6 Smart Things
Including my novel of the year (so far) and a Dalloway Day marathon
From The Hours
To anyone who will buy the flowers themselves! I’m going to be taking part in 92Y’s Dalloway Day reading marathon on June 14. Other readers include Parul Sehgal, Francine Prose, Jenny Offill, and Jiayang. You can buy tickets for in-person or online viewing. (Fingers crossed I get the section in which Clarissa and Peter recall their youthful dalliances!)
I’ve been reading and rereading that Wendell Berry poem that starts,
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be…
I recently learned that the prisoners at Auschwitz had corporate logos stamped on their uniforms (and so much more), in this holy-shit, must-read memoir by midcentury Hungarian reporter and Auschwitz prisoner József Debreczeni.
Katie Kitamura’s Audition is the novel of the year for me (at least so far). The incomparable Laura Marsh breaks it down in the New York Review of Books.
The next two books I’m planning on reading:
Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel (a debut surrealist novel about what happens when New York City makes renting illegal and so a thirtysomething transplants herself to rural Texas)
Immemorial by Lauren Markham (a short nonfiction book about the desire to memorialize everything that is currently being lost—ice sheets, decorum, norms, birds…)
DC people: Agnes Callard is going to be talking Socrates with Becca Rothfeld on Thursday, April 17, at the Politics & Prose at The Wharf. I plan on being there. Anyone else?