cookies. When dinner was ready the housekeeper took my hand in hers and led me into the big room. I was too full to eat the bright pink roast on the broad, gold-rimmed dinner plates, or sip from the tiny glass of tomato juice resting on a paper doily on a miniature plate. I know the attention on me was uncomfortable and confusing. My feet dangled from the chair in patent leather shoes and I was reprimanded by my father more than once for kicking the bar that stretched between the legs. Tucked in the large bureau behind me was a Batman and Robin coloring book, a gift chosen I supposed because of my name, not gender, along with a fresh pack of crayons, promised to me only if I ate my entire dinner. Later I am shattered, inconsolable, my face rubbed raw against the shoulder of my father’s tweed coat as he carries me from the apartment, a piece of meat still lodged between my cheek and molars.
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This Week In Books: The New Lord and Lady of the Apartment

Me, doing the laundry. (OMIURI SHIMBUN/AFP via Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

This week I figured out that the best way to hang-dry our sheets is over the closet doors. From across the room they look like a pair of dangerously large jellyfish landing on a dead coral reef.

Is that a weird thing to think? Well, it gets worse. Because as I foisted those sheets unto their bleached white thrones, and regarded them as the new reigning lord and lady of our apartment, I felt a sudden terror not for myself (because I’m losing it) but the guys who work at the laundromat.

You see, I’ve been trying to think of everyone; to contact trace, as it were, the Danavirus, and catalog everywhere I habitually spread my (ew, this metaphor, what the hell) droplet$. And the laundromat, oh god, oh gods, oh gelatinous lords of the reef — I hadn’t thought of them yet! I’d been so fixated on developing a process for handwashing all our stuff in my kitchen sink that I had forgotten the dire economic impact that this, too, has wrought. The laundromat guys must be so worried right now! How can they possibly be making any money?? So, I worried a bit for them. I’m trying to figure out if they have a gofundme but I can’t find it. God, everything sucks.

I shudder to think of how much handwashing is happening in America right now. It’s not good. I am not good at it. Everything is stiff. It turns out washing machines have water filters in them, who knew! So now everything I own is hardened by the invisible minerals in the tap water (“We are learning much about the Invisible Enemy,” the soft, slug-like President of America whispers to me silkily from his hidey-hole in the crisped white reef), invisible minerals which I’m questioning whether I really should have been drinking straight from the tap for…. my entire…. life….

I know I sound like I’m spiraling, which is why I’ve decided this week to read A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s classic work of narrative nonfiction about the Black Death. So far the book has taught me that everything is going to be fine!

Haha, sike, no it’s not. You know, at the time, they didn’t call it the Black Death. They called it the Great Mortality. I’ve been wondering what this whole corona thing is going to be called one day — or even what it’s going to be called next month. In my roundup below, one of the articles, featured on Lit Hub, is called “How Did Writers Survive the First Great Depression?” which caught me off guard when I read it. I thought to myself, with a noticeable chill down my spine, “Oh, are we already calling this the Second Great Depression?” Then I belatedly realized the article is an excerpt from a book about the Great Recession — making it unclear whether the “second” Great Depression presumed by the article’s title is a Lit Hub editor’s gesture toward the current corona crisis or the book itself making a statement about the severity of the Recession. It was jarring, this realization that I personally do not have enough data to say for sure, off the top of my head, whether the second Great Depression has already happened or not; that historical time has become so warped in our supposedly post-everything future that the scale and scope of things is somewhat beyond me. It was like looking into a mirror that’s facing another mirror and seeing my foremost reflection first, a half-second before I notice there are a dozen more just like it, going all the way back.

1. “From Now On, I Vow Only to Read Fiction” by Nausicaa Renner, N+1

“I admire those who are stable enough to keep reading essays,” Nausicaa Renner writes in this very good essay. “From now on, I vow only to read fiction.”

2. “Trout Fishing in America” by Greil Marcus, Bookforum

The great Greil Marcus interviews the great Percival Everett; it’s an unbeatable interview combo, beyond reproach. “I can’t look directly at a beautiful river—I find that I have to turn away and steal glimpses of it, because it’s too much for me.”

3. “I Love Paulette Jiles’s Novels. So Why Won’t She Talk to Me?” by Emily McCullar, Texas Monthly

I think at one point I was the kind of person who would have had some reservations about this kind of thing. I would have thought, maybe, that no matter how cranky and conservative and capricious Paulette Jiles is, it’s still sort of awkward to finish your profile of her once she’s cut off communication with you and insulted you on her blog. But now, in the Age of the Virus, I have shed many feelings and beliefs. My heart has been hardened (“by the minerals in the water,” the pale white President in the Reef whispers raspily to me while Lorrie Moore is soothed by the sound of it), and now, to me, it is noble and just to publish the profile of someone who has insulted you on her blog. News of the world, indeed.

