Oliver Beer. Photo: Adam Reich. © the artist.

Every object, the British artist Oliver Beer said as he introduced his Vessel Orchestra last Friday at the Met Breuer, makes a sound, different for each object but always the same sound, constant and unchanging: the thing sings forever at an unchanging pitch. In this installation, thirty-two objects drawn from around the museum, including a Miró vase from 1942 and a five-thousand-year-old ceramic jar from Iran, have been hooked up to tiny microphones and speakers. I don’t at all understand how this works, but when a certain note is played, you can hear the object whose note it is respond. The Vessel Orchestra will be on view at the Met Breuer until August 11, and every Friday, a different group of musicians and writers will, essentially, “play” it. The artists at the performance I attended were the band Mashrou’ Leila and the novelist Rabih Alameddine, who read a series of texts about robing and disrobing, veiling and unveiling. The experience was mysterious to me, the songs being sung mostly in a language I don’t understand, the vases and jars resonating via a process as inexplicable to me as the one that creates consciousness. But there was resonance, harmony, and it made me think that perhaps those are the things we should be seeking—trying not to change ourselves in whatever ways are fashionable but to tune ourselves, to find our own frequencies; trying not to make ourselves heard but just to find resonance with whatever out there is tuned the same. —Hasan Altaf Read More

Leslie Jamison. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Earlier this week I had the rare and enviable—if slightly inconvenient—experience of missing a subway stop because I was so engrossed in what I was reading. The culprit: the first essay in Leslie Jamison’s collection Make It Scream, Make It Burn, forthcoming from Little, Brown in September. In the offending essay, “52 Blue,” Jamison explores the science and mythology surrounding a whale whose uncommon song, inaudible to other members of the species, earned him the title “The Loneliest Whale in The World.” Part reportage, part philosophical musing, Jamison’s meandering prose seeks to understand what the whale represents—morally, symbolically, ecologically—to the community of scientists, artists, and internet followers who identify with it. What emerges is a searching and insightful meditation on obsession, longing, and the telling ways we seek to draw meaning from the natural world. The other thirteen essays in the collection (which can easily be torn through, though should really be savored) contain observations on an eclectic array of subjects, from the eerie past-life memories of young children, to the online community Second Life, to the harrowing legacy of the Sri Lankan civil war. Like the glass in a kaleidoscope, Jamison’s fine-tuned attention seems capable of refracting whatever subject it touches. When I finally looked up from the page—a full two stops past my apartment—it was with a renewed sense of wonder. —Cornelia Channing  Read More

Ingeborg Bachmann. Photo: Heinz Bachmann.

I knew I was going to appreciate Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 cult classic Malina before I even picked it up—not only have I enjoyed reading her poetry in the past (some of which has been published in the pages of this very magazine), she’s also a major influence on one of my favorite writers, Elfriede Jelinek. And so I sat down this past weekend to finally read Malina, recently reissued by New Directions, with a great eagerness—but I didn’t realize just how profoundly it would affect me. The novel is almost impossible to describe—dense and experimental, it’s essentially a portrait of one woman’s psychological unraveling. The narrator, a nameless writer in Vienna, is torn between obsessive relationships with two different men: Ivan and the mysterious Malina, who may or may not be real. But the book is also about trauma and shame and the implicit violence that lurks in the relationships between women and men. Many pages are dedicated to a series of nightmarish visions the narrator has about her father, seemingly based on Bachmann’s hatred of her own Nazi father. Like Jelinek after her, Bachmann delineates the relationship between patriarchy and fascism to extraordinary effect, and though her vision may be bleak, it is one of profound, disquieting importance. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Ben Lerner. © John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Used with permission.

Ben Lerner’s forthcoming novel The Topeka School weaves a masterful narrative of the impact that mental illness, misogyny, homophobia, politics, and religion have on children who want to be men. The book follows high school debate champion Adam Gordon’s coming of age in the nineties, told through the voices of his psychoanalyst parents, interspersed with the story of his bullied childhood peer, Darren, to form an intricate exploration of Topeka and the way we recall our youth. There is a tension in the fallibility of each memory, which Lerner’s characters examine and reexamine through the lenses of adulthood, therapy, and language. As Adam discovers poetry, the book—and thus his life—takes the form of art, something edited and revised and set out for scrutiny. In the present day, Adam demands, “Tell me what led up to this scene,” and though The Topeka School is heavily steeped in mid-90’s American liberalism and home phone lines, Lerner plots history with a contemporary eye to reconcile where we were then with where we stand now. It’s rare to find a book that is simultaneously searing in its social critique and so lush in its prose that it verges on poetry —Nikki Shaner-Bradford  Read More

Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Photo: Erik Tanner.

The legendary profiler Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s debut novel, Fleishman Is in Trouble, lives up to the hype. In it, the hardworking hepatologist Toby Fleishman explores the world of dating apps after his estranged wife, Rachel, disappears, leaving their two children in his care. But Brodesser-Akner’s story is more complex than it at first seems. Told through the voice of Toby’s longtime friend Libby, a former men’s-magazine writer who’s become a full-time mother, Fleishman Is in Trouble is a book that unspools. Within the contours of Toby’s story live those of the women he knows and misunderstands, whose emotional, physical, and mental labor shape and trim the New York that Brodesser-Akner evokes. In a nearly Dickensian style, Brodesser-Akner creates a city epic that delves into the gender divisions of housework, marriage, divorce, and the anxiety of middle age with wit and brutal honesty. At one point, Libby laments her inability to end with anger in her writing, to access fire without internalized shame. But in telling Toby’s tale, Libby, and therefore Taffy, tells “all the sides of the story, even the ones that hurt to look at directly.” —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More

Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: © K. Dubiel.

How to describe Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead? Unlike her Man Booker International Prize–winning novel Flights, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead—first published in Poland in 2009 and newly translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones—has a plot. It follows Janina Duszejko, an amateur astrologer and former engineer-turned-teacher, and the series of murders that occur over the course of a winter in a remote Polish town near the Czech border. Unlike Mrs. Duszejko, a vegetarian who fondly refers to local deer as “Young Ladies” and who, alongside her former pupil Dizzy, likes to translate the poetry of William Blake for fun, the murder victims are all men, all crude, and all hunters. Are the town’s animals taking their revenge? Or is something else going on? While the book itself is a damning indictment of humanity’s attempts to control and destroy nature, it never feels didactic; Mrs. Duszejko’s narration, with its old-fashioned capitalizations and tangents about astrological charts, is equal parts charming and inspiring. Tokarczuk, with her ability to marry the political, the philosophical, and the eccentric, creates a stirring defense of the natural world, even when it is threatened by consumerism and the Catholic Church. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More