The Slaves of Solitude has a fantastic pedigree. First, it’s a British novel published by New York Review of Books, which does not miss, especially with out-of-print or reissued British novels. Also, it’s written by Patrick Hamilton, a novelist I didn’t know but whose plays I do know–one of which became the movie Gaslight, another of which became the movie Rope. So based on those plays, with The Slaves, I expected a drama of full-contact relationships. The novel delivered.

Centered on the unfortunately comically named Enid Roach, Hamilton’s The Slaves probes a facet of WWII-era London that is neither very threatened nor very heroic. The war is a persistent inconvenience for the middle-aged Miss Roach, unable to get certain creature comforts like stockings or makeup, yet the war brings the excitement of American servicemen, the urgency of blackouts each night, and the relief of tea-room drama. Hamilton places Miss Roach in a not-luxurious boarding house where she is endures the most passive aggressive insults imaginable by a sixties-or-older bachelor and a German emigre flirt. Furtive makeout sessions & long loud evenings in pubs with a sort of schlubby American cad give Miss Roach something to dream about. I’m not making it sound as funny or as just or as hopeful as it is, but that’s because Hamilton makes us laugh at, criticize, and yearn for Miss Roach, sometimes all on the same page, in the same scene. The resolution is what you’d hope for.

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Decades ago in the book fair of a small academic conference, I came across a table devoted to an independent publisher, Paul Dry Books. Behind the table was … Paul Dry. I asked him what the gateway drug to his publishing house was, and he directed me to Walter De La Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget, a novel so good that I often return to Dry’s website, searching for something new & unknown. Something like Stefan Żeromski’s The Homeless.

The novel begins in high spirits, in high culture, in high times–Dr. Tomasz Judym, visiting Paris from Poland, hears an old woman speaking Polish to what he guesses (correctly) is her two granddaughters and their governess. The conversation is so effortless, the erudition so sincere that you expect something romantic to happen soon. Instead, Żeromski directs Judym back to Poland, where he makes triumphs & missteps both personal & professional. He is a wise & principled young man around knowing & skeptical old me; he is a man of deep feeling around men, women, & children too impoverished to feel much of anything; he attracts the love of a beautiful & sacrificing woman but … Well, you’ll have to see. It is a heart-enriching & heart-breaking book about how rootless many of us are. (I don’t doubt that the title is true to the original, but I feel like these characters are home-poor, or rootless rather than what we think of when we think of homeless.)

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This blog continues to be a NYRB-stan site. Loved and Missed is the first novel I’ve read by Susie Boyt. Most of the novel is told in the voice of Ruthie, the mother of Eleanor, who is the mother of Lily. Like most British novels I’ve read about families, I loved the psychological candor of this one, loved the way it gleaned pathos from the banal & from the everyday. And Ruthie’s story is so many stories in one.

It’s a story about women in the world & with each other. It’s about parenthood in all its joy & anxiety. It’s about the consequences & costs of addiction without ever descending into melodrama or narrative slumming. It’s a story about how quickly & how permanently the veneer of sin & vice gets removed from personal shortcomings & betrayals, to the point that these choices become like the furniture of our lives, things we navigate around & grown comfortable in & with. It’s a coming of age & a … well, I don’t want to spoil anything. An utterly human & surprisingly hopeful novel. If you like Mike Leigh movies, you’ll love this novel.

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In There’s Always This Year On Basketball and Ascension, Hanif Abdurraqib does all the things you’d expect a certified genius to do. He offers you a unique personal lens on a subject you thought you knew–maybe that subject is basketball, or LeBron James, or Abdurraqib himself. He exorcises demons without descending into self-pity or badboy braggadocio. He weaves culture with self, faith with race, place with eternity. If it sounds like I’m speaking vaguely & broadly, it’s because it’s difficult to do justice to what Abdurraqib does with all of his poetry, all of his journalism, all his writing. Id’ highly recommend the audiobook for this one–even though I wish I had the book itself nearby so that I could underline things to luxuriate over later.

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I really really tried with this one that had long been in my queue. I patiently (but never really joyfully) hung in for all its stops & starts & nudge nudge wink wink “playfulness”. About halfway through, I decided that I might save this one for the nursing home.

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Our school librarian is a master at finding high-interest, issue-infused, stylistically engaging books by living authors. True Biz by Sarah Nović is just such a book.

