Let’s skip an intro this time, and get right to the good stuff. Here are a few things I’ve been very into throughout summer 2023.
1. Jhumpa Lahiri’s whole backlist.
I’ve been reading and rereading all of Jhumpa Lahiri in preparation for my talk with her in DC on October 21 (you can buy tickets here), and good god I’d forgotten how wisely she charts out how families drift and converge over time, how so many of us can still smell the smoke from when a bizarre childhood experience branded itself on our memories. Her oeuvre is divided into two rather distinct parts — her writing in English, typically about first- and second-generation Bengali Americans; and her writing in Italian, which has a more amorphous tone to it, with unnamed characters and more coolly handled settings. What I love about the former is how keenly Lahiri makes the specific feel universal, and what I love about the latter is the opposite. If you’ve never read her, I recommend you go in order (which definitely isn’t always the case). Start with her debut book, The Interpreter of Maladies, which won her the goddamn Pulitzer Prize, and then keep going.
2. This quote from Davis Marchese’s long interview with GOAT atheist Daniel Dennett: “Many years ago, Giulio Giorello, wonderful philosopher of science and journalist in Milan, interviewed me, and the headline in the Corriere della Sera the next day was, ‘Sì, abbiamo un’anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot’: ‘Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.’”
The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin
My first Toibin was The Master, his 2004 bionovel (is that a word?) about the late-career woes Henry James experienced after his play Guy Domville bombed. It was (is) magnificent. Since then I’ve read most of Toibin’s fiction, including the beloved Brooklyn (which contains a singularly well-done vomiting scene) and Nora Webster, a novel so beautifully Irish that I’m surprised my copy didn’t sprout grass. In the summer I’m often desperate for a certain tone in books — cool breezes and hushed conversations. So I looked backwards and found The Blackwater Lightship, Toibin’s 1999 Booker-nominated family drama. It’s set over a few days, in a ramshackle seaside cottage where three generations of women gather to nurse a family member with AIDS. I may be the only living writer who doesn’t have a troubled relationship with her mother, but that doesn’t mean I don’t drink in stories like these, where old family harms are resurrected with barely any prodding.
The title story from Yiyun Li’s new collection Wednesday’s Child (out September 5)
I’m drawn to work that scares the shit out of me – not horror, exactly, but stories that anticipate the feelings I most fear I’ll someday be unable to shake. For instance, I read Lorrie Moore’s “Terrific Mother,” about a woman who drops a friend’s baby and kills it, at least a few times a year. You don’t need to psychoanalyze me here, I understand that my anxiety feels tamed when I can control the outcome of traumatic events by keeping them contained inside fiction. But if you read for the same reason, you’ll be entranced by “Wednesday’s Child,” the story of a middle-aged woman named Rosalie who is traveling from Amsterdam to Ypres, arguing with herself about her teenage daughter Marcie who died unexpectedly by suicide. The hitch that Rosalie keeps encountering is her own mother’s comment that “Any time a child chooses that way out, you have to wonder what the parents did.” But this isn’t simply a story about guilt, it’s about the ways that grief keeps a person alive long after their body has gone.
5. This exceptional New York Times piece on Donnell Drinks, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole at 17 for murdering a man during a robbery. He was just one of the “child lifers” from Philadelphia (my hometown) who expected to spend every last second of their lives locked up in Graterford Penitentiary; that is, until a crusader and a new District Attorney began rethinking what rehabilitation might mean.
6. The tags on this John Jeremiah Sullivan essay in Harpers, which include “bowel movement” and “smoke bombs.”
7. The sentence “Books that you are never going to finish can be moved to the archives.”
I started using the book-tracking app Italic Type as an alternative to Goodreads after I grew tired of the latter’s unhinged commenting policy that allows vicious users to one-star-bomb books that haven’t been released yet. I simply wanted a place that allows me to monitor what I read and when I read it, and to categorize those books based on my ratings: Italic Type has that, along with an enjoyable interface. A few weeks ago the above sentence floated onto the homescreen unbidden and freed me from the tyranny of the half-read book. We all have one (or dozens): books we’ve begun and set aside, sure we will return to them in the near future. Spoiler alert: we do not, in fact, return to them, and they remind us daily of our inadequacy. Now I can simply usher them out of my “Currently Reading” queue and into my archives, where they will rest quietly without causing undue harm to my literary self-esteem.
“Welcome to Mary Oliver Garden” on McSweeney’s
“What will you do with your one wild and precious appetizer? Toasted ravioli?”
There are only eight?