Kate Zambreno. Photo: Heather Sten. Courtesy of Columbia University Press.

Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead just might be the first truly great book about the coronavirus pandemic. Ostensibly a study of the French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, who died of AIDS in 1991 and became famous for work such as the 1990 novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, To Write As If Already Dead divides itself into two distinct parts, both focused on questions of intimacy, interpersonal relationships, and the human body. In the lightly fictionalized first half, a woman working on a study of Guibert ponders an old internet-based friendship that ended abruptly after her anonymous friend deleted her blog. In the second half, Zambreno writes of Guibert, the book’s “ghost, the projected shadow, the echo,” and also her second pregnancy, the failures of the American health care system, correspondences with friends, and the frightening early days of the coronavirus pandemic. “I worry to her,” Zambreno writes of a conversation with a friend, “I’m not cosmopolitan enough or queer enough to write about Guibert, that I would never have been included in Foucault’s circle. I am a mom on a couch!” But literature is slippery; To Write As If Already Dead, in its pairing of fact and fiction—a technique that Zambreno has used before, most notably in Screen Tests and Drifts—elides these boundaries, instead working to create parallels between relationships, spaces, and historical moments. “I wonder if death is the ultimate betrayal, not writing,” she questions near the end. “Writing as a way to mark an ‘I’ before it is extinguished.” —Rhian Sasseen  Read More

Joss Lake. Photo: J. Aharonov.

Part sci-fi, part fantasy, part trans Brooklynite millennial saga, Future Feeling revels in its own chaos. Joss Lake’s debut novel kicks off when Pen, a trans man who works as a dog walker, enlists his roommates, the Witch and the Stoner-Hacker, to place a hex on Aiden, a trans influencer whom Pen resents. Rather than falling on its intended target, the hex sends Blithe, an adopted Chinese trans man raised by white parents, to the Shadowlands, a dark landscape one goes to when they have “completely lost their shit.” The Rhiz, a highly elite underground queer organization, enlists Pen and Aiden to bring Blithe back from the Shadowlands, where he’s struggling emotionally with his transracial upbringing and gender transition. Am I doing the plot justice? Not really—I told you this book revels in its own chaos, and chaos and coherent narrative summary don’t tend to mix. But I love how Future Feeling lingers in the mayhem. More than linger, Lake embraces it, forgoing the neat narrative of before and after in favor of the messiness of process and becoming. Plus, this book is fun: hexes, moonlit rituals, a pet plant named Alice the Aloe, and well-placed critiques of gender, capitalism, and the alienating nature of advanced technology all abound. I’m still not sure how to classify Future Feeling—but defying neat categorization is kind of the point. —Mira Braneck  Read More

William Hilton, John Keats (detail), ca. 1822, oil on canvas, 30 x 25″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Poets can be divided into two groups: those who dutifully tortured “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” in secondary school (POET = WORRIED ABOUT DYING scrawled unhelpfully in the margins) without ever giving its author a second thought, and those for whom Keats serves as spiritual teacher. To his followers, Keats is a poet’s poet, is the poet’s poet, a writer whose brief span compressed all the love, pain, and existential uncertainty of a lifetime, which the finest of his fifty-four published poems animate. He believed pain and trouble were their own education, “school[ing] an intelligence to make it a soul.” His was a rare gift, and yet his best poems weren’t earned without effort; early examples are uneven and clumsy, and for that perseverance and learning by shrewd emulation, we admire him all the more. His death at twenty-five trapped that quiddity in amber.

“When I have fears that I may cease to be”—and then he did; he died young, corroborating that fear, poised and brave in his final moments, and leaving the rest of us neurotic types (what sort of reasonable person isn’t hung up on the terror of premature death?) wringing our hands, staring into the middle distance. In this way, Keats confirms every poet’s greatest anxiety—that our fears, in truth, are sometimes justified, and that our clever poems may know more than we do.

These, of course, are my own ramblings on a figure whose life I found myself drawn to only once I had outlived him. Each year now brings me paradoxically closer and farther from Keats.

Andrew Motion’s biography of the poet is fantastically scholarly and accessible, a term that’s been overused so as to mean almost nothing. What I mean is this: on a Sunday in ninety-degree heat, you can lift the tome in your withered state, flip to a chapter at random, and find Motion guiding you with energy, intelligence, and a true sense of partaking in the marvelousness of Keats with you. Motion is wonderfully clear and direct while still making his mark on the prose at every turn, as on our understanding of the dimensions and shape of Keats’s life through his well-considered interest in the poet’s social and political circumstances. His description of Keats’s dying moments is quietly gripping, worthy of a season finale of one of the medical dramas that multiply like invasive species across American television, and yet the book goes on another twenty pages, making such partings bearable. Life goes on, even when major stars extinguish. In Keats’s case, that extinguishing served as a spark, with each subsequent generation of poets holding vigil. —Maya C. Popa  Read More

Chris Reynolds. Photo: Chez Blundy. Courtesy of New York Review Books.