Centering on three characters at a school for the deaf (an adult administrator, a teenage boy, a teenage girl), this book guides the reader through challenges unique to deaf people and challenges common to most people: Cochlear implants & divorce, feeling isolated & feeling embraced, not being understood & being understood / “heard”, navigating an adult world that sees you as broken & navigating a friendship that sees you for you, etc.

Nović recreates the variety of experiences on this campus-under-threat. CODA interacting with the deaf, the deaf interacting with hearing medical professionals, nearly (?) deaf people interacting with fully deaf people. In order to bring these varieties to life, Nović deploys dialogue as one might expect as well as italicized passages indicating when characters are communicating ASL (and even via BASL). Moreover, in regular nonfiction interludes, Nović provides succinct historical context that informs & deepens but never derails the narrative. Most helpful are the passages explaining syntax, verb tense, dialogue, and much more in ASL , passages illustrated by visual artist Brittany Castle.

This is one I can’t wait to recommend & teach again.

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead won the Pulitzer in 2006. It is a patient novel that will make you wish you were the intended audience. The conceit of the novel is that the aged narrator, the reverend John Ames, is writing to his seven-year-old son. The “you” of the novel is decades from reading or understanding the story we navigate. For a novel about a man who never leaves his small hometown, Gilead is a wandering novel. It luxuriates over the smallest of domestic memories, some of Ames & his young son, some of Ames & his much younger wife before the birth of the son, some of Ames & his own father, some of the struggle for the soul of a nation during abolition. Robinson’s Ames does not move chronologically, but instead according to the whims of the heart, captured between meals & naps, sermons & visits with an old friend (also a reverend).

The novel is a thoughtful meditation on faith & family without ever sounding preachy, even when it is literally about preaching. It is a subtle almost elegy to a kind of living that few Americans might want in a part of America where few people stay, but it never descends into simple nostalgia or broad critiques of modernity. It is literally a love letter.

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John Darnielle is the lead singer & songwriter for a band that I don’t listen to often. Eight or ten years ago, his debut novel Wolf in White Van got on my radar, and I picked up a digital copy, which I forgot about until recently. The cover gives you a sense of part of the plot, a washed-out maze. The protagonist / narrator Sean is the designer & curator of a mail-order game with nearly-infinite possibilities, some of which are subterranean. The narrative keeps several things at bay–the ultimate end of his game, for example, or the relevance of the novel’s title. The most unsettling of these mysteries is Sean’s facial disfigurement, a fact of his life so central & apparently so far back in his history that Darnielle withholds the reasons for the disfigurement.

It’s a novel that answers the whys of the lives of its isolated characters. And the answers are rooted in a certain kind of youthful rootlessness, a certain kind of youthful isolation that is the stuff of many American novels, but few novels so unforgiving in their resolutions. But Darnielle is true to his protagonist in shaping this kind of labyrinth of shared loneliness, of the power of the imagination to make despair nearly livable.

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Years ago, a friend recommended the novel Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice. I wrote back then that it was tragic how with covid it had become such a timely novel, one in which an Anishinaabe community gets cut off from the rest of the non-res world, inexplicably: no power, no communication, no food deliveries to their local store, no radio, no cell phone coverage, no internet. Rice centered that survival narrative on Evan, an able and virtuous and brave member of the community.

With Moon of the Turning Leaves, Rice returns to Evan & his community twelve years after the catastrophe. They have moved from their reservation home to a community in the north. After twelve years, food supplies & wildlife are dwindling; a search party sent out years earlier has never returned. Evan, his daughter Nangohns, his old friends Tyler & JC, and two younger community members Amber & Cal form a reconnaissance team to walk toward their ancestral home & hopefully return with news of that they can relocate. As with Crusted Snow, this novel’s language is direct, and the action is at turns both suspenseful & tender. So very clear about the fear & urgency of living in a world with dwindling resources, it’s very clear about racism & man’s inhumanity to man, and also clear–and optimistic–about the power of ceremony, of language, of family, of ancient skills & endurance of this brave and eternal people. Most reviewers name-check McCarthy’s The Road, which is a little sparse & unforgiving in comparison. Like The Road, however, Rice’s Moon of the Turning Leaves resolves with a hope & a rejuvenation in nature that is well-earned by its characters & welcomed by its readers.

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Vinson Cunningham worked on the Obama campaign right out of college. His novel Great Expectations is about David, a young Black man working on a presidential campaign right out of college. The Candidate in Great Expectations is clearly Obama, although never named Obama. The unnamed celebrities, movers, & shakers populating the novel are … you wonder why Cunningham does not say “Quincy Jones” or “Jay-Z” or whoever as readily as he says, for example, “Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul & Mary said [some cringey borderline prejudiced thing]”.

