Books Matter

Reviews, quotations, poetry and more, written and curated by writer and editor Tiffany Gibert.

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I tend to regard fear, where my writing is concerned, as an indication that I ought to pursue whatever has me feeling frightened or nervous.

Tracy K. Smith; I interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet about her memoir, Ordinary Light

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"Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine. So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. "I mean," I said, "men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power." "They're afraid women will laugh at them," he said. "Undercut their world view." Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "They're afraid of being killed," they said.

Margaret Atwood, from Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 1960-1982

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Enough time has passed; the terror has settled. There’s nothing left to loot, few reasons to kill (though everyone still carries a weapon and a speck of suspicion). People have settled into townships around defunct gas stations and hotels. Those who have ceased wandering now harvest in their gardens and raise children and swoon for Shakespeare — so like and unlike our own world. After many years of performing, the Symphony has culled their repertoire down to only the Bard. As one actor reasons, “People want what was best about the world,” a sentiment that could make even the hardest hearts yearn to read a sonnet, to smell a book, to perform any gesture to illustrate gratitude for what we have.

I reviewed Emily St. John Mandel's spectacular post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Here.

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Among many other reasons to love Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (Knopf, 9/9/14), this perfect epigraph by Polish poet Czesław Miłosz.

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My fairy tales are non-representational, and I use color very selectively for this reason. I want as little contrast as possible through a book, in order to support the emotional and intellectual essences I want the book to induce. Strict formal restrictions allow me to focus on the ideas and emotions, so I must restrict colors. Pink was the first color I chose for this book. It is a short word that ends on a nice hard consonant and I have always liked it. Pink is a flat word, somehow very exposed. It is a bit of a nervous word, though as a color it can be lovely. Full of contradictions, which was good for the range of emotions of this collection. I think pink is one of the saddest colors in the world, and many American humans are taught not to take anything pink seriously, which is weird.

I interviewed the marvelous Kate Bernheimer about her new collection, How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales (from Coffee House Press).

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When at a Certain Party in NYC

Wherever you’re from sucks, and wherever you grew up sucks, and everyone here lives in a converted chocolate factory or deconsecrated church without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup in sight, but only carefully edited objets, like the Lacanian soap dispenser in the kitchen that looks like an industrial age dildo, and when you rifle through the bathroom looking for a spare tampon, you discover that even their toothpaste is somehow more desirable than yours. And later you go with a world famous critic to eat a plate of sushi prepared by a world famous chef from Sweden and the roll is conceived to look like “a strand of pearls around a white throat,” and is so confusingly beautiful that it makes itself impossible to eat. And your friend back home— who says the pioneers who first settled the great asphalt parking lot of our middle were not intact heroic, but really the chubby ones, who lacked the imagination to go all the way to California—it could be that she’s on to something. Because, admit it, when you look at the people on these streets, the razor blade women with their strategic bones, and the men wearing Amish pants with interesting zippers, it’s pretty clear that you will never cut it anywhere that constitutes a where, that even ordering a pint of tuna salad in a deli is an illustrative exercise in self-doubt. So when you see the dogs on the high-rise elevators practically tweaking, panting all the way down from the 19th floor to the 1st, dying to get on with their long planned business of snuffling trash or peeing on something to which all day they’ve been looking forward, what you want is to be on the fastest Conestoga home, where the other losers live and where the tasteless azaleas are, as we speak, half-heartedly exploding.

—Erin Belieu

© 2010 Erin Belieu

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Last fall, I heard Anne Carson read from her 59 paragraphs about the character Albertine Simonet from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. That evening was one of the best literary experiences of my life so far—I even wrote a short poem about it. Carson's phenomenal work (still beautiful for those who haven't read Proust, I'm sure, but especially appealing to those of us who own multiple editions of the novel and at least seven nonfiction books about him) is now available as part of the New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series, and here are my two favorite passages:

appendix 15 (a) on adjectives

Adjectives are the handles of Being. Nouns name the world, adjectives let you get hold of the name and keep it from flying all over your mind like a pre-Socratic explanation of the cosmos. Air, for example, in Proust can be (adjectivally) gummy, flaked, squeezed, frayed, pressed or percolated in Book 1; powdery, crumbling, embalmed, distilled, scattered, liquid or volatilized in Book 2; woven or brittle in Book 3; congealed in Book 4; melted, glazed, unctuous, elastic, fermenting, contracted, distended in Book 5; solidified in Book 6; and there seems to be no air at all in Book 7. I can see very little value in this kind of information, but making such lists is some of the best fun you'll have once you enter the desert of After Proust.