4. “The Provincial Reader” by Sumana Roy, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Sumana Roy remembers growing up as a provincial reader in rural West Bengal, which reminded me a little of growing up in Ohio, back when most of my favorite books were garage sale paperbacks with the covers mysteriously ripped off. “In pre-liberalization India, everything arrived late: not just material things but also ideas … This temporal gap turned journalism into literature, news into legend, and historical events into something akin to plotless stories. But like those who knew no other life, we accepted this as the norm.”


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5. “How Did Writers Survive the First Great Depression?” by Jason Boog, Lit Hub

In an excerpt from the The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today, Jason Boog writes about becoming obsessed with authors who struggled to survive the Great Depression while he himself struggled through the Great Recession. “I paid 50 dollars to get a copy of Newhouse’s out-of-print novel so I could show it to everybody I knew. Like some misguided missionary, I’d show it to people and say, ‘See? See? He’s talking about us!’ His book felt like a bomb with a busted timer that had stalled back in the 1930s and had been stuck on a dusty shelf for 80 years, losing none of its dangerous potency. I wanted to fix the timer and blow something up all over again.”

6. “Lunar Phase” by Kamran Javadizadeh, The Point

Kamran Javadizadeh ruminates about what kind of book he would ideally like to be reading right now, and lands on the moon. “I find now that what I want out of reading is both contact and distance … I want something that makes me feel like I do when I listen to those lunar audio loops. Which is to say, both close to a voice and far from its source; securely connected, as though by an invisible cable, to a distant but steady point in space.” He writes that the only thing really doing the trick is James Schuyler’s 1974 poetry collection Hymn To Life. In an address to an inaccessible and distant beloved, one poem reads: “In / moon terms, you’re / not so far away.”

7. “‘Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited’ and the Inner Life of Catastrophe” by Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker

In light of the recent tendency to compare the coronavirus pandemic to the HIV pandemic, Garth Greenwell revisits Andrew Holleran’s 1988 Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited (originally published under the title Ground Zero). “[Henry] James, Holleran writes, ‘claimed the raising of a woman’s eyebrow across the dinner table was more dramatic to him than the fall of Rome.’ The question of many of Holleran’s columns in the eighties was what such a writer can do when Rome actually falls.”

8. “Complex Messiah” by Ratik Asokan, Bookforum

An invigorating read about Heinrich von Kleist, a sort of batty early 19th century Prussian romanticist whose novella The Duel is lowkey one of my favorite books. I’ve always wanted to read his best known work, Michael Kohlhaas, and in this review Ratik Asokan writes that New Directions has just given us a robust new translation. “…The tales unfold with a wild, almost savage intensity, which contemporary readers found disturbing; infamously, Kleist’s hero Goethe dismissed the younger writer as diseased.”

9. “A Detrimental Education” by Zaina Alsous, The New Inquiry

Zaina Alsous interviews Eli Meyerhoff about his book Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World, an examination of how the older concept of “study” has been superseded by the more recent, capitalism- and colonialism-inflected idea of “education.” “With the formal end of slavery, racial capitalism shifted to wage labor contracts … So, in order to enable arbitrage of humans as capital, capitalists needed to create distinctions in the category of ‘the human.’ Stratified and hierarchical education produces differences among humans that, in turn, create arbitrage opportunities in fractured labor markets.”

10. “The Phony Warrior” by Yoshiharu Tsuge, The Paris Review

In an excerpt from The Swamp, a new collection from Drawn & Quarterly of work by the 20th-century comics artist Yoshiharu Tsuge, a samurai is disappointed to learn that a traveling ronin he meets on the road is both more and less great than rumor has it.

Stay well,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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No Time Like the Present

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Robert Burke Warren | Longreads | April 2020 | 5 minutes (1,174 words)

What day is it?

In pre-pandemic days, I said those words, or heard them, most often when traveling. Now, I say and hear them (or read them) every day, while social distancing at home with my wife and son. Like Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse Five, I am “unstuck in time.” Surely, many days have passed, but no, it’s been only one or two. A week seems a month, a month a season. Last week? No. Yesterday.

I know I’m not alone. “March was the shittiest year ever,” goes the meme.

