- 23 Dec, 2023

- 22 Dec, 2023

- 21 Dec, 2023

23 Dec, 2023

- Lit Hub Weekly: December 18-22, 2023

- The Ultimate Best Books of 2023 List

- The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2023

- The 10 Biggest Literary Stories of the Year

- The 38 Best Books We Read in 2023

- We Need Your Help: Support Lit Hub, Become a Member

Lit Hub Daily

Lit Hub Weekly: December 18-22, 2023

Lit Hub Daily   6:30AM, 23 Dec, 2023

december 23

TODAY: In 1947, Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in New York, starring Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando in his first major stage role.

- “Protecting students from books containing sexual acts does not protect them from performing sexual acts.” Jane Smiley talks to an Iowa high school newspaper about book banks, after her novel A Thousand Acres was banned from Iowa City schools. | Lit Hub Politics

- Say hello to the ten most popular Lit Hub stories of the year (which definitely proves that readers like to read). | Lit Hub

- It’s time for another Lit Hub tradition, in which Emily Temple scours all the Best Of lists to tally the Ultimate Best Books of 2023. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

- The best traditional mysteries of 2023. | CrimeReads

- “The bombs are still falling, my heart breaks every day.” Sally Rooney and Isabella Hammad discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict. | The Guardian

- Carolyn Dever on the British Library’s attempts to recover from a massive cyberattack. | Public Books

- How the Birmingham bombing radicalized James Baldwin. | Boston Review

- “Refaat did not just impart knowledge; he offered a glimpse of hope, a respite from the relentless pressures of Gaza.” Jehad Abusalim remembers his teacher, Refaat Alareer. | The Nation

- Laurie Stone on madeleines: “Once human beings know something, we think we’ve always known it—like the discovery of irony by a child, it’s a one-way door.” | The Paris Review

- Tajja Isen ponders the enigma of how to sell a book. | The Walrus

- Kathy Acker masturbated here: Jack Skelley reports from the celebration of the donation of the author’s desk to the Poetic Research Bureau. | LARB

- “The premise is simple: Show up with a book, commit to vanquishing a chapter or two and chat with strangers about what you’ve just read.” An evening at a “reading party.” | The New York Times

- Writers, artists, and filmmakers weigh in on their best film experiences of the year. | Metrograph

- “Smith diligently repudiates a triumphalist narrative of progress—the present casts its long shadow over the novel—but she offers no theory of history in its place.” On The Fraud and the condition of the social novel. | The Point

- Mr. Darcy: Canceled? | Slate

- “This is the bleak testimony of the damned and blasphemed. It’s sanctioned by the culture of self-aggrandizement. It’s at once one of the great ballads in hip-hop and a manifesto about the insurmountable depravity of the industry.” Harmony Holiday on Madvillain’s “Accordion.” | Oxford American

- How to experience LA like a poet, as told by the poets themselves. | LA Times

- Natan Last on inclusivity in the world of crossword puzzles. | The New Yorker

- “Anything that happens in the present is, by definition, imaginable. We can see it.” Read Masha Gessen’s Arendt Prize lecture. | n+1

Also on Lit Hub:

Drumroll, please: It’s the Biggest Literary Stories of 2023 • On John F. Kennedy’s last movie: From Russia with Love • Sakiru Adebayo on the diasporization of African literature • On the transformative experience of listening to audiobooks while ill • Why you should definitely read Poor Things, even after seeing Poor Things • On the 17th-century witch trials of the Arctic Circle • 30 years after its premiere, Paul Morton considers how Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List has endured, for better and for worse • On the cautious optimism of poet-philosopher Lewis Thomas • A conversation about the Supreme Court’s checkered past and future • Matthew Hays reflects on the complicated experience of reading a late friend’s novel • The authors of Spectral Evidence: The Witch Book discuss the contemporary echoes of centuries-old fears • Andrew Quintana reviews Andrew Haigh’s masterful new queer film, All of Us Strangers • The 15 best literary adaptations of the year • Blake Butler on (not) finding your voice

Craft and Criticism / Features / Literary Criticism / Reading Lists

The Ultimate Best Books of 2023 List

Emily Temple   4:55AM, 23 Dec, 2023

ultimate2023

The end of the year is approaching, the universe is expanding, and the internet is updating—right now, it is mostly updating its Best Of lists. Therefore, per Literary Hub tradition, I will now present to you the Ultimate List, otherwise known as the List of Lists—in which I read all the Best Of lists and count which books are recommended most.

This year, I sorted through 62 lists from 48 publications, which yielded a total of 1,132 books. (I can only say: yikes.) 94 of those books made it onto 5 or more lists, and I have collated these for you here, in descending order of frequency.

*

20 lists:

James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

19 lists:

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

David Grann, The Wager

Zadie Smith, The Fraud

16 lists:

Jonathan Eig, King: A Life

15 lists:

Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend

14 lists:

Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell, Our Share of Night

Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

13 lists:

S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

12 lists:

Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice

Victor LaValle, Lone Women

11 lists:

Emma Cline, The Guest

Daniel Mason, North Woods

Justin Torres, Blackouts

Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto

10 lists:

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America

Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog: Stories

Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

9 lists:

Darrin Bell, The Talk

Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

Alice McDermott, Absolution

Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

John Valliant, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

8 lists:

Jen Beagin, Big Swiss

Jamel Brinkley, Witness

Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir

Anne Enright, The Wren, The Wren

Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Michael Hofmann, Kairos

Tania James, Loot

Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story

Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

7 lists:

Daniel Clowes, Monica

Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

Homer, tr. Emily Wilson, The Iliad

Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC

Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

Elliot Page, Pageboy: A Memoir

6 lists:

Sebastian Barry, Old God’s Time

Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

Tania Branigan, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution

Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

Teju Cole, Tremor

Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral and Other Stories

Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost

Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation

Tahir Hamut Izgil, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide

Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

Deborah Levy, August Blue

Yiyun Li, Wednesday’s Child: Stories

Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home

Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era

Britney Spears, The Woman in Me

Barbra Streisand, My Name is Barbra

Alice Winn, In Memoriam

Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World

5 lists:

Naomi Alderman, The Future

Anne Berest, tr. Tina Kover, The Postcard

Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

Tom Crewe, The New Life

Patricia Engel, The Faraway World

Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life

Cristina Rivera Garza, Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice

Paul Harding, This Other Eden

Mick Herron, The Secret Hours

Nathan Hill, Wellness

Lydia Kiesling, Mobility

Jhumpa Lahiri, tr. Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz, Roman Stories

Andrew Leland, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

Ayana Mathis, The Unsettled

Marie NDiaye, tr. Jordan Stump, Vengeance Is Mine

Mark O’Connell, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder

Caroline O’Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

Ed Park, Same Bed Different Dreams

Salman Rushdie, Victory City

Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki, Roaming

Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

Paul Yoon, The Hive and the Honey

List of Lists Surveyed:

The New Yorker’s The Best Books of 2023 (The Essentials) • The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2023 and 10 Best Books of 2023 • TIME’s The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023 • The Atlantic’s The Books That Made Us Think the Most This Year • Publishers Weekly’s Best Books 2023 • The Wall Street Journal’s The 10 Best Books of 2023 • The Los Angeles Times’s 13 Best Novels (And 2 Best Short Story Collections) of 2023 • The Washington Post‘s 50 Notable Works of Fiction and 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction and 10 Best Books of 2023 • Vulture’s The Best Books of 2023 • Slate’s The 10 Best Books of 2023 (Laura Miller) and The 10 Best Books of 2023 (Dan Kois) • Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2023, Best Nonfiction of 2023, and Best Short Story Collections of 2023 • The Economist’s Best Books of 2023 • Vanity Fair’s 20 Favorite Books of 2023 • Esquire’s The 20 Best Books of 2023 • Oprah Daily’s The Best Books of 2023 • Den of Geek’s Best Books of 2023 • Amazon’s Top 20 Books of the Year • Book Riot’s Best Books of 2023 • Chicago Tribune’s 10 Best Books for 2023 • Inside Hook’s The 10 Best Books of 2023 • The Guardian’s Best Books of 2023 • Powell’s Books’ Best Books of 2023: Fiction and Best Books of 2023: Nonfiction • Real Simple’s 60 Best Books of 2023 • Good Housekeeping’s The Must-Read Books of 2023 • AIR MAIL’s 12 Best Books of 2023 • The New York Public Library’s Best Books for Adults 2023 • The Boston Globe’s 55 Books We Loved in 2023 • Book Soup’s Best Books of 2023 • The Chicago Review of Books’ Best Books We Read in 2023 • The California Review of Books’ 10 Best Books of 2023 • The Globe and Mail’s The Globe 100: The Best Books of 2023 • Tattered Cover’s Books of the Year 2023 • ELLE’s Editors Share the Books They Loved Best in 2023 • The New Statesman’s 20 Best Books of 2023 • Harper’s Bazaar’s The 45 Best New Books of 2023 You Won’t Put Down • The Chicago Public Library’s Favorite Books of 2023 and Top 10 Books of 2023 • BookPage’s Best Fiction of 2023 and Best Nonfiction of 2023 and Best Mystery & Suspense of 2023 and Best Romance of 2023 and Best SFF & Horror of 2023 and 10 Best Books of 2023 • Shelf Awareness’s Best Adult Books of 2023 • Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction Books of the Year and Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • Library Journal’s Best Books 2023 • The Telegraph’s 50 Best Books of 2023 • The Conversation’s Best Books of 2023 • The New York Post’s Best Books of 2023 • PEOPLE’s Top 10 Books of 2023 • Foreign Affairs’ The Best of Books 2023 • Town & Country’s The Best Books of 2023 • The Independent’s 25 Best Books of the Year • and of course, Literary Hub’s The 38 Best Books We Read in 2023.

Craft and Criticism / Features / Literary Criticism / Reading Lists

The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2023

Book Marks   4:45AM, 23 Dec, 2023

Book Burning

“With the kids jingle belling

And everyone telling you be of good cheer…”

*

Welcome, fellow haters, to another bilious edition of the Most Scathing Book Reviews of the Year.

As longtime readers of this annual feature will know, each year in the run up to the holidays, we (the normally benevolent stewards of BookMarks.reviews) make a sacrificial offering to the literary criticism gods in the hope of a bountiful review harvest for the coming year.

Among the books being flung into the fiery pit this time around: Walter Isaacson’s “dull, insight-free doorstop” biography of Elon Musk; Paris Hilton’s “vapid and vaporous” memoir; Tom Hanks’ “bland busman’s holiday dressed up as literary fiction”; and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “hollow PR exercise.”

So here they are, in all their gory, gut-punchin’ glory: the most scathing book reviews of 2023.

*

“Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer … There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter …

To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best …

There is a far more interesting book shadowing this one about the way our society has ceded its prerogatives to the Musks of the world. There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your savior turns out to be the world’s loudest crank? So who or what is responsible for Elon Musk? ‘Growing up in South Africa, fighting was normal,’ Musk says, and there’s a whiff of desperate masculinity floating through the book, as rank as a Pretoria boys’ locker room. It is not a coincidence that the back jacket features a fully erect penis (some may argue it is actually one of Musk’s rockets, but I remain unconvinced) …

Isaacson’s book constantly tries to build dramatic tension between the species-saving visionary and the beaten bullied boy. But we know the ending to Musk’s story before we even open it. In the end, the bullies win.”

–Gary Shteyngart on Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk (The Guardian)

“The overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard—someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly …

All the culture war Mad Libs can’t distract from the dull coldness at this book’s core. A former military prosecutor, DeSantis is undeniably diligent and disciplined … Even the title, with its awkward feint at boldness while clinging to the safety of cliché, suggests the anxiety of an ambitious politician who really, really wants to run for president in 2024 and knows he needs the grievance vote … For the most part, The Courage to Be Free is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT …

At around 250 pages, this isn’t a particularly long book, but it’s padded with such banalities … Take out the gauzy abstraction, the heartwarming clichés, and much of what DeSantis is describing in The Courage to Be Free is chilling—unfree and scary.”

–Jennifer Szalai on Ron DeSantis’ The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival (The New York Times)

“…a book that must rank as one of the most bizarre I’ve ever read. Yes, it is—at moments—very sad. There’s ongoing shame in it for tabloid journalism. But for a title written explicitly in the cause of securing sympathy and understanding for its so-called author, boy, does it misfire. It’s not only that Harry is so petulant: a man who thinks nothing, even now, of complaining about the bedroom he was allotted for his summer hols in Granny’s castle. With every page, his California makeover grows less convincing …

What kind of person insists on an air-clearing meeting with their father on the day of his father’s funeral? A myopic, self-obsessed, non-empathic kind of person, I would say. Exactly the same kind of person, in fact, who would talk about reconciliation in the same breath as they publicly slag off their family … Such things are made all the more jarring by the yawning gap between the way Harry speaks and the way his ghost, JR Moehringer, writes…I suppose he wishes he were Ben Lerner, or some other hip young literary American gunslinger, rather than having to channel a raging Sloane who must look up the word compere in a dictionary when his brother asks him to be one at his wedding and whose epigraph from Faulkner—’The past is never dead. It’s not even past’—he found on brainyquote.com. Sometimes, Moehringer writes. Like this. In short sentences. Bang. Bang-bang. At other times, it’s as if he’s been at Harry’s weed or something …

Here we are. Penguin Random House has helped him out and we can only hope he’s happy with his end of the deal, a pact more Faustian by far than anything his father or brother have ever signed.”

–Rachel Cooke on Prince Harry’s Spare (The Guardian)

“…amounts to a book-length shrug … At least you can say there’s no false advertising. Roxane Gay’s new collection of essays is titled Opinions, after all, not Thoughts or Ideas. She gives us exactly what she promises: a series of opinions on various subjects, arranged haphazardly, adding up to nothing substantial at all …

It isn’t Gay’s fault that feminism became so devoid of meaning that our hard-won slogans were easily stripped from their context and used by bad actors to fight against abortion rights, to protest vaccine and mask mandates during the pandemic, and to harass trans women. But Gay, in her anti-intellectual stance, became a kind of mother figure for those who would prefer to avoid thinking their way through cognitive dissonance, smoothing back their hair to coo, ‘you’re already perfect, just the way you are’ …

It’s not an argument for acknowledging complexity, it’s an argument for not thinking. It’s an argument for focusing, first and foremost, on our own comfort … Such tepid writing makes no intellectual, ideological or psychological demand of its reader. Working against ideology might look like a principled, sophisticated stance, one that values nuance and uncertainty, but instead it reveals a lack of rigour. If anything, you could say that ‘comfort’ is her primary ideology, as she uses the word and its variations dozens of times throughout …

Readers see her waffling and confuse it for courage … ‘Extend your empathy’ is her instruction—as vague and thoughtless as an advertisement for a new moisturiser. This book is proof that the anti-fascist philosopher Simone Weil was right, when she wrote: ‘There is nothing more comfortable than not thinking.’”

–Jessa Crispin on Roxane Gay’s Opinions (The Telegraph)

“Killing Moon is so cruelly, brutally misogynistic and brimming with every savage cliche of crime fiction that it’s barely readable … Nearly ten pages into Killing Moon, I wondered whether Nesbo had always depicted women in such a cruel, hateful way. Did I overlook it for two whole decades? … Perhaps some readers simply don’t mind Nesbo’s description of young women as ‘parasitic bimbos on the hunt for a suitable host’ because, as he asserts, it’s traditional …

Maybe someone needs to remind Nesbo that storytelling in fiction allows us to explore alternate worlds. It lets us stand in the shoes of characters who are both like us and entirely different so we can expand our thinking and take on new perspectives. Storytelling that relies on tired cliches that frame women as hapless gold-digging victims who are lucky to have an ancient, alcoholic ex-cop on their case is a literary tradition we can do without.”

–Cat Woods on Jo Nesbø’s Killing Moon (Observer)

“Melodramas of oppression and resistance do not brook much nuance, and, in any event, it can be difficult to insist on ethical complexity when faced with a story that resonated with many readers … Mom Rage is Dubin’s book-length effort to grant mothers the absolution that many of them seek … Dubin’s claims and prescriptions are, by now, staples of pop-feminist nonfiction …

The newer books—call them ‘feminish’—engage only sparingly with the original sources. Reading paraphrases of paraphrases of paraphrases, one starts to feel as if there is something a little hollow and shiftless about the ease with which phrases such as ‘white supremacist, homophobic, classist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, capitalist patriarchy’ are trotted out. We get the right words, strung together like marquee lights, but not the structural analysis that puts them in relation to one another …

Dubin does not appear to have interviewed any mothers who do not claim to suffer from mom rage. Nor has she interviewed father … No doubt the patriarchy and capitalism have power, but how precisely that power results in the rage of mothers toward their children, as opposed to their husbands or their bosses, remains unclear … The imprecision of Dubin’s language strands her argument on unstable ground …

The book fails to universalize a particular predicament, and, in strenuously attempting to do so, turns into an exercise in ill-advised candor … How clearly can a writer see anyone or anything—her children or the social and political contours of motherhood—when she perceives everything through the haze of moral cliché?”

