Armistead Maupin. Photo: Christopher Turner. Courtesy of Harper Perennial.

Why did I sleep on the Tales of the City television reboot? Maybe my 2019 self knew that her October 2020 counterpart would desperately need to hear one of her favorite fictional characters, Anna Madrigal (played by the incomparably sympathetic Olympia Dukakis), declare to a doom-mongering millennial documentarian: “We’re still people, aren’t we. Flawed. Narcissistic. Doing our best.” I write now to recommend the show, but with the caveat that you must read all of the books first (start here), and it’s not a bad idea to watch the previous television adaptations, either. Go ahead, immerse yourself in the five-decade epic of Mrs. Madrigal, a San Francisco landlord who resembles a fairy godmother (imagine!), and the eclectic tenants of her hilltop home as they navigate friendship, romance, and gender identity. Armistead Maupin’s Tales series found me when I was about twenty-four, and it gave me both an escape from my own situation and an education about the wider world. Like Dickens, Maupin writes for the masses, and he originally published the first five books of the Tales in serial. He gives characters names like Anna Madrigal, DeDe Halcyon, and Mary Ann Singleton; Michael Tolliver, the boy looking for love at the center of it all, is surely an outright nod. And like Dickens, Maupin is both an operatic storyteller and a documentarian of contemporary social issues, though he doesn’t judge or preach. The Tales were where I first met and loved transgender characters and where I learned about AIDS as it was experienced personally and over decades by gay men, rather than as a distant reason for high schoolers to practice safe sex. The books were, sad to say, revelatory for me even in the early aughts—but when they were first published, in the seventies and eighties, they were revolutionary. Beyond the candid treatment of then-taboo subjects, each book interweaves juicy personal stories and a dark secret that the gang works together to uncover—a stand-in for the real danger in their lives and a nudge that living honestly is the best policy. But these are cozy mysteries: whether you’ve recently broken up with your person or you’ve just found out they’re a psychopath, you can always go home to Barbary Lane, where Mrs. Madrigal will roll you a joint and affirm your human value. Now that things are feeling scarier than ever, what a godsend it is to revisit Maupin’s clear-eyed yet somehow still hopeful world. —Jane Breakell  Read More

Bryan Washington. Photo: © Dailey Hubbard.

There are many ways to cross this country. What my gentleman and I did the first summer of our romance, the September after we graduated, was take three weeks to drive along the northern United States in a sedan with four CDs, little money of our own, and no air-conditioning. By the time we drove down out of the Berkeley Hills, I wondered if he still liked me, much less loved me. The matter of what keeps people together, what makes two people a couple, is one of the central questions of Bryan Washington’s extraordinary new book Memorial, and no one writing today can make an unanswered question as satisfying, as delightful, as moving, or as vibrant. Memorial has the kind of premise for which generations of M.F.A. students would offer lesser-used digits: a young man wakes one morning to the reality of living in a Houston one-bedroom alone with a stranger—his boyfriend’s mother. Things aren’t going great with the boyfriend, who has just flown to Japan, where his estranged father is dying. Washington writes with ease, like a juggler who is adding in new objects all the time, except the book ends with everything aloft instead of in hand. In contemporary fiction, there seems to be an idea that only brutality is sophisticated and only evil is art, but basically all of Washington’s characters are capable of goodness and love. In 2020, that is one hell of a twist. I finished Memorial with a shout after several late-night sessions and handed it immediately to my man, who, it turns out, does still like me. It can be difficult to share your life with someone; Washington somehow explains this anew. Memorial, on the other hand, is easy to share. —Julia Berick  Read More

The writers featured in Two Lines Press’s Home: New Arabic Poets hail from Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and elsewhere, and all write with one eye turned toward the personal, the everyday, and the other toward the political. The result is unbelievably exciting, the kind of writing that makes you want to sit down at your desk and get to work. From Mohamad Nassereddine’s “Dogs,” translated by Huda Fakhreddine (“I want to write you / a love poem. / I search for language / for a tender word. / But words line up like trained dogs”), to Riyad al-Salih al-Hussein’s “A Marseillaise for the Neutron Age,” translated by Rana Issa and Suneela Mubayi (“We live in the neutron age / The age of quick kisses in the streets / And being utterly vanquished in the streets”), these are poems to read and reread, repeating the lines as though they were a secret between yourself and the page. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Evan Rachel Wood as Old Dolio Dyne in Miranda July’s Kajillionaire. Photo courtesy of Focus Features.

