“Faithful and Virtuous Night,” by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
I always love Louise Glück’s poems, and her compassionate and heartbreaking new collection, “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” has stayed with me every day since I read it. Never in my life have I read such complex meditations on loss, love and mortality. Somehow, even the darkest poems in this collection left me feeling hopeful and less alone. A deeply beautiful book.
For example, when I read in Ann Arbor, I read with my friend V.V. Ganeshananthan, who is writing a novel about a former Tamil Tiger. The portion she read for our event was about political action and violence and thinking about the ways that bodies hold scars, and how these scars hold meaning. So her ideas were intersecting my ideas about empathy from an entirely different direction: fiction rather than nonfiction; the implications of political violence. The people in the audience got a chance to hold two very different perspectives in mind; feel them chiming off each other.Rabih Alameddine, author of “An Unnecessary Woman” (Grove Press)
“Citizen,” by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press)Julia Fierro, author of “Cutting Teeth” (St. Martin’s Press)
“Station Eleven,” by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf)Rivka Galchen, author of “American Innovations” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“Piano Stories,” by Felisberto Hernandez (New Directions)
Felisberto Hernandez is a Uruguayan writer who died in 1964. I had never heard of him before this year, but after reading the Luis Harss translation of his “Piano Stories” I find him as essential and singular as Kleist, or Kafka, or Emily Dickinson. He is a major minor, one of those writers whose “small” stories feel as rooted and full as a tome of Tolstoy or Mann.
There are two tests a book must pass before I know it is one of my favorites—one test involves my mother, the other my best friend. Emily St. John Mandel’s exquisite novel, “Station Eleven,” passed both.
I was alone in a woodsy cottage in upstate New York when I finished “Station Eleven,” and the surprising and inevitable ending (the best kind) left me breathless. The drone of the cicadas in the woods surrounding the cottage made me feel, for a few thrilling moments, as if I had joined the novel’s characters—a band of Shakespearean actors traveling across a ravaged dystopian land, risking their lives to preserve a dying culture.
I dialed my mother, wanting to hear another voice, to share my reader’s buzz, but also because the rich and complex emotions the novel had stirred made me feel as if I just had to say Mom, I love you. Test No. 1 passed.
Next, I texted my best friend (aka my literary kindred spirit), novelist Caeli Wolfson Widger. My message was: READ “Station Eleven” NOW! True to form, she read the novel and was as smitten as I was. Test No. 2 passed.
Emily St. John Mandel’s masterful genre-bender, which succeeds as both literary and dystopic, is that rare novel that inspires a range of emotion in a reader—despair, joy, terror, comfort, and, ultimately, redemptive hope.
Had you asked me before November, I would have said my favorite book was “Fourth of July Creek” by Smith Henderson. But then I read Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” which I found to be moving, stunning, and formally innovative–in short, a masterwork.
A lot of the events that I loved most this year have been rewarding partially because they’ve happened outside the boundaries of the literary community. I’ve spoken to medical school communities. I spoke to a group of outpatient mental health caregivers — social workers and therapists — in Connecticut, people who work with clients who don’t have anywhere else to turn. I spoke at a psychiatric hospital in Princeton a couple weeks ago. And at those events, the kinds of questions and reactions I get from the audience are coming from a totally different angle than writers’ questions would. It’s not about how does formal experimentation work in these essays; it’s about how empathy might be effective in a clinical setting. I don’t necessarily feel like an expert, but I can offer a perspective from beyond the bounds of their discipline; and they offer that to me as well.
You got a tattoo with the epigraph to your book that says “I am human. Nothing human is alien to me.” And you wrote a wonderful essay for the New York Times in which you talked about the reasons for getting that tattooed, mostly freedom from an ex. But you’ve had quite the year, first with the success of your book and then with meeting, falling in love with and marrying the writer Charles Bock. I’m wondering if looking at this tattoo now, does it hold an even deeper meaning for you than it did when you first got it?