–Merve Emre on Minna Dubin’s Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood (The New Yorker)

“Now, in her early 40s, she has published a memoir, which for ephemeral, unreflective celebrities like her is usually a way of fending off imminent obsolescence. The book—ventriloquized by Joni Rodgers, who describes herself as a ‘story whisperer’—is as vapid and vaporous as the fragrances Hilton sells; all the same, archaeologists may one day consult it in the hope of understanding how and why our species underwent a final mutation into something glossily post-human. The antics of this entitled flibbertigibbet expose the absurdity of a culture in which the self only exists if it is validated by a selfie, membership of society depends on the mirage of social media and the reality in which we were all once anchored has been replaced by a flimsy virtual replica …

This air-headed mysticism merges with the digital revolution, which allowed Hilton to disseminate her image around the globe and to seep into our defenseless heads … Yes, it’s her world and after reading her book I just wish I could move off-planet.”

–Peter Conrad on Paris Hilton’s Paris: The Memoir (The Guardian)

“…an ascendant group of conservative thinkers persists in defining liberalism as everything and nothing…This motley crew might have served as an advertisement for liberalism’s commitment to religious toleration, were its denizens not united by their shared distaste for globalism, the sexual revolution and allegedly latte-lapping elites … Deneen’s disregard for details, among them the awkward fact that no one actually defends the position he attributes to practically everyone, is unfortunately characteristic. The post-liberals are dramatic, even hysterical, stylists, prone to sweeping pronouncements about the entirety of culture since the dawn of time …

The uninitiated might wonder whether Deneen should have consulted a single ambassador of ‘the many’ before making so many confident assertions about ‘what most ordinary people instinctively seek’ … Deneen makes it easy to turn away from his politics of personality and his terminological indignities.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Patrick J. Deneen’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (The Washington Post)

“No…fever pitch is reached in Alderman’s new novel, whose outlook is decidedly more reformist than revolutionary. Instead of a bottom-up social movement led by young women, change in The Future comes from the top down … What follows is a dubious effort to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Alderman has an undeniable talent for concocting a twisty, rollicking narrative, replete with assassination attempts, desert island bunkers and machine-learning prophets. Yet for all its conspiratorial thrills, The Future mostly reads like a manifesto for technocracy wrapped up in a genre-fiction bow …

The book suffers not just from its dogmatism but also from its homogeneity … The book’s most impressive quality is its vivid, tactile imagination of our ultra-computerized future … Though it purports to affirm the human capacity for empathy and curiosity, The Future is built like a machine: calculating, doctrinaire and hollow on the inside.”

–Ian Wang on Naomi Alderman’s The Future (The New York Times Book Review)

“All this should be fun. But alas, The Romantic is a tired, spiritless piece of work, written as if Mr. Boyd was slogging dutifully through the formula he created and has previously used to better effect … Who is Mr. Boyd’s target reader, one wonders? Anyone with a genuine interest in the Byron and Shelley circle, or African exploration, or literary London, will find nothing of consequence in these pages. And anyone looking for an engrossing love story will not find one in the conventional romance of Ross and his Raphaella. The novel might serve as a novice’s introduction to the period, a sort of 19th Century 101. But for an author of Mr. Boyd’s reputation, that’s a low bar to set.”

–Brooke Allen on William Boyd’s The Romantic (The Wall Street Journal)

“As usual the ‘action’ proceeds by peristalsis, with descriptions of roads, shops, real estate, traffic jams, motels, tourist attractions and free publications constantly interrupted by long, unwieldy flashbacks to all the stuff that’s happened since the last Frank Bascombe novel. It’s immersive stuff: reading these books is the closest you’ll come to being stuck in an actual traffic jam without leaving the comfort of your armchair …

I wonder whether a) people arrive at these books predisposed to favour fiction that showcases the mundane and b) the swathes of mediocre prose slip under the radar because it’s basically quite easy to read … If you like the boring bits of Knausgaard and Ford, I can’t argue with that. But I’m still going to try to persuade you not to read Be Mine, for several other reasons. First, there’s nothing novel about this novel … Why this boorish, boring also-ran is taking up fresh shelf space in 2023 is a mystery.”

–Claire Lowdon on Richard Ford’s Be Mine (Times Literary Supplement)

“The most intriguing thing about Central Park West—in a way, the real mystery here—is the strange sense that there is something missing. For all his power and access, all those decades of crimes and secrets, Comey has produced any other middle-aged lawyer’s clunky but passable fling at that courtroom novel he always threatened to write. It raises an almost depressing question: Does Comey—do any of these politicos turned authors—have anything to reveal at all? …

To describe the prose as workmanlike would be too kind. It is often lurching and awkward, and the dialogue frequently reads like someone ran the original English through a machine translator into a foreign language and back again … Location descriptions are painful, like notes that a more fluent writer would plug in fully intending to come back to on a second draft … But there is still something to like here. Within reason. For all its clichés, it is a work of genuine imagination. It is plotted with reasonable care …

How deflating, then, to discover that the most these semiretired potentates of the great secret machinery of government can imagine amounts to a rip-off of more professionally written TV shows and mid-tier Hollywood action properties.”

–Jacob Bacharach on James Comey’s Central Park West (The New Republic)

“It would be nice at this point to confirm Hanks’s book as a satire. That way we could applaud the means by which it deftly—even affectionately—pricks the pompous self-regard of Hollywood’s inner circle, complete with a star who unwinds by taking her Cirrus jet for a spin and a gonzo method actor who insists on sleeping in a tent. We might then go on to laugh at the idiotic footnotes that provide a needless justification for the use of slang and blithely mis-explain Alfred Hitchcock’s MacGuffin. Alarmingly, though, this tale is deadly serious. Johnson is great and Knightshade is amazing and therefore everything about them is a source of endless fascination. The production, says Hanks, runs for 53 days. Somehow his book makes it feel even longer …

A bland busman’s holiday dressed up as literary fiction, a bungled behind-the-scenes tour that can’t see the wood for the trees. It’s crying out for an editor. The plot is borderline incontinent … aking a movie is tough; writing a novel is hard, too. So accentuate the positives, draw a line and move on. On a pure sentence level Hanks’s book is at times pretty good. Overall I confess it was very much not for me.”

–Xan Brooks on Tom Hanks’ The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (The Guardian)

“Ms. Streisand is a woman of many talents. Curating memories of the way she was—well, that isn’t one of them … This plaintive observation would have packed a greater punch had it not been buried in an avalanche of minutiae about Ms. Streisand’s grade-school crushes, her pastries of choice at the local bakery, her ideal bagel toppings, her preferred beverage at the drugstore and her favorite treats at the movie theater … There may be gold there, but readers will have to pan diligently …

For 40 years, Ms. Streisand says, editors, including Jacqueline Onassis, asked her to write an autobiography. She steadfastly declined because of her desire to live in the present rather than dwell in the past. It should come as a surprise to exactly no one that, having finally acceded, Ms. Streisand charged full-bore into yesteryear. In so doing, she failed to remember her reaction to the overemoting Mr. Patinkin in the early days of the Yentl shoot: Sometimes less is more … Doesn’t have an index, so there are no shortcuts for impatient readers … Even her most devoted followers will be crying uncle or, more to the point, Yentl.”

–Joanne Kaufman on Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra (The Wall Street Journal)

“What of the book? Permit me to save you the trouble of finding out for yourself: Be Useful is a raw deal, a hollow PR exercise filled with precepts and quips but devoid of self-awareness or humility. You might be swayed by Arnie’s touching faith in bipartisanship and the need to tackle the climate crisis or moved by his tales of heroic procurement of personal protective equipment during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as a pitch for Marcus Aurelius status…it’s thoroughly expendable—an overpromoted TED Talk, just another cross-promotional weapon in the Schwarzenegger multimedia arsenal.”

–Charles Arrowsmith on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life (The Los Angeles Times)

*

Thirsty for more takedowns?

Reacquaint yourself with the most scathing book reviews of 2017 , 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Book News / Features / Literary Criticism / Politics / Technology

The 10 Biggest Literary Stories of the Year

Literary Hub   4:44AM, 23 Dec, 2023

top102023

And yet again, we’ve reached the end of a long, bad list year.For the sake of posterity, and probably because we’re masochists, this week we’ve been counting down the 50 biggest literary stories of 2023, so you can remember the good, the bad, and all the literary cool girls we met along the way. But you’ve made it to the end, almost. So with no further ado, these are the biggest literary stories of the year that was:

10.

It was time for Colleen Hoover to face the backlash.

2022 was the year that Colleen Hoover—BookTok monarch and undisputed heavyweight champion of 2020s book sales—went stratospheric. She outsold John Grisham and James Patterson combined. She outsold Dr. Seuss. She outsold the damn Bible. As Alexandra Alter put it in a New York Times profile of the author, published in October of that year: “To say she’s currently the best-selling novelist in the United States, to even compare her to other successful authors who have landed several books on the best seller lists, fails to capture the size and loyalty of her audience.”

2023, however, saw the bloom go off the rose a wee bit.

It began in January, when Hoover announced that she and her publisher, Atria, were issuing a coloring book tie-in for her biggest hit, It Ends With Us. That decision was not well received. Here’s how Chels Upton, writing for Slate, described the backlash:

The negative response was swift and overwhelming, for obvious reasons. It Ends With Us is a book about domestic violence. Hoover detractors who say she romanticizes abuse had a new weapon in their arsenal: How can Hoover pretend she takes the subject matter seriously while creating cutesy, juvenile merchandise? Only 24 hours after the coloring book’s publication was announced, it was canceled due to pushback from both her fans and critics.

After this happened, there seemed to be something of a vibe shift within the CoHo fan community, and impassioned Hoover takedowns—often accusing the author of romanticizing abuse and glamorizing harmful relationships—began to garner hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and YouTube.

Speaking to Jenna Hager Bush in June, Hoover seemed to take the criticism in her stride:

“If people don’t like what I write, I just try to avoid that side of it. I get it. It doesn’t bother me at all. I feel like when you have five books on the bestsellers list it’s very hard to be upset in any way by criticism. Because you know that people out there are enjoying your work, and I just keep my focus on that.”

Fair enough. –DS

9.

Elizabeth Gilbert pulled her Russia-set novel after social media blowback.

On June 6th, Elizabeth Gilbert announced on social media that her next novel, The Snow Forest, would be published by Riverhead in February 2024. The story was inspired by Karp Lykov and his family, members of an orthodox sect who fled to the Siberian forest to escape religious persecution from the Soviet government and lived there, cut off from human contact, for decades.

On June 12th, the Eat Pray Love author returned to social media to announce that she was indefinitely delaying publication due to a “enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from [her] Ukrainian readers, expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain about the fact that [she] would choose to release a book in the world right now … that is set in Russia.” (The criticism largely manifested through one-star reviews on Goodreads, presumably before most reviewers had read the book.)

As you might remember, the internet exploded with think pieces and backlash to the backlash—some applauded Gilbert, many more expressed concern over censorship (self-imposed and otherwise), everyone continued hating Goodreads, and at least one person wondered if Gilbert was just bored. (As the New York Times pointed out, other novels set in Russia flew under the radar, perhaps indicating that popularity is not a writer’s best friend.) Riverhead, noticeably, stayed mum on the matter.

Will The Snow Forest ever see the light of day? Who knows. Decidedly not in February 2024, which will mark two years of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. –ES

8.

Private equity fund KKR bought Simon & Schuster.

No one was really expecting the Justice Department to halt Penguin Random House’s attempted purchase of its largest rival, Simon & Schuster, so when the final word came down in late 2022, it sent shockwaves through publishing (and through PRH). For many in the book world, the decision was a welcome one, a rare moment of government intervention on the side of the little guy (writers, in this case, and the potential size of their advances).

But as the dust settled we all began to wonder what would come next? Nick Fuller Googins wrote optimistically at Lit Hub about the huge positives of the employee ownership model, aka the Norton model:

The workforce of WW Norton has successfully owned and managed the venerable publishing house since shortly after World War II, when Mary Norton sold her stock to the company’s editors and managers. They drew up a Joint Stockholders Agreement that still remains in effect, allowing active Norton employees to elect leadership, participate in decisions affecting the company’s future, and share profits. Anyone who leaves Norton must sell back their shares, ensuring that no outside market exists for ownership of the company. There is no risk of a hostile takeover, no fear of an unexpected sale. The employees are free and independent to do what they have done so well for decades: publish kickass books.

Wow, yeah, that does sound really good… But it was not to be.

In early August of this year it was announced that KKR, a private equity fund, had purchased Simon & Schuster for $1.62 billion. It’s no secret that private equity funds like to acquire struggling companies, ramp up short term profits (often by slashing expenses), and then sell them for a profit; but as many have noted, Simon & Schuster is far from struggling. As Alex Kirshner’s great piece for Slate points out:

Simon & Schuster is already humming. It just reported a record sales year and seems to have been on the market in the first place mainly because its parent company, Paramount Global, saw it as “not core” and liked the chance to pay down some debt with the proceeds. A private equity firm’s specific designs for Simon & Schuster would be clearer if the book publisher were a disaster site, an iconic brand in need of better management so that it could return to its place as a literary pillar. But Simon & Schuster never lost that status in the first place, so KKR’s buyout lacks the patina of a rescue operation.

So will KKR leave well enough alone? The company has talked publicly about giving employees equity—which is a good sign—but ask anyone who’s worked in newspapers or magazines in the last 20 years about private equity and they’ll roll their eyes, or vomit, or both.

Check back in this space a year from now and we’ll have a better idea… –JD

7.

Ron DeSantis’s war on books continues unabated.

Soon-to-be failed presidential candidate and wearer of terrible boots Ron DeSantis has succeeded in making Florida one of the most hostile states in the union when it comes to books. Again and again DeSantis has doubled down on his role as Culture Warrior in Chief, ginning up conspiratorial fears of the Woke Mind Virus, mobilizing veritable armies of white suburban moms against queer people, Brown people, and the collected works of Kimberlé Crenshaw anything to do with Black history.

According to PEN America: “Florida is one of the worst states in the country for those who care about the freedom to read: 13 school districts in Florida banned books in the second half of 2022—more than in any other state—adding up to a total of 357 bans.”

And as our own Janet Manley asked back in May:

FLORIDA, ARE YOU OKAY?

I’ve kept a rough tally of things the sunshine state is afraid of:

the word “gay”

Oprah

reproductive rights

Mem Fox

drag shows

Judy Blume

fresh water

and things Florida thinks are fine:

assault weapons

alligators

parrot shirts and Crocs that come with a bottle opener

Are you a Floridian? How is the vibe down there right now? I’d love if you could let me know in the comments. <3

Perhaps the worst thing to come out of DeSantis’s unrelenting and deeply cynical fearmongering is that scourge of school boards everywhere, Moms For Liberty, cofounded by Tallahassee’s Jennifer Pippin and Sarasota’s Bridget Ziegler (she of the now infamous sex scandal). Though it appears the group is collapsing from within, much damage has already been done, as the Washington Post itemized this past May (translations mine):

“Nearly half of filings — 43 percent — targeted titles with LGBTQ characters or themes, while 36 percent targeted titles featuring characters of color or dealing with issues of race and racism.”

TRANSLATION: We don’t want to hear about you unless you’re white and straight.

“Many challengers wrote that reading books about LGBTQ people could cause children to alter their sexuality or gender.”

TRANSLATION: Books can turn you gay.

“Serial filers relied on a network of volunteers gathered together under the aegis of conservative parents’ groups such as Moms for Liberty.”

TRANSLATION: It only takes a few bad actors to corrupt an otherwise open society. This is the Tolerance Paradox at work.

“‘These censorship attacks on books have real-life human impacts that are going to resonate for generations,’ said John Chrastka, cofounder and executive director of library advocacy group EveryLibrary.”

TRANSLATION: The few hateful book-banners don’t actually care about the mental well-being of children.

“From the 2000s to the early 2010s, LGBTQ books were the targets of between less than 1 and 3 percent of book challenges filed in schools, according to ALA data. That number rose to 16 percent by 2018, 20 percent in 2020 and 45.5 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available.”

TRANSLATION: This is a targeted, activist-driven culture war in the absence of any real policy ideas on the right.

“‘If that book was made without the strap-on dildo,’ Jennifer Pippin (founding chairman of Moms for Liberty) said, ‘that book wouldn’t be challenged.’”

TRANSLATION: Jennifer Pippin will not peg you, no matter how nicely you ask.

It’s hard to gauge whether we’ve reached peak book-banning, yet. My guess—as we enter an election year—is no. Thanks to DeSantis, politicians across the country have seen just how easy it is to mobilize vague conservative unease into full-blown, torch-bearing mobs. Whatever comes of the remainder of DeSantis’s ugly political career, his place in the annals of American demagoguery is assured, boots and all.  –JD

6.

It was a big year for ghostwriters.

One of the biggest books this year—without a doubt—was Spare, which was published just as Harry and Meghan officially stepped down as senior royals. In the publishing industry, everyone was a bit stressed trying to get a copy of the book before the on-sale date (Alexandra Jacobs recounted the New York Times’ inability to get an advance copy, which meant she only had a day to read and review it.) We were teased audiobook clips of the now Duke of Sussex dealing with his frostbitten penis, but most importantly, we saw book sales soar: the day it went on sale, the book sold more than 1.4 million copies; in its first week it sold 3.2 million.