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appendix 29 on kimonos

Knowledge of other people is unendurable. Japanese kimonos were in style in Paris in the '20s. They had been redesigned for the European market, with less sleeve and more pocket. Albertine keeps all her letters in the pocket of the kimono that she so carelessly tosses over a chair in Marcel's room just before falling asleep. The truth about Albertine is that close. Marcel does not investigate. Knowledge of other people is unendurable.

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A poem, dedicated to Ethan Hawke, about seeing Macbeth last fall appears in the brand-new, all-women issue of Vector. But you'll have to find the issue to read the second half.

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Book review: Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey

A memorably wrecked character and unparalleled writing will mesmerize readers

A review of Catherine Lacey's new novel, out July 8 from FSG Originals.

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An embroidery of one of my favorite tweets by one of my favorite poets, Mark Leidner

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I don’t make up marvelous tales. I only try to express — as clearly as possible — the thoughts and feelings many people have. Often my subjects are the simplest things in the world: joy, family, the weather, houses, streets. Nothing fancy. And when I sit down with these subjects my aim is clarity. I’m really trying to clear some of the muddle from my own brain — my brain being a very muddled place indeed. Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just as muddled as I do, and might be happy to tag along with me on this search for clarity, for precision. I love that aspect of writing. Nothing makes me happier than to hear a reader say: that’s just what I’ve always felt, but you said it clearly.

Zadie Smith, in her acceptance remarks for the 2014 Moth Award

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In an impressive underdog achievement, debut novelist Eimear McBride just won the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, beating out both Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch) and Jhumpa Lahiri (The Lowland). McBride’s first book, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, presents the maturing consciousness of a young woman, grappling with new feelings and new sexuality and detailing the relationship with her brother, whose intellect still suffers from the effects of a childhood brain tumor.

Baileys Women’s Prize Judge for 2014, Caitlin Moran, describes the work as "an astonishing debut novel of risk, energy and creative dazzle.” 

To honor this debut author’s achievement, here are five other women writers whose first novels you’ll want to read this year:

Nobody Is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey (FSG Originals, July 8 2014) The premise is fairly simple—the narrator, still haunted by her sister's suicide, leaves her husband and travels to New Zealand without telling anyone. But Lacey’s unique, almost stream-of-consciousness narration style makes this one of the best books of the year.

Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng (The Penguin Press, June 26 2014) Ng’s tender debut presents a portrait of the Lee family, living in 1970s Ohio and mourning their sixteen-year-old daughter. The novel touches on the myriad paths grief may take and how much a tragedy can affect relationships in a family.

Adam, Ariel Schrag (Mariner Books, June 10 2014) Already a highly-acclaimed graphic memoirist and screenwriter, Schrag uses her keen storytelling skills and wit to tell us about Adam: recently relocated to New York City, this teen joins his older sister in the city's LGBT subculture…only to be mistaken for a transgender guy and to fall in love with a lesbian.

The Sixteenth of June, Maya Lang (Scribner, June 3 2014) Fans of Ulysses will re-Joyce (sorry) in Lang's nods to the Irish masterpiece in her debut, which takes place entirely on Bloomsday. This social satire revels in lyrical prose as long-held tensions come to the forefront between Leopold Portman, his fiancée Nora, and his brother Stephen.

California, Edan Lepucki (Little, Brown and Company, July 8 2014) This novel doesn’t really need my praise after Sherman Alexie praised it on The Colbert Report, and Colbert himself has now Tweeted about buying it (partially as a response to Amazon’s bullying of Hachette). So listen to these two wise men and read the book. But don’t let the dystopian setting fool you: this novel offers so much more than end-of-society turmoil.

