Nicole Claveloux. Photo courtesy of New York Review Books.

The topic of night terrors has come up in a slew of my conversations lately. In part, this is due to the fact that I’ve been hanging out with a precocious two-year-old with rare but potent insomniac nights. But I also have Nicole Claveloux to thank for my current fixation on hypnagogic hallucinations, those surreal visions that crop up at the threshold of consciousness. Claveloux’s graphic short stories from the late seventies, originally written in French and published for the first time in English in 2017 as The Green Hand and Other Stories, are not literal renderings of night terrors. But the comics are nightmarish in the best sense—absurd, sharply funny, visceral, revealing. I read the collection in one big gulp, prickling with affection for the band of outsiders that populates its pages: a root vegetable with aspirations of becoming a panther, a misanthropic bird, a talking houseplant, a devilishly clever kid on the cusp of puberty. —Jay Graham  Read More

Cynthia Cruz. Photo: Steven Page. Courtesy of Cruz.

America: land of the free, home of the brave. A country, as our cultural mythos would have it, sans the social restrictions of the Old World. A country, thanks to the competitive fervor of meritocratic capitalism, without class. But we know this isn’t true: the idea of the United States as a land of the Protestant work ethic and the righteously rich is a fantasy, one especially relevant in the world of the arts. As the poet Cynthia Cruz painstakingly illustrates in her new book The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, an expansion of her 2019 essay of the same name, the working class is more often than not shut out of the arts in the contemporary U.S., reliant as this world is on low wages, credentialism, and social networking. In chapters that combine her own personal experiences as a working-class writer and the work of many American and international writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers—including Clarice Lispector, Barbara Loden, James Baldwin, the Jam, Cat Power, and more—Cruz explores the “melancholia” that results when a working-class artist abandons their origins and is subsumed into the middle and upper classes. In a world that denies their very existence, she argues, the working-class artist is a ghost: “neither dead nor alive, the working class exists between worlds.” Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Mark Fisher and Freud, as well as some good old-fashioned proletarian internationalism, Cruz makes a convincing argument as to how the working class can best resist assimilation and instead continue to make provocative, formally experimental work that transcends the borders of both class and country. —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Becka Mara McKay. Photo courtesy of McKay.

Becka Mara McKay once asked me to make a list of things one would never find in a poem, the lesson being that an exploration of lawn mower parts or the muscles used while bowling or natural marble patterns might yield some wonderful language, and if we’re not putting wonderful language in poetry, then where will all this wonderful language end up? A lot of wonderful language has found its way into McKay’s latest collection, The Little Book of No Consolation, which is structured around seldom-used terms such as scorse, inhabitiveness, wood want, and donkey’s breakfast. In “from the Dictionary of Misremembered English” she writes, “I can only bless you once, says the Angel / of Syntax, who believes we are born among / words the way birds are born among wings.” These poems investigate the layered intricacies of language itself as much as they plumb the depths of their subject matters, which tend toward the intersection of the animal, the translatable, and the mysteries of faith, locked together like calcite crystals in mizzi stone, expertly sawn, sanded, and polished to a mirror finish. —Christopher Notarnicola  Read More

César Aira. Photo: Nina Subin. Courtesy of New Directions.

César Aira’s latest book to appear in English, The Divorce (translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews), brings to mind an older approach to fiction—that of pure fabular storytelling, unencumbered by character development or realism. The plot is essentially nonexistent: a freshly divorced academic travels from Providence, Rhode Island, to Buenos Aires in order to distract himself from his emotions, and spends a day sitting outside a café around the corner from his guesthouse. While sitting there and chatting with a video artist named Leticia, he encounters Enrique, the guesthouse owner, who is holding a bicycle and appears to be freshly soaked from a large amount of water that has just been splashed upon him. Multiple stories quickly emerge: a surreal childhood encounter between Enrique and Leticia, the impoverished background of an acquaintance of Enrique’s named Jusepe, the strange life of Enrique’s mother (including the time she narrowly survived a mob killing), and the mysterious origins of the love of Enrique’s life, who is connected to the water with which the narrator finds Enrique soaked. These are tall tales in the most pleasurable sense of the term, looping and linking around one another as though to echo the strange circularities and synchronicities that so often repeat themselves in the course of a human life. “And with one hand,” writes Aira of Enrique, “he went on holding the delicate machine at his side: that ‘little steel fairy,’ the bicycle, from whose spinning stories are born.” —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

James Brandon Lewis. Photo: Diane Allford.

James Brandon Lewis has quietly become a legend in edgy jazz circles over the past decade, picking up where Albert Ayler and David S. Ware left off under the sign of John Coltrane and adding his own highly lyrical sense of song into the mix. I hadn’t known about him, but the recent buzz (including this New York Times profile) tipped me off, and I’m deeply grateful. Lewis’s compositions and solos always feel like they are about something, even if that something is veiled or just beyond the reach of words. Lewis’s amazing new record, Jesup Wagon—his first with his Red Lily Quintet—takes inspiration from the work and life of the Renaissance man George Washington Carver. The music is alternately beautiful and jarring, anxious and clear-eyed. I especially enjoy the musical conversation between Lewis and the cornet player Kirk Knuffke. And I’m absolutely in love with the drumming of Chad Taylor, whose sound is paradoxically anxious and steady. William Parker on bass and Chris Hoffman on cello hold down the low end and add plenty of flourishes and surprises. This is a not-unfriendly way into the challenging fringe of the jazz universe, and after a few listens, Jesup Wagon becomes a good friend indeed, a record equally suited to headbanging and meditation. —Craig Morgan Teicher  Read More

Hazel Jane Plante. Photo: Agatha K. Courtesy of Metonymy Press.

Just as there are an infinite number of stories to be told, there are an infinite number of ways to tell a story. Take Hazel Jane Plante’s Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) as case in point. When the narrator’s best friend dies, she decides to write an encyclopedia about her friend’s favorite television show. While Plante’s novel takes the form of an A-to-Z guide to the fictional one-season TV series Little Blue, it also tells the story of a queer trans woman mourning the loss of her straight trans best friend, for whom she felt an overwhelming, unrequited love. Through her thorough examination of the show, the narrator creates a beautiful, holistic homage to Vivian’s life. At the end of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), I found myself in awe of the book’s author. Not only has Plante imagined an incredibly complex TV show from scratch, she’s written an entire encyclopedia about said show, and somehow told a deeply heartfelt story of mourning, love, and friendship in the process. —Mira Braneck  Read More