David’s coming of age happens in a believable if not always smooth braiding of influences & challenges. His campaign-trail hookups give the reader a sense of the freedoms & releases endemic (perhaps) high intensity hope & change minded young people. His apprenticeship & eventual high-profile status within political fund-raising have a gossipy reality, including the indictments we should have seen coming a mile away. His personal life as a son & new father are … less skillfully narrated & woven in, often delivered as post-coital currency, his part in a quid pro quo of Cunningham’s [ahem] David‘s social climbing. Perhaps the Obama campaign has an iron-fisted NDA, but I can’t help but feel like this book would have worked better as a memoir than as a novel.

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Greek Lessons by Han Kang is one of those novels that teaches you how to read it. I bought it because of the cover, which does not hint at the fact that it is a novel about two people struggling with being able to understand & be understood. If I had read the inside flap or any of the reviews, that two-person path would have been quite clear. Instead, I was thirty or forty pages (maybe more) into the novel before I realized that it was impossible for this to be a narrative about one person. That thirty or forty pages (maybe more) was a real trip, though, as I was imagining this as a single story.

Which, of course, in some ways, it is.

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I am rarely disappointed by a publication from NYRB. So I was excited to pick up J.L. Carr’s novella A Month in the Country. It’s a gentle story about gentle people. Even the not-so-nice people are shaped with empathy, with care. The month in the country is devoted to a single job performed by Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War, an unveiling of sorts.

Still shell shocked, Birkin works alone over a summer to uncover, inch by inch, a medieval mural in a country church. A fellow veteran works alone in the churchyard, searching for the rumored remains of a country family’s ancestor. Reverends & station masters, daughters & wives populate this country novella with intensity & yearning. War & judgment, marriage & history, art & faith loom large, but only large enough to fit in the open hearts of Carr’s characters. A gentle, beautiful, artful, thoughtful story that [warning: cliche approaching] you will not want to end.

Since our department added narrative nonfiction as a required class a few years ago, I’ve read a lot of memoirs lately. In many cases, what draws me in is what I hope to guide my students through — namely, a reckoning with one’s origins. Sometimes these kinds of stories are steeped in trauma, in exile. Lately I’ve read that kind of story so often that I feel like I can recognize the tropes, the beats, even the surprises in those memoirs. I hope that is the sign of a perceptive reader rather than the sign of a skeptical or jaded one.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras shapes an origin / ancestral story that truly had me in suspense and in its thrall. The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir is a sort of quest, a righting, an answer to the request of their deceased grandfather, a renowned curandero.

What’s unique, primarily, about the memoir is the detailing of inspiration. I mean “inspiration” literally — Contreras & her family are spirited beings, spirit-readers, spirit-talkers. Her family story draws upon pre-colonial Colombian ritual & wisdom without ever losing the challenges & hauntings of the present; her story of the present draws upon the century-long conflicts & disappearances of Colombian history without ever losing the apolitical heart of the story. Nono, the grandfather curandero, has visited his daughter & Contreras (his granddaughter) asking to put to rest — except that he’s been dead & buried for years.

At the heart of the story is a doubling. Contreras & her mother look so much alike that family & friends alike constantly remark on it. Contreras & her mother have suffered / experienced a kind of amnesia that leaves them in some small way separated from themselves & linked to spirit voices & truths.

It’s complicated. It’s … you’d call it magical realism, if Contreras were not there to tell you that to Colombians, this is simply their realism. It ends with the kind of peace that, while impermanent, is lasting enough for most of us.

I often judge books by their covers, which often works out, as it did when I picked up Godshot by Chelsea Bieker. It’s a story set in (but not deeply precise about) climate crisis, a current-day drought-affected California rural community; it’s a story with character driven by (but not deeply probing about) a current-day American brand of Christian apocalyptic male leader ego & charisma. Bieker depicts the ways that the protagonist Lacey May must live within the strict boundaries imposed by the drought & by her Pastor. Family dysfunction & adolescent ignorance is balanced by a sort of wounded mother character on the outskirts of Lacey’s town–the proprietor of a phone sex business. There are forced impregnations, baptisms in soda in lieu of water, shabby trailer & apartment living, and even a kind of shootout or two. It is not pretty, even if it is often darkly funny. I worried that in enjoying this novel I was participating in a sort of class snobbery. Were it not that Bieker has affection for her characters (enough that good things happen to the mostly-good and bad things happen to the mostly-bad), I might have had a really sour taste in my mouth after & during this novel. But it somehow works.

