March 6, 2024
Two notes: I wrote a very short review of Pablo Larraín’s El Conde for this spring’s issue of The Drift. You can read it here. On March 27, at 6:30pm, Alexander Sammartino and I will chat about his debut novel, Last Acts, at Grey Matter Books in New Haven. (We’ve pushed the date back a week to bypass Yale’s spring break.) If you’d like to attend, let me know by replying to this email or messaging me on Twitter.
Earlier this month, a few titles that I’ve been waiting for dropped:
Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s Ghost Pains, which Jack Hanson reviews for 4Columns: “The language, though occasionally swept into lyric beauty, is more often stunted, gestural, a stubborn distance determining even the most involved first-person narratives. ‘For our honeymoon we went to Tuscany. This got a big sigh from me.’”
It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken, and Tell by Jonathan Buckley, the 2022 winners of The Novel Prize, published jointly by New Directions and Giramondo.
Édouard Louis’s Change, an autobiographical novel in which the protagonist seems to figure as a kind of Rastignac. Seeing a review out now by Madeleine Crum.
Stranger, by Emily Hunt, a new collection of poems from The Song Cave.
Christina Henríquez’s The Great Divide, a historical novel about the construction of the Panama Canal.
Later this month, I’m looking forward to Percival Everett’s James, Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed, and Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses. And to reading the new story by Anna DeForest that has just appeared in The Yale Review.
For now, I leave you with more Javier Peña of Grandes Infelices (this time on Pessoa), and with two records I’ve been looping: Donald Glover’s 3.15.20 and JPEGMAFIA’s All My Heroes Are Cornballs. Both albums are even better than I remember—and I remember them fondly.