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A new poem up as part of The New Poet's 30 days of poetry—click through to read instructions on how to feel full again.

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On Shirley Jackson

In honor of the new collection of Shirley Jackson’s previously unpublished works—titled Garlic in Fiction and coming from Random House in 2015—here are some compelling tidbits about this unique storyteller, as well as links to many of her stories available online.

A varying number of cats, often black, resided with the Jackson family, contributing to the writer’s macabre allure. She once told her daughter, Sadie, “The cat told me what you did in school today.”

Also according to Sadie, the Jacksons would educate their children at the dinner table, choosing a few topics for the year and reading relevant texts while the family ate. Similarly, her son Laurence Jackson Hyman recounts that jokes were a staple in the household and each family member had to tell one at meals.

The prevalence of magic and strange happenings in her stories very much influenced views of Jackson during her lifetime—and perhaps obscured the true value of her skills.  In 1949, a reporter rather famously remarked, "Miss Jackson writes not with a pen but with a broomstick.”

Jackson’s last journal entry, six months before her death, concludes:

"I am the captain of my fate I am the captain of my fate I am the captain of my fate. Laughter is possible laughter is possible laughter is possible."

 As a prank, Jackson once hid all the local library’s movie reference books in her closet so she could convince her husband (literary critic Stanley Hyman) that his favorite old movie, Freaks, did not exist.

A cartoon Jackson drew, illustrating her imaginings of Hyman’s time at The New Yorker offices:

 The Union of South Africa banned Jackson’s most well-known story “The Lottery,” a fact that made her quite proud. According to Hyman, “she felt that they at least understood the story.”

Jackson, some time before her death of heart failure, requested that no funeral or memorial take place in her honor, an action fitting with her staunch avoidance of becoming a public figure. Jackson also rarely gave interviews and felt no need to promote or explain her work.

And on one of the occasions that she did speak about her work—she was very willing to lecture on craft at schools and conferences—Jackson said:

"I tell myself stories all day long. I have managed to weave a fairy-tale of infinite complexity around the inanimate objects in my house, so much so that no one in my family is surprised to find me putting the waffle iron away on a different shelf because in my story it has quarreled with the toaster….It looks kind of crazy, of course. But it does take the edge off cold reality. And sometimes it turns into real stories."

Stories

"The Lottery"

"What A Thought"

"The Bus"

"The Daemon Lover"

"The Night We All Had Grippe"

"Charles"

"Trial by Combat"

"Louisa, Please Come Home"

"It's Only a Game" and "The Third Baby's the Easiest" (free to Harper's subscribers)

And thirteen stories, from 1943 to 2013, are available to to subscribers of The New Yorker here

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From Amber Nelson's In Anima: Urgency (Coconut Books, 2013)

Happy National Poetry Month!

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The best moment of Janet Malcolm's Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice:

There was a moment of danger in July 1944, when four Gestapo men broke into [Gertrude Stein's Paris] apartment and threatened to cut up and burn the Picassos.... A resourceful neighbor called the French police, who were able to dispatch the Gestapo men by asking them for requisition orders that they did not have. (When the police arrived, the Gestapo men were in Stein's bedroom trying on her Chinese coats.)

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I remember a review of Maria Callas’s recording of Carmen that suggested that first hearing her voice was shocking, like biting into a lemon. I remember saying to myself that I wanted my poems to startle, to arrest the attention in that way. I thank the judges for choosing what I hope they found to be, in part, like biting into a lemon…. We all know that at bottom there is no competition. In the real world, rather than the artificial hothouse of a finalist list, there is no need to choose between Donne and George Herbert. Between Colette and Faulkner. Each feeds a hunger in us that we first discovered when we first read them…. There is no competition between writers because no writer, not even Shakespeare or Dante, says it all. Art is continually saying, 'That’s true, too.'

From Frank Bidart's National Book Critics Circle Award acceptance speech. Watch the full ceremony video here.