Certainly, certainly. That tattoo has always related to the end of that relationship and also a lot of other things. It now holds the experience of the book going out into the world — feeling the different ways people have responded, this idea of resonance in a more general sense. What are the possibilities of resonance? What are its limits? What are the dangers of assuming too much resonance or trying to pretend that we can understand each other more than we actually can? One thing I like about the tattoo is it holds my memories of people who resisted it, or didn’t agree with it, or wanted to question it. Most recently, a warden in a Kentucky prison. He said something to the effect of: Nothing is alien to you? I’m not so sure about that.Scott Cheshire, author of “High as the Horses’ Bridles” (Henry Holt & Co.)Samantha Harvey, author of “Dear Thief” (Atavist Books)
“Cold Blood: Adventures With Reptiles and Amphibians,” by Richard Kerridge (Chatto & Windus)
The best nonfiction books are love stories, whatever their subject. To me, “Cold Blood” is a love story between the author and the “strange and beautiful and savage” creatures he found while growing up in the city. He begins the story as a teenager longing for something dangerous. There’s a notable lack of lions, lynxes and warthogs in London, so instead he’s driven to the undergrowth, and there they are: little colorful, elusive beasts of quiet drama – newts, toads, lizards, adders. This book is about them, and about the author – he describes their biology with exact, glowing prose and through it he sees – and seems at times to be surprised by – his own biography. There is something pure, sincere and lovely about this book.
“Dept. of Speculation” by Jenny Offill (Vintage Contemporaries)
Very early in 2014 a friend pressed Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” into my hand. She said you need to read this. She was right. The novel has everything I want a novel to have–an undeniably singular voice, an unabashed search for meaning amidst the detritus of daily life, and a paper-thin veil between that narrative voice and the reader (possibly even the writer). The book is daring, strange, and emotionally complex. And yet never at the expense of its heart. It has lots of heart. And lots of smart. All in less than 200 pages. I’ve read it twice. And I’ll probably read it again, soon.Meghan Daum, author of “The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“Rainey Royal,” by Dylan Landis (Soho Press)
I urge you to read “Rainey Royal” by Dylan Landis. This novel (in stories, according to some, but it very much feels like a cohesive novel to me) so vividly captures its time and place – New York City in the 1970s – that I could practically smell the patchouli and tea rose oil. (I also felt in moments like I was watching a John Cassavettes movie.) The heroine is the teenage Rainey, who lives with her jazz musician father in a proto-shabby chic townhouse in Greenwich Village. At once empowered and hobbled by her burgeoning sexuality, Rainey’s abandonment by her mother and constant creepy attention from her father’s acolytes has made her feral and angry, but most of all imbued with the kind of confusion that can easily be mistaken for confidence – the most dangerous kind. Landis’s genius is that in neither scolding Rainey nor letting her off the hook she shows us a soul that is both too old for its time but still unfinished and possessed of limitless possibilities. It’s also the funniest sad book I’ve read in quite some time.
“Faithful and Virtuous Night,” by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
I always love Louise Glück’s poems, and her compassionate and heartbreaking new collection, “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” has stayed with me every day since I read it. Never in my life have I read such complex meditations on loss, love and mortality. Somehow, even the darkest poems in this collection left me feeling hopeful and less alone. A deeply beautiful book.
For example, when I read in Ann Arbor, I read with my friend V.V. Ganeshananthan, who is writing a novel about a former Tamil Tiger. The portion she read for our event was about political action and violence and thinking about the ways that bodies hold scars, and how these scars hold meaning. So her ideas were intersecting my ideas about empathy from an entirely different direction: fiction rather than nonfiction; the implications of political violence. The people in the audience got a chance to hold two very different perspectives in mind; feel them chiming off each other.Rabih Alameddine, author of “An Unnecessary Woman” (Grove Press)
“Citizen,” by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press)Julia Fierro, author of “Cutting Teeth” (St. Martin’s Press)
“Station Eleven,” by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf)Rivka Galchen, author of “American Innovations” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“Piano Stories,” by Felisberto Hernandez (New Directions)
Felisberto Hernandez is a Uruguayan writer who died in 1964. I had never heard of him before this year, but after reading the Luis Harss translation of his “Piano Stories” I find him as essential and singular as Kleist, or Kafka, or Emily Dickinson. He is a major minor, one of those writers whose “small” stories feel as rooted and full as a tome of Tolstoy or Mann.
There are two tests a book must pass before I know it is one of my favorites—one test involves my mother, the other my best friend. Emily St. John Mandel’s exquisite novel, “Station Eleven,” passed both.
I was alone in a woodsy cottage in upstate New York when I finished “Station Eleven,” and the surprising and inevitable ending (the best kind) left me breathless. The drone of the cicadas in the woods surrounding the cottage made me feel, for a few thrilling moments, as if I had joined the novel’s characters—a band of Shakespearean actors traveling across a ravaged dystopian land, risking their lives to preserve a dying culture.
I dialed my mother, wanting to hear another voice, to share my reader’s buzz, but also because the rich and complex emotions the novel had stirred made me feel as if I just had to say Mom, I love you. Test No. 1 passed.
