Books
Books is generously sponsored by the Hawthornden Foundation.
“The history of a poet in this form,” Boris Pasternak writes of autobiography, in his own autobiography (1958’s Nobel-awarded Safe Conduct) “is completely unthinkable. … It can’t be found under his name and must be looked for under someone else’s, in the biographical columns of his followers.”
Bestselling author Wally Lamb explores the idea of forgiveness in his latest novel, The River Is Waiting (a recent Oprah Book Club selection), which depicts the fallout from an unthinkable accident that changes one family forever, and tests whether a husband and wife are able to forgive themselves and the other.
Behind the State Capitol sets a multi-layered stage based on streetlife, homosexuality, travel, interpersonal relationships, mental health, drugs, the silver screen, and more in its theater. The challenge of being with this poetry is that it is often as unsettling as it is revealing.
Rhyme & Reason is less a history of poetry, and more of a history of poetry readers. Who were poems intended for? Who was reading them? Why were they so popular? Forsyth tracks English poetry from Geoffrey Chaucer to W. H. Auden. It is expertly written, easily accessible, and instantly unforgettable.
Francis M. Naumann has been among the leading scholars of Marcel Duchamp’s art and life for decades, including his consequential interactions with Brazilian artist, Maria Martins, who kept a studio in New York during the 1940s. A thoroughly illustrated little monograph, entitled Impossible (after one of her sculptures), provides an account of the romance between Duchamp and Martins alluded to in his letters to her.
About a third of the way through A Day Like Any Other Schuyler’s poems begin to dot the pages, and Nathan Kernan hits his stride. He’s wonderful in walking us through a work, piecing together a line, and breaking a fourth wall in the process.
Darcey Steinke’s most recent book, the memoir This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith, is less a narrative than a sustained argument against that hierarchy.
In her novel and her stories, Nora Lange is a chronicler of all that is strange and secret about people, mining that strangeness for comedy and pathos.
In The Disinherited, Terrence Arjoon’s debut full-length poetry collection, we find we are not alone in a post-colonial world that seems to deny meaningful, shared interpretations of history.
There are lessons to be learned in Tolani Akinola’s debut novel, Leave Your Mess at Home.
Outlandish as it may sound, Kory Stamper has now given us a spiritedly breathless account of the effort to define thousands of different colors—define, as in “dictionary entry.”
With a bit of editing, Charleen Hurtubise’s new novel might have read like a fast-paced, Reese Witherspoon optioned thriller, with Jennifer Garner or Jessica Alba attached to a rumored adaptation. Trim some of the big ideas about art.
Kevin Sampsell’s writing is by turns subversive, endearing, doleful, and agog at the wonders of the world. His artistic eye is a kaleidoscope, so it’s fitting that he works with collage as a medium in addition to the written word.
More than forty years ago, the Jewish Publication Society of America released In New York: A Selection, a collection of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern poems translated from Yiddish into English by Kathryn Hellerstein.
If ever there were a character who could benefit by reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People—straight through, ASAP—it’s Rose Cutler, the dyspeptic protagonist of Sara Levine’s laugh-a-minute novel The Hitch. As the spiritual healer she eventually hires on behalf of her nephew observes, “You’re sincere but misguided” and also a “noodge.”
Berghain Nights, Liam Cagney’s personal account of his love affair with Berlin and the techno that fuels the clubs with which the city is synonymous, feels like an answer to a question he’s been asking himself all his life.
Barnett Newman: Here by Amy Newman is the definitive biography of one of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. Barney (b. 1905, d. 1970)—as he was known to peers—significantly advanced abstract painting and sculpture, as well as the language of its critical reception at mid-century.
In Kim Samek’s debut short story collection, I Am the Ghost Here, characters navigate absurd modern predicaments ranging from limbs that go missing in “the cloud” to insatiable appetites for plastic. But at the heart of each of these stories remains a deeply human yearning for connection, wholeness, and purpose in worlds that put these aims just out of reach.
Nearly nine months after Gunk had its UK release, I had the chance to chat with Saba Sams over zoom. Gunk is as much a book about labor and the transactional nature of relationships under capitalism as it is a subtle exploration of what we ask from the people we love in the messiness (gunkiness) of life.
A tycoon of poetry for more than fifty years, Anne Waldman has written a new book that searches out the value of the imagination amidst imminent global catastrophe and ultimately teaches readers to work, build something of human value, as our world collapses.
There are works of literature that so acutely respond to the moment in which they were written that they can be said to paradoxically appear “before their time.” Time, in other words, must do what it does best in order to catch up with the literary work and the moment and material experiences it has crystallized as composition, or anticipated as unreciprocated touch, through the intimacy of reading.
This February, Semiotext(e) reissued Lee & Elaine, one of her two novels, originally published in 2002. Despite the contemporary tone Rower achieves, this couldn’t have been written today.
Giada Scodellaro’s story starts with the gaze, awkward and self-conscious, panning the subjects and their contours. First the legs, then their fingernails, then their bare feet. Always at a distance, the gaze hones its focus with equal amounts of judgment and curiosity, though nothing is ever concluded.
Caroline of Brunswick was a royal woman not content to go gently into that good night. Her defiance and demand to receive the title she was owed is at the heart of author Ann Foster’s debut biography, Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Queen Without a Crown, released by Hanover Square Press.
Rule 34 is an internet theory that states: “If it exists, there is porn of it.” Second Skin, the writer Anastasiia Fedorova’s new book on kink and desire, suggests a modified version: if it exists, someone has a fetish for it.
In one of the many aphorisms that makes up Oscar Wilde’s “Preface” to The Picture of Dorian Gray, the author writes, “All art is at once surface and symbol.” Richie Hofmann’s exquisite volume of eroto-aesthetic poems, The Bronze Arms is concerned less with symbol than it is with surface and its often literal penetration.
First published in 2005, Richard Hell’s Godlike is being reissued this year as a NYRB Classic, which means that after a little over two decades it has been selected as a work of literature most likely to be discovered “outside the classroom and then remember[ed] for life.”
George Saunders’s Vigil is a kind of ars narrationis—the art of narration, if I may be bold enough to create this phrase—consummately plaiting often faulty human perceptions into a novel that examines the subject of storytelling itself, this deeply necessary, essentially human, pursuit.
Four years ago, Lana Lana sent me an email: “I am working on an experimental double memoir modeled on Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Mentorship would entail reading one hundred pages or so of my manuscript in the next month and giving me critical feedback.” I was so honored. I was a big Stein and Toklas fan, and so I was quite excited to dive in.
During my conversation with David Guterson, we explored his commitment to restraint, his trust in the reader’s intelligence, and his belief that what remains unseen—or out of reach—can be as truthful as what is named. His approach is patient and generous, attentive to the way significance emerges when it is not compelled.
If the constant barrage of headlines hadn’t desensitized us to the signs that the world might be ending, and if we took a moment to actually sit with the carnage before us, we might have the same response to our current sociopolitical state as Flat Earth’s Avery: becoming unbearably shallow and jaded and caring for no one but ourselves—while caring for ourselves very little.
49 Venezuelan Novels—Sebastian Castillo’s first book—delivers on its title. These are indeed forty-nine novels, if you can think about novels in an expansive (and thus tiny) way. The work’s epigraph is Jorge Luis Borges: “Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes.”