What Is What Was
Richard Stern
I put this book on my to-read list over five years ago, and I’ve long since forgotten what recommendation or reference prompted me to put it there. I’ve never read Richard Stern before, and this is a book of “miscellany”: essays, stories, and poems grouped thematically across portraits, places, criticism, etc. Miscellany isn’t the best place to start with a writer, but I felt promise from the preface which ends with these lines:
The discrepancy between the truth of what one’s been, known, and felt and the historical, biographical, fictional, and even cosmological … reconstruction of it done years or even minutes later by oneself or someone else is a motif here. When the discrepancy is large, the reaction to it may be olympian indifference, anger, outrage, laughter, or litigation. Some gap is always there; from it issues the rumble under biography, history, and reporting which can never be completely silenced.
The first profiles on W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, and Ralph Ellison gave particular insight into the lives of these well-known writers. In Pound’s case, his later years in Venice. But moving into Places, my attention drifted. When I got to the essay on Wimbledon, 1992, I was overcome with boredom. I skipped forward, skimming past other essays dated to the mid-1990s, and found this start to the essay “Over the Hill”:
Autobiography and memoir writing are senior precincts. The presumption is that having made it over the hill, you’ve had the good view and are willing to describe it for other climbers. No longer active, you have little to lose, less to conceal. Yeats called this “withering into truth.”
Skimming a little further, I found a Letter to the Editor from 1995, rejected from The New York Times. Stern introduces it by tallying the number of letters and unsolicited op-ed pieces he has sent to the Times and how few of them were ever published. The letter, responding to Mickey Kaus’s analysis of Republican welfare legislation, is not that interesting of a letter 25 years later.
At that point, I decided those two excerpts quoted above were enough for me to take from this book. Stern’s obituary in the Times says that he was a writer famous with other famous writers. Maybe if I were “famous” — and this definitely refers to older, whiter, straighter male writers — I would have found more to appreciate.
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What If This Were Enough?
Heather Havrilesky
We have to recognize that when we feel conflicted and sick about our place in the world, that’s often true because our world was built to sell us things and to make us feel inadequate and needy.
But there’s a freedom in never being present enough to feel disappointment, never
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The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
I had a memory of reading this book, but it’s possible I just picked up enough about it through cultural references over the years to convince myself that I had. Or maybe my powers of recall are failing, because I didn’t notice any of the things that are drastically different in the TV show version...more
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The End of Eve
Ariel Gore
I put this book on my to-read list shortly after it came out, and every so often I would notice it on my list, read the synopsis about Ariel Gore caring for her dying mother, and then I’d wonder if it was really something I wanted to read. Eventually five years later, I was looking for an ebook that I could download on my phone in a...more
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If, Then
Kate Day Hope
An interesting take on counterfactuals or alternate realities… If, Then follows four neighbors who begin seeing hallucinations that are actually glimpses of other possibilities in their lives. Though the concept has a lot of potential, the actuality of the novel is a bit disappointing. The damp Oregon setting is effective,...more
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong
Dear Ma,
I am writing to reach you — even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.Though I expected to love this book, honestly I was a little disappointed. I loved the elegiac writing that winds a story around the reality of intergenerational trauma, but I felt the ending was a...more
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Strange Birds: A Field Guide to Ruffling Feathers
Celia C. Pérez
Celia is a friend, so I am biased here. But I’m pretty sure I would love her books even if I didn’t know her. After the success of her first middle grade novel, The First Rule of Punk, she’s back with Strange Birds, embarking on new territory. Four girls in a...more
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Here Comes the Sun
Nicole Dennis-Benn
There are many compelling facets to this book, which is largely the story of a mother and two sisters who live together in Montego Bay, Jamaica. The older daughter Margot is employed at a big resort and has worked her way up, striving towards the management level, partially through her strengths in business but also in part because she learned...more
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When Brooklyn Was Queer
Hugh Ryan
This has been a slow reading year for me, but for the most part I’ve been spending my decreased reading time with really good books, cutting out the ones I would have been pushing myself to finish or charging through disinterestedly. Quality over quantity is not a bad approach. If I were to make a top ten list at the end of this...more
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Guestbook: Ghost Stories
Leanne Shapton
I really like this book in theory, as a collection of eerie vignettes that explore different hauntings through photos and ephemera. But while it’s enjoyably creepy, eventually the hints and suggestions of ghosts fell short for me. It makes sense in a way that the specters feel just out of reach, but the sections where the images were...more
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Magical Negro
Morgan Parker
from “A Brief History of the Present”
… I worry sometimes
I will only be allowed a death story. No one will say in
the New Yorker how my mother made her money, who
I married, how my career began. Your people. The death …
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The Clothesline Swing
Ahmad Danny Ramadan
Beautiful, elegiac. A play on the concept of Arabian Nights/One Thousand and One Nights, Hakawati takes the role of Scheherazade; many years past (close to the reader’s present) he was a Syrian refugee, a gay man who first experienced violence due to his identity and later due to the brutality of war. But he escaped...more
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Birds of America
Lorrie Moore
A classic collection of short stories, I keenly felt while reading this how many stories I’ve read that have emulated the witty absurdity of Lorrie Moore. But while there may be a layer of quirkiness on top of her writing, not far underneath are more complex, melancholy themes: grief, loneliness, anxiety, illness. The last story “...more
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Blind Spot
Teju Cole
I was especially curious about this book after reading Known and Strange Things as the last essay there is also called “Blind Spot.” That one is about Teju Cole’s sudden loss of vision while he was attending an artists’ residency. This book version doesn’t seem directly related...more
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Essayism
Brian Dillon
Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure. Imagine what it might rescue from disaster and achieve at the levels of form, style, texture and therefore (though some might cavil at “therefore”) at the
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Known and Strange Things
Teju Cole
This collection of essays is divided into three sections — “Reading Things,” “Seeing Things,” and “Being There” — and for me they progress from the least cohesive to the most cohesive. Many of the literary essays feel more like sketches than fully fleshed out essays, and I slowly worked through these over the summer before lulling out...more
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Transit
Cameron Awkward-Rich
So many amazing poems here around experiences of gender identity and race. Elegant syntax and introspective atmosphere. The series of “Once” poems and “The Child Formerly Known As ____” stand out. And then there’s the sequence of “Theory of Motion” poems, starting with this one: Essay on the Theory of Motion …more
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There There
Tommy Orange
Multilinear novels always take a risk of remaining fragmented, never fully weaving the strands together, and There There struggles with this a bit, its cast of characters all moving toward the Big Oakland Powwow where a violent catastrophe awaits. Starting with a lyrical prologue that briefly encapsulates a progression of Native...more
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Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Whenever I read a historical novel, I make some kind of disclaimer about the genre not being something I’m usually interested in; hence why Wolf Hall sat on my to-read list for many years — on the one hand I felt swayed by all the recognition it received and on the other uncertain, because would I really like a book about Henry...more
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The Best Kind of People
Zoe Whittal
A very engaging story about a stereotypical, seemingly-perfect family in a small Connecticut town suddenly thrown into distress when the father George Woodbury, a science teacher at a private school, is accused of sexual misconduct after a school-related ski trip. Years before he had tackled a gunman in the school, saving students from a...more
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There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
Morgan Parker
Morgan Parker is a writer I feel excited about, so I requested her second book from the library almost immediately after finishing the first. Centered around experiences of being black and female, she includes a lot of cultural references in her work — as the presence of Beyoncé in the title reveals from the start. She speaks the...more