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 “Wonderful Mother” is about a woman who is handed a friend’s baby at a barbecue, loses her balance, and drops the baby — a fatal accident. In her resulting pathological guilt, she marries a professor, who she seems at most ambivalent about, and then goes with him on an academic retreat in Italy. It may sound like a beautiful escape, but instead every night she struggles to make conversation with the other academics, who generally lose interest when they realize she is merely a spouse. Her attempts to maintain their interest get zanier as the nights progress.
Moore makes especially entertaining moments involving group conversations, including the New Year’s Eve party in “Beautiful Grade” and an exchange in “Dance in America” that seems to be quoted often on Goodreads. The narrator is a dancer who spends a night with an old college friend, his French wife, and their son with cystic fibrosis. Over dinner the friend asks about the dancer’s relationship, and she informs him that it has ended. Then the wife chimes in, presumably in sympathy:
“The thing to remember about love affairs,” says Simone, “is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney.”
“Oh, not the raccoon story,” groans Cal.
“Yes! The raccoons!” cries Eugene.
I’m sawing at my duck.
“We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney,” explains Simone.
“Hmmm,” I say, not surprised.
“And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped that the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead.” Simone swallows some wine. “Love affairs are like that,” she says. “They all are like that.”
In many ways her stories follow similar arcs and patterns, but they are so enjoyable to me that it doesn’t matter.
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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
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This Is Not Your City
Caitlin Horrocks
You could summarize this collection as: stories of isolation from the perspective of female characters. While I think the collection could have varied a bit more in overall feeling, Caitlin Horrocks creates some pretty exceptional moments and her characters are distinct. She has a very intuitive perspective that makes for rich stories that feel...more
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Forty-One False Starts
Janet Malcolm
As a collection, Forty-One False Starts falls to the side of indiscriminate, especially the several shorter essays at the end that felt like they were included more because they fit the theme of artists and writers than because they had something truly remarkable to say. Maybe they were victims of placement, but they probably stand...more
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Songs from a Mountain
Amanda Nadelberg
These poems feel haphazard and jumbled to me, and I kept waiting to settle in and catch the flow of them. Instead I finished feeling like something logical and grounded had been cut apart and randomized so that there would be moments of insight followed by unexpected zags into something totally different. The experience is not...more
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Writings
Agnes Martin
There is in reality no need for self-sacrifice and no call for it. Do not settle for the experience of others. If you follow others you are in reality at a standstill, because their experience is in the past. That is circling. Even following your own past experience, is circling. Know your own response to your own work
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Long Division
Kiese Laymon
There are just enough time periods and stories within stories woven into this novel that in some ways I felt like I had to suspend my disbelief and not examine the technicalities too closely or the shifts and nested turns wouldn’t actually line up. But I read most of the book in one day, so it was not difficult to get lost in the...more
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Fen
Daisy Johnson
Fanciful stories situated in eastern England’s marshy flatlands, populated with creatures from folklore and comprised of odd events only partially explained. The local pub is always the Fox and Hounds, and the narrator is always a woman, and usually she is young. There isn’t much differentiation in the characters and...more
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Bright Dead Things
Ada Limón
Ada Limón writes around the emotions and banal details of life, maintaining a personal, even confessional, tone, which usually draws me right in when it’s genuinely introspective. Capturing memories of her childhood, her parents’ early marriage years, her stepmother’s death, and her own relationship bringing her from New York City...more
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A Memory of the Future
Elizabeth Spires
It was the title that interested me about this book, though it appears there may be hundreds of books with this title or slight variants of it so it’s entirely possible it reminded me of some other work I heard about in the past. Most of the poems here didn’t draw me in very far, but the title poem was worth it for me....more
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Our daily lives have to be a satisfaction in themselves
Emily Larned (publisher)
You may remember how it was in the early ’70s. Feminists were really angry. We thought that we’d suddenly discovered something that we’d explain to men and everything would change. —Selma Miriam
This beautiful book is handmade by Emily Larned, put...more
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Tell Me How It Ends
Valeria Luiselli
First published in 2016, Valeria Luiselli wrote this long essay before the Trump administration came into office and further muddled already insufficient immigration policies. Structured around the forty questions she asked undocumented children from Central America during her volunteer work helping connect these children with legal...more
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Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night
Morgan Parker
I am more comfortable
being mourned than loved.The past has not been as rewarding
as I had hoped.Waiting nearly four months to write about a book makes it nearly impossible to write anything substantive. I remember that there weren’t any complete poems...more
