April 3, 2024
Sorry to have missed you last week. I was hanging out with Alex and Jackson.
Thank you again to those of you who attended. We had a lot of fun, and really appreciated the support. Hopefully the first of many readings in the space.
A lot of books out this month. A few I’m really excited for:
Alice Notley, Being Reflected Upon (Penguin Books, April 2) – a memoir in verse by one of the living greats: “a window into the sources of [Notley’s] telepathic and visionary poetics, and a memoir through poems of her Paris-based life between 2000 and 2017, when she finished treatment for her first breast cancer.”
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays In Praise of Excess (Metropolitan Books, April 2) – “a subversive soul cry to restore imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment to all domains of our lives.”
Mauro Javier Cárdenas, American Abductions (Dalkey, April 23) – his third novel, following Aphasia (2020), which I loved, and wrote about here.
Justin Taylor, Reboot (Pantheon, April 23) – a Hollywood satire in the form of a celebrity memoir. I wrote on this one for the forthcoming issue of Bookforum. I won’t spoil my “take” on it here, except to say that it’s fantastic.
José Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night (New Directions, April 23) – an unabridged reissue of an absolute behemoth of a novel, first translated into English in 1973. I’m writing on this one now.
Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (Coffee House Press, April 24) – “stories-as-essays or essays-as-stories” from the cofounder and editor of Dorothy.
Jesse McCarthy, The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (April 25, University of Chicago) – on Wright, Baldwin, Glissant, Brooks, and Carter. Alongside Zadie Smith’s Feel Free and Brian Dillon’s Essayism, McCarthy’s Who Will Pay Reparations On My Soul? is one of the collections that opened me to the possibilities of criticism, just as I was beginning to write it.
What else should I look out for?
RIP John Barth. I think often of his 1986 essay “A Few Words About Minimalism,” in which he argues for the value of both maximalist and minimalist aesthetics, and his metafictional story “Lost in the Funhouse.” Now onto The Sot-Weed Factor, reissued by Dalkey last fall.
