Silvina Ocampo. Photo: Adolfo Bioy Casares. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I love a good hundred-page novel. Too many books go for quantity over quality, choosing to bloat their page counts with unnecessary plot twists—and don’t even get me started on that silly term novella. Not so for Silvina Ocampo’s The Promise, recently translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell. Ocampo—an aristocratic Argentine who was friendly with Borges and whose elder sister Victoria was the founder of the prestigious literary journal Sur—purportedly took twenty-five years to finish The Promise, and every sentence glints with precision. The plot is minimal at best: While traveling from Buenos Aires to Cape Town to visit family, the narrator falls ill. On the way back to Argentina, she falls off the side of the ship and spends the rest of the book swimming—and presumably, eventually drowning—as she recalls various persons and experiences from her life back home. A few characters reoccur: Leandro, an untrustworthy doctor; Irene, his lover; and Gabriela, also known as Gabriel, Irene’s daughter. Entire paragraphs repeat themselves with small variations, and water seeps in again and again. The confusion is part of the appeal—what you’re after are the sentences, which have the feel of epigrams: “I envy people who cry; they show off their tears like necklaces,” goes one. “Women love with their eyes closed, men with their eyes open,” goes another. I think I took a photo of nearly every other page so as not to forget them. The twenty-five years of work were worth it. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Ha Seong-nan.

There’s something pleasingly matter-of-fact to the many off-kilter moments found in Ha Seong-nan’s short story collection Flowers of Mold (translated from the Korean by Janet Hong). When problems arise for her characters—a potential intruder in a woman’s farmhouse bedroom, a woman’s loss of memory following the arrival of a new neighbor, a group of tenants faced with eviction by a spoiled and wealthy landlord—their approaches to solving them are no-nonsense, even as the stories themselves border the surreal logic of dreams. The tenants hatch a plan to kill their landlord; the woman’s memory loss betrays her own place within her family; the intruder may exist and may be buried in the orchard. Ha lends a critical eye to capitalism, advertising, and gender in contemporary South Korea, and in each story, she combines the ordinary with the extraordinary to truly disquieting effect. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Damon Daunno as Curly and Mary Testa as Aunt Eller in Oklahoma! © Little Fang.

My junior year of high school, I was not asked to the prom. Bear in mind that my high school had 4,500 students and that although 2,250 of them were eligible to attend this dance, not a single person deigned to be my date. I went, instead, to see Oklahoma! A lovely time, to be sure, but boring as all get-out. While my peers enjoyed a disastrous evening of sex, drugs, and revelry, I watched that bland production from a blurry distance. At Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! last weekend, I found these two evenings had merged into a marvelous party, to which I had finally, belatedly been invited. Twitter chatter informed me this was “Sexy Oklahoma!,” and while it certainly is sexy, it’s also so delightful I beamed through much of the first act. It’s funny and warm. The house lights are almost always up, and they serve chili during intermission. First, we are primed with tenderness; then, tragedy unfolds, and its arrival is shocking, cold, and truthful. I loved it, and I’m pretty darn sure it loved me back—if only for one night. —Noor Qasim  Read More

Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Adam Shemper.

Over the holiday weekend, I devoured The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom’s remarkable and deeply researched memoir about her family’s New Orleans home. The youngest of twelve siblings, Broom grew up in a lively—and at times chaotic—shotgun-style house in the neighborhood of New Orleans East. Bringing together oral history, archival research, and first-person narrative, Broom weaves a multigenerational story of place that celebrates and complicates one of our nation’s most mythologized cities. “The Yellow House was witness to our lives,” writes Broom. And indeed, the house itself is essentially the protagonist of the story, a living organism animated by the decades of life that course through it like a pulse. Broom is an uncommonly thoughtful archaeologist of her own past, uncovering fragments of near-forgotten stories, dusting them off, and delicately piecing them back together. What emerges is an astonishing and kinetic portrait of the way places shape, and are shaped by, the people who love them. —Cornelia Channing  Read More

Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Caffe Trieste, 2012. Photo: Christopher Michel (CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)). Via Wikimedia Commons.

I have always loved November. I don’t know if that’s because I was born in it or because it’s when fall becomes the cruelest version of itself. The air bites; the final leaves fall to the ground. Either way, the month is tailor-made for nostalgia. At times like these, I often turn to the first poet I ever loved, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In high school, I memorized “The Pennycandystore beyond the El” and recited it to myself daily as a strange sort of mantra. At the time, I thought myself the girl in the poem, a heaving form full of tragedy and potential. But now, I see I am the cat, strolling among the sweets, unhurried and unbothered. I don’t know if I’ll ever be the man. Or maybe that’s all I’ve ever been, sitting in the “semigloom,” “in love with unreality.” —Noor Qasim  Read More

Nesrine Malik.

“Every social unit,” Nesrine Malik writes in We Need New Stories, “from the family to the nation state, functions on the basis of mythology … Some myths are less useful than others, and some are dangerously regressive.” Over the course of a tight two hundred sixty pages, Malik discusses six of the most influential myths in our “age of discontent.” Focusing on the U.S. and the UK, Malik is keenly aware of our moment—one of “political awakening and despair, when it is becoming clear that something (is) not working, where there (is) fear and distress but also a healthy impulse to resist and mobilize.” Too often, Malik argues, we are “still fixated on the idea of returning to a time before it all went wrong, rather than the recognition that things have been going wrong all along.” Thus, male, white, heteronormative power—presented as the preordained natural order of things—remains unchallenged. “A lack of uniformity breeds dissent,” Malik states, “and so it is logical that diversity of thought becomes a threat.” If so, let us say that this book is a welcome threat. Furthermore, it is one that has just found a U.S. publisher. Announcing the deal on Twitter last week, Malik wrote: “it’s hard to get publishers to back books by black women that are not exclusively about the experiences of black women. An authoritative non-fiction non-first person voice is still broadly the preserve of white men. So am heartened by the support.” I am heartened, too. —Robin Jones  Read More