In California, you’re always waiting for the Big One. This shaky ground serves as the foundation for Miranda July’s latest film, Kajillionaire, in which the Big One could be either an earthquake or a windfall for an oddball family of three who get by pulling scams and living in the leaky office of a bubble factory. But that’s how they like it, the patriarch claims, saying, “Everybody wants to be a Kajillionaire. I prefer to just skim.” His twenty-six-year-old daughter, Old Dolio, has never known anything but this perpetual absence of money, comfort, and so-called tender feeling. Along comes Melanie, who tries to show Old Dolio a world beyond her parents. Small earthquakes anticipate Old Dolio’s reckoning, interrupting moments of potential intimacy. But little tendernesses urge her to crawl out from the bubble factory basement or the gas station bathroom stall. Even the simplest acts of affection are transcendent, surprising: getting her hair brushed, the word hon. Fans of July’s work will not be surprised by the strangeness—the intricate motions of the bodies, the strange encounters, the role-playing—but they might not expect the sense of resolution. This ending is hard earned, though. The cinematography brings out the precious moments of softness as the screen suddenly is overtaken by a sunspot and the soundscape swells. “I’m lucky … I won’t miss my life,” Old Dolio says when she thinks the Big One has come. She knows this is it, she says, because she’s always been told that when it comes, “it will be all dark all around.” Then she opens the door to blinding light. —Langa Chinyoka
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Still from We Are Who We Are. Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis / HBO.

The promotion for Luca Guadagnino’s new miniseries, We Are Who We Are, was vague at best, teasing not much more than a gorgeous trailer, Kid Cudi and Chloë Sevigny in starring roles, and the promise of some kind of sun-drenched coming-of-age story set in Italy. For me, at least, that was enough. In the opening of the trailer, the two main characters are sitting on a boat. One asks, “Why do you read poetry?” And the other responds, “Every word means something.” When the first episode premiered this Monday, I took these words as instruction, trying to figure out exactly what I was watching, what it would become. Fourteen and brimming embarrassingly with earnestness and angst in equal measure, both characters seem to be doing the same. Fraser, the protagonist and new kid in town, is achingly New York. Being of the city seems to be the only information he’ll willingly, proudly give about himself, and I laugh, because anyone from here can understand that. Despite his ostentatious clothing, his bleached hair and painted nails, he doesn’t seem to have a sense of himself. Already the show is painting a picture made up of details he can’t define or articulate. But we see him at his most vulnerable, at his most violent, so predictably giving himself away. There are seven more episodes in the series, which will carry me to November. Good. I’d been starting to wonder what else I would have to talk about come October, when I can no longer sigh over the lost summer and wallow in nostalgia. —Langa Chinyoka  Read More

Joanna Klink. Photo: © Antonia Wolf.

When I picked up Joanna Klink’s new poetry collection The Nightfields, I had half a mind to rush to the main event, Night Sky—a long sequence inspired by James Turrell’s massive land art project Roden Crater. (Paris Review readers got a preview of Night Sky in the Fall 2018 issue). For fans of Turrell (I consider myself one, as do Drake and, recently on the Daily, Scott O’Connor), the cinder cone crater is the culmination of his life’s work—and also a fiercely guarded work in progress. The Arizona site is closed to the public, leaving followers to squint over elevation drawings at museum exhibitions and trawl the internet for artist-approved and illicit photos. Now we can turn to Klink’s metaphysical sequence to get a different sort of visit to the earth work. Her poems do a tricky thing of being at once urgent and geologically slow (every breath and breeze is noticed, but time passes such that copper is “greening” and stars “thicken”); the sequence is imbued with depth and color and all the possibilities of a pitch-black night. Before I leave, I should acknowledge my other half a mind: like a dutiful editor, I started The Nightfields at the beginning and found prior to Night Sky several exquisite poems about the passage of time (“Most weeks I am no more than the color of the walls / in the room where we sit”) and the liminal space between seasons (“The bright key of morning. / The bay fanned with foam”) that make the quotidian nearly as beautiful as Turrell’s monument. —Emily Nemens  Read More