Search Results for: new yorker

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.
Read more…

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.”


Sign up to have this week’s book reviews, excerpts, and author interviews delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up


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
Sign up here

What Happens If I Don’t Like Fiona Apple?

Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,481 words)

Even the way I first listened to Fetch the Bolt Cutters was oppositional. It wasn’t intentional. I knew I needed about an hour to listen to it all the way through. I knew I couldn’t really do anything else in order to give it my attention. So I took Fiona Apple’s inside record outside. At four in the afternoon in Toronto, the sun was piercing and it was open-coat weather, a strange way to listen to Apple’s nicotine voice and bedroom lyrics. Walking in the middle of a day so bright I needed to squint even through sunglasses, “Fetch the bolt cutters/I’ve been in here too long,” bounced out of my headphones, a jazzy paradox. As everyone knows by now, the album was made by a shut-in, a “messianic figurehead,” according to the New Yorker, who hadn’t produced an album in eight years. A backstory all the better for conjuring the image of a mythical genius at work on an inevitable masterpiece.

I didn’t get it.

Claustrophobia is the overarching theme, even if it isn’t, of the album that came out of Apple’s exile. And during a crisis in which we all feel that same thing, it was inevitable that the concept would eclipse the music itself. It’s also understandable that not answering Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ call would feel particularly alienating — Slate music critic and Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste author Carl Wilson, who I contacted for this column in befuddlement, said that even he was surprised by how much attention Apple’s fifth album was getting. But in the present atmosphere, with physical connection forbidden, every other kind of connection becomes that much stronger. A man singing on his balcony in Rome unites a building, and a woman pounding on a piano in her home in Venice Beach unites the rest of us. Most of us. In normal times, having the dissenting opinion is a point of pride. In pandemic times, where all you want is to not be alone, it’s a cause for concern. Which is why it felt so important to figure out why I didn’t much like Fetch the Bolt Cutters.

* * *

Technically I started listening to Apple’s album before that walk. Motivated by the unanimous praise, I went to YouTube and played the first track, “I Want You to Love Me.” But the second I heard whatever that sound is, I don’t know, a keyboard and cymbals chucka-chucka-chucka-ing, I thought, “Fuck, no.” I am not listening to that experimental shit. Later, in a more studious frame of mind, I persisted. And after about 20 seconds, that sound liquefied into a cascade of piano trills which would be familiar to any ‘90s Apple-ite. At the risk of sounding reductive, this is kind of how Fetch the Bolt Cutters goes if you aren’t feeling it; verses of relief surrounded by weird shit that plays like the opposite of an actual melody. In between hangs the kind of Apple-isms that have always clanged in my ear — mouthfuls of the kind of poetry that was once limited to high school but now stalks us all on Instagram — not to mention the insufferable repetition of words and phrases and the obnoxious holding of never-ending notes like “youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.” At the end of “I Want You to Love Me,” Apple discharges a lengthy, high-pitched throat warble that reminds me of Andie MacDowell’s dolphin-like vocalization in the 1991 Bruce Willis flop Hudson Hawk, a squall that causes Sandra Bernhard to sneer listlessly, “Just shoot her.”

I’m not going to make you suffer through much more of my non-critical thinking around music, but there’s definitely a sensation with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, if you listen to it from start to finish, of a knot being untied, of the songs relaxing into something more digestible as you pass the halfway mark (Editor’s note: “Are the songs relaxing into something more digestible, or are you relaxing into the songs?” Author’s note: It’s not me, it’s her). What doesn’t morph is the subject matter, which, restricted as it seems to Apple’s interpersonal grievances, seems all too confined for a project that was already confined in its production. The whole thing just struck me as too insular for how sweepingly it was being lauded. And despite the claims at raw unprocessed sound, those dog barks on the title song are so strategically placed I was more tickled by the actual dogs barking behind the fence I passed while listening to it. But then you can’t deny the added texture Apple’s voice has acquired with age and her own liberation from her old song strictures. The song I momentarily hated the most on the album, for the opening repetition of its title (“Ladies,” sixteen times!), is also the one I liked the most. Despite the clunky lyrics — “ruminations on the looming effect and the parallax view” — some subterranean motor seems to power this track through the history of music, from folk to rap to whatever, sailing between genres like there’s nothing to it. When people talk of genius, when Pitchfork gives the album 10 stars, I hear a glimpse of that here.

