{"id":114126,"date":"2017-08-18T12:30:55","date_gmt":"2017-08-18T16:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=114126"},"modified":"2017-08-23T09:03:17","modified_gmt":"2017-08-23T13:03:17","slug":"what-else-our-writers-are-reading-this-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/18\/what-else-our-writers-are-reading-this-summer\/","title":{"rendered":"What (Else) Our Writers Are Reading This Summer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this summer, in place of our usual staff picks, we asked five contributors from our Summer issue<\/a> to write about what they\u2019d been reading. This week, we\u2019ve asked five more. You can read June\u2019s writer picks here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Mihail Sebastian, circa 1930\u201345.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I just finished Mihail Sebastian\u2019s 1934 novel\/notebook For Two Thousand Years<\/em><\/a>, which Other Press is about to publish for the first time in the U.S. It is\u2014among many other things\u2014an elegant and candid and horrifyingly understated account of watching violent unreason rise around you. He almost can\u2019t believe what\u2019s happening. Alli Warren\u2019s I Love It Though<\/a><\/em>, from the excellent Nightboat Books, is helping me to love it, the whole fucked up thing, despite the long daily litany of reasons to despair: \u201cI wave a flag for brute feeling,\u201d she writes, and I\u2019m rallying to it. \u201cOr the courage or not \/ of me and my friends \/ orbital in lilt, directive in drink \/ while container ships brim \/ and caps and bergs \/ slope across the slog \/ I want to be able to continue \/ to love to stay alive.\u201d With my daughter\u2019s I\u2019m reading \u00bfQu\u00e9 puedes hacer con una paleta?<\/em><\/a> by Carmen Tafolla, illustrated by Magaly Morales. I\u2019m reading it some thirty times a night. \u2014Ben Lerner\u00a0<\/strong>(\u201cThe Camperdown Elm<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

I recently read two excellent, very different books about identity, home, and belonging (the theme of my recent\u00a0Paris Review Daily\u00a0<\/i>piece<\/a>). The first was\u00a0Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right<\/i><\/a>, which uses personal interviews to analyze why people in the Southern U.S. are often hostile to government protections for their own threatened and beloved environment\u2014and more broadly, why these people voted for Trump. The book helped me see how these choices might make at least an emotional kind of sense. The second is also set in the American South, and plays a terrifying thought experiment with Hochschild\u2019s story of the deep antagonism and mutual misunderstanding between the North and the South of the United States. American War<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>by Omar El Akkad evokes a dystopian future in which the disagreement about the proper use of fossil fuels leads to another American civil war, and we see how one individual\u2014a girl from Louisiana who grows up in a refugee camp for displaced persons and is later subjected to years of torture\u2014forms a desperate, enraged, dangerous sense of identity through her attachment to a home that has been utterly destroyed.\u00a0\u2014Emily Wilson <\/strong>(a translation of\u00a0Homer\u2019s\u00a0Odyssey<\/em><\/a>)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cMy father thought all he needed to make a film was to hire trusted family members to be part of it. And we believed him. Ours would be an Italian family affair, just like the Coppolas. The reason why family-owned restaurants had the best food was because it was in everyone\u2019s interest to run a good business.\u201d In Things That Happened Before the Earthquake<\/em><\/a>, a family of upper-class Romans tries to go to Hollywood and winds up in the San Fernando Valley\u2014with dire results for their teenage daughter, Eugenia. Set in the early nineties, between the Rodney King beating and the earthquake of 1994, Chiara Barzini\u2019s wry, vivid first novel tells the story of a precocious, sexually and intellectually curious kid in a chaotic and dangerous new world.\u00a0\u2014Lorin Stein\u00a0<\/strong>(a translation of Patrick Modiano\u2019s \u201cThe Hat\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Of course\u2014since I\u2019m eligible (not everyone is)\u2014I vote in local elections; sometimes I call officials or knock on doors or march. But I have never been arrested for blocking traffic, toppled Confederate monuments with my own chain, or locked myself to an old-growth tree. If you want to know what that\u2019s like, or if you want to know when, whether, and why such projects have succeeded in the recent past, in the United States, you, too, will be glad you read L. A. Kauffman\u2019s brief, clearly written, and densely researched\u00a0Direct Action<\/i><\/a>. By the end, you may also revise your definition of success. Kauffman\u2019s story starts with the implosion of the New Left; she ends, as you might expect, in Ferguson, where national black-led organizations \u201cwere savvy enough not to try to \u2026 speak for the protesters,\u201d but \u201clooked for ways to support them.