Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age by Sara Wheeler | I reviewed Wheeler’s book on traveling contemporary Russia through the lens of great, 19th-century Russian writers for The Georgia Review’s Summer 2020 issue.
A Luminous Republic by Andres Barba | Chicago Review of BooksThe protagonist of Andres Barba’s novel A Luminous Republic is its premise: thirty-two mendicant children appear in the city of San Cristobal, make the local denizens uneasy, speak in an unintelligible language, commits acts of seemingly random violence, disappear into the jungle, and eventually lose their lives. Continue reading…
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor | On the SeawallHurricane Season begins, appropriately, with boys. Here is the first line: “They reached the canal along the track leading up from the river, their slingshots drawn for battle and their eyes squinting, almost stitched together, in the midday glare.” These boys, mere children, are already immersed in a culture of violence, ready for some imaginary battle their world tells them to prepare for. None of them “would dare admit he was scared,” as the others, even if they were afraid, would make merciless fun of him. These boys are the ones who find the Witch’s body. Continue reading…
Object Impermanence: On Kimiko Hahn’s Foreign Bodies | Vol. 1 BrooklynA caveat: Foreign Bodies is Kimiko Hahn’s tenth collection of poetry, but it’s the first and only one that I’ve read. By my own standards as a critic, this lack of familiarity with a writer’s work usually disqualifies me as a reviewer of one of their books. The only exception I make for this is when I read a book that is so fantastic and exhilarating and rich that I’m compelled to write less of a review and more of a celebration, a fan’s note, a paean to a particular book’s achievements. This is one of those cases. Continue reading…
Control the Echoes | Yes PoetryA personal, poetical, and philosophical investigation of echoes, a new essay of mine up at Yes Poetry!
Against Style Guides…Sort Of | VultureThe notion of being taught language has always been oxymoronic because language is in a constant state of flux, a restless, malleable, impatient entity that, like the idea of now, can never be fixed in place. Take, for instance, the journey of the semicolon as chronicled in the delightful, enlightening new book by Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. The twisty history of the hybrid divider perfectly embodies the transience of language, the ways it can be shaped by cultural shifts that have nothing to do with correctness or clarity. Invented by the Italian humanist and font pioneer Aldus Manutius in the late-15th century, the semicolon was originally “meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon” (hence its design). Continue reading…
“The secret to life,” wrote Stanley Elkin, “is specialization,” and I think the same is true for conversation. Nowadays, anyone can comment on the latest article or news story foisted on the world by social media, but the most fascinating discussions come from deeper and more specialized sources: books. To read a well-written nonfiction book on any given subject is to arm you with a richer insight into its topic, so the next time you’re at a party or out with friends, you can actually tell them something they didn’t know. From George Washington to superbugs to sex, here are 20 nonfiction books to read by authors from whose expertise we can all socially benefit. Continue reading…
Costalegre by Courtney Maum |The year is 1937 and Leonora Calaway, a wealthy art collector, has gathered up the artists “the Führer decided were the most degenerate in Europe” and sailed to Costalegre in Mexico, where Surrealists and Dadaists, writers and painters, all live together to wait out the coming war. Continue reading…
Upcoming Fiction from Great Writers | Read It ForwardFiction, as an art form, requires an inordinate amount of time to perfect. Most novelists spend years crafting their books, and any reader with her salt can quite easily see why. No one, in other words, means to rush a novelist’s intricate work, yet the understandable gap between novels can seem interminable for us fans. The trick, I think, is to read as widely as possible, so that every month (or at least every year) promises new books from authors you like, thereby making the wait more tolerable for the ones by the writers you love. Continue reading…
Poets Who Shine a Light on Our Present Moment | Read It ForwardThe following poets, of varying ages and points in their careers, each tackle, from an eclectic array of perspectives, the dizzying complexities of being alive today. Whether through surrealist imagery or personal narrative, these collections help us zero on the lives and dreams of richly drawn individuals and communities, so that by experiencing a moment in the heart of one person, one family, or one geography, taken altogether we can create a mosaic that resembles, imperfectly but still vitally, the world around us. Continue reading… (Image: @yummypixels)
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett |Set in a richly rendered Florida and filled with delightfully wry prose and bracing honesty, Arnett’s novel introduces a keenly skillful author with imagination and insight to spare. Continue reading…
I reviewed Lost Time for The Georgia Review’s Spring issue. Check it out here.