Blackouts by Justin Torres is a provocative & thoughtful novel, artful & deeply moving. Torres’s protagonist / witness (the pseudonymous Nene) is a queer sometimes hustler visiting a decades-older Juan Gay, who is clearly dying. The action of the novel is not about conflict resolution but instead about blackout unveiling. Nene listens to Gay reveal an oral & lived & academically bowdlerized queer history.

As a child, Gay was effectively adopted by a queer researcher, who renames herself Jan Gay, and her beloved, who also renames herself & who uses Juan Gay as a model for her children’s book illustrations. The research Jan Gay conducts is thorough & personal, given her ability to interview subjects as a fellow queer. Knowing that her work will be published only under the co-authorship of a traditional academic, Gay opens herself & her subjects’ lives up to academic scrutiny, misinterpretation, & eventual erasure–the research becomes published in near-unrecognizable form & intent under the title Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.

I’m making this novel sound very bookish–it kinda is, but it is more erotic than sexual, more about friendship than eros, more about the desire to know & love than to transgress. Juan Gay’s storytelling draws upon Nene’s own rash exploits & johns, upon academic rigor & image, upon Berlin bohemianism & Puerto Ricanness, upon flashbacks & rereadings. It is the kind of novel that makes you feel more empathetic & intelligent, more aghast & awakened with each page.

The summer of long books (The Name of the Rose, The Illuminaries, etc.) gave way to the fall of reading cool stuff and things that finally came up in my Libby queue. I’m glad that I’m getting back into the habit of tracking my reading, though.

Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach had been on half-price shelves frequently enough that I worried it was one of those novels that people purchased but didn’t finish. I finished it, quickly.

Within the opening pages, I was reminded of a novel that I really enjoyed–city setting, poor Irish family, young girl, etc. Those characteristics lingered through Manhattan Beach even as the setting shifted to the sea, even as the family’s fortunes improved, even after the young girl became a young woman. Anna Kendrick pays a visit with her father to the luxurious shoreside house of a handsome charismatic man that, like her father, thrives in the liminal space between polite society and gangster society. It’s an affecting opening, one that shows the deep pull that each man has on Anna and the deep pull that the sea has on her.

Egan moves Anna’s affections & fortunes briskly back & forth between these men, between these settings, between then (near the end of the Depression) and now (near the end of WWII). The set pieces, such as a trip to a Times Square jazz club, always feel authentic; the historical research, such as the fine details of military deep-sea diving, always feel essential to the internal life of the characters.

The secrets & desires of the main three characters are at the heart of the novel, and the secondary characters (an aunt that was a silent movie bit player, a mysterious man-behind-the-men mafioso) keep you alert to the ways that a character’s fate is in the hands of so many. It was, in short, a fully human, fully historical, fully suspenseful & satisfying novel.

Like many folk around the pandemic, I’ve read my fair share of minimalist books, and I’ve watched a lot of YouTube reflections on the practices & payoffs of severing yourself from things. It’s not easy for me. A huge part of my identity was formed around the content I consumed & curated, shared & gave. Music, books, movies, and now podcasts, were the main elements of my intellectual self–and of my material self. What is left when I sever ties or when I throw away these things? Abraham Joshua Heschel has an answer.

In The Sabbath (1951), Heschel offers a powerful argument for re-viewing this severing not as a loss but as a chance to rejuvenate. Each chapter is both scripturally rigorous and personally considerate. It’s a book that hits you in the heart & in the head, that offers wide gateways into thinking about opening up what the sabbath provides, in Heschel’s words, “the architecture of time”. The week doesn’t end with the sabbath; it culminates in the sabbath. Everything we do during the week is informed by, is nourished by, is made sacred in this much-needed, oft-misused time.

The Sabbath is not a lengthy book, but it’s one that I needed to read quite slowly, so poetic & elegant is the prose. It’s not a stuffy orthodox book, but it’s one that shows the vitality & gift of a cultural, spiritual inheritance. Representative quotation: “[…] the sabbath is not an occasion for diversion or frivolity […], but an opportunity to mend our tattered lives, to collect rather than to dissipate time. Labor without dignity is the cause of misery; rest without spirit, the cause of depravity” (17-18). Heschel offers the reader gems / challenges like that three or four times a page. It’s a dizzying & challenging work, one that guides the reader to interrogate their own values, their own choices, and the consequences of living so busily that we don’t let menuha (tranquility, serenity, peace and repose) in.