\u201d Kauffman covers the Seabrook Clams (who stopped a nuclear plant), ACT UP<\/small>, the Lesbian Avengers, and the second Gulf War; she\u2019s clear on the goals, and the downsides, of \u201cprefigurative\u201d movements, where activists model the society they want (result: hours and inconclusive meetings), and she shows how white-led movements can go off the rails. Kauffman says she took decades to write the book, in part because she spent so much time participating in the kinds of actions she chronicles. Nonetheless, she\u2019s produced not a set of a rules for radicals but a pellucid history, one whose well-meaning actors make choices that resemble\u2014but are not quite\u2014those we face now.\u00a0\u2014Steph Burt<\/strong>\u00a0(\u201cSpoken for a Pair of Ferrets<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been taking care of the plants at my mother-in-law\u2019s apartment, and the other day on the\u00a0bookshelf I came across a copy of On Photography<\/em><\/a>. As Sontag goes it\u2019s pretty approachable,\u00a0and still I\u2019m basically holding on for dear life. But the overall effect is Sontag\u2019s unrelenting\u00a0moral rigor applied wholesale to an entire form. Fair enough: whatever the subject, a photo is an act of appropriation, of exploitation\u2014to a lesser extent, admittedly, in an Edward Weston photo of lettuce than in the photographs, mostly of women of color, collected under the title \u201cPassengers,\u201d that Chris Marker took in secret on the Paris metro, or in the nightmarish images of prostitution and drug use and squalor Antoine d\u2019Agata has been gathering the world over throughout his career, a large selection of which can be found in a volume called Atlas, and in many of which he appears with his subjects, enacting literally the more abstract violations inherent to the camera. On a lower shelf with higher clearance, I found copies of both of these truly captivating books as well, and flipping through them in my mother-in-law\u2019s bright living room surrounded by shrubs and succulents and orchids, it\u2019s hard not to think of art in general as an appallingly inhuman practice. But\u00a0then, what Sontag always brings home is that an uneasiness about art is one of art\u2019s most reliable exhilarations. \u00a0\u2014Chris Knapp <\/strong>(\u201cStates of Emergency<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading recommendations from \u2018Paris Review\u2019 contributors Ben Lerner, Emily Wilson, Steph Burt, and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[30179,3263,30174,30181,29156,30182,29158,2682,30183,456,30175,30172,30176,30178,29707,1965,883,30171,30177,472,501,30180,25743,30173,30170],"class_list":["post-114126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-american-war","tag-ben-lerner","tag-carmen-tafolla","tag-charia-barzini","tag-chris-knapp","tag-direct-action","tag-emily-wilson","tag-homer","tag-l-a-kauffman","tag-lorin-stein","tag-magaly-morales","tag-mihail-sebastian","tag-nightboat-books","tag-omar-el-akkad","tag-on-photography","tag-other-press","tag-staff-picks","tag-steph-burt","tag-strangers-in-their-own-land","tag-summer-issue","tag-susan-sontag","tag-things-that-happened-before-the-earthquake","tag-trump","tag-two-thousand-years","tag-writer-picks"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat (Else) Our Writers Are Reading This Summer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Reading recommendations from \u2018Paris Review\u2019 contributors Ben Lerner, Emily Wilson, Steph Burt, and more.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/18\/what-else-our-writers-are-reading-this-summer\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What (Else) Our Writers Are Reading This Summer by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 18, 2017 \u2013 Reading recommendations from \u2018Paris Review\u2019 contributors Ben Lerner, Emily Wilson, Steph Burt, and more.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/18\/what-else-our-writers-are-reading-this-summer\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-08-18T16:30:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-08-23T13:03:17+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/banville_1-052616-e1463608700968.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1597\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1065\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/18\/what-else-our-writers-are-reading-this-summer\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/18\/what-else-our-writers-are-reading-this-summer\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/4a14f739935c82f100675b84e220252e\"},\"headline\":\"What (Else) Our Writers Are Reading This Summer\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-08-18T16:30:55+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-08-23T13:03:17+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/18\/what-else-our-writers-are-reading-this-summer\/\"},\"wordCount\":1099,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/18\/what-else-our-writers-are-reading-this-summer\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/banville_1-052616-e1463608700968-1024x683.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"American War\",\"Ben Lerner\",\"Carmen Tafolla\",\"Charia Barzini\",\"Chris Knapp\",\"Direct Action\",\"Emily Wilson\",\"Homer\",\"L. 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