That’s the tension. If I just thought everyone had bad taste, or was dumb, I wouldn’t be tortured by disliking Fetch the Bolt Cutters. My lack of connection to it suggested I was missing some substantial sliver of intellect, which is something I can’t abide as someone who never really feels smart enough. So I groped for a music critic to explain it to me. But if I felt alienated from this particular cultural event, critics didn’t seem too concerned about inviting me in. “She sings, scats, lightly raps — and proceeds to curl her voice into an extended-vocal contortion à la Yoko or Meredith Monk, over a Reichian piano loop, signaling an avant-garde inclination,” Jenn Pelly wrote at Pitchfork. Wait, what? That isn’t critical analysis, it’s critical flexing. At The New Yorker, Carrie Battan’s use of the term “feral authenticity” to describe Apple’s oeuvre — based on her penchant for avoiding the public —  recalled my mother’s duo-syllabic reaction to Apple (“hippie”) but not much else. So, I emailed Carl Wilson. Then I called Wilson; that’s how desperate I was for Wilson to explain what was wrong with me. “I feel a little stymied by your question,” he rightfully responded, “how can I tell you how to like something you already know you don’t like?” 

But then he proceeded to write the kind of email that should have been an article, the kind of explanation that’s the reason Wilson is my favorite music critic. That space between the music and the person listening to it? He writes the bridge. Wilson explained that the reaction to Fetch the Bolt Cutters felt “disproportionate” because of Apple’s absence for so long and because it is “of the moment in its theme and feel.” That includes its lyrics on the sort of gender issues we are currently confronting — not to mention Apple’s transcendence of musical boundaries, mixing disparate genres from cabaret to hip-hop — and that raw home-recorded style that opposes today’s ubiquitous hyper-produced singles. Wilson also noted the self-selection of music critics. And that most of the reviews I read on Apple’s album were by white women, on a beat that has famously had a dearth of female voices as a whole, does imply her music still hasn’t shaken that decades-old Lilith Fair connection. 

“Personally, I wasn’t a huge fan back when — like you, I kind of felt that she was good but not great, maybe a little too self-conscious and strained to be great,” Wilson explained. But then he heard Apple’s fourth album, The Idler Wheel…, in 2012. That’s when he thought she had finally self-actualized (upon his suggestion, I listened to that album too and, indeed, the last track, “Hot Knife,” would not sound out of place on her new record). On Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Wilson noticed the piano that Apple forefronted in the past melded into layers of rhythm and percussion and vocals, her monotonous deep bluesy voice fracturing into a wider range of pitches. “To my ears that’s really opened up the space in her style, which I used to find too suffocating,” he wrote. “It has an immediacy that I find really rare in music right now, allowing by turns for both vulnerability and rapture.”

After all of that, Wilson’s final words could have very well been all he had written: “[M]aybe you just find Fiona Apple a bit much.” The irony is that the same thing I critique her for — for being too solipsistic, for making it all too self-centered — is the same reason I can’t hear her straight. My reactions to art are as impulsive as my consumption is lonely. It’s why, ultimately, I can’t trust critics’ taste though I can trust their analysis, and why I can’t trust the artists themselves, only their art and my own experience of it. If you think about it, it’s a little crazy to believe in your gut when your gut is at least in part influenced by exposure: “acquired taste” is a thing for a reason. And yet I always seem hellbent on independently deciding on the quality of everything. If nothing else, I am entirely secure in my judgment, because, the thinking goes, I may not know much about anything else, but I know myself perfectly. 

