Every month, our desks at the Review pile up with dozens of soon-to-be published books, only some of which involve writers we have heard of, or subjects we know anything about. More often, we wind up with a mix somewhere between that of a cabinet of curiosities and a Little Free Library stocked by an indecisive grad student; this summer, for example, alongside many debut novels and NYRB reissues, we found an Italian chapbook of cat-themed poems from the eighties and a semiepistolary critique of psychiatry whose letters are addressed “Dear Neoliberalism.” While combing through these galleys for good ideas or good writing, I sometimes save passages I like. Here are a few I found in July and August.

—Tarpley Hitt, online editor

In our Spring 2024 issue, we published a story by Joanna Kavenna called “The Beautiful Salmon,” about a philosophy student who goes to a dinner party at the house of a “brilliant and terrifying” professor, who has cooked a beautiful salmon. A version of that story appears in Seven: or, How to Play a Game Without Rules (Faber & Faber), Kavenna’s sly and dextrous new novel about the same student and the same professor, who specializes in something called “Box Philosophy,” short for “Thinking outside the Box about Thinking outside the Box.”

At one point, the professor sends the student to Greece to track down a “poet-dentist” named Apostolakis, who is “tangentially linked to Box Philosophy,” but has lately been working on a book he’s calling the Fanouropiton, or the Catalogue of Lost Things: 

The book was divided into short entries, like an encyclopaedia. Things Lost by War. Things Lost by Human Folly. Things Lost Because No One Really Cared About Them. And, Things Lost Because Too Many People Cared About Them—a category full of betrayals and thefts. One entry in Things You’d Assume Were Too Big to Get Lost described an entire galaxy that shone approximately 2.5 million times brighter than the sun, but when various distinguished astronomers gathered to examine it further, they found it had disappeared. No one knew why—they would have needed to find it again to answer the question of why it had vanished.

 

In an email I received about a new book by the author A. Igoni Barrett, his agent succinctly summed up Blackass, Barrett’s debut novel from 2016, as follows: “A young man named Furo Wariboko woke up one morning in Lagos to find that he had transformed into a white man. Except for his ass.”

This is the epigraph to Barrett’s follow-up, Whyteface (Greywolf): 

Please don’t peace here
—WORDS SCRAWLED IN PAINT ON A PISS-STAINED WALL SOMEWHERE IN NIGERIA

 

Claire Carusillo—who recently chronicled her first month running a combination bookstore-skate-shop in Utah in a diary for the Daily—wrote a novel called The Responsible Party (Henry Holt), in which a protagonist, also named Claire Carusillo, untangles a complex family history involving several sinking ships, a mother-daughter duo who made it big in the regional vaudeville circuit, and a murder. Here’s a paragraph about one branch of the family tree: 

As a girl, my great-grandmother Dag exuded that same toxic chromium-6 glow as the perfect tens I grew up with a hundred years later. Like those dime pieces, Dag was astonishingly beautiful for Illinois and still pretty good by coastal standards, and so secure in her wherewithal to fellate any male school instructor under fifty that she never worried about participation points. And if you think I sound bitter because I wasn’t popular enough to get teen pregnant or so drunk that I crashed a Jet Ski into a floating hot dog stand during after-prom weekend, then you misunderstand me. Bully for them. I was busy back then, exfoliating my chin and decorating my laptop with puffy stickers.

 

Rosalind Belben’s Is Beauty Good was originally published in 1989, and is probably a novel, though one would be forgiven for mistaking it for a collection of stories, poems, very long koans, or, as Esther Kinsky puts it in her introduction to a new reissue (NYRB Classics), “fairy-tale pebbles.” From a chapter called “The Shy Elt”: 

She has sold all our assets & squandrd the proceeds a child cld tell her that is !!false econ. I AM perturbd.

The endnotes of Lee Cadesky’s Grub: Why We Eat, Why It Matters, and the Seven Forces That Shape Our Food (Prometheus) include an appendix titled “A Brief and Selected Chemistry of Water”: 

The atoms in water arrange themselves in a very specific way. Oxygen sits at the center of the molecule, reaching out in either direction to hold on to a hydrogen atom. Oxygen has two pairs of electrons that sit on its back side and two remaining electrons that each share themselves with a hydrogen atom to create a covalent chemical bond. This gives the water molecule a little kink.

 

We Were Forbidden (Transit) includes three short stories by Jacqueline Harpman, the late Belgian author of I Who Have Never Known Men, in translation by Ros Schwartz. From the opening of the second story, “The Outcast”:

Henriette Serrano and I were fifteen and we were friends. We would talk nonstop, mostly about literature, but we weren’t afraid to tackle any of the big issues facing humanity. We discussed the existence of God, the meaning of life, human destiny and who was likely to win the war … In 1942, after the American landing in Casablanca, Henriette switched allegiance from Pétain to De Gaulle. I tactfully refrained from comment. 

Emily Eakin’s The Frenchmen: Or, My Life In Theory (Penguin Press) is something like a group biography, though one whose eight subjects—the French theorists Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, as well as one Belgian (Paul de Man)—largely agreed the author was dead. Derrida, for example, once told an interviewer that “sometimes the one who reads a text by a philosopher, for instance a tiny paragraph, and interprets it in a rigorous, inventive, and powerfully deciphering fashion is more of a real biographer than the one who knows the whole story.”

Nevertheless, Eakin’s biographical research yields many tiny paragraphs worth unpacking:

In some ways the École Normale hadn’t changed much since Althusser first saw it. The menu at the pot—the cafeteria—had no doubt improved; when Derrida was a student, he filed a formal complaint about the food, objecting to the mushy peas and the Camembert that approached “the consistency of brick.” 

Ivan Turgenev’s Smoke, newly translated by Donald Rayfield (NYRB Classics), was panned by his peers for its scathing depiction of Russian expats, prompting him to add a foreword—which, in this copy, appears at the end: 

In view of the very various negative comments to which the tale Smoke has been subjected, some of the author’s friends have advised him to equip its edition in book form with a foreword, in which he would try to clear up any misunderstandings that have arisen. But after mature consideration of the matter, the author did not think it necessary to follow this advice.