Then in May, “Harry’s ghostwriter” J.R. Moehringer broke the cardinal rule of celebrity ghostwriters (which many are contractually forbidden to speak about) and wrote a seven thousand word essay about what it was like to be the Royal’s ghostwriter (as well as Andre Agassi’s and Phil Knight’s). The essay is warm, informative, and telling: he describes an argument he had with Harry over how to end a “difficult passage”:

Some part of me was still able to step outside the situation and think, This is so weird. I’m shouting at Prince Harry. Then, as Harry started going back at me, as his cheeks flushed and his eyes narrowed, a more pressing thought occurred: Whoa, it could all end right here.

Of course Harry used a ghostwriter, but what does it mean when we begin to acknowledge that the books “by” our favorite celebrities are, in fact, written by writers like Moehringer, who also happens to have a Pulitzer and has written his own memoir and novel? Let’s call 2023 the year of the ghostwriter; with many high-profile (and high-advance) celebrity books published, it was inevitable that the details would be revealed—Britany Spears (who was reportedly paid a $12.5MM advance for her memoir) apparently had a team behind her that included the writer Sam Lansky; in Paris, Paris Hilton thanked her ghost writer, Joni Rodgers, as someone who “helped me find my voice.”

But it’s not just memoirs—celebrities who write fiction likewise use ghostwriters, as The Guardian explored over the summer. Teenage actress Millie Bobby Brown’s novel sparked some controversy when it was revealed that her fall novel was written with (or by?) a ghostwriter.

Their names might not be on the cover copy—yet. But perhaps we’ll see more acknowledgments in years to come #nametheghostwriter. –EF

5.

Posthumous editions of Roald Dahl’s books—and then Ian Fleming’s—ignited controversy.

In this time of deep partisan divisions, it was in a way refreshing to see people from across the political spectrum come together this year over one particular topic: outrage at Roald Dahl’s work being posthumously changed to reflect the suggestions of modern sensitivity readers.

It wasn’t just the usual right-wing bloviators getting up in arms about wokeness (although there was, of course, plenty of that)—Steven Spielberg and Salman Rushdie and Suzanne Nossel of PEN America and the Queen Consort all chimed in about it. In an unholy fusion worthy of David Cronenberg, knee-jerk defenders of the perceived right for a person to be as offensive as they’d like came together with champions of good writing and good humanity to decry Penguin’s decision to edit the texts. They swiftly changed course and brought out a batch of ‘classic’ editions of the Dahl books—indeed, so swiftly that one might believe it had been a double-dipping plan all along.

Stories followed about how Ian Fleming’s James Bond books were being edited for a reissue campaign, about how R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books had been edited without his knowledge, and a new generation was introduced to the concept of bowdlerization.

And to be clear, some of the changes to the Dahl books in particular were unforgivable. Entire sentences added to the text, rhymes butchered, and a real “trees instead of forest” practice of removing specific words like ‘fat’ and ‘crazy’ or gender-specific pronouns while leaving the rest of the questionable context in place.

This is a complicated topic to discuss under the best of circumstances, and the internet of 2023 is certainly not the best of circumstances—but I’m going to give it my best shot. James Bond will always be a character defined by his casual racism and his brutality towards women, in service of the Crown. Roald Dahl was a terrible anti-semite and his books contain some of the nastiest sentences in fiction, children’s or otherwise. Agatha Christie really did title a book that, only to have it retitled twice. These things are true and it is in fact important that we know about them. Erasing any of this does nothing but try to sweep history under the rug, and anyone who has ever cleaned a house before knows that you can only get away with that for so long before all hell breaks loose.

It’s also true that it can hurt to read a slur, or a scene of sexual violence, or to in any way be thrown out of a work of fiction by a harsh reminder that the world used to be a crueler place. At a time when real violence is being done to marginalized populations, is it really such a big deal that we take steps to protect the more vulnerable among us?

But just as conflict is not abuse and retweets are not endorsements, assuming that all readers who encounter these texts in their unexpurgated form will take them at face value is a colossal misunderstanding. We read in order to make sense of the world, and while it might be true that Roald Dahl had plenty of shitty stances on beauty, race, size, and intelligence, he also wrote with grace about the incredible powers of imagination and love. When we read Ian Fleming and see James Bond talking casually about rape or racism, it is valuable to be able to say “you know, I don’t agree” instead of just pretending that it wasn’t there at all. After all, a version of King Lear with a happy ending isn’t a good revision; it’s one that misses the entire point of the story. –DB

4.

Writers and other literary people won some key battles against corporate interests.

Though we didn’t need any further evidence that solidarity is always a good look, unions racked up some significant wins in 2023. In February, after almost hitting the 100-day mark on the picket line, HarperCollins Union members (UAW 2110) agreed to a tentative deal with management. In April, the Writers Guild of America went on strike for 148 days. Writing about authors on the picket line, Alexis Gunderson made the point that “when there are already so few paths to having a stable career as a writer, the prospect of losing this one has also proved to be galvanizing.”

Of course, not everyone was galvanized—Drew Barrymore was set to host the 2023 National Book Awards, until she announced that her eponymous show would resume production amid the strike—without its writers.

“The National Book Awards is an evening dedicated to celebrating the power of literature, and the incomparable contributions of writers to our culture,” the National Book Foundation said in a statement. “In light of the announcement that The Drew Barrymore Show will resume production, the National Book Foundation has rescinded Ms. Barrymore’s invitation to host the 74th National Book Awards Ceremony. Our commitment is to ensure that the focus of the Awards remains on celebrating writers and books, and we are grateful to Ms. Barrymore and her team for understanding in this situation.”

LeVar Burton, who walked the picket line as a SAG member during this year’s 118-day actors’ strike, replaced her as host. Let this be a lesson to all of us! –JG

3.

The book banning continued.

The biggest literary story of 2022 was the national proliferation of book bans. Unfortunately, the trend did not abate in 2023—though neither did the efforts to push back.

PEN America recorded 3,362 cases of book bans in the 2022-’23 school year, a 33% increase from the 2,532 bans in the 2021-’22 school year. Over 40 percent of these bans are happening in Florida. The most banned books include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, John Green’s Looking for Alaska, and of course, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir.

The American Library Association has also recorded a record high of book bans and attempted book bans in 2023; this year was notable for the fact that the challenges had notably expanded from school libraries to public libraries. “The irony is that you had some censors who said that those who didn’t want books pulled from schools could just go to the public libraries,”’Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told the AP. Super.

“I never thought I’d be a president who is fighting against elected officials trying to ban and banning books,” said President Biden in April, at a White House event honoring teachers. “Empty shelves don’t help kids learn very much. And I’ve never met a parent who wants a politician dictating what their kid can learn, and what they can think, or who they can be.” In June, the Biden administration promised to appoint an “anti-book ban coordinator” in the Education Department; that person was finally named in September, though the scope of their powers is fairly limited.

In October, Scholastic came under fire for a policy change around its beloved Scholastic Book Fairs: some books had been separated into a separate, optional collection, which they titled Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice. This collection included “most of the books dealing with issues of race, gender and sexuality,” according to NPR. The internet was displeased.

Initially, Scholastic defended their decision, explaining in a press release:

There is now enacted or pending legislation in more than 30 U.S. states prohibiting certain kinds of books from being in schools—mostly LGBTQIA+ titles and books that engage with the presence of racism in our country. Because Scholastic Book Fairs are invited into schools, where books can be purchased by kids on their own, these laws create an almost impossible dilemma: back away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians, and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued, or prosecuted.

But after a few days of public pressure, Scholastic president Ellie Berger apologized and reversed the decision. “This fall, we made changes in our U.S. elementary school fairs out of concern for our Book Fair hosts,” Scholastic told USA Today in a statement. “In doing this, we offered a collection of books to supplement the diverse collection of titles already available at the Scholastic Book Fair. We understand now that the separate nature of the collection has caused confusion and feelings of exclusion. We are working across Scholastic to find a better way.”

And there has been other pushback as well: In May, PEN America, along with Penguin Random House and a group of authors, parents, and students, filed a “first of its kind” federal lawsuit to prevent the removal of books from school libraries in Escambia County, Florida. In June 2023, Governor Pritzker signed a bill making Illinois the first state to outlaw book bans; in September, California’s Governor Newsom followed suit. Elsewhere, individual parents and educators continue to fight the good fight. After all: the vast majority of Americans do not want this. Which is, I suppose, a certain kind of silver lining. –ET

2.

Writers are killed in Gaza; censored, silenced, and standing in solidarity in the U.S.

For over two months now, Israel (with the full military, financial, and diplomatic support of the US) has laid siege to the already-benighted Gaza strip, killing at least 18,272 people (including 8,000+ children), injuring at least 49,229, displacing at least 1.8 million, and damaging or destroying at least 305,000 homes. Despite calls for a permanent humanitarian ceasefire from the UN, the Pope, every major human rights association the world over, and tens of millions of protestors, this horror, this genocide, continues apace.

Gaza’s literary and journalistic communities have suffered heavy losses.

At least 75 Palestinian journalists and writers, as well as numerous members of their immediate and extended families, have been killed by Israeli airstrikes and sniper fire since the war on Gaza began. On October 20, the novelist, poet, and educator Heba Abu Nada was killed, along with her son, in their home in south Gaza. On November 19, Belal Jadallah, the “godfather of Palestinian journalism,” was killed while trying to reach his family. On December 7, the poet and scholar Refaat Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike that also killed his brother, his sister, and four of her children.

The damage to Gaza’s cultural sector has been so devastating, and so clearly targeted, that many are now referring to it as a “cultural genocide.”

Here in the US, many literary and cultural institutions showed that the McCarthyist streak in American public life is alive and well.

Artforum‘s editor-in-chief was fired for publishing a letter expressing solidarity with Palestinians. Several events for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama author Nathan Thrall were called off. Salvadoran poet and activist Javier Zamora was disinvited from a panel for publicly supporting Palestinian liberation. eLife editor-in-chief Michael Eisen, was fired for reposting an article from The Onion. 92NY canceled an event featuring the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen after he signed an open letter critical of Israel. Zibby Owens withdrew sponsorship from the National Book Awards, citing its “pro-Palestinian agenda.”

However, we also saw many inspiring displays of Palestinian solidarity to counteract this chilling of free speech.

Thousands of writers signed an open letter expressing solidarity with the people of Palestine. More than a dozen of this year’s National Book Award finalists took to the stage to call for a ceasefire. Over 2000 poets and writers pledged to boycott the Poetry Foundation, citing “a recent instance of prejudiced silencing.” Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Boyer resigned from the New York Times with this extraordinary letter. The Giller Prize ceremony in Toronto was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters, who were later supported by more than 1,700 Canadian writers. The kidnapping of poet Mosab Abu Toha by Israeli forces prompted an outcry from the literary community (Abu Toha was later released and eventually made it to Egypt with his wife and children). Hundreds of literary translators signed a statement in solidarity with Gaza, as did dozens of indie bookstores and hundreds of small publishers from around the world. And Rupi Kaur publicly declined an invitation from the White House.

As human rights activist and Booker Prize-winner Arundhati Roy said in a powerful address to the Munich Literature Festival back in mid-November:

If we allow this brazen slaughter to continue, even as it is livestreamed into the most private recesses of our personal lives, we are complicit in it. Something in our moral selves will be altered forever.

…

The world must intervene. The occupation must end. Palestinians must have a viable homeland.

If not, then the moral architecture of western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even that provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.

So please—for the sake of Palestine and Israel, for the sake of the living and in the name of the dead, for the sake of the hostages being held by Hamas and the Palestinians in Israel’s prisons—for the sake of all of humanity—cease fire now. –DS

1.

The rise of OpenAI, ChatGPT, and fears of an AI takeover.

The jury is still out on whether or not artificial intelligence will replace the novelist as we know it or is, in fact, one big dumb bubble. The one thing we know for certain is that everyone has an opinion about AI and will freely share it. Here at Lit Hub, we’ve published more than our fair share this year, pro and con:

Randy Sparkman wondered if a computer could write like Eudora Welty:

This time, I asked the model to take on the role of tutor. Teach me more about Eudora Welty’s writing. Give examples of her use of language. Ask me questions that develop my understanding of her writing and use of language, until I say “class is over.”

Debbie Urbanski actually thinks novelists should embrace artificial intelligence:

I worry that we’re forgetting how amazing this all is. Rather than feeling cursed or worried, I feel lucky to get to be here and witness such a change to how we think, live, read, understand, and create. Yes, we have some things to figure out, issues of training, rights, and contracts—and, on a larger level, safety—but I think it’s equally important to look up from such concerns from time to time with interest and even optimism, and wonder how this new advance in technology might widen our perspectives, our sense of self, our creativity, and our definition of what is human.

Naomi S. Baron feels strongly that we need to defend human writing in the age of AI:

If writing helps us think, what happens when we surrender the process to AI? We risk becoming cognitively and expressively disempowered. […] If we cede to AI final say about words and even commas, we jeopardize more than artistic pride. We risk convincing ourselves that in the name of efficiency, it’s harmless for AI to assume ever wider swaths of what we previously would have written ourselves.

Gabrielle Bellot takes a more nuanced approach and approaches the problem from the opposite direction, through literature:

Artificial intelligence has its precursors in many of our earliest achievements as a species. It’s in our tools, or technology—not just the obvious cases, like chatbots, but in the simpler ways that we have been taught to make technologies extensions of our own flesh-and-blood bodies.

This isn’t a bad thing, in and of itself. It’s how we’ve survived this long as a species, using our tools to do things that other creatures can do—flight, deep dives into the ocean’s blues, enhancing our strength and environmental resistance and speed through weapons and clothes and vehicles. Technology is the story of humanity from our earliest days in firelit caverns, which is why Freud famously called humans “prosthetic gods” in Civilization and Its Discontents.

I have no doubt that we will publish many more such pieces in 2024, of differing positions, about AI and its relationship to writing.

And while I think people are right to worry that a lot of writing jobs will be made redundant by AI, it’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of those jobs are predicated on a terrible version of the Internet that relies on an endless churn of content, with little to no value. (I’d also point out that human beings write thousands of terrible novels a year, too, but that might get me in trouble.)

To be frank, AI is not only the biggest news story of the year, it’s going to be the biggest story of our era, whether we like it or not.  –JD

Craft and Criticism / Features / Literary Criticism / Popular Posts / Reading Lists

The 38 Best Books We Read in 2023

Literary Hub   4:04AM, 23 Dec, 2023

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It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times, but at least the reading was good. Here are the Literary Hub staffers on the best books—both new and old, because why limit ourselves? Time is a flat circle, etc. etc.—that we read in 2023:

Andrew Leland, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (2023)

One of my most recommended books of the year is Andrew Leland’s investigative memoir, The Country of the Blind. Since his teenage years, when he was diagnosed with a rare eye disease, Leland has watched his vision recede around the edges and waited for the moment when he’d officially be declared “blind.” But it turns out the borders between sightedness and blindness are more porous than that, and at middle age, he determines to learn everything he can about his changing condition and a community that he feels both welcomed by and estranged from. He attends a convention of the National Federation of the Blind in Florida, travels to Colorado to become a student at the Colorado Center of the Blind, teaches himself to read braille, explores the art and activism of blind artists and activists. With wit (and a few dad jokes), he talks to his wife and son about their experiences, and as a consummate reader, he delves into the lives of his literary predecessors (here he is on Borges). A prolific podcaster, Leland knows how to take his audience on a journey as informative as it is profound.  –Eliza Smith, special projects editor

Katie Williams, My Murder (2023)

Who wouldn’t want to read a speculative sci-fi murder mystery, featuring clones, a serial killer, and a real who done it? Well, me—I scare easily. But Williams’ novel is a layered portrayal of Lou, a new mother, navigating the realities of parenthood, female friendship, and marriage. She just happens to be the last victim of serial killer Edward Early. Recently brought back to life, via cloning and a government Replication Commission, she must attend a “serial killer survivors group,” although the women here aren’t survivors at all, but other clones. Have their lives been solved by joining the world of the living? Is there something creepy about Lou’s husband? Why won’t Lou’s baby bond with her (is it because her cloned body is missing a C-section scar)? With thriller-like pacing and not-quite-this-world elements like super-advanced driverless cars and VR video games, My Murder was one of my favorite books I’ve read this year.  –Emily Firetog, deputy editor

Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell, Our Share of Night (2022)

I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Mariana Enriquez but I was unprepared for how much I would love this, her first novel translated into English. It’s an epic about family and gender and growing up and Argentinian politics, utterly human and glorious in the face of terrible darkness, and it completely consumed me for a week. I found myself living and dreaming inside this book, in the same way I felt about David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks and some of the chunkier books of Stephen King’s canon. “And then a door closed inside the house” was the scariest sentence I read in any novel this year, but it is only one of several images that have stuck with me: a boy watching two men embrace, golden nails on a blackened clawed hand, a father driving with his son down dusty backroads, young lovers sitting together  enraptured by each other and London and the world…  –Drew Broussard, contributing editor

Catherine Lacey, Biography of X (2023)

This book is everything. I mean that emotionally, spiritually, literally, metaphorically, metaphysically—everything. It’s the story of a woman who married and loved and lost a great, unknowable artist. It’s the story of a widow trying to learn about and grieve her complicated wife. It’s the story of a relationship but it expands so far beyond that. X feels completely realized and real, no matter how much it expands, no matter what sharp turns it navigates. The book never loses sight of the elegy at its center, the question of whether we can ever really know someone. It’s full of depth and texture and possibility and I wanted to inject the whole thing directly into my brain. A masterpiece!  –McKayla Coyle, publishing coordinator

Kathleen Alcott, Emergency: Stories (2023)

Back in July, as part of our Most Anticipated Books of the Year preview, I wrote of Kathleen Alcott’s Emergency: “Each of these seven stories—about unmoored women dealing with crises of identity, creeping despair, and the psychic wounds left by corrosive men—is a small marvel: intense, cerebral, and tender.” Looking back, and having read the collection again, I think I undersold it. Emergency is, by some distance, the best short story collection I’ve read this year, and further proof of Kathleen Alcott’s remarkable aptitude for knotty psychological portraiture.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks editor-in-chief

Paul Murray, The Bee Sting (2023)

I’m not really one for the Big Family Novel. I’m not against them, but it’s not a descriptor that particularly makes me pick up a book. I only say this for those in the same camp, so that they will not skip The Bee Sting. Because yes, it’s a novel about a family, but it’s more importantly a novel about four people, each of whom happens to have the same family, and each of whom has their own secrets and their own tendency to fuck up and explode whatever good things they have going, and also sometimes scrape themselves together again. So sure, it’s a little bit like a Jonathan Franzen novel—if Jonathan Franzen let himself be as weird and pointed and pessimistic and fun as I believe he secretly wants to be. Also, if he were Irish.