Whereas once we lamented “Where does the time go?” meaning it’s racing too fast, now we move through denser space, longer minutes filled with yesterdays for which we pine, and tomorrows we either fear, or fixate on with rapacious longing. Or both. Routines — job, school, shopping, socializing — are disrupted, crippled, or gone. In this strange, new “now,” we fill space with worry and/or desperate hope, visiting a conjured future and/or hazy yesterdays, all out of our control. Unstuck in time. “The past is never dead,” Faulkner famously wrote. “It’s not even past.” Too true, Bill.

And we don’t know what day it is.
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Let’s Not Talk About Estrangement

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At Guernica, Joanna Hershon considers her estranged uncle (a man she met once, but never knew) and wonders not only about how his self-imposed distance has affected his parents and siblings, but specifically about the lack of family discourse or discord over their missing member.

Researchers at Emory University in the 1990s—Dr. Marshall Duke and Dr. Robyn Fivush—discovered that the more children know about their families, the better they do in the face of life’s challenges. The kinds of stories that predict the closest families aren’t successes or failures but rather tales that incorporate life’s challenges into the family lore. It’s not my uncle’s absence that haunts me—after all, I never knew him. It’s that no one—not my grandparents, my parents, or any of my mother’s cousins we visited with over the years—told me stories about him, or about losing him. No one mused aloud about why he removed himself from the rest of us. It’s the absence of inquiry that feels disquieting, even now. How could my mother grow up in the same small house as her brother, and have nothing much to say about him? What are her questions, and where does she put them?

Read the story

Little League, Revisited

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Little League World Series / Photo illustration by Longreads

Adam Kuhlmann | Longreads | April 2020 | 17 minutes (4,265 words)

It’s a cold, gray morning in late December, the week that sags like bunting hung between Christmas and New Year’s. I pull my mother’s Subaru alongside a large cinder block building identified only by a street address peeling from a rust-pocked and dented steel door. I see no functional windows, just a few square cavities that have been boarded up from the inside.

My wife, Mysha, eyes the grim façade from the passenger seat. “Is it strange,” she asks, “that Chase takes lessons inside a commercial slaughterhouse?”

Chase is my nephew, an 11-year-old with the eyelashes of a Hollywood starlet and a penchant for neon athletic wear. During our annual holiday visit to my Virginia hometown, he had invited us to watch him pitch and hit baseballs for an hour, under the tutelage of a private coach.

“It gives him a leg up,” my sister had told me the previous night after Chase went to bed. Perhaps sensing my skepticism, she explained the nature of today’s competitive child-rearing: how all of a kid’s activities — from his first birthday party to his college admissions — must be coordinated and enhanced, for a fee, by biologically unrelated adults.

At 39, with no plans to father a child myself, I am free to pass judgment on all manner of parental behavior without worrying that, one day, I’ll have to admit I was wrong. So, I reminded my sister about the 1990s, when the most we’d hoped for was piano lessons. As for getting into college, I told her about the Friday night before I took the SAT. I’d stayed up late, crowding around Betsy Newman’s backyard fire pit. I’d joined a boozy, a cappella rendition of Blind Melon’s “No Rain.” My test prep had consisted of just saying no to the nozzle of a can of Cool Whip, a triumph of restraint I’d managed without a glance of adult supervision.

My sister patiently absorbed my nostalgia. Then she added: “Chase wants this too. He loves baseball.”

I couldn’t argue with Chase’s results. Last summer he’d been selected for the all-star team of his neighborhood little league. My sister sent us photos of the boys celebrating at a local Mexican restaurant. In one close-up, Chase’s arm is draped over the shoulder of a boy with the same tousled hair spilling from the same star-spangled hat. With the other hand, he is slugging a yellow concoction from a goblet the size of a table lamp.

During our annual holiday visit to my Virginia hometown, my nephew, Chase, had invited us to watch him pitch and hit baseballs for an hour, under the tutelage of a private coach.

Looking down at her phone, Mysha confirms the address, so we slip into a small parking lot in the back of the building. Though it’s no more welcoming than the front, at least we find no sign of doomed Angus cattle.

Inside, the facility’s décor hews to jock brutalism. Forty feet above us, fluorescent lights hang from metal beams, filling the cavernous room with a stadium’s ice-blue brightness. The atmosphere is warmed only by the sound of classic rock rattling from speakers bolted to the walls. Black netting curtains off a pair of batting cages, where a few stocky teens hack at soft tosses. The floor is covered in green artificial turf studded with five-gallon buckets, around which cluster litters of scuffed baseballs.

