July 5, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Fathers, Fleabag, and the French Toast of Agony By The Paris Review 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
June 28, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Peonies, Poetry, and Passing Things By The Paris Review 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
June 21, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Ballet, Bob Dylan, and Black Smudges By The Paris Review 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
June 14, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Jai Paul, Journalists, and Just Policies By The Paris Review 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
June 7, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bunnies, Berries, and Baffling Omissions By The Paris Review Mona Awad. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe. Mona Awad’s prose is dangerous. She crafts beautiful meals laced with poison; her new novel Bunny is a satirical glimpse into elite education that transforms a college into the deep, dark woods of a fairy tale. Set on the ivy-covered campus of Warren University, a monied institution gleaming at the heart of a poverty-stricken, crime-ridden city, Bunny follows the M.F.A. candidate Samantha Heather Mackey as she becomes entwined with four fellow writing students, a glittering, eerie group of women who call one another “Bunny.” The Bunnies lure Samantha into their mysterious Workshop, where “kill your darlings” is a literal practice, the creative process a twee but twisted game of playing god(dess). Awad’s words have shadows to them, dual meanings that she flexes in her surreal descriptions of the university’s faculty and in the academic jargon the Bunnies employ to justify their desires. And though Bunny is steeped in strange magic, real forces lurk throughout the novel, lying just past the confines of campus: poverty, gentrification, mental illness. The Bunnies’ creativity is equally driven by magic as it is by class; they “inherited it, like our summer houses, our grand pianos, our perfect, nuanced taste.” Awad captures the allure of these tastemakers, the desire to be part of a we, and the insidiousness that comes with power, a “necklace gleaming in the tall grass that could be a snake.” —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More
May 31, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Odes, #Ads, and Amazing Grace By The Paris Review Kathryn Scanlan. Recently, a friend told me about a job she’d had clearing out an apartment in Chelsea. It belonged to a woman who’d recently died, a woman my friend had never met. The woman was a hoarder, and when her apartment became impassible, she’d bought the one next door. In her final days, just enough space was cleared in her first apartment for her bed and hospice nurses. Slowly, my friend pieced together the woman’s life—an antique Chinese tea case shoved full of highlighters, hundreds of self-help books, thousands of photographs. A photo of the woman and her husband, who’d left her in her youth, naked in the bath with their cat; photos from her solo travels to Mongolia, Israel, and China. The woman had died alone, estranged from her family, but in death, through her photographs, my friend fell in love with her. Who wouldn’t? There’s something about encountering only the most intimate remnants of a life that can make us feel it is our own. Something similar happened to the writer Kathryn Scanlan when she came across a stranger’s diary in a box at an estate sale. The diary chronicled the years 1968 through 1972 in a small town in Illinois. Its owner was eighty-six when she began to write in it. For a decade, Scanlan read, cut, reread, and rearranged the words in the diary until she could no longer tell what was her own. The result, an elegant and unpretentious volume published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next week as Aug 9 — Fog, grants every reader that simultaneous pull between mystery and intimacy. Some pages contain only a single sentence: “Robin on nest today,” “Terrible windy everything loose is traveling.” And yet buried within this pragmatic poetry (“Fog out. I sure slept. Took a Nytol.”) is a life, a death. These barest clues—of new lights installed and tomatoes canned, tombstones bought and weeds tormented, a self-help book with a photograph from decades before tucked inside—are the ones that make us fall in love. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More