I loved Murray’s Skippy Dies, for its mordant wit and blackened good nature, but The Bee Sting is on another level: an extended, unbelievable magic trick of plotting and voice that ticks along like clockwork until you realize that’s actually the sound of a bomb. This was the best reading experience I had all year, and probably in the last five years. The ending is insane. You won’t be sorry.  –Emily Temple, managing editor

Michael Cunningham, Day (2023)

Few subjects are as daunting to me as a writer as the recent past. Now, in particular, writing about the last few years with anything like grace strikes me as almost impossible. Unsurprisingly, Michael Cunningham is up to the challenge. Much of Day takes place amid the pandemic—both its most acute stage and its most hopeful—but it’s not a Pandemic Novel. It’s a novel about love and desire and the way we construct ourselves for public consumption and how we make sense of ourselves to ourselves alone. If you’ve read Cunningham’s other work, it won’t surprise you that Day is brimming with stunning sentences, both heartrending and very funny. Cunningham dips into each member a family, as well as others in their orbit, and renders each one as achingly real—including the family’s youngest daughter, Violet. (As a lifelong hater of precocious children in literature, this is maybe the highest compliment I can pay.) Day is a novel that made me want to pay closer attention.  –Jessie Gaynor, senior editor

Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything (1958)

Written in 1958 but reissued this year, let’s count it as both an old and a new book. Set in the 50s, the novel revolves around four young women as they leave college and enter that rarified, glamorous, ridiculous field: book publishing. The novel is a wonderful lengthy tome to sink into, perfect for the subway, the beach, the couch, wherever. It’s about the girls’ work life, their family life, their sex life. Being 2023, nothing is too shocking within these pages, but reading it at the time, I can only imagine it must have been an utter sensation: a gloriously frank depiction of sex, and namely, desire of women. It’s hefty, in the way that I want a good novel to be, to really spend time with these characters, watch their careers grow, their friendships evolve, their boyfriends change. Mainly it’s a treat to exist in the 1950s with them for a spell, witness the way life was different, what we’ve lost and gained in the years since, and the way life has so clearly remained the same.  –Julia Hass, contributing editor

Patricia Engel, The Faraway World (2023)

I read Engel’s new story collection shortly after moving to Miami, and immediately It began changing my perspective on everything I was seeing and experiencing in my new hometown. What more can you ask of a story collection? Her work moves across the American diaspora, across registers, capturing the subtleties of everyday life and the mysteries of human longing. Not all her stories have a connection to Miami, of course, but they seem to move through a particular vision of modern life that resonates here with special force, with stories of characters that won’t soon be forgotten.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads editor-in-chief

Kim Hyesoon, tr. Don Mee Choi, Phantom Pain Wings (2023)

Sometimes we get the perfect poet-translator pairing, and that’s what’s happened here with radical Korean poet Kim Hyesoon and her translator, Don Mee Choi, a radical poet in her own right. Phantom Pain Wings is a powerful yet bizarre act of ornitho-literary ventriloquism. Maybe it’s better to let the poet explain what that means for herself: “…after Daddy passed away, I called out for birds endlessly, I wanted to become a translator of bird language. Bird language that flies to places I’ve never been.” Personal favourites from this collection include “Abortion Boat” and “Girl, Your Body Has So Many Holes for Straws.”  –Samuel Rutter, contributing editor

Sarah Viren, To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories (2023)

Chances are, a book based on a viral essay is not going to reproduce the same level of tension—more room to spread out isn’t always a net good. But Sarah Viren’s memoir, based on her 2020 essay for the New York Times Magazine about the false Title IX claims made against her wife, is an exception to the rule: I tore through this book greedily, as if I didn’t already know how the story ended. Viren layers that enraging, page-turning story (a cruel act of sabotage, committed in the pursuit of a coveted professorship) with an authority figure from her past: her high school philosophy teacher, in whose classroom she discovered the intellectual freedom to question notions of truth before he, too, betrayed her and the rest of her peers. It’s a book about facts and stories in an age of conspiracies, and a shining example of one of my favorite subgenres: memoirs by journalists.  –Eliza Smith, special projects editor

C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020)

How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a story about two orphaned siblings, the children of Chinese immigrants, trying to survive in the American west at the end of the gold rush. But that description is deceptive, because Zhang’s debut novel is the kind of story that rewrites itself repeatedly in its telling. Every element of this story is allowed space to grow and change over the course of the novel. Nothing has an easy answer, no relationship or character is limited to one dimension. This book opens up to the reader in a way that implies it’s struggling to be contained. It’s a book that lives far beyond its own margins, a book that doesn’t leak but floods out of its pages.  –McKayla Coyle, publishing coordinator

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (1998)

This one has been sitting on my bookshelf for years and I finally got around to cracking the spine over the summer. Hochschild’s harrowing, enraging, meticulously researched (that’s not blurb-speak for tedious, I swear; this book is extraordinarily propulsive) 1998 account of the land grab, and subsequent genocide, orchestrated by the rapacious Belgian monarch at the close of the 19th century, as well as the heroic efforts of early human rights advocates and missionaries to shine a light on the horror, was credited with dragging back into the public discourse “the great forgetting” of the Congo atrocities. After reading King Leopold’s Ghost, you’ll want to pack up your melting furnace and hop on the first flight to Brussels.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks editor-in-chief

QNTM, There is No Antimemetics Division (2021)

Imagine, if you can, an entity that it can immediately erase any knowledge of its existence from the minds of anyone who encounters it. Now try to imagine that you’re one of the few people working for an organization trying to defend humanity from such an entity — but you can barely remember the gig, because of the aforementioned memory erasure. Welcome to the antimemetics division; no, this is not your first day.

An absolutely rip-roaring slice of techno-thriller slash Weird fiction, about which I knew next to nothing going in save that it was recommended to me after a recording session for an episode of the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast by Michael Kelleher, prize director and host of the show, who told me he’d never read anything like it. Neither had I, and it is probably the book with which I had the most fun this year. Super high-concept and tremendously well-thought-out, delivering on all its wild promises.  –Drew Broussard, contributing editor

Daniel Kehlmann, tr. Ross Benjamin, Tyll (2020)

Somebody sent me this book during the fog of the early days of the pandemic, and it remained in my TBR pile until this year. It’s a bawdy picaresque centring on the life of Till Eulenspiegel, a semi-folkloric / semi-historical character possibly from the first half of the fourteenth century. In Kehlmann’s treatment (which sold some 600,000 copies in Germany) Tyll is an itinerant jester and performer whose life is brought forward to the period of the Thirty Years War, a period in which Germany’s population declined by as much as 50%. So there’s a lot of mud, sickness, superstition and violence. The chapters are non-chronological and almost standalone and there are quite a few shimmering moments of surprise and delight amongst all the death and destruction.  –Samuel Rutter, contributing editor

Mona Awad, Rouge (2023)

If I could sum up this book in a sentence, it would be: justice for the wicked step-queen! After all, the mother in Rouge may be exoticizing her daughter’s beauty, but she’s also not competing with it—she’s trying to save her daughter from the same toxic obsession with youth and beauty that has led to her own world narrowing, as the quest for youth replaced the will to live. This book also left me with a lot of questions, none of which I can express here because they would be full of (nonsensical) spoilers, but I can rest assured that this book takes up at least an hour of book club discussion. Awad’s writing is as sharp as it is gorgeous, and Rouge is the best kind of modern fairy tale: one with love, and longing, and sharp teeth.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)

For this list a couple years ago, I wrote about the what-took-me-so-long experience of reading Nella Larsen’s most famous novel, Passing, for the first time. Knowing that Larsen published only two books during her short writing career (a literary injustice of the gravest kind), I put off reading her debut novel, Quicksand, but only for so long. Considered partly autobiographical, Quicksand tells the story of Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman in search of belonging, from 1920s Harlem to Copenhagen to the Deep South. In short, it is bleak, biting, and brilliant. Like Passing, Quicksand found critical acclaim if not the public reception it deserved, which is why I was very excited to learn that the Everyman’s Library published The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen this year, which contains—in addition to Passing and Quicksand—three short stories that I will try, and presumably fail, to dole out at a reasonable pace.  –Eliza Smith, special projects editor

Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (2023)

Lorrie Moore’s new novel is stranger than someone overly familiar with her work might expect—the undead girlfriend, alive but in the early stages of decomposition, and the Civil War-era letters interspersed throughout, for example—but IAHITINMY has all the hallmarks of her work: sentence-level fireworks, a wry humor, and poignant, emotional depth. Finn, a high school history teacher, is suspended (he thinks the moon landing was faked and has questions about various historical assassins). So he takes a road trip from Tennessee to New York to visit his brother Max, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. When he leaves Max, he gets even closer to death, learning his ex-girlfriend Lily has died by suicide. Then, in a turn that is an absolute shock but not a spoiler, Finn picks Lily up from the cemetery and takes a road trip with her and her decomposing body so she can go to a “body farm” and die, again, and donate her body to science. Is it an allegory? Is it real? It doesn’t matter. Exploring sibling love, death, and longing, it’s a novel with big questions, no answers, and it’s absolutely brilliant.  –Emily Firetog, deputy editor

Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer (2022)

I quit a record number of books this year. I wanted nothing more than a propulsive family saga that was also beautifully written, which was, seemingly, an overtall order. Luckily, just as I thought all was lost, The Latecomer came available at my local library and restored my faith in the fat family saga. Korelitz’s novel is twisty without being tricky, gossipy yet substantial, and above all, an extremely fun read about an unforgettably unhappy family. Come for the irresistible characters, stay for the pitch-perfect elite school satire.  –Jessie Gaynor, senior editor

Jen Beagin, Big Swiss (2023)

The Hudson Valley is rife with weirdos and oddballs (I count myself among them) who are always good for a laugh, but they’ve maybe never been funnier than they are in Big Swiss. It’s a love story, and a great reflection on modern intimacy, but mostly it’s just a riot. The log-line alone—a woman working as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist grows increasingly infatuated with one of the patients, and then meets that patient in real life and strikes up a relationship—promises sideways delights but boy oh boy does the book deliver on the laughs. I also had the pleasure of hosting Beagin for a launch event for this book (in my side-gig at my local indie bookstore) and it somehow made an already-hilarious book even funnier: there were wigs, her partner got involved, and at least one person in the audience decidedly resembled some of the quirkier side-characters from the book. But even if you don’t live in the HV, read this one when you need a bit of relief from the horribleness of the world — you won’t find good people here, necessarily, but you will find laughter.  –Drew Broussard, contributing editor

Megan Abbott, Beware the Woman (2023)

Beware the Woman is a stylish, sensual thriller that unfolds like a fever dream, with Abbott’s uncanny talents on display like never before. From the first page, we’re launched into a rich feeling of claustrophobia, even as the wilderness expands around us. A pregnant woman accompanies her new husband on a visit to his father’s remote house in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A creeping sense of dread warns her that all is not right here, and she soon finds herself in an increasingly vulnerable situation. Abbott handles every new suspicion and revelation with a craftsman’s care, but what really elevates this novel is the pitch-perfect atmosphere, crafted with an immediacy and a physicality that make the reading at once disorienting and utterly thrilling.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads editor-in-chief

Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast (2023)

This whip-smart, soulful, and gloriously atmospheric neo-noir—about a jaded fixer in a down-at-heel coastal town and the heist he cooks up with a mysterious old flame—from CrimeReads editor-in-chief Dwyer Murphy (whose Chinatown-inspired debut, An Honest Living, was one of my favorite novels of last year), reminded me of everything I love about the genre, both in literature and film. Murphy’s sentences crackle, the repartee between his shifty characters is second-to-none, and his seedy seaside setting is so evocatively conjured I could taste the salt, stale beer, and boat fumes in the air. Murphy knows the genre inside out, and his novel is peppered with pleasurable nods to the classics, but he also unfurls a wholly original mystery that kept me on the hook right to the final farewell.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks editor-in-chief

Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers (2018)

I guess I was the last person on earth to read this, but in a way I’m glad, because it allowed me to experience something basically unheard of (for me): reading a novel that actually lived up to the hype. Makkai’s big book, which weaves together two timelines but is basically about the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the late 1980s and its impact on one group of friends—both at the beginning of the epidemic and decades later—is instantly immersive, relentlessly affecting, and a shining example of that oft-claimed but rarely achieved thing: the literary page-turner.  –Emily Temple, managing editor

Lydia Kiesling, Mobility (2023)

What if a tragedy is comedy plus time? Mobility follows a diplomat brat, Bunny, from her teenage years in Azerbaijan where her father is on a posting to a job relating to the “energy transition” in Texas as an adult and into a future just past ours, when the fruits of our procrastination begin to ripen. As a novel, it’s just so smart: all the pieces come together for the reader with a sense of “had to be this way” at the same time as Bunny realizes the fallout from everyone’s general intransigence on climate change. What if the new world order doesn’t come down to Illuminati but to corporate information architects and mothers who stupidly poison their children’s future for a better set of heels? I’m still thinking about it. Really just a cracking read.  –Janet Manley, contributing editor

Caroline O’Donoghue, The Rachel Incident (2023)

I have a friend who, whenever she comes over, always pours over my bookshelf and asks, do you have anything “fun”? While the word sounds simple, generic even, it is actually quite a narrowing device for the broad array of books that sit on my shelves. It usually gets us down to about three books from the year, two of which are often both “fun” and also quite technically bad. That rare thing, a light, enjoyable, interesting, truly good, Fun Novel, is a treat when discovered, and this year I’d advise everyone eager for such a thing to look no further than The Rachel Incident. It has all the gossipy, compulsively readable components of a beach-read page-turner, along with being a well-written story of depth and realness. It revolves around the friendship between two Irish twenty-somethings: Rachel and her best friend James, who work together in a bookstore and together take on the joys and pains of being young, finding a place in the world, and trying to live a little differently than generations past. This, of course, includes living in an apartment where they can never stay warm, living off of crisps and pints, and experiencing romantic rejection in spades. The central romantic relationship is, interestingly, between Rachel’s older, married, male professor (who Rachel is in love with), and James. This relationship sets many other plot points in motion, and allows the reader to understand the complicated betrayals and love between the various characters. It toes the line between light and weighty, portrays real love and friendships and wrong choices while being laugh-out-loud hilarious, and well, it’s just Fun!  –Julia Hass, contributing editor

Johanne Lykke Holm, tr. Saskia Vogel, Strega (2022)

Technically Strega is about a young woman who goes to work at a nearly-abandoned hotel in the mountains of Italy with a handful of other lost young women. At one point there might be a murder. It doesn’t matter what the plot is, though, because ultimately this is a book about vibes. Strega never misses an opportunity to enhance its aesthetics. It’s like if David Lynch directed Call Me By Your Name, or if something really bad happened to Wes Anderson and he started making way darker, cooler movies. It’s full of sapphic longing and lost girlhood and truly stunning atmospheric descriptions. Strega is a decadent, shimmering, sensuous feast.  –McKayla Coyle, publishing coordinator

Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors (2023)

I love a good fantasy metropolis—Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris, China Miéville’s New Crobuzon, Renee Gladman’s Ravicka—and I’m delighted to add Vajra Chandrasekera’s Luriat to the places I’ll vacation again and again in my dreams. Even better, Chandrasekera’s novel gleefully upends fantasy convention, cementing him as a writer I’m desperate to read more from. His main character, Fetter, is introduced as a chosen one, trained from birth to kill his messianic father but Chandrasekera skips over all that predictable stuff in the first few pages and leaps ahead to Fetter in his twenties: living in the city, attending a support group for chosen ones, dating a nice man, helping new arrivals acclimate to the city’s byzantine bureaucracy. But fate is never far away and what follows is a gripping and ever-surprising exploration of faith, history, politics, identity, zealotry, art, and story—which sounds like a lot to fit into a sub-400-pg novel but somehow not only does Chandrasekera do it, but it never feels rushed or overstuffed. Bonus: I got to talk with him for an episode of Voyage into Genre and it was one of the best conversations I had this year.  –Drew Broussard, contributing editor

Juan Tallón, Obra maestra (2022)

This book was published in Spain in 2022 and—attention acquiring editors—is yet to be translated into English, but I had to include it as it was certainly one of the most entertaining books I read this year. It’s what the Europeans, much to the chagrin of American critics, like to call a nonfiction novel: based on true events but with fiction drizzled on top like salsa brava over patatas. So here’s the premise: in 1986, the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid acquired a large-scale work of steel by Richard Serra called Equal-Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi. It goes on show for a few years before being placed into storage in 1990, at which point things get murky. The company storing the sculpture goes bust, the government bulldozes the warehouse, and in 2006 the Ministry of Culture finally admits they’ve “lost” a sculpture that weighs 42 tons.