Álvaro Enrigue has written two novels that play with history. The first, Sudden Death, dazzled & delighted me with its deft bouncing between Old World & New World, between painting & poetry, between high art & low urges. In it, the tennis court becomes a central setting at a time when tennis was a game of rogues & royalty, a blood sport more akin to Fight Club than to the crisp uniforms & silent well-born audiences of today’s tennis courts. In its brutality & humor (& in its deliberate veering from / inspiration from the personages of Caravaggio & Quevedo), Sudden Death reminds the reader that the writing of history is, at its best, a righting of history–and not always what we would call an accurate one.

You Dreamed of Empires is equally profane & thoughtful, equally of Europe & Mexico (or more accurately, of what would become Mexico). Sudden Death‘s tennis games are replaced by …. well it depends on the word you’re most comfortable with. Diplomacy or ritual, conquest or evolution, dreams or naps, wills or visions, the ancient clean or the modern grit. Enrigue calls this novel an account of the birth of the modern world–November 9, 1519, the day that Cortes meets Moctezuma, or the day that Moctezuma hosts Coretes, or the day that Moctezuma fits Cortes into his schedule while he’s trying to manage the dissolution of a multi-tribe/nation/people alliance, or the day that Moctezuma gives Cortes hallucinogens to trip together.

Enrigue delights in anachronism (T.Rex Monolith playing in the background of a Tenochtitlan temple) and outright fantasy (Moctezuma dreaming the author himself centuries later writing the account of Moctezuma dreaming the author himself …). He delights in what Toni Morrison called Homeric fairness, where no monster is without his humanity, where no slave is without power, where Spaniards & indigenous people can’t stand the smell of one another and can’t shake the allure of one another. It’s a quietly feminist novel, one in which Cortes is referred to as El Malinche more often (I think) than Malintzin is referred to as La Malinche. And it’s got a heckuva ending.

If I’ve read Philip Roth before, I can’t remember — which is saying something, just having finished Operation Shylock: A Confession. The voice is a difficult one to forget. Utterly personal in tone, brashly direct in how it interrogates Jewishness, how it describes the / his male libido, how it invites you to laugh at serious things & take mockery seriously. The subtitle here should have been a greater key to the book than it was.

Not a novel–not something made up. Roth not only depicts himself as he is (late middle-aged, lauded but not Nobel’d, keenly aware of his weaknesses & talents, a diasporic Jew) but also constructs depicts a double Philip Roth who looks like PR, who knows PR’s entire personal & professional history, and who is busy with his own non-fiction, high-stakes world-building: soliciting help from well-known illuminaries such as Lech Walesa & the Pope as well as quietly influential figures working in & on behalf of the Mossad to get Jews out of Jerusalem, where the double-PR says they’ve never belonged, and back to Europe, which the double-PR says is much more their natural home.

The confession is not Roth’s alone. Roth recounts the confession of a former grad school acquaintance (in this case, an Egyptian professor) consumed with righteous anger over what Israel has done in Palestine, has done to Palestinians. He recounts the confession of a former anti-Semite, the former-nurse of the double-PR, who creates a kind of AA for recovering anti-Semites (the “real” Roth line edits his twelve steps). Roth observes a Jerusalem courtroom (show)trial, hoping to hear the confession of John Demjanjuk, a defendant denying that he is Ivan the Terrible.

There are briefcases full of money. There are mysterious phone calls. There is an apologia to a different strand of anti-semitism probably ever chapter. There are masked would-be kidnappers prowling under cover of the night. There is pathos & stupidity. There is a kind of Hebrew school lesson / subtle Mossad interrogation / protection scene. There’s a chunk about halfway through that summarizes & clarifies just how weird these true events you’ve read are. There is a Preface, explaining the still-ongoing legal facts of “the confession”; there is a closing note to the reader asserting, “This confession is false.”

I’m not making it sound funny enough. Or serious enough. Or timeless enough. Or timely enough. It was / is all those things, true or false.

