on beauty and being just by elaine scarry
a small place by jamaica kincaid
don’t let me be lonely by claudia rankine
citizen by claudia rankine
an american marriage by tayari jones
an unkindness of ghosts by rivers solomon
sweet talk by stephanie vaughn
cruel optimism by lauren berlant
the future of the image by jacques ranciere
love anger madness by marie vieux chauvet
library
her body and other parties by carmen maria machado
do not say we have nothing by medeleine thien
the refugees by viet thangh ngyuen
my little monster by robico
chemistry by weike wang
re-read
on beauty by zadie smith
the plague of doves by louise erdrich
bluets + the argonauts by maggie nelson
wish list
the book of the dead by orikuchi shinobu
anatomy of criticism: four essays by northrop frye
- finish the package (eps 7-12)
- finish awl (eps 6-12)
- watch bravo my life (eps 16-20)
- gif awl and the package
- leave comments on fic
- spend at least an hour a day working on wa memory fic
- finish oranges are not the only fruit
- avoid family bs
father is strange [sat/sun] (28/50)
bad thief good thief [sat/sun] (4/50)
fight my way [mon/tues] (4/16)
suspicious partner [wed/thurs] (4/40)
seven day queen [wed/thurs] (0/20)
the best hit [fri/sat] (0/32)
on hold:
secret love affair (4/16)
everyone’s getting married (6/10)
upcoming/to watch:
my sassy girl
heard it through the grapevine
ruler of your own world
sandglass
valid love
individualist ms. ji young
love shuffle
twin peaks
the leftovers
still star crossed
skam
As day-to-day life in 2017 takes hold, the general pall of 2016 does not seem to be lifting—in fact, it now seems that things are weirder and worse than we could have imagined. And though the noble…
The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press, 2/7)
The second work of fiction from the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees was written over a period of twenty years and “explores questions of immigration, identity, love, and family.”
An Arrangement of Skin, Anna Journey (Counterpoint Press, 2/14)
Having already published two collections of poetry, Anna Journey’s first nonfiction work focuses on the shifting nature of selfhood, offering “idiosyncratic anecdotes” enriched by “literary and cultural meditations” and enhanced by her ear for poetics.
Why I Am Not A Feminist, Jessa Crispin (Melville House, 2/21)
In Why I Am Not A Feminist, the founder of Bookslut delivers a scathing rejection of the contemporary feminist movement and calls for revolution, demanding “nothing less than the total dismantling of a system of oppression.”
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, Patti Yumi Cottrell (McSweeney’s, 3/14)
A Spring 2017 B&N Discover Great New Writers Selection, Patti Yumi Cottrell’s debut is a a dark comedy about suicide that is, in the words of Danielle Dutton, “absurdly funny, surprisingly beautiful, and ultimately sad as fuck.”
Mikhail and Margarita, Julie Himes (Europa Editions, 3/14)
A literary love triangle set against Stalinist repression and the long shadows of purge-era Moscow? Starring Mikhail Bulgakov and Osip Mandelstam? Oh god yes please.
One of the most buzzed about books in translation of 2017, Can Xue’s dreamlike novel tells of the citizen’s of Pebble Town, and life on a frontier where wolves roam the streets and paradise might be right around the corner.
Futures of Black Radicalism, Gaye Theresa Johnson (Verso Books, 4/11)
The last few years in America have shone an increasingly bright light on the deep fault lines of racial injustice that have existed in this country from its inception. Running parallel to those fault lines, though, has been a rich tradition of Black radical thought. This collection considers that tradition and continues it with contributions from writers like Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Jordan T. Camp, Christina Heatherton, Thulani Davis, Shana L. Redmond, and more.
Not One Day, Anne Garréta (trans. Emma Ramadan) (Deep Vellum, 4/11)
Winner of the Prix Medicis, this intense collection of Garreta’s memories of past loves—written under strict Oulipian constraints—is at times at once tender, bitter, and intimate.
It's the (second) most wonderful time of the year.
Refuge by Dina Nayeri: Nayeri’s first novel, A Teaspoon of Earth, follows a young girl as she grows up in post-revolutionary Iran and dreams about her sister’s life in America. Refuge, Nayeri’s second novel, also centers on a young Iranian girl, Niloo, but this time the story is flipped: Niloo flees Iran, leaving her father behind, and grows up in Europe. Twenty years later, she’s a sophisticated academic struggling to navigate her connections to her family, a growing community of Iranian refugees, and her adopted homeland. A nuanced look at what it means to seek refuge; novels don’t get more timely than this.
The Art of Death by Edwidge Danticat: In this hybrid work of memoir-criticism, prolific writer (and Year in Reading alumna) Danticat reflects on the death of her mother, part of a longer meditation on the way that artists cope with death. Michiko Kakutani writes that Danticat “wants to learn how to use language to try to express the inexpressible, to use her art to mourn.”
Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz: 1960s and 70s L.A. party girl and writer extraordinaire Babitz is having a revival. Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company were recently published by NYRB Classics, and now her novel Sex and Rage is being re-issued by Counterpoint. Readers can’t seem to get enough of her writing and it’s hard to imagine literary L.A. without her voice. That’s because Los Angeles is not just a setting in her work, it’s not a character, it’s not a myth, or a lover. It’s love itself.
I Hear Your Voice by Young-ha Kim: One of Korea’s most prolific and celebrated authors brings us a new novel, translated by Krys Lee, about two young men on the streets of Seoul: Jae, who is abandoned as a baby and becomes a leader of a powerful motorcycle gang, and Dongyu, who runs away from home as a teenager to follow Jae. Booklist remarks: “this is a wrenching examination of discarded youth, abuses of power, and the irreparable disintegration of societal structures,” and John Darnielle is a fan, saying, “Young-ha Kim is kin to those writers of more experimental times than ours: Daniel Defoe and Thomas Nashe, writers who followed their stories and themes into whatever haunted, humid dark corners they found, and who weren’t afraid to linger in those places to see what else might be there.
The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison: This volume collects the great novelist’s Norton lectures at Harvard University, giving those of us who didn’t get to attend a glimpse at Morrison’s thoughts on race and otherness, and how these things affect literature and lives around the world. The lectures also include revealing discussion of her own novels. With an introduction by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Katalin Street by Magda Szabó: Why does writing this vivid take so long to find its way West? Equal parts lament, paean, and family saga, Szabó’s 1969 novel (and 2007 Prix Cévennes winner) in Len Rix’s legato English translation captures handily the “double tragedy of eastern Europe”—razed by Nazis and rebuilt by Communists. The unquiet spirits of post-war Budapest put meat on the bones of the Soviet joke that “only the past is unpredictable,” and one less-than-silent witness of the sins and slights of a shattered community harbors no illusions about permitting the living to exist peaceably in the soft-focus sentimentality of their survival.
The Twelve-Mile Straight by Eleanor Henderson: It is 1930, in Cotton County, Ga., and Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper’s daughter, gives birth to two babies, one light-skinned, the other dark. A field hand is accused of her rape, lynched, and dragged behind a truck down a road known as the Twelve-Mile Straight. So begins this second novel by the author of the radically different Ten Thousand Saints, set in New York’s gritty Lower East Side in the 1980s. “This is the kind of novel you sink into, live inside,” says Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling, about The Twelve-Mile Straight.