So far, all of this is true. What Tallón delivers is a kind of fictional oral history (in the style of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives) for an art world whodunit that remains officially unsolved.  –Samuel Rutter, contributing editor

Catherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things (2022)

I’m just a girl whose favorite book in this world is All My Puny Sorrows, so anything that even gets close to making me feel the way Miriam Toews does goes immediately in my best of the year pile. We All Want Impossible Things did exactly that, and hits every note I want from a book. It punches straight to the heart; about grief and the impossibility of letting go, of a lifelong best friendship ending too soon, about being the one left behind. To be both devastatingly heart-breaking, and joyful, life-affirming, is to achieve the impossible. It made me laugh, it made me cry: it’s a perfect book for anyone who’s ready to really feel.  –Julia Hass, contributing editor

Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, tr. Julia Meitov Hersey, Vita Nostra (2018)

I mean, basically, this is a fantasy novel about the power of studying. Recommended to any and all current and former type-A students and aggressive book nerds.  –Emily Temple, managing editor

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (2013)

Do you ever read a book and then for a week afterwards you’re like, “Wait, is that memory something that happened to me or something that happened in the book?” A Tale for the Time Being did that to me. I felt this novel so deeply and viscerally that I sometimes lost track of where I ended and where the Ozeki’s story began. This book is split between two characters and two timelines: Nao, a girl in Tokyo who has decided to take her own life, and Ruth, a novelist and meta character who is and is not Ruth Ozeki herself. The two characters are connected by Nao’s diary, which washes up on Ruth’s shore in Canada after the 2011 tsunami. This novel is a philosophical text but it’s also a speculative time travel story populated by mysterious crows and Hello Kitty lunch boxes and the Pacific ocean. I don’t know, just read it! I can’t explain it because it’s so much bigger than I am! (Content note that quite a lot of the story centers on the theme of suicide).  –McKayla Coyle, publishing coordinator

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake (2023)

Patchett’s writing is simply incomparable in the modern landscape. Nobody writes about families with such nuance, insight, or surprise. In Tom Lake, she brings another inter-generational saga to life with impossibly intricate and moving set pieces that quickly reveal her characters in all their complexity and contradiction. While I was reading the novel, I found I was spending my spare time thinking about her characters and their fictional dilemmas as if they were my own family. I was consumed with their dramas and felt utterly, impossibly transported.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads editor-in-chief

Adania Shibli, tr. Elisabeth Jaquette, Minor Detail (2020)

National Book Award finalist Adania Shibli’s slim, devastating novella—about the 1949 rape and murder of a Palestinian girl Negev desert by Israeli soldiers, and the attempt by a young woman living under occupation in Ramallah in the present day to uncover the truth—was at the center of a firestorm back in October when the Frankfurt Book Fair cancelled an award ceremony for Shibli and Minor Detail, citing the Israel-Hamas war as the reason. The book itself is a magnificent achievement; an acutely observed and quietly brutal meditation on colonial violence and the debilitating psychic toll of life under occupation. It shook me to my core.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks editor-in-chief

Jon Klassen, The Skull (2023)

In the depths of spring 2020, I could only read John le Carré novels and Jon Klassen books. His illustrations are so deeply my jam, somehow soothing and funny and a little eerie too, and The Skull opens a whole new realm of work that I hope he’ll continue: retellings of folklore. I loved this book so much that I got a tattoo of the titular skull on my forearm, a little memento mori that manages to be joyful and silly while also poignant and honest. We’re all going to die someday, so we might as well have a nice time in the meantime, you know?  –Drew Broussard, contributing editor

Melissa Banks, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999)

Does Girls’ Guide really need to be on another Lit Hub list? Sure, fine, if you know you know, but this is for those who don’t: pick up this book immediately, you won’t be sorry. And it’s the perfect time too, for Viking is reissuing the book as a Penguin Classic 25th Anniversary Edition next summer. Twenty-five years since the character of Jane Rosenthal was created, every bit as alive and witty, as convivial and charming company that any reader could hope for. Girls Guide is described as interconnected short stories, though all but one piece is about Jane, growing up and into herself. Jane as a young girl watching her brother fall in love for the first time, Jane moving to New York, working in publishing, Jane having a relationship with a man twice her age, Jane’s parents growing older, Jane growing older. I deeply loved having Jane’s voice in my ear and I missed her as soon as I reached the last page. Melissa Bank passed away this year, a loss for us all, but what a gift she left behind: a girl as droll, and searching, and recognizable and real as Jane, here for you whenever you choose to pick up this amaranthine gem, a truly lasting collection.  –Julia Hass, contributing editor

Michael Finkel, The Art Thief (2023)

This is the beautifully detailed story of Stéphane Breitwieser, the most prolific and brazen art thief ever, who, alongside his girlfriend Anna-Katherine, carried out more than 200 heists, stealing more than 300 objects, from tiny works to wall-sized tapestries, from museum and cathedrals all over Europe. Breitwieser never stole for money, refusing to sell his treasures and instead storing them in his mother’s attic like a collector. Finkel’s account is meticulously researched, with interviews with Breitwieser who not only implicates himself but revels in dozens of capers with incredible detail. It’s a speedy, fun read that’s a mix of art history, true crime, and portrait of a very peculiar psychology.  –Emily Firetog, deputy editor

Jessie Gaynor, The Glow (2023)

Wellness often comes with a coating of knowingness–quippy packaging that gives cover to our dropping more money every year into glorified Vaseline products and the commoditization of charismatic weirdos in pursuit of self-care, self-actualization, self-escape. The best way to take on wellness culture then, is with satire as sharp as a facial extraction at the mall. Jessie Gaynor’s The Glow is just such a riff on the Goopified world, and begins with Jane, a down-and-out PR gal who out of financial desperation attempts to turn a beautiful yoga girlie with smelly pits into the next Gwyneth.

As Jane progresses from merely branding the Kool-Aid to drinking and bathing in it, we get raucous scenes of OM, a sweaty portrait of cult-building, and a beautifully complex story about how and why we end up enmeshed in delusions of betterment. Gaynor–one of Lit Hub’s beloved senior pens–writes a comedy with heart. Eat with Cheetos.  –Janet Manley, contributing editor

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain Gang All-Stars (2023)

If I wasn’t already a prison abolitionist before reading this, this book would’ve made me one. Adjei-Brenyah continues in the near-future vein of his spectacular and unsettling short-fiction debut Friday Black by delivering an America that has turned its prison system into a gladiatorial entertainment machine. It hits hard, and unforgivingly: we follow prisoners and partners Loretta Thurwar and Hamara Stacker as they fight their way through these death matches, trying to hold onto their humanity and to each other — but Adjei-Brenyah lets us see glimpses into the lives of civilians, other prisoners, and even the suits running the deathmatch operation to deliver a polyphonic look at a frankly all-too-plausible America. You think people wouldn’t tune in for televised death matches? Just look at the number gruesome injuries have happened in just this current season of the NFL. You think people would have a hard time seeing fellow humans stripped of their humanity? Just listen to the rhetoric from Trump supporters, or those who offer justification for the genocides happening in Palestine, Myanmar, Sudan, Ethiopia. Adjei-Brenyah’s book reminds you that this is all much, much closer than you think.

Oh and the ending made me genuinely gasp and then burst into tears, a rarity in my reading and a moment that still gives me chills just thinking about it. This book will remind you just how important it is to feel and to be human, in the face of impossible awfulness.  –Drew Broussard, contributing editor

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Literary Hub   3:22AM, 23 Dec, 2023

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22 Dec, 2023

- Lit Hub Daily: December 22, 2023

- Blake Butler on (Not) Finding Your Voice

- Colm Tóibín! Geraldine Brooks! A guide to killing time! 19 books out in paperback this January.

- “Dead Cats Continue to Meow.” A Poem by Nasser Rabah

- The 15 Best Literary Adaptations of 2023

Lit Hub Daily

Lit Hub Daily: December 22, 2023

Lit Hub Daily   10:30AM, 22 Dec, 2023

december 22

TODAY: In 1945, Holden Caulfield makes his first appearance in J. D. Salinger’s story “I’m Crazy,” published in Collier’s.

- “One morning, we didn’t find homes, just heaps of red words piled like dirty clothes on sidewalks.” Read “Dead Cats Continue to Meow,” a poem by Nasser Rabah. | Lit Hub Poetry

- From Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. to American Fiction, we’ve rounded up the 15 best literary adaptations of the year. | Lit Hub Film & TV

- 19 new paperbacks to check out in January. | The Hub

- These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli assault. | The Hub

- “Your only mission among the void is to not end up like all the others, even while knowing that you will.” Blake Butler on (not) finding your voice. | Lit Hub

- “Anything that happens in the present is, by definition, imaginable. We can see it.” Read Masha Gessen’s Arendt Prize lecture. | n+1

- J.R.R. Tolkien’s estate has won a court order to destroy Lord of the Rings superfan Demetrious Polychron’s unauthorized sequel to the books. | The New York Times

- “While of course the material is political, with a point of view, it’s very much not a polemic.” Daniel Torday on teaching Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. | Slate

- The secret history of Patricia Highsmith’s life in comics (in comic form). | The New Yorker

Craft and Advice / Craft and Criticism / Features / Literary Criticism / Memoir

Blake Butler on (Not) Finding Your Voice

Blake Butler   9:02AM, 22 Dec, 2023

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This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

I hate when I hear a writer talking about “finding their voice.” I’m sure they mean well, but for my money, confining yourself out of the gate beneath the idea that there’s a certain way you’ll need to learn to talk—much less to think, or to be—in order to have “something to say” is about as damning a condition as needing permission from Crest in order to eat. Or better yet, needing an Amazon account to educate yourself.

No one has a voice once they are dead. Words on paper assume power specifically from not needing to be attached to anything but—and the idea that they’ve been put there by someone “qualified” to narrate their experience for equally “qualified” onlookers is a condition of confinement, not expression. The worst thing one might do, then, is learn to believe that if they never crack the code on their own kind while they still can and find some kind of pasture there, they’ll be forgotten—just the same as if they never lived.

Everything you think is what you are. What you do with what you are is who you are to everyone who isn’t you. Doing what many others have already done before you in your own way isn’t a voice—it’s a performance, and guess what? Everybody else is very busy with their own performances. What do you think you know that you’d actually want to be caught dead saying anyway? Would anybody hear you if you did? Would you still be thick enough to try to say it if you knew we couldn’t hear you? What else might you become if you weren’t you?

In the end, it’s almost as if the work of writing, any shred of glory in writing, comes not from defining and pursuing one’s most formidable apparition, but rather from a private, impossible process that is meant to be remodeled step by step. It’s almost as if believing there’s a voice out there for you, that you must slay and master and present like some skinned hide, is essentially the same as death.

This is not to say there is no merit to speaking craft. Rather, it is to point out the guiding mechanisms put in place by the presiding corporate publishing landscape to assist the burgeoning “creatives” of our future to believe that the path to making sense—and therefore, finding success—must be in lockstep with the processes of branding, marketing, and publicity, lest they be left behind in mortal dust.

“OK, but what does all this mean for me?” you might be wondering. “How can I proceed to find an audience for my work if I don’t even know where I’m going?” In short: You can’t. And it’s not your job to. Your only job is to find a way to secure enough time to keep throwing yourself into the void. Your only mission among the void is to not end up like all the others, even while knowing that you will. In relinquishing the fear of irrelevance, incontinence, or even worse, your audience shifts from the marketplace—as full of “bad actors” as any “bad neighborhood”—to, as Virginia Woolf famously put it, a room of one’s own.

Honestly, I’m already feeling my spray wearing off, so I think I’d better say something actionable. Something about how someday you might be looking back and wondering how you ended up where you are even after trying with all your might to end up elsewhere. About how had you known how you’d turn out, you might have tried giving up petitioning to anyone who’d listen for their compassion, and consumed yourself instead with writing yourself out of the hole you couldn’t feel sliding up around your ankles, your hips, your neck, your mind, your life.

Guess what I’m thinking about now? That scene in the Facebook origin story movie where Justin Timberlake tells the CEO, CFO, and Girlfriend of the CFO of Facebook that they don’t even know what Facebook is yet. Which comes before the scene where he gets caught by the cops doing coke off a minor belly-ring-laden belly. Which signifies that my roleplay as your facilitator has been compromised. Like all strange things, you should take all of what I’ve said here and try to erase it from your memory before it makes you something you’ll regret. Or otherwise destroys you, like all good words should. I’ll wait.

Oh hey, you’re back! I’m so glad you were able to free yourself of any association with my mentality as derived from on the precipice of my own dissolution into 1s and 0s. Not your grandma’s clickbait, is it? No. It’s mine. And what’s mine is yours, at least I hope. How about you? What does your clickbait tell you to do today?

_______________________________________________

Molly by Blake Butler is available now via Archway Editions.

Literary Criticism / Reading Lists / The Hub

Colm Tóibín! Geraldine Brooks! A guide to killing time! 19 books out in paperback this January.

Gabrielle Bellot   9:01AM, 22 Dec, 2023

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2o24 is approaching! It’s hard to believe that 2023 is over, but a new year means new possibilities (always), new resolutions (maybe), and new books (once again, always). But it also means a new chance to pick up some excellent reads from 2023 that you might have missed when they first came out, and below you’ll find nineteen exciting books that will be out in paperback in January.

There are novels by Colm Tóibín, Geraldine Brooks, Tome Crewe, Priya Guns’ queer ride-share-based retelling of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and many other narratives from authors new and established. You’ll also find a plethora of fascinating nonfiction: a moving reflection on stuttering, a charming look at owls and illness, an inventive “annotated photo album” by Janet Malcolm, an expansive look at phone-free hanging out, an account of the experiences of Black Americans in the Second World War, and much, much more.

If you missed any of these before, now’s your chance to curl up somewhere cozy with a brand-new paperback, because what, really, can beat that? Here’s to ushering in the new year with a blend of old and new.

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Colm Tóibín, A Guest at the Feast: Essays

(Scribner)

“These essays show the landscape of the author’s soul, mapping out events that have shaped him as a person and writer….Readers will savor every page of this book. Erudite essays from one of the world’s finest writers.”

–Kirkus Reviews

Geraldine Brooks, Horse

(Penguin Books)

“[A] marvelous novel. Brooks structures the book like a mystery….Through Jarret’s story, the author reveals the unique and indispensable role Black trainers and jockeys played in the pre-Civil War South….Equestrian or no, readers will appreciate Brooks’s invitation to linger awhile among beautiful and graceful horses, to see the devotion they engendered in her characters.”

–Shelf Awareness

Tom Crewe, The New Life

(Scribner)

“The spirit of Forster broods over Tom Crewe’s lyrical, piercing debut, The New Life, which lends a contemporary urgency to an exploration of same-sex intimacy and social opprobrium….The New Life is a fine-cut gem, its sentences buffed to a gleam, but with troubling implications for our own reactionary era.”

–The Washington Post

Miriam Darlington, The Wise Hours: A Journey into the Wild and Secret World of Owls

(Tin House)

“A smooth mixture of memoir and nature writing….Lyrical and captivating…heartfelt, enchanting, and beautifully written.”

–Kirkus Reviews

Janet Malcolm, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory

(Picador)

“[Still Pictures] may be the world’s most elegant annotated photo album….Each sentence, in true Malcolm form, turns out masterful….The collage artist puts fragments next to each other to make meaning, or spark energy, and this is what Malcolm does in Still Pictures.…She is writing about the difficulty we have evoking our former selves, the many ways in which they are strangers to us.”

–The Atlantic

Matthew F. Delmont, Half American: The Heroic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad

(Penguin Books)

“This vivid book shows how much of World War II looks different when viewed from the perspective of Black Americans—many of whom drew parallels between the fascist threat abroad and Jim Crow at home.”

–The New York Times Book Review

De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Decent People

(Bloomsbury)

“De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s powerful second novel Decent People is a gripping mystery but also something more. A thoughtful examination of small-town life becomes a story about America itself, looking directly at the legacies of racism and segregation, homophobia and secrecy, poverty and power.”

–Rumaan Alam

Priya Guns, Your Driver Is Waiting

(Vintage)

“A queer feminist retelling of the 1970’s film Taxi Driver, this one had me laughing loud enough to draw looks on the subway, and that takes some doing. It’s a crackling social commentary on the social justice movements of our time, the gig economy, performative wokeness and who gets to speak on behalf of the disadvantaged. It’s a fast-paced read that begs to be devoured.”

–Good Housekeeping

Grady Hendrix, How to Sell a Haunted House

(Berkley)

“Grady Hendrix’s horror novels are a gateway drug to the genre….By weaving violence, family trauma and humor, Hendrix creates a texture that engages the reader emotionally and viscerally…[a] gripping, wildly entertaining exploration of childhood horrors.”