I haven’t been great about keeping track of reading, or maybe I just need to reconcile myself to a method unlike my old one. Here goes some quick takes:

I’ve read a lot of memoir, and I’ve read a lot of border stories. And I’m still certain that I’ve never read anything like Javier Zamora’s Solito. I’ve taught excerpts from Unaccompanied, Zamora’s debut poetry collection, which focuses in parts on his journey north to join his parents already living & working in the United States. Solito, however, is a painstaking recreation of that journey, complete with near-crossings, re-crossings, various groups & safe houses & coyotes along the way. Short of walking the terrain oneself or experiencing Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s immersive artwork Carne y Arena, nothing will quite capture what you thought you knew of a border crossing quite like Solito will. Most importantly, how (despite the title) this is a shared experience, with collaborators & family members, with migrants & guides, all burdened with the same hope & fear, exhilaration & despair, fatigue & worry. Zamora animates & ennobles his memoir with the true account of three fellow travelers who became a kind of surrogate family. Truly unforgettable.

I am late to Louise Erdrich, and I began with Future Home of the Living God, a patient and engrossing novel (though not one as widely lauded as some of her others). It tells a story of unexplained social disintegration & the kind of grassroots fascism that grows most quickly & takes deep root during social unrest. The novel is narrated by Cedar Hawk Songmaker, the adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, and Erdrich stick to Cedar’s very limited first-person POV. We don’t know what exactly has happened to chickens & ducks, why archaeopteryx have returned, why Black & brown people are disappearing, why exactly pregnant women are feared, rounded up, & euthanized / punished / killed–but we do know that Cedar, pregnant with her first child, is being hidden & hunted. Erdrich makes believable to quick shift from neighbor to willing executioner, from life as normal to life or death. It’s a novel that satisfies more on the emotional (& at times spiritual) than social commentary level.

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh is a harrowing & haunting novel. Set in contemporary Syria, it blends stark realism with trauma-induced dreamworlds, the political horrors of war with the bodily sufferings of its victims, the rubble & unrest of Syria with the heart & hope of its people. Katouh focuses on Salama Kassab, a pharmacy student who has–through necessity–becoming something of a nurse, a doctor, a counselor … whatever is needed at the hospital at the time. While treating a young girl, she reconnects with the patient’s older brother, an activist via YouTube video and her near-match for an arranged marriage before the war undoes everything. It is a long look at a war still raging, one that slipped the attention of many Americans, due to events in Ukraine. In any time, it would be a necessary look at maintaining one’s humanity (not one’s moral perfection) in the worst of times.

I audiobook-read & loved Angeline Boulley’s YA thriller The Firekeeper’s Daughter. And I’d highly recommend the audiobook here, due to Isabella Star LaBlanc’s authentic & tasteful narration. Around the same time, I read an advance copy of Jas Hemond’s YA romance / suspense story We Deserve Monuments. It’s the rare novel that gets the messiness of family right and the messiness of young love right and the liminal spaces of American identity & ethnic / racial identity and the richness & sanctity of ceremony right. These two novels get all of it right in ways that any reader would love, including those skeptical of YA (like I used to be).

Okay, maybe Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan isn’t exactly a classic. But in the words of her most recent publisher, “If [Trevelyan] was a bloke, she’d still be in print”, some eighty years after she died.

It’s a novel that isn’t helped by its title, until you read the opening pages of Trevelyan’s novel and see how labor & human dignity, labor & human necessity are centered in the story.

Set between 1919 & 1936, Two Thousand Million Man-Power tracks the fortunes of Robert & Katherine, a chemist & a schoolteacher. Each just beginning a career or a life that could possibly be a career or a life of the mind. Every day, Robert, a recent graduate, works in a lab for ladies cosmetics, and every evening, he takes notes on a theory of time he hopes to one day complete. Kath has narrower ambitions but thinks big, mostly thanks to big dreamers around her, like Robert (and like a colleague who invites her to communist party meetings). Their courtship is slow & thoughtful–they attend weekly lectures–and it is bound by convention, which means they must sneak around in order to spend evenings together. Either due to true love or historical necessity, they get married. It is hopeful for a time.

It’s an honest love story–which includes daily pettiness & small joys, struggles over shared money & individual hopes, friendships & unavoidable comparisons with couples outside one’s relationship. It is deeply realistic about the loss of youth and the allure of materialism / comfort. It’s very nuanced & ambiguous about politics & history, cities & work, communities & countries. And it’s got a perfect ending.

Thanks to this one, I’ll definitely keep my eye on the publisher Recovered Books.

For four years, I tracked my reading, and as a result, I got to the point where it’s kind of a habit that I read broadly ([ahem] at least within literary fiction), that I read as much as possible in translation, and that I am deliberate about what I read next.