I know, for instance, that I have a particular aversion to hippies, and that during the making of this album, Apple chanted around her house with various other musicians, banging on a box of her dead pet’s bones. I know I am intimidated by the blues and by jazz and reject them because of how stupid they make me feel, a symptom of my more general difficulty with engaging in art I don’t at least marginally understand. I know I have a particular aversion to beautiful women in the arts, because it’s never just about the art. I know this particular beautiful woman has dated powerful men — most notably the director Paul Thomas Anderson, as he got more and more famous — and that never means nothing, good or bad. And I know I resented Apple as a teen for being publicly tortured when she was publicly everything girls like me tortured ourselves for not being — good enough, but, more importantly, the right package to cover up for it (as Apple herself sings: “I resent you for never getting any opposition at all.”) I know all of this, but I feel it more.

Unfortunately, you can’t think yourself out of the way you feel.  “A lot of the record is about feeling confined, emotionally and societally,” Wilson explained, “and about thinking of ways to liberate yourself.” But had Fetch the Bolt Cutters not alienated me musically, everything around it would have. I’m skeptical of blanket accolades; that something can appeal so globally suggests a lack of originality. And I can’t escape (liberate myself from?) the fact that being told another artist has achieved perfection is, as they say, triggering. The idea that someone has unlocked everything they are capable of and created something that is so purely them that it transcends time and space, God-like, to become an indisputable piece of perfection — it’s the thing every artist wants, for all their neuroses and all their intellect and all their values to coalesce into this object that by virtue of being so essentially them is essentially the rest of us as well. It’s incredibly rare, but you see it in work like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, for instance, or Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, both of which have had the added advantage of being recognized for their greatness. But this rarity makes each new proposed addition to the canon seem less believable than the last. 

More than that, though, it plagues every other artist. Every time we hear that someone else has achieved mastery, or at least been recognized for achieving it, we’re reminded that we haven’t and likely never will (let alone be acknowledged for doing so). That’s the deepest feeling of isolation for an artist of all of them, that chasm between them and immortality. That’s the one they fear most that they (I) will never breach.  

* * *

I listened to Fetch the Bolt Cutters on a Spotify mix, so the album ended and then rolled into “Criminal,” Apple’s Grammy-winning 1997 single and perhaps her best known. Hearing that smooth lyrical piano and that even smoother voice felt like slipping into sweats after a long day in a pencil skirt; I think I may have sighed aloud. (Apple wrote “Criminal” when she was 17 and maybe that says something: that my music appreciation is stuck at that age.) The song, about how bad she felt for getting things so easily by virtue of her sexuality, recently resurfaced in Hustlers, with Jennifer Lopez making her entrance as stripper doyenne to Apple’s adolescent croon, “I’ve been a bad, bad girl.” That was another piece of popular culture that was unanimously praised that I was only so-so about. The difference is that I felt no tension there. I know films, and I could explain why I didn’t like Hustlers much. Because of that, because I had a reason, I allowed myself to dislike it. And until my editor mentioned it, I didn’t think that had anything to do with my gender. But now I’m starting to think it does — men never seem to require permission to opine, they don’t feel the need to be informed to do so. Which is not to say I shouldn’t — it’s to say they should. Because it means meeting a piece of art halfway, respecting the spirit in which it was made, and respecting the artist who made it.

As much as I continue to feel dissatisfied with my response to Fetch the Bolt Cutters, I’m less troubled after speaking to Wilson and researching Apple herself. A Rolling Stone profile from 1998 reminded me that when she was a kid, she carried around this quote by Martha Graham: “No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” It’s the same quote I used in a column last August. And according to her New Yorker profile from March, Apple continues to display a photograph of Graham on her piano, the one she played on Fetch the Bolt Cutters. So even if I couldn’t connect to that album, I could, in a way, connect to the woman behind it, another isolated artist, unrested, just trying to keep marching.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Japan: A Longform Reading List of Longform Writing

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

Before I traveled to Japan for the first time in 2014, I read as much about the country as time allowed. Japanese culture and ecology had interested me since I discovered anime in the fifth grade; I read books by Pico Iyer and Donald Richie, novels by Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, and collected countless online stories about everything from Japanese architecture to history to customs. I wanted to understand more about this island chain that has been inhabited since at least 30,000 BCE. I wanted to know more about this aggressively innovative culture simultaneously committed to tradition, a country that is famously easy to navigate by train but difficult to integrate into as an outsider. I wanted to understand Tokyo, the world’s largest city, whose allure comes partly from its incomprehensibility.