Morelia by Renee Gladman | Publishers Weekly
Gladman’s strange and hypnotic novella depicts a woman moving through a dreamlike world and trying to find meaning in its inexplicable shifts. Upon discovering a sentence in a language that “wasn’t English” written on a piece of paper tucked inside one of her books, the unnamed woman attempts to figure out what it means. Continue reading…
Springtime in a Broken Mirror by Mario Benedetti | Publishers Weekly
This rich, heartbreaking novel from the late Uruguayan writer Benedetti (1920–2009) (The Truce), first published in 1982, describes the devastating effects on one family of Uruguay’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and ’80s. Continue reading…
Social justice is a concept with many branches, and despite the fact that somehow the phrase has, in some circles, acquired a negative connotation, it is the harbinger of progress, the engine of civic betterment, and the hallmark of vital causes. Encompassed within the term are movements like civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ advancement, women’s and African-American’s suffrage, Brown v Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Black Lives Matter, the Stonewall uprising, and numerous examples of changed legislation. As a loose primer—or, more aptly, as a means to demonstrate the breadth and depth of it—here are seven books that cover different aspects of social justice. Continue reading…
Not a Clue by Chloé Delaume | Publishers WeeklyDelaume’s first novel to be translated into English is a sly and thorny work that loosely takes the form of a game of Clue, and even more loosely takes the form of a novel. The six murder suspects are psychiatric patients in Paris’s Saint-Anne’s Hospital, and each gets a few chapters providing their backgrounds, how they wound up institutionalized, and attributing to them a name from the board game. Continue reading…
Mars: Stories by Asja Bakić | Publishers WeeklyBosnian writer Bakic’s debut teems with the oddball narratives of George Saunders, the eerie atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe, and the feminist intellect of Marge Piercy. Her characters all, in one form or another, use language to survive, to manipulate, or to shine. Continue reading…
Books, as we all know, offer views into other worlds, journeys through unknown territories, engagements with unheard points of view, intimacies with the unfamiliar, and confrontations with the oppositional. They are transits into the other, guiding us—sometimes comfortably, sometimes perilously—through a world too big for us to travel in one lifetime. Through books we become voyeurs, co-conspirators, sidekicks, tag-alongs, psychics, and quantum leapers. They are our windows looking out over everything.
Anthologies go even further: they present a symphony of voices, ruminating on a single subject, a common theme, a unifying thread. They acknowledge in practice the truth that no one author can write the story for an entire group, so they collect disparate yet connected pieces to hint at the bewildering complexities of some of our most pressing issues. They amalgamate work from myriad backgrounds into, if not a representative whole then a satisfying unit that scratches at the idea of representation, like puzzles pieces that when put together form another, larger puzzle piece. Anthologies bring together writers and thinkers into a volume, and by doing so bring together readers into a necessary view of distant horizons. Continue reading…
The reason debut novels are so exciting is because it’s the chance to witness potential greatness at its earliest stage—there are no previous novels to live up to, no signatures or habits to look out for, and no end to what we can imagine a new voice will do in the future. With each novel by a first-timer that you enjoy comes another career to follow, another sting in the dizzying yarn knot of your literary interests, and soon every month brings out a second, third, or fourth novel by someone who you’ve read since the beginning and whose development you’ve traced like a proud parent or a sports fan. Continue reading…
New Year, New Verse: 4 Great New Poetry Collections | VulturePoetry ought to be the preeminent form of this age — hell, every age. In a smattering of words, a poem can eulogize, satirize, criticize, proselytize. The greatest verse clues us into what Jane Hirshfield calls “poetry’s knowing,” its function of “clarification and magnification.” It’s the quintessential hybrid form: an amalgam of essay, lyric, story, polemic, and diary. Poets are penguins, to paraphrase E.E. Cummings. They use their wings to swim. Continue reading…
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell |Recalling the work of Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez as a sometimes magical, sometimes horrifically real portrait of a place, Serpell’s novel goes into the future of the 2020s, when the various plot threads come together in a startling conclusion. Intricately imagined, brilliantly constructed, and staggering in its scope, this is an astonishing novel. Continue reading…
Trump Sky Alpha by Mark Doten |A blistering and heartbreaking satire in which president Trump brings about a nuclear apocalypse, Doten’s second novel (after The Infernal) is by turns a dystopian nightmare, a cyber thriller, a spot-on treatise on memes, and a tragic tale of love and loss. Continue reading…
For true bibliophiles, there is nothing lovelier than a volume of collected works. Such a book, filled as it is with a career’s worth of writing, isn’t meant to be read conventionally, from beginning to end, but can be nonlinearly perused, occasionally opened, to any old page, to one’s favorite piece, and enjoyed again and again. Add to this the fact that these collection contain all—or at least most—of an author’s work in a given form, which means when it comes to the collected writer, you’ve got them covered; never again will you have to seek out something they published, since you’ve now got everything they’ve produced in a handsome, stuffed-to-the-brim edition. Below you’ll find some recent collected works by some of the most influential and monumental talents in the world—a few you’ve no doubt read, while others may be new to you. But they all, in their careers, ran the gambit of subjects and themes, explored the outer reaches of their forms, and composed a rich array of poetry and prose. Continue reading….