–The New York Times

John Hendrickson, Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter

(Vintage)

“Life on Delay recasts stuttering and, in doing so, challenges long-standing attitudes toward disability….Hendrickson transforms the disorder…into an invitation to all of us to demonstrate genuine humanity….This full-hearted memoir grapples with shame, resentment and fear as Hendrickson answers with courage and compassion one of the most meaningful questions in life: ‘How do you accept an aspect of yourself that you’re taught at such an early age to hate?'”

–The Washington Post

Sheila Liming, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time

(Melville House)

“Like me, you will thoroughly enjoy hanging out with this book. Jam-packed with eloquent and authentic testimony, it delivers many fresh insights on experiences that we might otherwise take for granted.”

–Andrew Ross

Matthew Connelly, The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets

(Vintage)

“Connelly has defined an existential crisis: the suppression of American history….The Declassification Engine makes the case that the culture of secrecy diminishes democracy. And it has now become a culture of destruction as well.”

–The New York Times Book Review

Kai Thomas, In the Upper Country

(Penguin Books)

“In the Upper Country is not only fiction alive with history; it is historic….In the Upper Country reminds me—yes—of Lawrence Hill’s Book of Negroes and Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying. And practically every page turns up a sentence or a phrase that could have been penned by Toni Morrison or James Baldwin…a gift of lyric genius to enthrall all—and to educate Afro-Métis people about the love and courage that enabled their creation.”

–George Elliott Clarke

Heather Darwent, The Things We Do to Our Friends

(Bantam)

“[A] tantalizingly sinister debut thriller….Readers will be on the edge of their seats with this gripping story of codependency and obsession, and fans of Kate Lowe’s The Furies and J.T. Ellison’s Good Girls Lie will devour this—and eagerly await more from Darwent.”

–Shelf Awareness

Brendan Slocumb, Symphony of Secrets

(Vintage)

“A provocative follow to his much-lauded 2022 novel, The Violin Conspiracy, praised for its pitch-perfect dive into the world of classical music and the struggles faced by Black musicians who want to be included and respected for their talents….Slocumb writes an intriguing and vivid story about social injustice, cultural appropriation and ‘whitewashing’….[The] thoughtful pacing carries an important message about race and privilege and the lengths to which people in power will go to manipulate history.”

–The Star Tribune

Selby Wynn Schwartz, After Sappho

(Liveright)

“Long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, this time-leaping novel connects a pantheon of queer literary titans—Sappho! Oscar Wilde! Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West!—with one muse. This book reads as if it’s skipping: full of movement, lightness, and whimsical defiance.”

–Bustle

Saket Soni, The Great Escape

(Algonquin)

“It’s paced like a thriller, written like a poem, and full of vivid characters who’d enliven any novel, but it’s the true story one of the largest modern-day trafficking incidents in recent history and how Saket Soni and his crew went after the powerful perpetrators. A story as important as it is riveting to read.”

–Rebecca Solnit

Jeff Hobbs, Children of the State: Stories of Survival and Hope in the Juvenile Justice System

(Scribner)

“In this original, heartfelt book, veteran journalist Jeff Hobbs brings us deep into the juvenile justice system, bearing witness to a broken system while capturing the everyday lives of unbroken teachers, counselors, and students locked behind its high walls. At turns touching and intimate, enraging and honest—this book, more than any other I know, forces us to see America’s youngest prisoners for what they truly are: just kids.”

–Matthew Desmond

Marta McDowell, All the Presidents’ Gardens: How the White House Grounds Have Grown with America

(Timber Press)

“History is often best learned from stories, and there are plenty of anecdotes here….The writing is conversational and inviting, as one might find when visiting a garden with someone who knows it well. Photographs, line drawings, paintings, maps, and other documents add to the interesting stories…a delightful and elucidating work.”

–Booklist

Features / Fiction and Poetry / Poem

“Dead Cats Continue to Meow.” A Poem by Nasser Rabah

Nasser Rabah   8:59AM, 22 Dec, 2023

gaza 1960s

Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963 and continues to live there. Like almost everyone in Gaza during the Israeli assault, he has been displaced and communication has been sporadic. Despite this, a poem of his appeared in Amman, several weeks ago, written and sent on the three percent of battery power left on his phone after a family member had been able to use a solar charger.

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“Dead Cats Continue to Meow”

Behind the walls of the grade school, while the students lined up to salute the flag, the younger kids flay cats alive, they hang the furs on tall sticks, they circle around the school with a continuous meow. The parents, who concluded that their kids became cats, sprinkled salt on the neighborhood’s streets to remove the stench of absence, and washed again and again the children’s clothes for a holiday that won’t come.

A blind man listening to a match replay on his radio said to curious runners-by:

don’t hurry, the match ends with the defeat of both teams; but they didn’t get the joke. They stole his radio and left him cursing the politicians. In those days, we didn’t pay attention to the complaints of walls—so much blood was on them, who cares about walls that complain? One morning, we didn’t find homes, just heaps of red words piled like dirty clothes on sidewalks, no one cared about them either; couples, though, continued—and without walls—their usual business, not only that, but they made more kids who flayed more cats inside the school.

The heart doctor treating me now recommends only one thing:

stop writing the diaries of a dead village.

______________________

Translated by Emna Zghal, Khaled al-Hilli, and Ammiel Alcalay

for the Brooklyn Translation Collective

Film and TV / Fullwidth Slider / News and Culture

The 15 Best Literary Adaptations of 2023

Literary Hub   5:24AM, 22 Dec, 2023

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Say what you will about 2023, but the year did bring us some top-notch book-to-screen adaptations, from the long-awaited film version of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. in the spring to Oppenheimer in the summer, Killers of the Flower Moon in the fall, and American Fiction and Poor Things here at the end. Lit Hub’s film critics have been voting on their favorite adaptations from 2023, presented here for your consideration. And a big shoutout goes to The Color Purple, which premieres on December 25th. We’ll see you at the theater! (In spirit, of course.)

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Orion Releasing LLC

American Fiction

Based on: Erasure by Percival Everett

The promos for American Fiction will have you believe that it’s simply a satire, but it’s not. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a razor-sharp, rip-roaring send-up of the publishing industry, the literary world, and the fake-woke approach to race in liberal America, but I also want to say upfront that, like its source text, it is an incredibly moving, quite sad story about growing older, about coming to terms with who you are (personally and publicly).

It’s a film whose worth isn’t tied only to its successful commentary or keen referentiality, but its understanding that the absurdities of life exist within life, and that life is often sad and lonely and full of regret. Like its scintillating source text, American Fiction is kaleidoscopic in its insights and interrogations about life and identity, and especially when these things get further complicated by the beasts of capitalism, commercialism, and media.

–Olivia Rutigliano

Searchlight Pictures

Poor Things

Based on: Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

Poor Things is definitely Lanthimos’s best English-language film, most likely his best film overall. A neo-Frankenstein tale about female desire based on the 1992 novel Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer by the postmodern writer Alasdair Gray, the film follows the adventures of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a human created by the scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). At the start of the movie, her brain is at the developmental level of an infant, despite her adult anatomy; over the course of the film, her mind grows to match her physical age and bodily urges. With its Gaudí-esque Victorian setting, Poor Things presents a dreamlike, imaginary history of the era that birthed the modern Western world; Bella bounces around the great ideas and minds of the moment, like a philosophical Forrest Gump, she assimilates them. It’s not a perfect movie, but it is an interesting one.

–Olivia Rutigliano

Lionsgate

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Based on: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume

First, a confession: I didn’t read Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. until a week before the movie premiered. (I was a Beverly Cleary gal through and through; not that the two are mutually exclusive, that’s just how the cookie crumbled.) Anyway, having not grown up on AYTGIMM in no way precluded me from absolutely adoring this film. I went in optimistic thanks to my colleague Olivia’s review and left positively chuffed: writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig nailed it, and then some.

Certainly, Fremon Craig was operating under pressure—Blume had refused to sell the film rights for 49 years, until the right filmmaker came along—but not only does she stay cool under pressure, she actually made a film that Blume called better than the book. Mainly, I think, that’s because Margaret’s grandmother (played by a career-high charming Kathy Bates) and mother (played by a sweetly melancholic Rachel McAdams) get their own storylines in the film, making it a much more multigenerational viewing experience. But Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret manages to never be dimmed by the Hollywood powerhouses around her; she captures the awkwardness and frustrations of adolescence without missing a beat—ditto for her comedic timing. This was one of my favorite movies of the year. If you haven’t seen it yet, I must INSIST.

–Eliza Smith

Universal Pictures

Oppenheimer

Based on: American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Oppenheimer is a biopic that should not work as well as it does—it’s never really a good idea for biopics to attempt to do what biographies do (and this movie is based on a doozy of a biography). A biography is responsible for capturing a sense of a person, often across their whole lives. If a movie does that, it might lack an arc. Because people’s natural lives don’t have arcs. But Oppenheimer manages to present the life of Manhattan Project supervisor J. Robert Oppenheimer across decades while also tracing character development, having a thesis, and making an argument. The point of Oppenheimer (and the realization that Oppenheimer has) is about the impossibility of keeping things at the level of the theoretical. Oppenheimer oversubscribed to theory as a methodology, and by the time he realizes that there’s no such thing, it’s too late. Incredible.

–Olivia Rutigliano

Apple Studios

Killers of the Flower Moon

Based on: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Sorry to be that guy, but Martin Scorsese really does do it like no other. Killers manages to capture all the intricacy of David Grann’s 2017 book without feeling like an overproduced info dump. It’s a dark and complex love story, an emotional epic, a biting take on the Western genre. It renders an unspeakably immense tragedy through a small cast of characters. Scorsese brings humanity to the screen in a way that feels visceral and raw and painful and true. He gives Killers room to breathe, he lets the story take its time. So yes, the movie is three-and-a-half hours long—but sometimes that’s just how long it takes. It’s worth it, I promise.

–McKayla Coyle

Neon

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Based on: How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm

This is an interesting adaptation, as it doesn’t seek to directly adapt the original work so much as put the work into action. Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a philosophical manifesto that calls for direct action and environmental terrorism in order to save the planet. The movie is a fictional, narrative film about a group of young people who decide to take direct action by literally blowing up a pipeline. It’s smart and fast-moving and has the shape of an action heist movie with the heart of a cli-fi drama. The movie does a great job of taking a philosophical text and applying it to the real world. I’d love to see more of this type of adaptation, the kind that really engages with the definition of adaptation.

–McKayla Coyle

Neon

Eileen

Based on: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen! This adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s debut thriller, which is basically perfect almost all of the way through, snuck onto my radar only a few weeks ago. Anne Hathaway rocks a portrayal of a sultry, secretive psychologist at a young men’s prison in Massachusetts. She, Rebecca, is the first bright spot in a while that Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), who works in the prison, has experienced, and it’s not long before Eileen begins to grow veeeeeery interested in her. The movie builds its tension very well, but a late-in-the-film monologue from Marin Ireland brings the house down. (If I have any issues with the narrative of Eileen, they are ones that I also have about the book; let this promise you textual fidelity.) Still, I found the movie more psychological, a deeper, more immersive bath in the themes of the original novel.

–Olivia Rutigliano

Janus Films

Orlando, My Political Biography

Based on: Orlando by Virginia Woolf

For Orlando, in Woolf’s eponymous titled book, time, gender, and the act of writing become both inextricably linked and trans: ever ongoing, moving across and beyond binaries with unbridled delight. And yet, the topic of Orlando’s body as a trans body has never been so culturally or cinematically underscored until Paul B. Preciado’s documentary Orlando, My Political Biography (2023) premiered at Berlinale this year.

…

Preciado’s film is not solely a retelling of Woolf’s story; it is also about Preciado’s experience as a trans man navigating state apparatuses, such as psychiatry and pharmacology, which systematically inflict violence and erasure on bodies that are not cis, male, middle-class, or white. In the spirit of performative, self-reflexive documentaries like Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet (2017) and Ruth Beckermann’s Mutzenbacher (2022), Preciado’s film is a meta-commentary on its own making, just as Woolf’s novel is as much about the act of writing a biography as it is the story of Orlando’s life. We see multiple trans actors auditioning for, or acting the part of, Orlando.

In between reading aloud from Woolf’s book, they also share their own histories with and hopes for dating, hormones, clothing, surgery, and utopian futures. One, a high school student, remembers his first crush as various crew members change the set design and lighting behind him. Culled from a panoply of voices and perspectives, Orlando, My Political Biography champions the ways in which writing is an inherently communal act. As Preciado says in voiceover, “Every individual life is a collective history.”

Read our critic’s full review here.

–Hannah Bonner

A24

The Zone of Interest

Based on: The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

Jonathan Glazer has finally returned to cinema after a decade-long hiatus. His newest feature, The Zone of Interest, is nothing short of a masterpiece. The film is a fully immersive experience into the domestic life of real-life camp commandant Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their family who live outside of Auschwitz. Loosely based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis—who passed away the day after the film’s premiere—Glazer takes many liberties with the source material, using it more as a foundation for his vision as opposed to creating a straightforward translation to the screen.

Glazer succeeds at making a Holocaust film that is completely unlike any we have seen before. The violence and brutality occuring within the camps that are often depicted on screen isn’t portrayed in the film, which uses the Höss family’s indifference to what happens beyond the walls of their idyllic home as a way to communicate the full scope of their evilness. We see them throw parties, have picnics, and spend time tending to their sprawling garden, while the outside horrors continue to loom.

Read our critic’s full review here.

–Jihane Bousfiha

Pathe UK

The Lost King

Based on: The King’s Grave by Philippa Langley and Michael Jones

The Lost King! This absolutely wonderful movie is an adaptation of The King’s Grave: The Search for Richard III by Philippa Langley and Michael Jones. Written by Steve Coogan and Joe Pope and directed by Stephen Frears, it is the beautiful, triumphant story of one of the most important historical discoveries of all time, completed by an amateur in the face of constant belittlement by the academic establishment. Philippa, played by Sally Hawkins, is middle-aged and working as a marketing executive when she discovers a passion for Richard III and grows invested in tracking down his remains, which have been lost to history.

She, who suffers from chronic illness that people constantly dismiss as made-up, is told time and time again that a gravesite for the maligned (also disabled) monarch might not even exist, and that many (more qualified) others have tried and failed to locate it. But she does not give up…. and, thanks to her phenomenal research, she finds him! The thing is, the film argues, that if a story about a passionate amateur who makes one of the most important historical discoveries of the last fifty years does in fact feel too contrived or unrealistic or far-fetched for you, then you might need some serious deprogramming. The Lost King is a clear condemnation of the kind of gatekeeping that governs academic spaces, as well as the psychological frameworks that exist in our own society that result in not taking people (especially if they are disabled) seriously.

–Olivia Rutigliano

Nimona

Based on: Nimona by ND Stevenson

I read the Nimona graphic novel when I was in high school and it was one of those books that stuck with me. I think of it often and fondly. It was a story that reintroduced me to how a story could be and what it could do. The animated Nimona movie adaptation is similarly thoughtful and weird and fun. It’s a queer kids movie that doesn’t beat you over the head with pedantic explanations and textbook definitions of queerness.

Instead, Nimona simply allows its characters to be queer and complicated and depressed and more than a little feral. As a queer person, I actually felt seen and represented. This is the kind of movie that would have Changed Me as a kid, and that I’m still grateful for as an adult. It’s also genuinely a lot of fun.

–McKayla Coyle

Netflix

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar / The Rat Catcher / The Swan / Poison

Based on: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl

I’m a Wes Anderson fan forever and always—Asteroid City was one of the best films of the year, and maybe the closest we’ve ever gotten to understanding the animating passions of the man behind the always-centered camera—and the marriage of his careful whimsy and Roald Dahl’s acerbic fables continues to bear fruit. This surprise quartet of… well, what are they? Individual short films? Or are they four pieces that make up a whole, as four short stories might sit next to one another to make a short story collection?

Whatever they may be, and despite Netflix (in a total but unsurprising failure of imagination) having no clue how to package or explain these, they are trinkets that nevertheless shine interesting light on both of their creators. Anderson leans into his theatricality here, giving the pieces a real “kids putting on a show” energy, and the result is sometimes silly (these must have been a blast for the actors involved) but never slight. I hadn’t read these stories since I was a kid and going back to them, first through Anderson’s lens and then on the page, reminded me of why Dahl’s work continues to excite children and challenge adults—and why Anderson continues to be divisive as well. But I’d take a thousand half-as-good curios from unswerving artists like Anderson in lieu of the vapid and unnecessary boardroom-ified misuse of IP that was Wonka.

–Drew Broussard

Disney+

American Born Chinese

Based on: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

The series moves between the realms of heaven and the American suburb, quickly establishing Jin’s dilemma: he is ready to grow up, but he doesn’t know what kind of person he is. He is torn by the choices that seem binary to him: whether he should join the soccer team or the cosplay club, be a jock or a nerd, act American or Asian. As the series moves forward with its multiple storylines and complex relationships between its characters, Jin continues to contemplate his choices and figure out who he is.

Bringing a colorful pantheon of Chinese folklore heroes, the show looks, sounds, and feels like a reunion of long-separated genres of Asian and Asian American cinema. Family drama flickers in and out of action-packed Hong Kong kung fu movies and Chinese fantasies with nonsequitur humor, creating a soundscape and visual collage that feel familiar in the Asian American experience.