My library was filled with anthologies on my other passions California, the American South, jazz. But while I had stellar fiction anthologies on Japan, like The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction and Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll, the nonfiction book I wanted didn’t exist.  I couldn’t find a single, English-language anthology collecting longform nonfiction about Japan. So I made it.

Read more…

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.”


Sign up to have this week’s book reviews, excerpts, and author interviews delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up


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
Sign up here

No Time Like the Present

Getty

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.
Read more…

Molly and the Unicorn

Rankin/Bass Productions / Topcraft / ITC Entertainment

Emily Flake | Longreads | April 2020 | 9 minutes (2185 words)

 

My parents took me to see The Last Unicorn in the theater when I was 5. The experience is seared into my mind for a number of reasons: Terrifying burning bull! Handsome prince says “damn!” Unicorn!!! But no scene hit me with quite the power of the one where the sad old bag Molly Grue meets the titular (last!) unicorn for the first time.

If you’re not familiar with this movie, allow me to express my condolences. It’s a batshit Rankin/Bass adaptation of the Peter S. Beagle novel of the same name, and it’s about a unicorn — but it’s not the magical creature that I’m interested in here. The character Molly Grue is a middle-aged woman, a scullery maid we meet as the unicorn is being led to safety by an inept wizard named Schmendrick (ha!) for reasons I won’t go into now (but really, stream it, you won’t be sorry). Her reaction to encountering an honest-to-goodness magical beast isn’t fear, or awe. It’s grief-stricken rage. “Where have you been?” she howls. “Where were you when I was new? How dare you come to me now, when I am this?” Even as a child I knew anguish and sorrow when I heard it — I’m pretty sure I didn’t know the word “melancholy,” but I understood that she was no longer the kind of woman to whom beautiful things happen, that to be a participant in a beautiful thing you had to be beautiful yourself. I felt that with every inch of my weirdo 5-year-old heart, and now, at 42, it resonates with a power that’s almost unbearable.

I am this, now. That feeling of loss, of being too old to be graced by magic — that’s no longer a hypothetical. My young maidenhood wasn’t spent sitting around under trees waiting for a unicorn to come to me, but I certainly looked for magic in places sacred and profane (mostly profane). I was blind to any beauty I might have possessed. I spent a lot of time apologizing for my body when I first started using it to have sex, a practice meant to head off any criticism my partner might have had, but which I now realize was insane and a perfect way to kill the mood. These days, I catch myself reflected in a window every now and again and feel uncomfortably sure that the tired-looking marshmallow with very dry hair squinting back at me no longer remotely qualifies as that kind of magic bait.

Mind you, youth doesn’t appeal to me, personally. Young men are sexual blanks to me — boring, unseasoned chicken breasts with nothing interesting to say. Give me your grizzled Gen Xers, your gray beards, your potbellies, your crinkled eyes. Give me your hearts heavy with regret, your gorgeous tattered men. I’ve always been more attracted to men at least a decade my senior, and once in my early 20s I slept with a man in his 40s because I wanted to see what that was like, to feel like I was giving my young body like a gift (for the record: it was lovely, bittersweet and poignant, yet deeply hot). Physically speaking, I no longer feel like a gift to anyone, not even to my own husband, a man contractually obliged to accept my body even if as a burden. In the increasingly rare instances where a comely stranger flirts with me, I hear Molly Grue’s voice: How dare you come to me now?
Read more…

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.