Big Bang by David Bowman | Publishers Weekly“Where were you when you first heard President Kennedy had been shot?” asks Bowman (1957–2012) in the opening of his big, bold, and brilliant posthumous novel, and for the next 600 pages, he investigates what occurred in the years leading up to that monumental event in American history. Through the lives of such iconic figures as Norman Mailer, Elvis, William de Kooning, Marilyn Monroe, Dr. Spock, Ngô Dihn Diem, the Kennedys themselves, and dozens of others, Bowman conjures an enormous narrative out of the troubled years from 1950 to 1963. Continue reading…
21 Books Set in a Post-Trump World | Read It ForwardWhether we like it or not, this is the age of Trump. Maybe Trump’s actual presidency will last for four years (or maybe less, fingers crossed), or even eight, but the repercussions of his policies, his behavior, and the world’s reaction to him will be felt for much longer. Entire volumes could be written about the impact of Trump’s tweets alone. In less than two years of the Trump era, writers have engaged with our political landscape with renewed passion and indignation. Poets and short story writers have traced Trump’s disheartening influence, and even novelists—not always known to be the quickest to respond to topical politics, considering how long it takes to craft a novel—have already tackled, in various ways, our Trumpian climate.
Sometimes directly and sometimes less overtly, it’s impossible to deny the effect Trump’s election has had on literary art. Many have called this the “post-truth” era, but these 21 books show that great literature doesn’t lie like Trump lies—self-aggrandizing, fault-avoiding, and shortcut-chasing. Instead, literature invents in order to tell us hard-won and difficult truths. Deception conceals; literature reveals. Continue reading…
10 Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime | Read It ForwardHere at Read It Forward, we talk a lot about new books because, well, we love books. But that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about the classics, those tried-and-true stories that never get old. Continue reading…
(Photo credit: Matt McCarty)
Clever Gifts for Lifelong Learners | Read It ForwardWith so many how-to websites and YouTube instructionals out there, we often forget that books can still be used to teach us things—like practical, everyday things, as well as the weird, historical, and out-of-this-world. For those who’ve never lost that sense of curiosity, we present gifts for lifelong learners: books on all manner of topics, from science to history to economics and more. Continue reading…
(Photo credit: Matt McCarty)
10 Gifts for Audiobook Lovers | Read It ForwardThere’s no wrong way to read a book—in print, on an eReader, or through audio. Audiobooks, for instance, can offer things that other forms simply can’t. With a talented performer at the narrating helm, an audiobook can enhance the depth of the characters through voice, capture the rhythm of the prose, and emphasize the emotional subtext of important scenes. Continue reading…
(Photo credit: Matt McCarty)
10 Books Dad is Sure to Love | Read It ForwardFathers are notoriously hard to shop for, but really, who isn’t? And anyway, all dads are different: some love the conventional dad subjects—sports, war, and presidential biographies—while others take on all sorts of eclectic topics. Continue reading…
(Photo credit: Matt McCarty)
Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen | Publishers WeeklyKorneliussen’s captivating debut centers around five young people over the course of a party and its aftermath in Nuuk, Greenland, as they come to terms, in various ways, with their identities. Continue reading…
The Birth of Loud by Ian S. Port | Kirkus ReviewsA rip-roaring journey through the early days of rock ’n’ roll, told through the lives of the men whose innovative guitars helped usher it into existence. Continue reading…
The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail | Kirkus ReviewsA war journalist and mountaineering aficionado chronicles his global travels to witness the stakes of humanity’s greatest battle: the destruction of our planet. Continue reading…
7 Wonderful Classic Reprint Series | Read It ForwardI’m such a sucker for handsome reprints of classic books that I own—no kidding—multiple copies of probably 20 or 30 books. I just love a new edition of a book I love; I can’t help it. And maybe you can’t, either. For those like me who’ll shell out 20 bucks for a new version of The Left Handof Darkness or Regarding the Pain of Others, or for anyone who doesn’t yet own some of these fantastic and vital works of literature, this list is a guide to my seven favorite reprint series. Continue reading…
The Supreme Orchestra by David Turgeon | Publishers WeeklyA man enters an art gallery and purchases an erotic drawing, which sets into motion a series of complex events in Turgeon’s solid first book to be translated into English. Continue reading…
16 Back-to-School Books for Your Brain | Read It ForwardEvery September there appears—in stores, in advertisements, in themed issues of magazines—a bewildering profusion of all things “back to school.” These are aimed, obviously, at children: to sell supplies, fashion, food, and whatever other product can somehow be categorized into the seemingly forever-growing category.
