FICTION
The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt
July 18, 2017
Women and girls hemmed in by their own lives grasp at the animal within them—or the creatures nearby—for connection and transformation in Samantha Hunt’s stories.
‘How,’ I want to ask him, but we are both deer now and deer cannot speak.”
Katalin Street by Magda Szabó, translated from Hungarian by Len Rix
September 12, 2017
In a novel of pre-war Budapest, three families entwined by haunted pasts reckon with ominous futures, rendered in the exquisite psychological clarity readers will remember from Szabó’s mesmerizing The Door (translated 2015).
Time had shrunk to specific moments, important events to single episodes, familiar places to the mere backdrop to individual scenes, so that, in the end, they understood that of everything that had made up their lives thus far only one or two places, and a handful of moments, really mattered.
The Mountain by Paul Yoon
August 15, 2017
Each of Paul Yoon’s characters in The Mountain is lost or stranded, from the Hudson Valley to the Pyrenees, and each is trying desperately to recognize themselves: quiet, stunning, not soon forgotten.
Years later, I returned to the sanatorium.
NONFICTION
Letters to his Neighbor by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis
August 22, 2017
In this new epistolary classic made for eavesdroppers, Davis weaves a novel out of found letters Marcel Proust wrote to his upstairs neighbor, Marie Williams, in their apartment building at 102 Boulevard Haussmann.
I have no longer in my memory a bouquet of all the written roses. Now yours seemed to me worthy of being added to them, and your prose of residing as neighbor with their verse.
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Claimed Russia by Masha Gessen
October 3, 2017
Over the last year, Putin biographer Masha Gessen has been one of my touchstones (along with Gary Shteyngart and Aleksandar Hemon) for trenchant analysis of autocracy and its dangers, reminding us all that it won’t matter how Russia stole the election when the US becomes Russia.
In Russia, first they came for the words of politics, value, and passion. Then they came for the words of action, the words that describe buildings, the numbers that denote dates. And then there were no words left to speak.
From “The Autocrat’s Language,” NYRB 2017.
Afterglow (a dog memoir) by Eileen Myles
September 12, 2017
In Eileen Myles’s memoir of their dog, Rosie, the poet remembers the pit bull fondly as their one true life partner; meanwhile Rosie has sued Eileen for damages and appears on talk shows to speak out about her grievances from the afterlife.
She was it. Mainstay of my liturgy for sixteen point five almost seventeen years. She was observed. I was companioned, seen.
POETRY
Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing
September 12, 2017
Sociologist poet Eve Ewing’s first collection entwines Afrofuturist Black feminist poetry, prose, and artwork through the first-person voices of young black women coming of age in contemporary Chicago.
the moon people had been listening all this time
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
September 5, 2017
Smith’s second poetry collection strives, impossibly and valiantly, to raise from the dead all the black boys and men taken by police and by AIDS, and to give color and rhythm to grief, dread, and vigilant remembrance.
history is what it is. it knows what it did.
bad dog. bad blood. bad day to be a boy