I spot my brother-in-law, Clay, seated with two other men whose buzz cuts and taut expressions would fit in on the bridge of a naval destroyer. They lean forward from metal folding chairs, studying the ritualized movements of their boys. Nearby is a makeshift pitching mound, where I spot Chase moving into his windup: a fluid and compact gathering of 100 pounds of muscle and bone. His pitch sails high, pulling out of his catcher’s crouch a college-aged man in gray sweats. His bottom lip is swollen with tobacco, and he pauses to discharge a brown stream into a soda bottle before offering my nephew a blunt appraisal: “You’re overthrowing again. What happened to your release point?”

Chase cocks his head thoughtfully. “I forgot to reach out with it.”

“Right,” the coach says, demonstrating with his own right hand before returning a dart to Chase’s glove side. “Fix it.”

In his plush suburban home, Chase is a merry prankster. When he was 4, he stood on the carpeted mezzanine, reached his hand between two wooden balusters, and dropped an untidy sock onto the face of my sister, napping on the sofa below. Here, in this Spartan box, Chase’s aim is nearly as true — but he is all business.

We slide in, and the fathers stand to make room for us in the self-consciously gallant way of Southern men. And suddenly I recognize that I am easily the smallest person in the seating area. This includes my wife, who at 6-foot-1 dwarfs me in a way that attracts stares in public.

Out of the corner of my eye, I track a wide throw that tips off Chase’s glove and bounces once on its way toward our congregated shins. I bend and manage to spear it with my right hand.

One father draws out a whistle through his teeth.

“Once a second baseman, always a second baseman,” Clay says.

I toss the ball back to Chase, who registers the deed — and our presence — with a stoic little nod.

“College ball?” asks the other father.

Before I can laugh, say “no,” and explain that this catch had been the most graceful maneuver I’d accomplished in 20 years — indeed, I’d just tweaked my back and would require, this evening, a liberal application of Tiger Balm — Clay jumps in.

“This guy played in the Little League World Series!”

I wince.

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This Week in Books: A B-Movie Storytelling Moment

English actor Robert Shaw (1927 - 1978) as Quint, viewed through a set of shark jaws, in a publicity still for 'Jaws', directed by Steven Spielberg, 1975. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

We’ve been watching a lot of movies lately — uh, just like everybody else on the entire planet — and there’s this particular kind of moment that I get really excited about (like, I start poking my boyfriend really hard and I say “It’s happening!!” a bunch of times, which I’m sure he loves) that is only ever guaranteed to happen in low budget movies, though it can happen in any movie. I call it the B-movie storytelling moment. It’s that moment in a B-movie (duh) when there is clearly something totally insane the filmmakers want to film, but they don’t have the budget for it, so they just have a character describe it at length instead.

Of course, sometimes this is simply done on purpose, for the effect. (Which, in my opinion, is a very awesome effect; awesome enough to make me just absolutely bother my boyfriend every time it happens, which, again, I am certain he adores.) But sometimes you can tell that the director clearly would rather have just filmed it. The fun part is guessing which moments are intentional and which are born of budgetary necessity — and realizing that maybe, functionally, there is no difference!

One of the most effective instances of a movie storytelling moment, to give an example pretty much everybody remembers, is when Robert Shaw spends an uncanny, uninterrupted several minutes giving a firsthand account of the (true!) story of the 1945 mass shark attack on the crew of the U.S.S. Indianapolis right before the climactic final shark-battle of Jaws. It’s such a memorably unsettling moment because the story Shaw’s character tells is a thousand times scarier and more messed up than anything dramatized in the movie. It compels the audience to imagine something way worse than the movie has the ability to show us.

So, yeah, I’ve been on the lookout for storytelling moments in all the movies we’ve been watching during lockdown. My favorite so far is in Night of the Living Dead, when, not long after Duane Jones and Judith O’Dea meet up in the farmhouse, Jones’ character gives a not-at-all-paying-attention O’Dea a long, detailed account of an encounter he had earlier that day with zombies at a gas station. The story he tells is noticeably, almost comically, beyond the scope of the lowtech flick — it involves, as I recall, zombies jumping onto a careening gas tanker truck (that is also being driven by a zombified guy? sorry I can’t find a clip but I think that might be what happens) that bursts into flame, after which Jones steals a pickup truck and mows down dozens of zombies in order to escape. It’s by far the most action that happens in the movie, and it’s all off-screen.

