currently reading: Nomadland by Jessica Bruder
books bought
Blind Spot by Teju Cole
Bad with Money: The Imperfect Art of Getting Your Financial Shit Together by Gaby Dunn
Awe by Dorothea Lasky
books received
Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race by Lara Prior-Palmer (out 5/7)
books read
What It Is by Lynda Barry
Hey you,
I've worked three days at my new job so the answer to the question "how is it" is I don't know, but the people are very nice and I feel a horrible sinking sensation sitting at my desk thinking about doing wage labor forever, a feeling perhaps best summed up by a temp in Louis Hyman's book Temp:
He felt an "equal measure of disgust and relief" because of his complicity in "wage-labor in general and to the peculiar rituals of corporate life in particular." Showing up to work, he felt, was like being "somebody who surrenders to a blackmail scheme... despite his attempts to reassure himself that he is doing the right thing under the circumstances... humiliation lurks at the bottom of his stomach."
So if you have any solutions to that feeling I would love to hear it.
Anyway, I thought I'd present you with a list of books to look forward to in 2019. It will not be a long list, because I was quite a bad reader* last year, but I hope you'll find something of interest.
Magical Negro by Morgan Parker (out Feb. 5)
I don't really feel like I have any legs to stand on when it comes to talking about poetry—I know almost nothing about poetry. And I think maybe you won't believe me when I say that but all I really know about a poem is that it has line breaks. Mostly I read poetry when I am looking for something to (quietly) light me up. So I'll spare you hundreds of words of me trying to put into words what it is, exactly, that made me fall so hard for this collection (the best I've come up with so far is "I was stunned at the vastness of its 90 pages") and share an excerpt or two so you can see what I mean.
This one is from "I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background" (after Glenn Ligon after Zora Neale Hurston):
Or, I feel sharp white.
Or, colored against.
Or, I am thrown. I am against. Or, when white. I sharp. I color.
from "I TELL MY THERAPIST I TRIED TO MEDITATE AND SHE LAUGHED":
I can't leave the house
bc I'm invisible/ the landscape
is like really hectic vibes/
I've been thinking/ Goddamnit
from "Who Were Frederick Douglass's Cousins, and Other Quotidian Black History Facts That I Wish I Learned in School"
What happened to the Indians?
How do we know about heaven,
and dragonflies?
Where did Harriet Tubman sleep?
Who did Harriet Tubman kiss?
What about the Africans that stayed?
Why are they hungry?
Did Frederick Douglass's mother
brush his hair in the morning?
Was he tender-headed and afraid?
Is this how I am supposed to feel?
Are you sure? How do you know?
Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li (out Feb. 5)
This is the only book on the list that's not really funny—the promotional material for it all says something like "an fictional/imaginary conversation between a mother and a child," but that makes it sound so vague and intangible. Of course it's a fictional or imagined conversation: the child, Nikolai, whom the narrator is addressing, killed himself. With that being said, I think I'd have a hard time putting this one on the shelf in fiction. Li wrote it after her son killed himself.
I'm muddleheaded, I thought, because I could go on thinking but would not reach any clarity: which, between hope and fear, had made life unliveable for him?
I've never called life unliveable, he said. I've never lived a single day without something that matters to me, something that I live for.
The New Me by Halle Butler (out March 5)
The New Me is about a thirty-year-old woman named Millie who's stuck working at a temp job. Here's my hot take: The New Me is, as far as I can tell, a better draft of Halle Butler's book Jillian, which is a book I really did like. But this one is...just like it? Only more so, and picked up by a bigger press. I don't think that's a bad thing, at least not in this instance. I think more people should write books about late capitalism and how it sits like a stone in your stomach or a five-hundred pound weight strapped to your back:
Two days completely inside, swallowed up, the idea of days being wasted laughable, but still the feeling of being pulled navel-first through an atmosphere, each point more frightening because of its similarity to the last point, yet getting harder, grimmer, stiffer, darker, traces of the last bad day, the last bad experience, clinging to me, stuck to me, all my past experiences as a collected grime I look through.
I described it to a coworker at the bookstore as "like having your throat slit," which was maybe overdramatic but certainly how I remember it reading.
Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race by Lara Prior-Palmer (out May 7)
Jenn at Catapult asked me if I would blurb the ARC of this book, and I said yes immediately, being, as I am, a barely-repressed horse girl. Then I avoided reading it for, I believe, actual months? It's a memoir written by a woman who won the Mongol Derby when she was 19, which was in 2013, which makes her roughly six months older than me and infinitely more accomplished. I was very worried I was going to hate her, honestly! I was worried I was going to be so jealous of her for accomplishing so much cool shit that it would turn into hatred and I wouldn't enjoy the book at all. (I'm not a good person!) Also, I don't love sports books, and I'm generally bored by people making a big deal out of how big and strong and brave they've been. Cool!
But—it's not that Lara underplayed her accomplishments or anything, but that she never takes herself too seriously. She is aware of her flaws and limitations and she knows what choices she made and what was luck. And also she is so fucking charming. And also also the book is just so well-written and funny and it straightens my spine like poetry does.
Turning up the hill pass, we see birds flit through fleecy pines. The pony is talking, the earth is whispering, the grass is humming, and who knows what sounds they hear from me. The pine branches, bent sideways by the wind, suggest I shut my eyes. Shut your eyes and you shall see better.
Are you sad? You look so sad, I tell the trees.
We only look sad because you can't imagine a stillness that's not.
Honorable mentions that are only "honorable mentions" either because I don't feel like writing the blurbs about them myself anymore or because I haven't technically finished reading them yet, so you can't blame me if they turn out bad
Talent by Juliet Lapidos (out Jan 22): A "deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere" (Helen Oyeyemi) debut, a young graduate student writing about—and desperately searching for—inspiration stumbles upon it in the unlikeliest of places.
Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World by Lucy Ives (out May 5): A tale of two idiots—the handsome, charismatic Troy Augustus Loudermilk and his unassuming, socially anxious friend Harry Rego—who, in the early days of the new millennium, scam their way into a fellowship at the most prestigious creative writing program in the country.
Riots I Have Known by Ryan Chapman (out May 21): the short, electric, uproarious, and biting debut novel by Ryan Chapman is a real-time confession, set during a prison riot in a high-comic pitch, a voice-driven narrative in the tradition of Paul Beatty's The Sellout and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.
Your friend,
Smalls
*By a "bad reader" I don't mean that I didn't read a lot, which, I don't really think you should feel bad about not spending enough time reading, which I know is easy for me to say—anyway I mean I spent more time than I'd like reading books I knew I wouldn't fall in love with.