Next, I texted my best friend (aka my literary kindred spirit), novelist Caeli Wolfson Widger. My message was: READ “Station Eleven” NOW! True to form, she read the novel and was as smitten as I was. Test No. 2 passed.
Emily St. John Mandel’s masterful genre-bender, which succeeds as both literary and dystopic, is that rare novel that inspires a range of emotion in a reader—despair, joy, terror, comfort, and, ultimately, redemptive hope.
Had you asked me before November, I would have said my favorite book was “Fourth of July Creek” by Smith Henderson. But then I read Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” which I found to be moving, stunning, and formally innovative–in short, a masterwork.
A lot of the events that I loved most this year have been rewarding partially because they’ve happened outside the boundaries of the literary community. I’ve spoken to medical school communities. I spoke to a group of outpatient mental health caregivers — social workers and therapists — in Connecticut, people who work with clients who don’t have anywhere else to turn. I spoke at a psychiatric hospital in Princeton a couple weeks ago. And at those events, the kinds of questions and reactions I get from the audience are coming from a totally different angle than writers’ questions would. It’s not about how does formal experimentation work in these essays; it’s about how empathy might be effective in a clinical setting. I don’t necessarily feel like an expert, but I can offer a perspective from beyond the bounds of their discipline; and they offer that to me as well.
You got a tattoo with the epigraph to your book that says “I am human. Nothing human is alien to me.” And you wrote a wonderful essay for the New York Times in which you talked about the reasons for getting that tattooed, mostly freedom from an ex. But you’ve had quite the year, first with the success of your book and then with meeting, falling in love with and marrying the writer Charles Bock. I’m wondering if looking at this tattoo now, does it hold an even deeper meaning for you than it did when you first got it?
Certainly, certainly. That tattoo has always related to the end of that relationship and also a lot of other things. It now holds the experience of the book going out into the world — feeling the different ways people have responded, this idea of resonance in a more general sense. What are the possibilities of resonance? What are its limits? What are the dangers of assuming too much resonance or trying to pretend that we can understand each other more than we actually can? One thing I like about the tattoo is it holds my memories of people who resisted it, or didn’t agree with it, or wanted to question it. Most recently, a warden in a Kentucky prison. He said something to the effect of: Nothing is alien to you? I’m not so sure about that.Scott Cheshire, author of “High as the Horses’ Bridles” (Henry Holt & Co.)Samantha Harvey, author of “Dear Thief” (Atavist Books)
“Cold Blood: Adventures With Reptiles and Amphibians,” by Richard Kerridge (Chatto & Windus)
The best nonfiction books are love stories, whatever their subject. To me, “Cold Blood” is a love story between the author and the “strange and beautiful and savage” creatures he found while growing up in the city. He begins the story as a teenager longing for something dangerous. There’s a notable lack of lions, lynxes and warthogs in London, so instead he’s driven to the undergrowth, and there they are: little colorful, elusive beasts of quiet drama – newts, toads, lizards, adders. This book is about them, and about the author – he describes their biology with exact, glowing prose and through it he sees – and seems at times to be surprised by – his own biography. There is something pure, sincere and lovely about this book.
“Dept. of Speculation” by Jenny Offill (Vintage Contemporaries)
Very early in 2014 a friend pressed Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” into my hand. She said you need to read this. She was right. The novel has everything I want a novel to have–an undeniably singular voice, an unabashed search for meaning amidst the detritus of daily life, and a paper-thin veil between that narrative voice and the reader (possibly even the writer). The book is daring, strange, and emotionally complex. And yet never at the expense of its heart. It has lots of heart. And lots of smart. All in less than 200 pages. I’ve read it twice. And I’ll probably read it again, soon.Meghan Daum, author of “The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“Rainey Royal,” by Dylan Landis (Soho Press)
I urge you to read “Rainey Royal” by Dylan Landis. This novel (in stories, according to some, but it very much feels like a cohesive novel to me) so vividly captures its time and place – New York City in the 1970s – that I could practically smell the patchouli and tea rose oil. (I also felt in moments like I was watching a John Cassavettes movie.) The heroine is the teenage Rainey, who lives with her jazz musician father in a proto-shabby chic townhouse in Greenwich Village. At once empowered and hobbled by her burgeoning sexuality, Rainey’s abandonment by her mother and constant creepy attention from her father’s acolytes has made her feral and angry, but most of all imbued with the kind of confusion that can easily be mistaken for confidence – the most dangerous kind. Landis’s genius is that in neither scolding Rainey nor letting her off the hook she shows us a soul that is both too old for its time but still unfinished and possessed of limitless possibilities. It’s also the funniest sad book I’ve read in quite some time.
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