Mauretania is a mood. Spend some time with Chris Reynolds’s The New World: Comics from Mauretania and you’ll feel it. Stark illustrations will envelop you in their contrasts—the blanket blacks of the foreground, the impossible star-bright skies—and you’ll find yourself thumbing anxiously for the uncertain medium of shadows. The characters will elude you—transient, distant, largely muted in their emotions—and their struggles will become your own as you search for meaning in an increasingly mysterious world. We tend to use the terms creepy or uncanny to describe such a mood. I’ve always liked the German word unheimlich. But that describes only a piece of the feeling that permeates these comics. For those moments when life is relatively fine and yet you can’t seem to shake the unease that manifests in everything from the building across the street to the sunlight that “roars across the fields” to the nearly programmable behaviors of the people around you, when you can’t remember why you entered a room, or when you’ve finished solving a problem only to realize you are just as confused as when you began, I propose the word Mauretania. An example: My local grocer no longer requires customers to wear masks, and the CDC says it’s all right, but it still feels a bit Mauretania in there. Things somehow feel Mauretania more and more. —Christopher Notarnicola  Read More

Rachel Cusk. Photo: Siemon Scamell-Katz.

There is a Joni Mitchell live album called Miles of Aisles, recorded while she was on tour in 1974. Caught on the recording is her response—in a slightly Dylan-esque posture—to the crowd’s wild chanting for a particular number. She complains that other artists don’t have to deal with this kind of crap: “Nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’ ” I think she’s wrong, though. The anticipation for Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Second Place, has been as close to feverish as we get in certain circles, and it is in part because Cusk answers the call to “paint a Starry Night again” so well. Much has been said in the past weeks about what we particularly want from Cusk and why. In fact, if you are a person who reads The Paris Review’s staff picks, you have likely read two or three meditations on the subject. Whatever it is we want from her, Second Place delivers in spades. And with the dynamism of a truly great writer, the novel seems written just for the spring of 2021 but was actually inspired by the memoir of Mabel Dodge Luhan, a patron who played host to D. H. Lawrence in Taos, New Mexico, in 1932. In Second Place, it is late spring on the English coast. Our narrator and her second husband invite a world-famous artist—now out of fashion—to use the second place on their property. He ends up arriving with a youngish woman of no defined role or position. If the opposition of these two relationships didn’t create enough refraction, our narrator’s daughter from a previous marriage and the daughter’s boyfriend come to stay as well. Cusk gives us three “stages of women,” leaving hints of female truths I’ll carry for the rest of my life, and no small amount of lush, threatening scenery. The Starry Night, I learned recently, was not universally loved at first. Only with the dedication of Van Gogh’s sister-in-law Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who peddled his troubled genius to the world, did we end up with refrigerator magnets and mouse pads. Although it’s in every job description, creativity is hard to see and harder to live with. We are taught to want it and fear it in equal measure. Among many other things, Cusk shows us this in Second Place, and I hope she never does it quite the same way again. —Julia Berick  Read More

Tove Jansson, 1954. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

My grandmother will be ninety-six this September. Lately she has taken to expressing herself with an almost childlike wonder, finishing television shows or simple meals or songs on the radio with jaw-dropping admiration, claiming them the best she has seen or eaten or heard in all her days. Thinking about this sometimes apt and more often comical appreciation for life’s otherwise ordinary details puts me in mind of another fanciful grandmother and her adventures around a small Finnish island on the heels of her six-year-old granddaughter, the spritely Sophia, in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. In the twenty-two vignettes that make up the book, told in the third person and translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, the narrative focus is shared between the main characters, often drifting subtly over the course of a story, illustrating the delicate overlap between the two, one’s perspective mirroring or adding to the outlook of the other. In “The Tent,” Sophia learns to observe the outdoors anew, having “really listened for the first time in her life,” and her relation of that strange new experience helps Grandmother relive her own childhood experiences as “new images came back to her, more and more of them.” Youth and age, awe and understanding, innocence and experience—what beautiful complements they can make. To my grandmother, who now seems as much the seasoned matriarch as she is the imaginative girl, and to her youngest daughter, my incomparable mother, who has taken expert care of us both—happy Mother’s Day. —Christopher Notarnicola  Read More