September 19, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Cesare Pavese’s The Leucothea Dialogues By Alec Mapes-Frances The Centrale Montemartini. Photograph by Briner2306, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Cesare Pavese referred to his Dialoghi con Leucò (The Leucothea Dialogues) as “a conversation between divinity and humanity.” In the twenty-seven dialogues, written between 1945 and 1947, figures from ancient Greek mythology discuss things like desire, fate, language, memory, nature, and death. The speakers, many of whom have been extracted from the narratives in which they serve as tragic heroes or gods, exchange words in a space that might be nowhere or anywhere. They reflect on their own existences and dilemmas, debating, interrogating, or confiding in one another. What is it to be Orpheus, Prometheus, Oedipus, Sappho, Endymion, Hermes, or Ixion? What is it to be in love, to be cursed, to be lost, to lose one’s love, to remember, to smile? And what is it to be mortal, to be subject to death, or to be immortal, to lack a death of one’s own? (The author’s suicide, three years after the publication of the Dialogues, gives many of these questions an autobiographical resonance, and has made the book, which he was carrying at the time of his death, into a mythical object.) Read More
September 19, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Chris Kraus’s The Four Spent the Day Together By Sophie Madeline Dess Chris Kraus, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Chris Kraus is the author of a book called I Love Dick. Chris Kraus is also the author of The Four Spent the Day Together, a new novel in which the main character, Catt Greene, is the author of a book called I Love Dick. Catt jokes that I Love Dick is “the one with the cover everyone posed with and tweeted.” Catt suspects at least a few of the people who pose with her book haven’t actually read it, but they like what owning the book implies: that they, too, love dick. It makes no difference that the novel is not exactly about loving dick, but about loving Dick, a particular man, not a sex organ. Read More
September 19, 2025 The Review’s Review Fall Books: On Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds and The Ice Palace By Karl Ove Knausgaard Vesaas’s home in Telemark, Norway. National Library of Norway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. There are books that don’t leave you once you have finished reading them but remain with you, some for the rest of your life. To me Tarjei Vesaas’s two masterpieces, The Birds and The Ice Palace, are such books. This is not just because they are good—the world is full of good books—but also because they did something to me, changed something in me. I think of The Birds as a place, a place where something vital becomes visible, something that is always present but goes unnoticed, something that Vesaas’s novel, through its great attentiveness, allows to appear. The protagonist is named Mattis. He is mentally disabled and lives with his sister, unable to provide for himself. In social settings he is helpless, he senses other people’s wills and demands but is unable to satisfy them, he gets all tangled up inside. But when he is by himself, in the forest, for instance, or out on the lake below the house they live in, his being opens up, and the world he knows, the world of nature, flows through him; in his relation to it, he is free and unfettered. The linguistic sensibility that Vesaas evinces to accomplish this is unsurpassed. The same sensibility is found in The Ice Palace, which is about an encounter between two eleven-year-old girls, Siss and Unn. They are drawn to each other without knowing why, and their encounter—where everything that is at stake, everything that happens between them is wordless—takes place in an indefinite zone between sensations, emotions, and thoughts, a zone in the novel with its own animal alertness. Seen from the outside, it is difficult to imagine a literature further from the center than these two books. The center of power, the center of money, the center of the entertainment industry. We are in the Norwegian countryside in the fifties, in the mind of a village idiot and in the mind of an eleven-year-old prepubescent girl. And the author himself, Tarjei Vesaas, came from a small, isolated inland village, surrounded by deep forests and high mountains, where he lived his entire life, and he wrote his books in Nynorsk, a language used by a mere half a million people. But when you open The Birds or The Ice Palace and begin to read, you are transported not to the periphery of the world but to its very midst. The circumstances of life in which the main characters, Mattis and Siss, find themselves, are far removed from the reader’s, but their being, their existential presence, is not. And this span of the reading experience is in a sense built into the books themselves, in their rhythm and overarching theme: the interplay between the familiar and the foreign, the near and the far, the graspable and the unfathomable. Vesaas himself called this the “Great Cycle.” Read More
September 18, 2025 Diaries Diary, 1978 By Celia Paul Photograph courtesy of Celia Paul. This diary entry was written on November 15, 1978, just after my nineteenth birthday, before Lucian Freud took me to meet Frank Auerbach for the first time. And the nervous head-jerks and twists of a wild bird. He receives you nervously, tentatively at first and then lunges at you, kissing you as though he would drown you, then as suddenly withdraws and with a serious, abstracted expression, moves towards the hall. Read More