Read our critic’s full review here.

–Yao Xiao

Curiosa Films

The Pot-Au-Feu (The Taste of Things)

Based on: The Passionate Epicure by Marcel Rouff

Loosely based on Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel The Passionate Epicure, The Pot-Au-Feu (renamed The Taste of Things ahead of its US release) emerged as an unexpected standout at this year’s Cannes Film Festival—so much so that Anh Hùng took home the prize for Best Director. A mouthwatering feast for the eyes, the film is a sensual experience that delicately captures the ritualistic act of cooking through the characters of Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) and Eugenie (a sublime Juliette Binoche).

Dodin, who has been nicknamed “the Napoleon of culinary arts,” and his personal cook/collaborator of over 20 years have a relationship built on trust and a mutual respect for each other’s craft. He spends his days developing recipes, and she flawlessly executes them with the assistant of their maid Violette (Galatea Bellugi) and Violette’s young niece, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire). Leisurely paced, the 2.5-hour film opens with a 40-minute sequence dedicated to the pair putting together an extravagant four-course meal for Dodin and a small group of his friends. Watching someone maneuver through a kitchen as they chop, stir, roast, braise, sear, strain, and bake food has never looked more mesmerizing.

Read our critic’s full review here.

–Jihane Bousfiha

20th Century Studios

A Haunting in Venice

Based on: A Haunting in Venice by Agatha Christie

Look, even if you don’t like Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot, you can’t deny that A Haunting in Venice was the clear best of his three Agatha Christie adaptations, an elegant supernaturally-tinged mystery (very) loosely adapted from a lesser-known Christie novel, Hallowe’en Party. But Branagh’s film is a carnival(e) of cinematography and camerawork, a spooky visual extravaganza. I guess the third time really is the charm!

–Olivia Rutigliano

21 Dec, 2023

- These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza.

- Are you the Literary A**hole? Ask Kristen Arnett.

- Lit Hub Daily: December 21, 2023

- We Are All Witches: Elizabeth Willis and Nancy Bowen on the Contemporary Echoes of Centuries-Old Fears

- All of Us Strangers Confronts the Dangers of Spinning Trauma Into Art

- The Annotated Nightstand: What Sabrina Orah Mark Is Reading Now and Next

News and Culture / The Hub

These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza.

Dan Sheehan   2:23PM, 21 Dec, 2023

Heba Abu Nada

One of my dreams is for my books and my writings to travel the world, for my pen to have wings so that no unstamped passport or visa rejection can hold it back.

Another dream of mine is to have a small family, to have a little son who looks like me and to tell him a bedtime story as I rock him in my arms.

Since October 7, Israel has killed at least thirteen Palestinian poets and writers in Gaza.

If we think of ourselves as a global literary community, then these people were our fellow travelers, our peers.

They—just like the more than 66 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza in the line of duty; just like every one of the more than 21,000 innocent people massacred in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel over the past 75 days—deserve to be remembered.

Here is who they were:

Heba Abu Nada

Novelist, poet, and educator Heba Abu Nada, a beloved figure in the Palestinian literary community and the author of the novel Oxygen is Not for the Dead, was killed by an Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza on October 20.

In her final Facebook post, published on October 8, the author wrote:

Gaza’s night is dark apart from the glow of rockets, quiet apart from the sound of the bombs, terrifying apart from the comfort of prayer, black apart from the light of the martyrs. Good night, Gaza.

Abu Nada was educated at Islamic University, Gaza, where she was awarded a bachelor’s degree of biochemistry. She went on to receive a master’s degree in clinical nutrition from Al-Azhar University, Gaza. In 2017, Abu Nada won the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity for Oxygen is Not for the Dead.

You can read two of her final poems, translated from the original Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine, here and here.

Omar Abu Shaweesh

The poet, novelist, and community activist Omar Faris Abu Shaweesh was killed on October 7th during the shelling of the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza.

Abu Shaweesh co-founded several youth associations and won multiple local and international awards, including the “Best National Song of the Year 2007” award at the International Festival of National Song and Heritage in Jordan, and the “Distinguished Volunteer and Ideal Young” award in 2010 at the Sharek Youth Forum in Palestine. He was also given the “Distinguished Arab Youth in the Field of Media, Journalism and Culture” award by the Arab Youth Council for Integrated Development of the Arab League in 2013.

He published a number of collections of poetry, as well as a novel, Alā qayd al-mawt (2016).

Refaat Alareer

On December 6, the poet, writer, literature professor, and activist Dr. Refaat Alareer was killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike that also killed his brother, his sister, and four of her children. He is survived by his wife, Nusayba, and their children.

Alareer was a professor of literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he taught since 2007.

He was the co-editor of Gaza Unsilenced (2015) and the editor of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014). In his contribution to the 2022 collection Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, titled “Gaza Asks: When Shall this Pass?”, Refaat writes:

It shall pass, I keep hoping. It shall pass, I keep saying. Sometimes I mean it. Sometimes I don’t. And as Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and to tell her stories. For Palestine.

Alareer was also one of the founders of We Are Not Numbers, a nonprofit organization launched in Gaza after Israel’s 2014 attack and dedicated to creating “a new generation of Palestinian writers and thinkers who can bring together a profound change to the Palestinian cause.”

Through his popular Twitter account, “Refaat in Gaza,” Alareer vehemently condemned the ongoing atrocities committed against his people by Israeli forces, as well as the successive U.S. administrations that enabled them.

In the wake of his death, Alareer’s heartbreakingly prophetic farewell poem, “If I Must Die,” has been translated into more than 40 languages; it has been read aloud from stages and written on the subway walls; it has been printed onto banners and placards and flags and kites held aloft in ceasefire demonstrations around the world.

Abdul Karim Hashash

The writer and Palestinian heritage advocate Abdul Karim Al-Hashash, along with many of his family members, was killed on October 23 in the city of Rafah. Al-Hashash was known for his writings on Palestinian folk heritage and his research on Bedouin heritage, customs, and Arab proverbs. He also collected dozens of rare books about Palestine, its history, and its heritage.

Inas al-Saqa

Inas al-Saqa, a celebrated playwright, actor, and educator who worked extensively in children’s theater, was killed by an Israeli airstrike late October alongside three of her children—Sara, Leen, and Ibrahim. Saqa and her five children were sheltering in a building in Gaza City when it was hit by an Israeli air strike. Two of her children, Farah and Ritta, survived the attack but are critically injured and in intensive care.

Saqa appeared in the 2014 Palestinian film Sara, which was directed by Khalil al-Muzayen and dealt with the issue of honour killings in the Arab world.

She also appeared in the film The Homeland’s Sparrow, which was produced in Gaza and directed by Mustafa al-Nabih. The movie covered the Palestinian struggle from the Nakba in 1948 through to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Saqa is also remembered for her cultural work, including her association with theatre groups within Gaza.

The Palestinian poet Khaled Juma wrote of Saqa’s death: “Today, my friend, the curtain has fallen…and the theatre’s stage has darkened.”

Saqa’s last Facebook post was on 27 August and in it she spoke of her experience of surviving Gaza’s past horrors, not knowing the fate that was to befall her in October: “Sometimes you look back and take a glimpse of your past… only to discover that you’ve come out alive from a massacre.”

Jihad Al-Masri

Dr. Jihad Suleiman Al-Masri died on October 17, succumbing to injuries sustained in the Israeli shelling of Khan Yunis. He had been on his way to join his wife and daughter at the time of the attack. Al-Masri was a historian and university professor whose contributions spanned generations. He served as the director of Al-Quds Open University’s Khan Yunis branch. He published numerous research papers on Islamic history and Palestinian oral traditions in both Arab and international journals.

Yusuf Dawas

Palestinian writer, journalist, and photographer Yousef Dawas was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his family home in northern Gaza on October 14.

Dawas was also a guitarist and active participant in the We Are Not Numbers initiative. He wrote in both Arabic and English and produced several videos discussing various topics, including his dream of traveling and exploring the world.

In January 2023, Yousef published an essay entitled “Who will pay for the 20 years we lost?” In the essay, he recounts the destruction of his family’s orchard by an Israeli missile strike in May 2022. The orchard trees produced olives, oranges, clementines, loquat, guavas, lemons and pomegranates, and its loss “destroyed an important piece of our past. Our family’s history. Our heritage.”

Shahadah Al-Buhbahan

The Palestinian poet and educational researcher Shahdah Al-Buhbahan was killed, alongside his granddaughter, by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on November 6.

Nour al-Din Hajjaj

The poet and writer Nour al-Din Hajjaj was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his home in Al-Shujaiyya on December 2. He was the author of the play The Gray Ones (2022) and the novel Wings That Do Not Fly (2021). Hajjaj actively participated in the “Cultural Passion” initiative, the Cordoba Association, and the Days of Theater Foundation.

This was his final message to the outside world:

This is why I am writing now; it might be my last message that makes it out to the free world, flying with the doves of peace to tell them that we love life, or at least what life we have managed to live; in Gaza all paths before us are blocked, and instead we’re just one tweet or breaking news story away from death.

Anyway, I’ll begin.

My name is Nour al-Din Hajjaj, I am a Palestinian writer, I am twenty-seven years old and I have many dreams.

I am not a number and I do not consent to my death being passing news. Say, too, that I love life, happiness, freedom, children’s laughter, the sea, coffee, writing, Fairouz, everything that is joyful—though these things will all disappear in the space of a moment.

One of my dreams is for my books and my writings to travel the world, for my pen to have wings so that no unstamped passport or visa rejection can hold it back.

Another dream of mine is to have a small family, to have a little son who looks like me and to tell him a bedtime story as I rock him in my arms.

Mustafa Al-Sawwaf

Writer and journalist Mustafa Hassan Mahmoud Al-Sawwaf was killed, alongside several members of his family, when an Israeli shell struck his home on November 18. Al-Sawwaf, one of Palestine’s most prominent journalists and analysts, wrote hundreds of pieces on Palestinian political affairs. He served as the editor-in-chief of several newspapers and was founder and editor-in-chief of the first daily newspaper published in the Gaza Strip.

Al-Sawwaf also published a number of books, including a six-part series of articles, Days of Rage (2005), and a collection of political short stories, There Was a Householder (2017).

Abdullah Al-Aqad

On October 16, writer Abdullah Al-Aqad was killed, alongside his wife and children, when an Israeli shell struck his house in Khan Younis. His latest post on social media was: “after today there won’t be any immigration, all respect to the people of Al-Shate’ Refugee camp and Al-Jala’ neighborhood who demonstrated stressing they are staying at their homes to the end.”

Said Al-Dahshan

The writer Dr. Said Talal Al-Dahshan and his family were killed by an Israeli airstrike on October 11. Al-Dahshan, who specialized in Palestinian affairs, was an expert in international law. His book, How to Sue Israel, outlined a legal strategy for holding Israel accountable for its violations of international law.

Saleem Al-Naffar

Saleem Al-Naffar was a renowned poet who advocated for peaceful resistance and whose poetry expressed the struggle of Palestinians to survive and to be remembered in history.

On Dec. 7, Al-Naffar and his family were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Gaza City. Born in a refugee camp in Gaza, Al-Naffar fled with his family during the 1967 war to Syria. Despite the death of his father when he was 10, Al-Naffar found solace in poetry and later studied Arab literature at Tishreen University in Syria.

In 1994, his family returned to Gaza, where he published poetry collections, novels, and an autobiography in Arabic.

His poem Life reads, “Knives might eat / what remains of my ribs, / machines might smash / what remains of stones, / but life is coming, / for that is its way, / creating life even for us.”

Al-Naffar once said: “I sometimes sing of our despair. But maybe people like my work because, even so, it never gives in to hatred or calls for violence.”

With thanks to ArabLit and the Gaza Ministry of Culture’s “Second Preliminary Report on the Cultural Sector Damage War on Gaza Strip” for providing much of this information.

*

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that Heba Abu Nada was killed alongside her son. Heba Abu Nada did not have any children.

Post updated 12/25/2023

Craft and Advice / Craft and Criticism / Humor / The Hub

Are you the Literary A**hole?

Ask Kristen Arnett.

Jonny Diamond   11:17AM, 21 Dec, 2023

drinking

Starting at the end of January, Kristen Arnett will be answering all your questions about how to get by as a writer, from the daily struggle of getting words on the page to how to behave when you’ve had too many Fireballs at the AWP offsite reading.

You can email her directly at AskKristen@lithub.com or, if you’re feeling sheepish about the time you heckled that open mic, you can submit anonymously below.

Lit Hub Daily

Lit Hub Daily: December 21, 2023

Lit Hub Daily   6:30AM, 21 Dec, 2023

december 21

TODAY: In 1892, Dame Rebecca West is born. (Photo by Madame Yévonde.)

- Drumroll, please: It’s the Biggest Literary Stories of 2023. | Lit Hub

- For winter solstice, the authors of Spectral Evidence: The Witch Book discuss the contemporary echoes of centuries-old fears. | Lit Hub History

- What Sabrina Orah Mark is reading now and next, from The Hearing Trumpet to The Ashley Book of Knots. | Lit Hub Annotated Nightstand

- “He has remained true to his original, gritty vision of queer life, even as Hollywood executives clamor for a certain stripe of adult gay tragedy.” Andrew Quintana on Andrew Haigh’s new film, All of Us Strangers. | Lit Hub Film & TV

- “This is the bleak testimony of the damned and blasphemed. It’s sanctioned by the culture of self-aggrandizement. It’s at once one of the great ballads in hip-hop and a manifesto about the insurmountable depravity of the industry.” Harmony Holiday on Madvillain’s “Accordion.” | Oxford American

- How to experience LA like a poet, as told by the poets themselves. | LA Times

- Natan Last on inclusivity in the world of crossword puzzles. | The New Yorker

- “Whereas, in our world, neglect was the operative force, in Reed’s novel, public health becomes urgent if what’s at stake is hierarchy itself.” Melvin Backman on reading Mumbo Jumbo in the post-Covid age. | The Nation

- Have a spooky-ooky Christmas: Isabella Kwai argues for bringing ghost stories back to Christmas. | The New York Times

Craft and Criticism / Features / History / In Conversation / News and Culture

We Are All Witches: Elizabeth Willis and Nancy Bowen on the Contemporary Echoes of Centuries-Old Fears

E. Tracy Grinnell   4:50AM, 21 Dec, 2023

16. Witches_WCC 3 (1)

This longest night of the year is an important time for Witches and Pagans. It is a time for introspection and setting intentions for the new year. Settle in and relax with Spectral Evidence: The Witch Book to savor through the night. (All images courtesy the authors.)

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E. Tracy Grinnell: One of the things that intrigued me when I received The Witch Book manuscript was that it began as two separate projects, each of you individually excavating your personal lineages and then bringing them into conversation with each other. Could you talk a bit about your projects before they came together?

Nancy Bowen: I grew up knowing that one of my ancestors was the Salem witch judge Samuel Sewall. As a feminist and witch-adjacent young person, I found this relation quite appalling. However, several years ago something compelled me to research him, and I found a much more complex situation that inspired me to create an installation that told his story.

Five years after the trials, Sewall publicly recanted and confessed his sins in church. He spent the rest of his life atoning for those sins. He wrote the first abolitionist tract that was published in the Massachusetts Colonies—“The Selling of Joseph”—in 1700. And he acknowledged the rights of women in his 1725 essay “Talitha Cumi.” He supported several young Nipmuc and/or Wampanoag men in his home and then paid for them to attend Harvard. Only one name is known—Benjamin Larnell. Sewall also left land and money in Point Judith, Rhode Island to Harvard College for the purpose of educating young English and Native men. Of course, these gestures were limited by the context of the colonial experience—“education” meant assimilating everyone to Christianity—but I was inspired by his attempts to make amends.

I created an installation in which Sewall faced off the twenty people he condemned to death. He was depicted as a large, abstracted figure wearing a hair shirt and weighed down with twenty small wooden gallows. The twenty dead were represented by abstracted gravestones with wings and skull heads and feet.

I called the installation “Spectral Evidence,” which was the phrase given to evidence based on dreams and visions, the “witchy evidence” that Samuel Sewall later believed was not in fact legally valid. I was working on this project during the Trump presidency. There were so many echoes with contemporary events—fake news and blustering men—that the project felt very current despite the fact that it was based in colonial American history.

There were so many echoes with contemporary events—fake news and blustering men—that the project felt very current.

Elizabeth Willis: My path was similar. When I moved to Massachusetts in 2002, an aunt asked me to visit the cemetery in Andover and told me we were related to at least a couple of convicted witches. If I’m remembering correctly, they were Martha Carrier, who was accused of causing a smallpox epidemic, and Mary Bradbury, who was accused of making a local sea captain’s butter turn rancid.

The logic of those convictions made me wonder what was going on beneath the surface. Martha Carrier was seven months pregnant when she got married, so she was not exactly the poster child for Puritanism, and she inherited her family’s property when her parents and most of her siblings died of smallpox, which made her the focus of a land dispute, so there were people who stood to gain by her conviction. Apparently, Cotton Mather considered her case an exemplary justification for spectral evidence.

ETG: Nancy mentioned beginning work on “Spectral Evidence” during the Trump presidency—was this about the time you began working on your poem “The Witch”?

