August 16, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cranberries, Canzones, and Catharsis By The Paris Review Téa Obreht. Photo: Ilan Harel. Many things will be said about Inland, Téa Obreht’s second novel. I can only hope to settle my tent with the believers. A Western as far as the eye can see, Inland starts with lickins and bounties and ends with them, too, teasing your sense of exploration like you’re home alone with the radio tuned to The Lone Ranger. But this is not The Lone Ranger; there are no heroes or, blessedly, “complexly wrought antiheroes.” Instead, reading Inland feels like a rare chance to read about people, history, and myth all at once without any part canceling out the others. The book is a marriage between some sort of Howard Zinn history lesson, E. L. Doctorow at his best, and the kind of murkily beautiful folktale that is so vivid in Obreht’s first novel, The Tiger’s Wife. I stayed up very late with Lurie, an outlaw with an improbable, unforgettable camel companion, and Nora, a homesteader with all the plagues, and felt the deep possibility of the impossible. It is a trick of the light that allows Obreht to introduce the sweet, downy Goatie (“Nobody could prove she was really a goat, and nobody could prove she was really a sheep”) while asking broad questions about American settlement, belonging, race, and undying denial of water scarcity. There are newspaper fights and gunfights and ghosts and romance, and I wish they’d all appeared earlier in the summer so I could tell the world THIS IS YOUR SUMMER READ. But in Inland, the past is present and will continue to be so into the fall and the next and the next. —Julia Berick Read More
August 9, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Barbecues, Beyoncé, and the Bourgeoisie By The Paris Review Nancy Hale. Photo courtesy of the Nancy Hale Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. Before picking up Where the Light Falls—a selection of Nancy Hale’s short stories forthcoming from Library of America this September—I had never heard of her. My ignorance, unfortunately, seems to be common. Despite being one of The New Yorker’s most prolific writers from the thirties to the sixties and a recipient of ten O. Henry Awards, Hale has been woefully overlooked. In some ways, this is understandable. Her concerns are primarily upper-crust, her scenes largely composed of WASPs feeling fraught. But how many men have written about these subjects to lasting acclaim? And while Lauren Groff, the collection’s editor, argues that Hale’s bourgeois subjects belie fierce political commitments, Hale’s prose is so compelling I hardly care. Every sentence pulses with energy and specificity. In “Midsummer,” Hale makes teen angst exciting again: “She wanted to climb the huge pine tree on the lawn, throw herself upward to the top by some passionate propulsion, and stretch her arms wildly to the sky. But she could only sit around interminably in chairs on the lawn in the heat and quiet, beating with hate and awareness and bewilderment and violence, all incomprehensible to her and pulling her apart.” Hale’s stories are rich, delightful, and often strange. They nearly always end abruptly, as if on an inhale, preparing you for whatever comes next. —Noor Qasim Read More
August 2, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Free Verse, Farewells, and Fist City By The Paris Review Nell Zink. Photo: Francesca Torricelli. Nell Zink’s Doxology is the first truly great novel to tackle the 2016 election. I’ve been a fan of Zink’s work since The Wallcreeper, but in this new novel, she’s sharper and slyer than ever before. At times, it almost feels like she’s winking at Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, with its indie-rock musician character and D.C. environmentalist subplot. But Zink turns everything on its head: the musician isn’t sexy but an idiot savant; the worldly D.C. operative isn’t greedy but instead trying to defeat Trump; the environmentalists’ idealism rapidly turns self-serving. And no one can write a one-liner like Zink: New York, for instance, is “a city devoted to making the labor theory of value look stupid.” In 2016, I briefly worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign. I’d never worked in politics before, and I’ll never work in them again; I joined the campaign out of a sense of fear, an obligation to do something, anything, in the face of Trump. We all know how that ended. But Zink, from her perch abroad, captures those doomed final days before November 8, 2016, more accurately than any breathlessly reported account from any political reporter or former campaign worker. “Hillary can beat a Republican, but she can’t beat a totemic forest spirit,” a character tries to explain at one point to a few hapless campaign staffers. It doesn’t work, of course. Nothing worked in real life either. But at least we have Nell Zink to show us how we got here. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
July 26, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: From Aphorisms to Zorn By The Paris Review While there are many things to say about the philosophical weightiness of the aphorism, or about its particular wit, it is my personal feeling that the best part of an aphorism is sharing it with someone. (The form of the tweet, an aphorism made expressly for sharing, perhaps proves this point.) Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art was given to me as a token from City Lights Books by someone who had just returned from San Francisco—a tangible way of sharing an experience. It is a pocket-size book of critical compasses, statements such as “A lyric poem must rise beyond sounds found in alphabet soup” and “Like a field of sunflowers, a poem should not have to be explained.” I won’t say that lengthy analysis wouldn’t bring you the same insights, but it certainly wouldn’t give you anything as enjoyable to read aloud to a companion. —Lauren Kane Read More
July 19, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mothers, Moons, and Marc Maron By The Paris Review 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
July 12, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Whales, Waitresses, and Winogrand By The Paris Review 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