September 17, 2025 First Person Indian Names By Julian Brave NoiseCat Ed Archie NoiseCat, Coyote Survives the Night. Courtesy of Julian Brave NoiseCat. The night watchman who found my newborn father in the dumpster said his cries for life sounded like a cat. But that was pure, if darkly ironic, coincidence. Because our last name, NoiseCat, originally had nothing to do with noises or cats. Instead, “Noiscat,” as it was once written, is a missionary’s bastardization of our ancestral name, Newísket. My family was colonized so hard we don’t remember what Newísket means. What I do know is that the name belonged to my great-grandmother Alice Noiscat from the village of Canoe Creek on the Fraser River. Listening to family and elders, I figure Alice was either a daughter, granddaughter, orphan, or slave of Copper Johnny Noiscat. Copper Johnny must’ve been both clever and industrious. During the Gold Rush and subsequent settlement of the colony and then province of British Columbia, he laid claim to a meadow that still bears his name. Today, Copper Johnny Meadow Indian Reserve No. 8 is part of the reserve lands of the remote Stswecem’c/Xget’tem (Canoe Creek/Dog Creek) First Nation. I’m not sure what Copper referred to. Maybe it referred to his red skin—a name stuck on him by semé7 (whites) who gave Indians names for amusement and convenience: “Oh yeah, this one’s ‘Indian Jim’ and that one’s ‘Copper Johnny.’ ” (In Secwepemctsín, the 7 denotes a glottal stop. The word kyé7e, “grandmother,” for example, is pronounced “kya-ah.”) Or maybe it referred to his wealth. In the Indigenous Northwest, copper is a prized trade good signifying that its owner has a wealth of food and culture to share. In a world where Indians had all our land taken from us, an Indian with land like Copper Johnny was rich. Copper Johnny Meadow may be the ancestral territory of the Newískets going back to some mythic progenitor whose deeds were marked and remembered on that land—through creation, transformation, and forces both natural and supernatural that make our world the way it is—all the way back to Coyote and whoever the first Newísket was. Or maybe, Copper Johnny is that first Newísket. He’s the oldest one we still remember today. Based on conversations with my kyé7e, Alice’s daughter, the name Newísket could mean a couple of things—maybe “Long Day” or “Tall Timber Day.” But to see how that might be the case, it’s necessary to understand some of the history and peculiarities of Secwepemctsín and the Salish languages. Because like the meaning of my name, my ancestral tongues are fast slipping from the Land of the Living to that of the dead. Read More
September 16, 2025 Diaries Tour Diary, 2008 By Natasha Stagg Photograph by Alexander Fleming. Courtesy of Natasha Stagg. In 2008, I graduated from the University of Michigan and went on a North American tour as the merch girl for my boyfriend at the time, a drummer some fourteen years older than me in an indie band. I didn’t have a smartphone or laptop and perhaps couldn’t find the privacy to write in a notebook from the van, so I typed a “tour diary” in the days after we returned, on a platform that I had until recently assumed was deleted. By 2008, the band had gone through several lineup changes since its start. The men—my boyfriend and the lead singer—were the only remaining original members. The women—a bassist and a second guitarist, also backup singers—had been hired to replace other women, whom I had already gotten to know and like. I mention this as context because my connection to a previous iteration may have been subtly felt. Either way, I’m sure my boyfriend had to defend the decision to take me along. Everyone else was older and treated the band as a job, because it was. I had been hired to sell T-shirts but treated the tour as a vacation from my day job (selling groceries). I’ve changed the names of band members because I’m not in touch with any of them and can’t ask their permission to publish this. I’ve also obscured or deleted the names of other bands, because mostly I wrote about how bad they were and how, in one case, I broke their merch intentionally. Accidentally rediscovering these notes, I am mostly struck by my own immaturity, although perhaps I shouldn’t be. It’s clear to me now that I was trying to convince myself of some intolerable situation, something that was worse than (or larger than?) leaving college and entering so-called real life. May 15, 2008 Subterranean – Chicago, Illinois Wake up around 11 A.M. to Andy’s mother in his house [in Ann Arbor, Michigan]. Have breakfast nervously, making sure I have everything. Ride in the back seat (because I’m told to) while Andy drops off his mother at a dumpster so she can dive in it. Go back to Andy’s house. Ben [the singer/guitarist], Carly [the second guitarist], and Daria [the bassist] arrive, having driven a rented van and trailer from the band’s practice space outside of Detroit. They help us load our suitcases into the trailer, which already has Andy’s drums in it. Ben drives us to Chicago. Early show, 7:30 P.M., not many people because of a false advertisement, bad opening band (lead singer steals all our free PBR tallboys and chugs them) but good show from [the touring opener]. Meet Ernest, our tour manager, who flew in from El Paso, I think. Pack up, check into the hotel (six of us in one room), and go across the street to a diner. Eat, then go back to the hotel to watch TV and go to sleep. Read More