Joan Didion. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe.

Joan Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean had me from the title: words can be hair-trigger things, to deploy them is to find oneself surrounded somehow by land mines, and despite the best of efforts and intentions, what one meant seems almost never to come through cleanly. So how does Joan Didion do it? Her words are still weapons, but the diamond-encrusted kind, as beautiful as they are deadly, and, more important, they are entirely at her command. Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of essays spanning essentially the last third of the twentieth century, is a tiny jewel box of a book, and you could read it for the prose alone—no one places a so like Joan Didion—but the real magic is that she pulls it off: she tells you what she means, and every injury is on purpose. There is a generosity to that, I think, and it feels like a gift just to understand what someone else meant even if one cannot hope to return the favor. —Hasan Altaf  Read More

Still from Hong Sang-soo’s Woman Is the Future of Man. © Arrow Films. Photo courtesy of MUBI.

I’m a big fan of the films of Hong Sang-soo, and something about them—their long, lingering scenes in bars, the conversations that trip over art and love and the differences between the sexes—feels particularly right for this moment when many of us are stuck indoors. Luckily, MUBI is running a series dedicated to his work, including 2014’s Hill of Freedom (a personal favorite, which follows a Japanese man as he wanders through Seoul trying to find a lost love, but is really about the unreliability of narrative) and 2004’s Woman Is the Future of Man (which I had never seen before), his first film to open theatrically in the U.S. Hong’s films are deceptively simple, seemingly a series of variations on a basic theme—romantic drama, alcohol, unreliable narrators—but there are always a few formal twists, a playful approach to the concept of linear time, to keep the viewer on their toes. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Sigrid Nunez. Photo: © Marion Ettlinger.

A candid attitude about death and sincere empathy for grief are wrongly put at odds: to speak with frankness is regarded as insensitive, and condolences are meant to come from the heart. But often it is the card-aisle euphemisms that ring false. Sigrid Nunez’s most recent novel, What Are You Going Through, is unflinching on the theme of mortality and thus presents an openhearted honesty so rare it feels thirst-quenching. The two major elements at play: dread about the end of the world, by way of the narrator’s ex, an academic who delivers lectures about what humanity has done to ensure the demise of everything; and the imminent death of the narrator’s friend, either by cancer or (the friend hopes) her own hand. I don’t want to call this a story without hope, because to face inevitability with the dichotomous perspective of hope versus no hope … you may as well be armed with Hallmark. Nunez renders the pain of aging, especially as a woman, with quiet humor and philosophy brought to life by sharp characters. Readers of Nunez’s previous novel, The Friend, will recognize these qualities, but here they feel honed, turned up in intensity. Afterward, I flipped open a book by a young person, about young people, and how silly it all seemed. —Lauren Kane  Read More

Still from Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

There’s a gently anarchic spirit to William Greaves’s 1968 experimental documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which follows Greaves and his crew as they attempt to film two actors staging a breakup scene in Central Park. This description barely scratches the surface of what’s really going on: Greaves himself is playing a role, that of the bumbling director—but he’s the only one in on it. The script is melodramatic; the actors—mostly a middle-class white couple, but other actors of different ages, backgrounds, and races are swapped in and out—overact; the crew—instructed to always have three cameras going, on the scene, the crew, and the park itself—stages a mutiny. Unbeknownst to Greaves, they film their grievances and critiques and present them to him once it’s all over (these make up three major sections of the movie). As one crew member remarks, this is a movie about power. But as it turns out, that was the conceit all along: at one point, Greaves explains that he was hoping they’d call him out on the bad script and provide some lines of their own. (The edits suggested by one crew member are equally terrible, to my ears, but in a kind of charmingly sixties way clearly born out of the sexual revolution.) Toward the end, they stumble across a man who claims to be homeless and living in the park; the last vestiges of an old New York bohemianism, he gives a flamboyant speech about all that’s wrong with the world. As I watched the crew wander again through the park while the credits rolled, something reminded me of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a merry band of revelers, role reversals, the breakdown of hierarchies, that summertime feeling of possibility. Immediately, I queued up Greaves’s 2005 follow-up: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Hannah Sullivan. Photo: Teresa Walton.

As much as there are perfectly crafted lines of poetry I think about often, there are perfect titles, too, that I find myself thinking about as much as the poems themselves. Recently, variations of the title “You, Very Young in New York,” the first in Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems, have been at the front of my brain—looking at old photos from old summers, making future plans, bestowing this very young in New York phase of my life with the dynamic cadence of the phrase. Though corporeally I am still in a body that is still in New York, that cadence seems to belong to a past or future self that I sometimes feel I have to go back in search of or somehow move toward. Yet Sullivan’s poem dispels this notion. While it overflows with precise detail and indulges each of the senses spectacularly, the poem makes space for slowness, too. From the first page, the reader is invited to embody the second-person narrator—to hail their cabs, to wait for age to wear down a type of unwelcome innocence. Even then, “the senses, laxly fed, are self-replenishing, / Fresh as the first time, so even the eventual / Sameness has a savour for you,” which is a gorgeous comfort to imagine now. The sumptuousness of the poem, then—the vivid colors and tastes of huckleberry jam or overripe peaches “sitting with their bruises”—happens not despite the quiet moments but inside them. The second poem, “Repeat until Time,” lets the days stretch out even more. There, “days may be where we live, but mornings are eternity. / They wake us, and every day waking is an absurdity.” I’m learning from Sullivan how to thank the sameness for its savour, to wake to the absurdity as well as the sun. “‘You will know when it’s time, when the fair is over,’” says the opening stanza of the collection, and by the time the poem ends, it still isn’t over, but “through tears, you are laughing.” —Langa Chinyoka  Read More

João Gilberto Noll. Photo courtesy of Nectar Literary.

This past week, when my roommate asked me about the plot of the João Gilberto Noll novel I was reading, Harmada, I struggled to even begin. “A man wakes up in the muck and encounters a child. He spits on the child’s wound to cure it, then walks away, eventually happening upon a play featuring two actresses. Then he has a threesome with the actresses, which eventually turns into a foursome with the company’s director, and by the way, one of the actresses is a single mother and has a baby, don’t forget. Then the man is in some kind of asylum or halfway house, remembering his life before, when he was a director and his wife abandoned him after he proved to be infertile. Then this baby, who’s now a teenage girl, is also there, and he helps her become the most famous actress in the city of Harmada. Eventually there’s a celebration, and I think this all might be a metaphor for the creative process and also Brazil, but maybe not … ” I’m still not entirely sure, but what I do know is that Harmada, translated from the Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, made me laugh out loud as much as it perplexed me, its boisterous absurdity and dreamlike logic making for a delightful way to spend an afternoon. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More