Lockdown is, of course, an uncanny time to become obsessed with the uncanniest moments in film. Although, to be fair, stories-within-stories have sort of always been my thing — like, give me a Bolaño novel that starts with a guy walking into a bar, and then another guy starts telling him a story, and the rest of that novel is just the second guy telling that story and you never even hear from the first guy again, and I’m blissed out, I’m happy. That’s the good stuff, to me. But this film thing feels, right now, sort of different from that. It’s not just a wacky way of taking a narrative delightfully off the rails. It’s a dispatch. It’s usually addressed nearly head on toward the camera, as an unbroken monologue, as though it’s being delivered directly to the viewer: a dispatch from outside the edges of the movie.

I don’t know what it reminds me of, exactly. Is it that I have been receiving little dispatches just like that? People in little boxes on these Zoom calls. Snatches of sound passing on the streets. A photo of corpses being piled up on the bed in a sleep study room in a hospital in Queens. Horrifying stories, from outside my narrative, way worse than anything this B movie life of mine has shown me, so far. Or something else altogether; is it more like, I am longing for that uncanny moment in a (real-life!) conversation when the other person suddenly tells a startling story? Honestly, there’s nothing like it; nothing like how weird things can get, sometimes, surprisingly, when you’re just talking to someone else, someone you don’t know very well.

I guess I miss the way other people can be surprising. Doing your own thing all day, you can start to forget that about them? I’m lucky I have my boyfriend here. I can tell he tries to come up with something new for me everyday. I am very lucky. I guess that’s what I’m thinking of, today.

1. “Don’t Look For Patient Zeros” by Scott W. Stern, The New Republic

A recent episode of the New York Times podcast The Daily about the supposed corona “Patient Zero” of New Jersey prompted pushback from several public figures, most notably Richard A. McKay, author of Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic, who responded by writing an essay debunking the entire “Patient Zero” concept. In this review, Stern fleshes out the history of the idea of “Patient Zero,” explaining how McKay’s book, which came out in 2017, served as rebuttal to Randy Shilts’ classic work of nonfiction about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On, which notoriously vilified Canadian flight attendant Gaétan Dugas as the “source” of HIV in the U.S.

2. “Joyelle McSweeney’s Poetry of Catastrophe” by Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

When reviewing Joyelle McSweeney’s devastating two-part book of poetry, Toxicon and Arachne — part one written during her pregnancy and part two written after the death of the baby — Dan Chiasson encounters a sickly aesthetic fit for the Age of the Virus, in which “nature is ‘poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects.’ The words of the living commingle sickeningly with those of the dead… prior language takes hold of a poem by seepage or contamination, in the stealthy way that ‘bugs, viruses, weeds and mold’ do, going about their relentless work.”

3. “Like No One They’d Ever Seen” by Ed Park, The New York Review of Books

Ed Park writes about the “ghostly” place held in the American canon by Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, an autobiographical memoir first published in 1937, which was rereleased yet again by Penguin Classics last year.

4. “The Elephant” by Chan Chi Wa, Lit Hub

A story about a missing elephant. Excerpted from That We May Live, an anthology of Chinese dystopic fiction.


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5. “As Clean as Rage” by Nadja Spiegelman, The New York Review of Books

Nadja Spiegelman surveys the work of the radical French writer Virginie Despentes, whose Vernon Subutex trilogy is in the midst of being released in the U.S. To give you a taste of Despentes’ iconoclasm, Spiegelman writes that, after her first sensational novel Rape Me was published in French, “The French press hurled themselves at Despentes … They tried to cast her as the girl who’d been saved from sleaze by the grace of her talents, but she refused the role, insisting that the best years of her life were the ones before she’d been ‘discovered’ … When a journalist asked her if turning her first trick had felt like violating the ultimate taboo, she responded, ‘Much less so than my first television appearance.’”

6. “The People Who Profited Off the Trail of Tears” by Caitlin Fitz, The Atlantic

Caitlin Fitz reviews Claudio Sant’s Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, a book about the bankers who profited from the theft of Native homes. “[Sant] follows the money, exhaustively researching company correspondence and government records to show how bankers in Boston and London financed the dirty work of dispossession in collaboration with southern speculators. The result is a haunting story of racialized cruelty and greed, which came to define a pivotal period in U.S. and indigenous history alike.”

7. “The Rise of the Lurker” by Adrian Daub, The New Republic

In a review of Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User — which imagines the lurker as a kind of twenty-first century flaneur — Adrian Daub writes that now, in the Age of the Virus, many of us, the inessential us, have become real-life lurkers.

Stay well and sanitize your groceries,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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