It’s been a while since I read R.F. Kuang’s Babel which I recommend enthusiastically. To aim to write a smart, accessible, thoughtful, & suspenseful novel is quite a narrow target to hit, and that one definitely did. Ada Limon’s The Hurting Kind is similarly smart & accessible, with a really gentle seasonal organization that never feels like it limits the poems. I reread Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, which is an engrossing story about a man pushed too far and the lengths he’ll go to set the story straight (even if it’s not entirely factual). But this post is about a chunk of reading that’s a little more deliberate, a set of books that I hoped would get outside of myself.

Usna Aslam Khan’s The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is a historical novel about a place I’ve never even heard of–the Andaman Islands. Leave it to an independent press (Dallas’s Deep Vellum) to take a chance on a novel like this one, that deserves a wide readership and will challenge anyone that picks it up. Khan’s Nomi of the title is not the main character, nor is she explicitly any more of a witness or a survivor than her brother Zee (who suffers a terrible fate due to a single courageous act) or her father (bent low, literally, by his punishment for a crime he committed, which brought him to the islands) or her mother (who suffers losses that eventually become unspeakable). Khan makes the reader feel deeply about almost every character, no mean feat, given that some of the colonial administrators are complicit in, at best, cruel & unusual punishment. This might fit under historical fiction or post-colonial literature, and in ways that test the limits of each genre. It is a novel in which the bravest act of all is staying put and trying to find the beauty & the humanity around you.

I’ll update this post when I finish Rodaan Al Galidi’s light-hearted (or is that deep-heared?) refugee novel The Leash & the Ball, Melody Razak’s debut about 1947’s Partition Moth, Ingrid Rojas Monteras’s memoir about a journey into her family’s history in Colombia The Man Who Could Move Clouds

At some point months ago, I signed up for (and then forgot about) Open Letter Publishing’s Translator Triptych Bundle, which got me three Open Letter books written by Spanish female authors and translated by Katie Whittemore. I wrote about Mothers Don’t already. And I just finished Lara Moreno’s Wolfskin.

Like Mothers Don’t, this one focuses boldly on the interior lives of a mother, and the non-mother parts of that person, the parts that strain against the expectations of motherhood.

In Moreno’s novel, the everyday strain of being an independent fully formed person and a mother is exacerbated by a surprise—the protagonist Sofia is blindsided by her husband Julio’s wish for a divorce. “Wish” is not abrupt a word–more like “steps toward getting” a divorce. She thinks nothing of their regular marital spats or disagreements, and she thinks nothing when his toothbrush is missing one morning. When the conversation eventually happens, there’s little to discuss: He will leave their apartment, he will support her, and he has it all figured out—even with an apartment at the ready. Sofia, he assumes (correctly), need take care of their son Leo as if nothing has happened. Julio will carry on as if what has happened is precisely what he wants, which it is. Moreno renders this emotional turmoil in very relatable & shrewd detail. Tears, worry, unanswered texts, accusations, siblings and parents drawn into the separation, all while Sofia struggles to keep things normal—until she chooses instead to retreat to her recently deceased father’s home for the summer. That’s the opening thirty pages or so.

With this escape Moreno complicates our sense of what a good mother is, what an amicable separation should look like, what sibling support looks like, what stops and what continues when the disruption in our lives does not approach in sheep’s clothing, but instead when we realize that we let the wolf in willingly, we saw his skin all along.

I’d give away everything if I wrote more. Just know that Whittemore manages Moreno’s prose & the characters’ voices deftly, including shifting perspectives & timelines, as well as the sentences that unspool for a page or more when the emotions become … well, when it’s appropriate. Know it’s also a novel about sex, about trauma, about sisters, about innocence, about letting people in. Highly recommend for mature readers.

For four years, I tracked my reading pretty carefully. It was a worthwhile project for four years, but the user interface there got unwieldy. Now I post readings here. I’m proud that these four most recent books are all literature in translation. Four years ago, that kind of flurry of translated lit would have been planned, would have been a choice. Now, it’s a habit.

Since I teach a lot of students of Indian heritage, I had my antennae up for Indian authors. Two short story anthologies really hit the spot.

Dallas’s own Deep Vellum Publishing published The Shehnai Virtuoso, a collection stories by Dhumketu, translated from Gujarati and compiled by Jenny Bhatt. Compiled from his twenty-four collections, this anthology offers a great variety — but for me a kind of single authorial ethos emerged. There is real affection for the characters, even those that make lousy choices, especially those that are in dire straits. There is an adeptness at setting and tone (realistic or fantastic, mythical then or megaurban now), and there is a satisfying wrap up to each. Generally, good things happen to good people, and Dhumketu lets us know why.