But here at Read It Forward, we thought, “What about everyone else? Are we not continually educating ourselves? Isn’t it our duty (especially right now) to always remain students? Shouldn’t we, in some sense, go back to school, too?” Continue reading…
An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom is #8 on SPD Books’ Nonfiction Bestseller List!Woke up to this news this morning. Pretty cool.
Interview with Tobias Carroll at Vol. 1 BrooklynFrom the piece, by Tobias Carroll: “It’s been a decade since Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 was first published in the United States. Given this amount of time, several writers have begun exploring the impact and influence of Bolaño’s bibliography, with a particular focus on this mammoth work. That’s the case with Jonathan Russell Clark’s An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom, which does an excellent job of explaining why Bolaño’s work continues to resonate today, even as it also critiques aspects of it that haven’t aged as well. I asked Clark about the origins of the book, the process of writing it, and what unlikely literary facts can emerge when exploring Bolaño’s body of work.” Continue reading…
Keeping Up with the Nabokovs | Read It ForwardJuly 2017 marked the 40th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s death in 1977. He was a multilingual master of prose who crafted some of the twentieth century’s most enduring works of fiction, including Lolita; Pale Fire; Ada, or Ardor; Pnin; and Invitation to a Beheading. His sentences were more like sculptures than strings of words, even when he wrote in English, his fourth language. Although profound on the darkness of human behavior, he was also funny as hell—who could forget, for instance, how he unceremoniously explained Humbert’s mother’s death in Lolita with two words: “picnic, lightning”? His fiction could be challenging and ambitiously experimental, as in his novel Pale Fire, which consists of a 999-line poem written by one of the characters, and endnotes to the poem written by another. Nabokov’s novels were each… Continue reading.
On Benno von Archimboldi | The Believer LoggerIf Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is a circular novel, then the figure of Benno von Archimboldi, along with the city of Santa Teresa, resides at its elusive center. He is the Nobel novelist par excellence, the prototypical long-obscure, sure-to-be-lately-recognized writer. For most of the novel, his existence remains peripheral and mysterious, and his entrance, in the book’s final section, does little to elucidate his enigmas. So how does one proceed into Archimboldi as a character in 2666? What is the best way to determine his metaphorical place in the novel? One way would be the way any writer would want to be investigated: through the work. Continue reading…
Full Stop excerpted my book on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666:
2666 begins with a quote—a fragment, really—from the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire: “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” Though the epigraph only cites Baudelaire’s name, the line comes from Geoffrey Wagner’s translation of the poem “Le Voyage,” from Baudelaire’s seminal work Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) (1857). Innovative, daring, and utterly original, Baudelaire laid the groundwork for modernism—he is, in fact, credited with coining the term “modernity”—with his sexually frank and morally ambiguous verse. He also raised some predictable controversies: six of his poems were deemed outrage aux bonnes mœurs (“insult to public decency”) and suppressed. One can easily imagine what a self-styled renegade like Bolaño would admire in a figure like Baudelaire. Continue reading…
The Dirt Below Us | An Excerpt from An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom | The RumpusThe Rumpus published an excerpt from my new book on Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, along with pieces from Genevieve Hudson’s A Little in Love with Everyone (on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home) and Jacob Bacharach’s A Cool Customer (on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking).
An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom:My first book is now available for pre-order from Fiction Advocate! It’s an examination of Roberto Bolaño’s magnum opus, 2666. You can pre-order your copy here!
The Poetic Persistence of Sharon Olds | Read It ForwardI have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.