Sign up to have this week’s book reviews, excerpts, and author interviews delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up


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
Sign up here

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Getty

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lauren Markham, Ariel Levy, Brooke Jarvis, Audrey Gray, and Chris Dennis.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. The Last Train Trip Before Everything Changed

Lauren Markham | LitHub | April 6, 2020 | 10 minutes (2,529 words)

On solitude, snow, and finding reasons to write.

2. A Missionary on Trial

Ariel Levy | The New Yorker | April 6, 2020 | 41 minutes (10,340 words)

“Renée Bach went to Uganda to save children — but many in her care died. Was she responsible?”

3. Why Old-Growth Trees Are Crucial to Fighting Climate Change

Brooke Jarvis | Wired | April 1, 2020 | 21 minutes (5,253 words)

Science has a lot to earn about the way ecosystems hold and process the Earth’s carbon, and how efforts like reforestation can help improve those systems’ effect on climate change. Two things are clear: Virgin forests sequester a lot of carbon, and humanity can’t keep clear-cutting forests and burning fossil fuels the way we have been.

4. The Baller

Audrey Gray | The Delacorte Review | April 1, 2020 | 21 minutes (5,492 words)

Weary and frightened by the scary science she encounters on the climate beat, journalist Audrey Gray finds hope in the form of octogenarian Ed Mazria, a former basketball player turned architect turned climate evangelist, who has an actionable plan.

5. Push Play

Chris Dennis | Guernica Magazine | April 6, 2020 | 7 minutes (1,969 words)

“It is now mostly unclear why I thought it was a good idea to bring Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits to school with me.”

This Week in Books: An Everlasting Meal

The False tomb of the child of Akbar in the Tomb of Akbar the Great in Agra on an overcast day. Robert Ruidl/Getty

Dear Reader,

The book that’s been the most help to me during lockdown is a book I’ve never read; I didn’t need to read it for it to save my life. I just needed, just one time, from a review or maybe from simply reading the jacket copy, to absorb its premise and go “huh that makes sense” and then to lock that information away deep in my nether-brain where it would be reserved for the occasion when I would really, really, really need it.

I am, of course, talking about Tamar Adler’s (no doubt) incomparable An Everlasting Meal, a (if I’m not mistaken) wonderful book, the main thrust of which (as I have been led to believe) is that to properly run a kitchen, you have to be constantly planning how the leftover ingredients of one meal will seamlessly blend into the next. This (surely) is a way of thinking and strategizing your grocery shopping which Tamar Adler wrote an entire book about. And I used to be such a bad cook — a non-cook, if you will — that when I first learned oh so many years ago about this concept from the book’s jacket copy or (as I’m now recalling) from my friend Hannah, who described the contents of the book to me (yes, that’s it, she once described the book to me) on the phone (honestly I barely have interacted with this book) or perhaps as we rode together on the train, I was so struck by the powerful logic of it that I locked it away tight in my hind-brain, my deep and permanent lizard-brain. In fact, so stunned do I remember being by this tremendous insight of Tamar Adler’s which (I have reason to suspect) she laid out in detail in the book An Everlasting Meal, that I have got to believe it had an impact on my grocery shopping and meal-planning right away; but the effects weren’t all that pronounced for a very long time, since back then I (truly) did not know how to cook anything. I did not know how to cook anything until last year and therefore until last year I never had an everlasting meal; I never had much more than an everlasting sandwich.

Last year is when I started getting really into recipes. But, reader, I was still a mere “shopping for one recipe at a time” person, a type of person which I have, these past few weeks, come to regard as a very weak and inferior type of person when compared to this accomplished and frankly powerful “shopping for three weeks of meals at a time” person that I have become.

To be totally clear, I placed a Fresh Direct order 3 weeks ago and we have not left the house since. I am a god.

Not a day of lockdown has gone by on which I have not thought of Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, a book I have not read. Not a day has gone by on which An Everlasting Meal has not made me mighty.

I still have plans to make so many — so many different — curries that it would make your head explode. If I told you how many I’m afraid the information would hurt you.

