Ali Smith. Photo: Christian Sinibaldi. © Christian Sinibaldi.

Dear Mum, I know it’s not Mother’s Day in Scotland, but it is here in America. The Queen has two birthdays—maybe you can have two Mother’s Days? Anyway, I’m only halfway through Ali Smith’s Artful, but it’s already sad and clever and beautiful. The book is composed of four lectures on literature, tangled up with a narrative of mourning, and is gently self-aware in a way that isn’t annoying. You’d like it, I think. I’ve just ordered another copy online and had it posted to you. I’m sorry it won’t arrive in time for Sunday (I didn’t have much forewarning regarding this extra Mother’s Day). What else from New York? I just read Emmanuel Carrère’s My Life as a Russian Novel, and it was a splendid, if somewhat traumatic, experience. Carrère lays bare his faults in such a way as to make one feel very aware of one’s own. It, too, is sad and clever and beautiful, but I can’t recommend it to you, owing to it being occasionally pornographic. If you want to read it, you’ll have to find it for yourself; I can’t be involved. Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day! Again. —Robin Jones  Read More

Mary Miller.

I’m inclined to call Mary Miller’s new novel, Biloxi, a lonely book. The narrator, sixty-three-year-old Louis McDonald Jr., is perhaps how one might cynically imagine the average late-middle-age man. He’s recently divorced, distant from his daughter, anticipating an inheritance from his father’s death, and living a quiet, burger-and-beer-fueled existence in front of TV marathons of Naked and Afraid. On a detour to avoid his ex-wife, he impulsively adopts a dog named Layla, and his solitude becomes a strange, blundering parenthood. Louis oscillates between embitterment and naivete, cloaking his anxieties in a devotion to Layla that verges on delusion. But even as he falls prey to shortsighted impulses—which include neglecting his medications, burning through his bank account, and impersonating a Baptist missionary to meet a woman—Louis retains a genuine desire for connection, despite his insistence otherwise. The narrative remains intimate throughout, swinging between neuroses and hilarity to create an empathetic depiction of masculinity. Biloxi is everything I want in a story: a man with an affinity for leftover Chili’s, an antisocial dog with digestive challenges, and a bunch of truly dislikable people I love regardless. —Nikki Shaner-Bradford  Read More

Still from Věra Chytilová’s Daisies. Courtesy of Brooklyn Academy of Music.

You’ve probably seen Daisies, Věra Chytilová’s dizzying 1966 masterpiece, especially if you were a young woman in the early aughts browsing LiveJournal or Tumblr, where screenshots of its two heroines dancing, throwing food, and declaring themselves “spoiled” abounded. But it’s difficult to find the rest of Chytilová’s films. Over the years, I’ve seen only two: the aforementioned Daisies and 1963’s Something Different, available via the Criterion Collection. That’s why I’m excited to spend the next few days essentially living inside the Brooklyn Academy of Music for their series “The Anarchic Cinema of Věra Chytilová.” What does a teen horror movie–meets–metaphor for authoritarian repression look like under a director like Chytilová? Or a comedic critique of the aging male libido? I guess I’m going to find out this weekend—and maybe you will, too. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More