Archipelago Books published The Dog of Tithwal, a collection of stories by Manto, translated from Urdu. These are darker and starker than Dhumketu’s. I’m not saying that it’s a fair or necessary comparison–I just happened to read these collections back to back, so forgive the apples to oranges comparisons. Manto’s cities are a little more unforgiving than Dhumketu’s, the relations between characters a little more selfish and amoral. The prose, as rendered in translations by Khalid Hasan and Muhammad Umar Memon, is direct. It reminded me often of the kind of mindset & prose that Sherwood Anderson called grotesque, that is, a set of stories about people who stick to their own truth and live with it during all their lives, but their truth turns to be faulty or even downright false.

New Directions recently published Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, a novel I purchased because the cover looked really cool. It’s translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani, and in many ways it’s a novel about translation, about trying to connect, about moving beyond who we are to who we hope to become. There’s a fact of the world of the novel that was very compelling that isn’t explained much: Sea levels have risen so much that Japan no longer exists. It’s been so long that Japan hasn’t existed that Japanese speaking people, like one protagonist of the novel, cannot find their language fellows. The hook is for this character to speak her own language with someone who knows it. There are other translators and global wanderers, people looking for a language of love & family, gender & food, friendship & home. It’s the first in a planned trilogy, and it feels like it–the wrap up leaves you in true suspense.

Open Letters published Katixa Agirre’s Mothers Don’t this year, translated from Spanish by Katie Whittemore. The title is the beginning of a sentence: Mothers don’t kill. This novel is about a mother that does, who kills her two infant children. The narrator of the novel is a recently-successful novelist (of a political thriller about ETA) and a new mother (of a fourteen-month-old son) who follows the trial of the mother, a woman she had a passing acquaintance with in college. Like another book I read recently, Agirre’s book draws upon religion, mythology, anatomy, forensics, personal experience, family upbringing, socioeconomic mores, cultural norms, and more to bring this tragedy (crime? temporary insanity?) to life. Agirre is unflinchingly honest about what makes for a bad mother, and how difficult it is to be good in what one does and in what one fights against doing, in what one thinks and in what one tries to banish from thought.

I’m not sure I can convey the charms of Such a Fun Age better than Trevor Noah did when he interviewed author Kiley Reed. It’s a smart readable suspenseful and morally complex story about race and class, and the American dream of reinventing oneself, if not climbing financially and socially. Reid choreographs a tense & sometimes beautiful pas de deux between her two protagonists—Emira, Temple alumna uncertain of what her future should hold, months away from aging off her parents’ health care plan, and Alix Chamberlain, the Instagram-sorta famous girl boss who hires Emira to babysit her child. Black women have been caregivers for white families for years, end this relationship is front at times with a deep strain of racial history and mistrust. Especially when friends get involved, love triangles form, and things go viral.

Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me is getting some well-deserved raves & attention. Like a couple of books I’ve enjoyed recently, Also a Poet blends cultural history, literary criticism, and personal memoir. Calhoun begins by trying to complete the unfinished project of her father–a biography of Frank O’Hara, a writer known primarily today as a poet but who was referred to famously in his NYT obituary as an art critic and “also a poet”. Through the course of the project, Calhoun battles her frustrations with her father, his friends, his past, and the executor of O’Hara’s estate. For all the insight that daughter & father gain into O’Hara’s life & times, it’s no spoiler to say that the book ends up being more about Calhoun & her father (an art critic and also a poet) than about the original subject, namely, Frank O’Hara. What the reader gets, however, is a complex & painfully true account of the process of writing, as well as the process of acceptance–of our families, ourselves, our pasts.

Even though I can’t remember reading a book like Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid, I feel like I’ve confronted this story before. And I mean that in the best way. It’s got magic & love, sisters quarreling & dads exerting unreasonable control. Marlinchen is the youngest of the X family—Undine, the eldest sister, can read the future in water reflections, Rosenrot, the middle daughter, can create just about any potion or cure from herbs. And they’ve all been kept to their home (the mother deceased long ago, naturally) for years. Reid opens the novel with a rare, and fateful, journey outside the family’s grounds, a trip to the opera, which introduces a love interest in the main dancer, and which summons the father’s deepest rage that they have gone out into the city, full of temptations & modern conveniences (electricity, for example) that is making their magic obsolete.