I have never read Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, but, if I never get the virus, friends, I am attributing my survival entirely to the fact that I once merely heard about Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal (a book so powerful that I am beginning to think that no one ever actually could read it without suffering some sort of permanent brain injury, or descending into madness, or raising up a creature from the Dark Pool Below the Tower in My Dreams and unleashing it on an unready world) and that, upon merely hearing of Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, I inscribed in my deepest and darkest most everlasting thoughts a message that will never leave me, that I cannot — that I will not! I refuse to! — forget: “Thus darkly and alone is the Way to everl

 

[Editors’ note: This draft of Dana’s weekly books newsletter, which we received in an email from a strange address that included several photographs in the attachments, each of which is labeled “the False tomb of the child of Akbar at the Tomb of Akbar the Great in Agra on an overcast day,” ends abruptly mid-sentence. We will update this post when we finally hear from Dana what the message of An Everlasting Meal is.]

 

1. “In ‘Afropessimism,’ a Black Intellectual Mixes Memoir and Theory” by John Williams, The New York Times

In an interview, Frank B. Wilderson III talks about his memoir-theory hybrid Afropessimism, which, true to its title, makes the pessimistic case that black suffering is “essential” and even “necessary” to the psychic life of society. It’s hard to read the coronavirus death statistics this week and not see his point.

2. “Beth Alvarado: Grieving in Dreams” by Kimi Eisele, Guernica

Two novelists discuss what it’s like looking back at the books about grief, mass death, and apocalypse they wrote before the coronavirus. “We had no idea then that the virus was there, waiting, and about to be so swiftly spread. Or maybe we did know, could sense, our own precarity. What could possibly sustain a world so stacked toward some and against others?”

3. “No One Disagrees With Rebecca Solnit” by Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic

Jennifer Wilson takes a turn touching the third rail of book criticism by pointing out that a widely lauded feminist author of many books is maybe a bit too easy to agree with.

4. “The Brilliant Plodder” by David Quammen, The New York Review of Books

Many years ago, I intensely read David Quammen’s extraordinarily gripping book about how pandemic viruses emerge. I liked his writing so much that I picked up his book about Darwin and read that, too. Ever since corona showed up, Quammen’s name has been popping up in my feeds a lot as various publications have asked him to weigh in, but I never click on those articles; in fact I feel alarmingly triggered by them, because that book was so terrifying that, honestly guys, the fact that David Quammen is weighing in means we are in terrible trouble. So, uh, here’s an article he wrote about Darwin instead. I read it; it’s delightful. Let’s all read this one and not the others; let’s not become paralyzed by fear when David Quammen says the Big One has come, as he foretold it would.


Sign up to have this week’s book reviews, excerpts, and author interviews delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up


5. “For the Union Dead” by Daniel Mason, The Atlantic

A short story from Daniel Mason’s forthcoming collection A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, in which the narrator discovers a startling aspect of his recently deceased uncle’s favorite hobby.

6. “Broken Pieces” by Cody Delistraty, Poetry

This is a really excellent profile of the poet Cynthia Cruz. “Throughout our afternoon together, Cruz earnestly asks me to help her interpret her poetry, as though she has located the lock to the deepest recesses of her mind but not the key.”

7. “Rereading Sanmao, the Taiwanese Wayfarer Who Sold Fifteen Million Books” by Han Zhang, The New Yorker

One of the world’s more popular writers has recently been translated into English for the first time. Han Zhang reflects on her girlhood fascination with Sanmao.

8. “from Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight,” Bomb

An excerpt from Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s novel Hex. After a lab accident, a disgraced toxicologist makes a choice. “I guess you could say that I like revenge and they like common decency. I guess you could say I don’t approve of myself enough to protect myself.”

9. “Season of the Witch” by Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Bookforum

A review of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, a novel about a real-life murder which she wrote in lieu of an investigative report because “in Mexico… they kill journalists, but they don’t kill writers, and anyways, fiction protects you.”

 

* * *