—Sharon Olds, “The Language of the Brag,” Satan Says (1980)
It hasn’t been easy being Sharon Olds, especially in terms of the critical response to her work, which has been two-fold: to ignore her completely, or to lambast her for “exhibitionism.” Continue reading…
The critic James Wood begins his book “How Fiction Works” with this little dictum: “The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors.” The same basic tenet can be applied, I think, to literary criticism. There are only so many ways one can write about a book. There is the New Critics-style textual approach: a no-frills method that sticks to the text itself, analyzing its properties and techniques wholly from within. One may take the historical stance (think of New Historicist critic Stephen Greenblatt) — that is, telling the history of the work itself, its cultural peculiarities, as well as its influence on subsequent generations, in order to gain insight into the time in which it was written. Also, a writer can enumerate his or her own personal experience with a book, a category Joyce Carol Oates referred to as “bibliomemoir”: how it changed, challenged or charged them. A writer can parody a novel or play or poem, employing the same techniques and stylistics, often for the sake of poking fun of the author’s quirks. Then, finally, there is the extrapolative technique, which is predicated on the idea that literature can matter to our everyday lives, or that books can be used to demonstrate principles of other intellectual discourses, like those Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture books that all end with … and Philosophy. Continue reading…
So You Want to Be a Writer? | Read It ForwardSuppose there was some kind of mysterious portal into a magical realm, and you, for all your life, have wanted nothing more than to march right up to that enchanted threshold and toss your body through it. But let’s say, too, that there have been others who’ve entered the portal before you, but when they report about their experiences—reports full of wondrous creatures and fantastic occurrences—their language is riddled with irked reservations, petty complaints, and seemingly obstacle-less problems. Yeah, they seem to say, the realm’s an incredible place—you ain’t seen nothing like it. But does it have to be so damn chilly all the time? Sure, no one actually complained about the chilliness of the place, but they may as well have. Because for you, simply getting into the portal is the whole point of your life, and yet here are these ingrates acting like it’s some burden to exist in a world of imagination. Continue reading…
“Autobiographical” feels like the right description for Rachel Khong’s “Goodbye, Vitamin.” But because I don’t know whether her debut novel is based on her real life (and because it doesn’t matter if it is or not), I’ll say her novel feels “lived in.”
Khong has crafted a believably human protagonist in Ruth, a 30-year-old woman who’s back in her childhood home to help take care of her father, who has Alzheimer’s. “Goodbye, Vitamin” follows Ruth’s adventures in her old stomping ground for one year, during which she also tends to her own problems, including a broken heart and a lack of purpose. Continue reading…
How One Becomes What One Is: 7 Memoirs of Artistic Development | Read It ForwardI’ve read a lot of memoirs by writers—in fact, it’s probably one of my favorite categories of literature. First of all, there is the sense of seeing what life is like for someone you’ve only known about through writing and/or their celebrity. Secondly—and this comes almost as a consequence of the first—it can be an absolute delight getting the inside scoop on other writers and figures of note. Think, for instance, of Ernest Hemingway talking shit about Ford Maddox Ford in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris. Or consider the juiciest bits of Stephen King’s On Writing, as in, e.g., that his novel Misery is a metaphor for cocaine addiction (which makes perfect sense when you apply it to the narrative!). Memoirs can function like literary tabloids, revealing the underbelly of the written word. Continue reading…
Image: Elsa Jenna
Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash | New York Times Book Review“People are bad at giving up,” a man tells the title character late in “Stephen Florida,” Gabe Habash’s debut novel. “A lot of the time they don’t do it early enough.” He’s commenting on life in the oil fields of North Dakota, where Stephen is considering a job after college, but he might as well be describing Stephen’s current situation: He’s a wrestler at Oregsburg College in the late 1970s, and it’s his senior year, which means it’s his last chance to win a collegiate championship. Habash’s novel follows Stephen through his event-filled final season and traces his complex inner turmoil as he pursues his unbending ambition to dominate the competition. By the time the above statement is made to Stephen, he’s veered far away from mere determination and ended up near monomania, and his will to win has become enmeshed in bitter jealousy, calculated malice and philosophical scrutiny. The sport itself, in other words, is beside the point, as are the actual benefits of succeeding. Stephen’s drive has brought him to the brink, but is it too late for him to give up? Continue reading...
Teju Cole’s newest work, “Blind Spot,” a collection of the author’s photos with accompanying textual commentary, is an eclectically brilliant distillation of what photography can do, and why it remains an important art form. Known for his novels “Open City” and “Every Day Is for the Thief,” Cole also is the photography critic for New York Times Magazine, and a hell of a nonfiction writer to boot (his recent essay collection “Known and Strange Things” unambiguously demonstrates this). “Blind Spot” proves that Cole’s singular talents extend into picture-making, yes, but more than that, it shows what an extraordinarily gifted writer he is. Continue reading…
Clichés Are Dangerous | Read It ForwardThere is more danger in certain clichés than the risk of confusion, or the laziness of pat phrases—some of them perpetuate really lousy ideas that, if you stop to think about their implications for a few minutes, don’t hold up to scrutiny at all, and seem in fact to be effective only because they’re clichés, so common that people forget to question the inherent philosophies underneath them. Here are a few dangerous clichés that I hope we stop using—or at least cease employing them so reductively. Continue reading…