EW: I wrote the poem around 2010, but before that I was doing research related to the Hollywood blacklist and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which similarly hinged on hearsay, accusations, and the naming of names. It drove Arthur Miller’s writing of The Crucible in the early ‘50s—and Ronald Reagan played an insidious early role in it when he was the head of the Screen Actors Guild.

The committee was deployed as a machine of disenfranchisement—withdrawing or threatening to withdraw individual rights in response to real or imagined acts of political or social will—especially targeting labor organizers, social justice workers, artists, writers, and other cultural workers but also gay citizens, particularly those working in government. Paul Robeson was not only blacklisted but had his passport confiscated so he couldn’t work abroad.

I wanted to know more about that boundary at which someone’s status changed from one kind of exemplary American to another. The committee and the people driving it clearly understood the power of performative language to shore up infrastructures of control, suspicion, and enmity, actively consolidating their own power while purporting to uphold a national identity of free speech and inclusivity.

That’s what I was researching back when the Supreme Court made their ruling on the 2000 presidential election, and in the years that followed when the surveillance and security industries were pouring unprecedented wealth into the pockets of people like Dick Cheney.

ETG: So, for both of you, recent histories and contemporary events intersected in fundamental ways with your personal investigations. What drew you to bring the two projects together, to present them in/as collaboration?

NB: During the time I was working on “Spectral Evidence,” my friends Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein introduced me to the work of Elizabeth Willis and in particular her poem “The Witch.” I loved the phrasing and the imagery it evoked, and I asked her if I could illustrate the stanzas. Her poem also felt very relevant to the political and cultural situation we were then in. And now with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, her poem feels even more pressing to me.

I talked to her about the poem and how she developed it. She told me about her research on the history of witches and how she watched old films like Haxan, a Danish film from 1922. Some of the lines in her poem were from her research and some she invented. I wanted to echo the idea of found language with found images, mixing those with other images I drew myself, and some that I found and altered. I like to construct images like a sculptor. I did not want to illustrate the lines directly or to use traditional stereotypical witch imagery like hats and brooms but to add a little friction to the experience.

So I tried to find an image whose visual meaning was slightly askew from the meaning of the words. For instance, I found an image that I liked of a hand emptying a glass, and it reminded me of the line about “dying of thirst” so I used it there. It was important also that this poem does not seem located in a particular visual time but makes references to several time periods. I chose some images that were from a 17th-century swimming manual and others from contemporary fashion.

EW: When I heard your story, I was fascinated by it—and by the work you were doing around it. When you told me about Samuel Sewall—not only looking at his actions and their repercussions when he was a judge but tracking the transformation that came from his own self-examination—I was struck by his commitment to a reparative path. His struggle of conscience cost him something, and this complicates the narrative in ways that pull it out of the binaries of good and evil.

I was also struck by the fact that the war against women’s autonomy was—especially early on in works like the Malleus Maleficarum (1494)—conducted through images. Engravings that show female pleasure in the absence of males were combined with scenes of cruelty, so you get strategically placed broomsticks, bodies that are part animal, and babies being sacrificed on the side. It was a genre specifically designed to associate female autonomy with the demonic and to fuel male anger while giving it safe haven under the guise of Christian devotion.

So, your decision to respond to that history through image-making seemed especially on point. About your question, Tracy, when I saw Nancy’s installation in Salem, with sculptures in the center of the room and the images with my text on the surrounding walls, I thought it had the feel of an exploded book, but the process of assembling it into an actual book with you and Rachael [Wilson] and Monti was where most of the collaborative decision-making came into play. To work collectively with you all seemed like a logical extension of the turn the work had taken.

So much of what we see playing out historically—including within present history—is the gaslighting of those whose experiences contradict the master narratives.

ETG: Returning to the book, now titled Spectral Evidence: The Witch Book, one of the things that is most powerful to me is that it does begin with the intimate work of personal excavation and reckoning, and imagination. In the global context of colonial history and capitalist exploitation of humans and nature, you begin with the individual, then engage in the relational (via collaboration) so that the conversation can open outward, become more inclusive.

I watched Häxan recently, and the scene that references an accused witch who was found sleeping naked prompted me to suggest the title of our conversation, “A Witch Sleeps Naked,” which is also the third stanza of Liz’s poem. I love thinking of personal reckoning and a willingness to make oneself vulnerable as “sleeping naked”…and beyond that, of course, is the absurdity of pathologizing whether or not one sleeps with clothes on!

NB: Some of the lines that I love in the poem “The Witch” are the ones that I see myself and all my female and femme friends in. “She appears to frown when she thinks she is smiling.” Well, haven’t we all done that? There is a kind of identification: Oh—I get it, we are ALL witches.

EW: I think there’s something very interesting going on in the movement between I, she, and we here. Part of the history we’re addressing has to do with keeping information held by women separate, so that if she/I/we feels at odds with the powers that be, if she/I/we is being told her sense of truth is categorical madness, then she/I/we are kept from establishing bonds with others who share similar senses of reality and desires for change.

So much of what we see playing out historically—including within present history—is the gaslighting of those whose experiences contradict the master narratives being told about the nature of reality and of individual experience. And it happens subtly and insidiously at the level of diction, with the most repressive political programs using the language of liberation to refer to its opposite.

*

Nancy Bowen is a mixed media artist known for her eclectic mixtures of imagery and materials in both two and three dimensions. Bowen has shown widely in the United States and Europe, and she recently received an Anonymous Was a Woman award. She is currently a Professor of Sculpture at Purchase College, S.U.N.Y. She maintains a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her other books of poetry include Address; Meteoric Flowers; Turneresque; The Human Abstract; and Second Law. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

__________________________________

Spectral Evidence: The Witch Book by Elizabeth Willis and Nancy Bowen is available from Litmus Press.

Features / Film and TV / News and Culture

All of Us Strangers Confronts the Dangers of Spinning Trauma Into Art

Andrew Quintana   4:50AM, 21 Dec, 2023

all of us strangers

British director Andrew Haigh has spent much of his career telling intimate queer stories that defy genre expectations, finding the poetry in our ordinary yet captivating realities. His characters grapple with self-consciousness, feeling as though they are constantly being observed and judged by a largely indifferent straight society. They carry the weight of their gay identity within a world that may no longer care either way, until it suddenly does.

His new film, All of Us Strangers, explores how gay men hide from themselves. It’s a companion piece to his 2011 masterpiece Weekend, a melancholy meditation on hook-up culture centered on two British guys in their 30s whose 72-hour affair is cut short by one of them leaving for America.

In All of Us Strangers, two men again connect against dramatic obstacles after a one-night stand. The paradox of Haigh’s approach is that his meticulous realism, capturing faces teetering on the edge of rejection, reaches for the extraordinary. He has remained true to his original, gritty vision of queer life, even as Hollywood executives clamor for a certain stripe of adult gay tragedy, in the vein of Brokeback Mountain or Philadelphia, or now increasingly, YA hits like Heartstopper and Red, White and Royal Blue.

Gay vulnerability is a crucial aspect of Haigh’s creative process—especially evident in All of Us Strangers, arguably his masterpiece. Haigh adapted the script from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, a metaphysical ghost story set in Tokyo. The book revolves around a divorced man who starts an affair with a woman named Keiko, the only other tenant in his apartment building, while simultaneously encountering manifestations of his long-dead parents as they appear to him from childhood.

This plot unfolds like a universal metaphor for the modern mind, alienated in an impersonal cityscape, yearning for sexual fulfillment as well as the safety and familiarity of home associated with one’s inner child. The protagonist reconnects with his estranged son at the novel’s end, subsuming his grief over his parents into the duty of fatherhood.

He has remained true to his original, gritty vision of queer life, even as Hollywood executives clamor for a certain stripe of adult gay tragedy.

When the film opens, the middle-aged protagonist, Adam (Andrew Scott), is struggling to work out a screenplay about his closeted childhood. The top of his laptop screen reads “EXT: 1987,” conjuring an image of a young boy growing up on the outskirts of London with conservative parents. This is the era of homophobia streamed on airwaves with the rise of Margaret Thatcher’s election, and the spread of HIV/AIDS; one can imagine a structure toggling between past and present.

But Haigh, in line with his previous films, deliberately steers away from flashbacks. What sets All of Us Strangers apart not only from its source material but other LGBTQ+ movies is the specificity of its central question: How can queer people contend with the grief of losing parents before getting a chance to reveal their true selves?

Haigh films his desolate London cityscape like an eerie dream. His opening shot captures the apartment building Adam lives in alone—or, almost alone. There are only two lighted windows. The person occupying the other apartment is Jake (Paul Mescal), a younger, thickly accented hot guy. We meet him holding a bottle of whiskey as he knocks on Adam’s door. His flirty banter carries an apocalyptic tone as he jokes (or does he?) that they live in the type of building designed to make people want to jump right out of it. Jake insists that since they are the only people in this building, they may as well get to know each other.

There is a hurried, rapid urgency on Jake’s face, the sort of pained longing familiar to many struggling gay men, scrolling apps at three in the morning, hoping for a stranger beside them to quell the unease of loneliness. But, as Jake stands helplessly at the threshold like a lost puppy looking for a home, Adam shuts the door: he is a stranger, after all.

Quite unlike the original source material, Haigh also proves attuned to the psychosexual dynamic between father and lover that the story suggests in thoughtful editing. When Adam strolls through a park and comes across a stranger who seems as if he’s cruising in the bushes, the man (Jamie Bell) tilts his head back like a proposition. But Adam—and by extension the audience—are instead led back to his childhood home.

This stranger is not a potential lover, but Adam’s dead father in early-middle-aged form. Adam’s parents died in a bicycle accident when he was 12 years old; the scenes that follow with their ghosts play out like a lost soul searching for catharsis and resolution in a fantasy. Adam comes out to his mom (Claire Foy) in the way he wishes he could’ve when she were alive. His Mom expresses worry that he could get AIDS, but Adam assures her,“It’s different now.”

How can queer people contend with the grief of losing parents before getting a chance to reveal their true selves?

The next day, after rekindling a relationship with his parents, Adam finally welcomes Jake into his apartment. They proceed to talk about semantics of queerness, Jake complaining that replacing the word queer with “gay” has taken the “cock-sucking” out of the whole thing. Adam admits he feels like his (straight) friends have abandoned him to raise kids in the suburbs. The heterosexual suburban fantasy connotes loss for Adam, both in childhood and adulthood.

Haigh takes advantage of the novel’s urban atmosphere to present a tragically relatable fable about what it means to be gay in the modern world, drawn to places and people which ultimately reveal themselves as intangible, even haunted. The camera’s steady, unsentimental lens, however, never steers the story into soap.

Instead, the unraveling of Adam’s metaphysical experience makes for Haigh’s most experimental, trippy filmmaking to date. In one scene, Adam attempts to introduce Jake to his parents; the house is empty. Riding the Tube back to London, Adam screams like he’s just heard the news his parents have died all over again and the screen rends itself apart like a Francis Bacon painting.

In Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, recently adapted for Broadway, tragedies constrict the central queer protagonist’s personality so tightly that he seems like little more than a collection of symptoms, almost presented as a dish to arouse the reader’s appetite for sorrow. All of Us Strangers, however, takes a different approach to trauma and characterization. The film delves into why Adam’s loss of his parents, who have never rejected him, results in profound sexual shame in adulthood. It lingers on the question rather than the answer.

What sets Haigh’s adaptation apart is his use of Yamada’s source material to contemplate why trauma exerts such an addictive grip over all of us and hinders our ability to form genuine connections with others. Adam and Jake, representing different generations of gay men, serve as foils for exploring broader themes of the universal experience of alienation among gay men throughout time.

As Adam aptly puts it about gay life to the ghost of his mother, “It’s different now,” but in some ways, it remains the same. After all, the only ghosts that can haunt anyone are those we willingly invite through the door.

Craft and Criticism / Features / Literary Criticism / Reading Lists

The Annotated Nightstand: What Sabrina Orah Mark Is Reading Now and Next

Diana Arterian   4:07AM, 21 Dec, 2023

reading list

As I mentioned in the earlier December post, during the often-dread-inducing/dreadful time of year when publications are putting out there “best of the year” lists, I’m glad to shine a light on a book I loved and think deserves more attention than it seemed to receive. This is always a hard task.

So, aside from this post’s guest, I would have loved to see the to-read piles of these authors and written about their books: Camille Dungy’s Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, Etaf Rum’s Evil Eye, Rita Chang-Eppig’s Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, Julia Fine’s Maddalena and the Dark, Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky, J. Michael Martinez’s Tarta Americana.

The author whose to-read pile we do get to peruse is poet and writer Sabrina Orah Mark. In her book Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales, Mark quotes the folklore scholar Maria Tatar: “Magic happens on the threshold of the forbidden.” This seems to be a guiding principle of the brief essays in the book, which began as a series in the Paris Review of the same title.

In “Happily,” as in the book, Mark attends to motherhood and fairy tales (those two seemingly often-entangled experiences), as well as what Maggie Nelson calls the “unsolvable ethical mess of autobiographical writing.” In Happily’s pages, Mark meditates on the stickiness of writing about family and friends who are potentially hurt by it. About her stepdaughters, her husband’s two ex-wives. When she tells him she’s writing about Bluebeard, his response: “Oh fuck.” The connections between life’s confusions and those of fairy tales seems more and more apt as the book goes on.

In response to reading a fairy tale about a spider and a flea and brewing beer in an egg shell that culminates in scalding, terror, weeping, a flood, Mark writes, “I can’t figure out if this is good news or bad news, and then I remember I am reading a fairy tale, not a will or lab results.” One might say the same thing of a pebble living for months in a child’s ear and, upon its extraction, his saying, “Oh, there you are. I was looking for you all over.”

But the purpose of fairy tales, other than exposing the dark underbelly of how humans think and express what we’re afraid most of is to, ideally, entertain children (but also maybe to terrify them and/or teach them a lesson). Regarding the involvement of her children in this whole enterprise, Mark explains in her interview with David Naimon: “I found myself raising my kids in a place far away from where I came from and suddenly, there’s one school shooting after the next and my kids are Black, and Jewish and I thought, ‘How are we going to all be okay?’ That was the impulse behind the essays, was to remember and to protect…the idea inside of a fairy tale is that the danger comes later, so what happens when you begin in the dangerous place? Can a book protect my kids? Can I turn the essay inside out and wrap it around my kids like some kind of wool, overcoat, bubble, cocoon-type garment?”

She goes on to say that, “If we better understand the world we live in, the things that came before us, and the things that came before that, then before that, will we have better tools to navigate? I think so. Or at least, we’ll have a little bit more light when it gets really, really dark.”

Regarding her to-read pile (note the amazing Writing Ink Made from Guns!), Mark tells us, “My nightstand stack is often more tower than stack, but here is a good representation. Leonora Carrington’s THE HEARING TRUMPET (I’ve read it 100 times) is always at the top to protect the others, and a Golem is always at the tippy top to protect Leonora. My two mystical guards. I have been writing a new book about my house burning down (two winters ago), which is slowly becoming a book about possession and knots and fairy tales and spells and the body and exile and Jewishness. Many of the books on this pile are giving me new ways of thinking about ruin and repair. As Daisy Hildyard writes, ‘What does all this have to do with you? Everything.’”

Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

If you do not know of the British-born Mexican creator Leonora Carrington’s art, writing, or tarot cards, may this be an invitation to scope out any (all) of the above. To give a sense of her as a figure, this is how Merve Emre opens her profile of Carrington in the New Yorker: “When asked to describe the circumstances of her birth, the Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington liked to tell people that she had not been born; she had been made. One melancholy day, her mother, bloated by chocolate truffles, oyster purée, and cold pheasant, feeling fat and listless and undesirable, had lain on top of a machine. The machine was a marvellous contraption, designed to extract hundreds of gallons of semen from animals—pigs, cockerels, stallions, urchins, bats, ducks—and, one can imagine, bring its user to the most spectacular orgasm, turning her whole sad, sick being inside out and upside down. From this communion of human, animal, and machine, Leonora was conceived. When she emerged, on April 6, 1917, England shook.”

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (translated by Aryeh Kaplan), The Lost Princess & Other Kabbalistic Tales of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

Nachman, an 18th/early 19th-century man born in modern-day Ukraine, was meant to follow the Hasidic tradition and become a leader within the movement (the movement is a hereditary dynastic one, and his grandfather was an important Hasidic figure). Nachman refused—but years later founded the Breslov sect of Hasidic Judaism.

His teachings stated anyone could become a holy person (it wasn’t only delineated by lineage), as well as suggested people sing, clap, and dance while praying. Nachman wrote a series of parables, as in this collected text, many of which are influenced by Eastern European tales. These were to impart stories that connect culture of the area and culture of religion. He died at the age of only 38 from tuberculosis and was buried in Poland. His followers began an annual ritual of visiting his grave on Rosh Hashana, which people did in the thousands. The Russian Revolution made that nearly impossible, and very few attempted to do so while Poland was in the USSR. Only some 70 years later were people able to continue the practice. Roughly 25,000 people went in 2008.

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace

Considering what Mark states about her own work-in-progress regarding losing her home in a fire, it makes sense this book is in her pile. Also, as a writer, can anyone not relate to Kingston’s impulse here? From Publishers Weekly: “In September 1991, Kingston (The Woman Warrior; China Men; etc.) drove toward her Oakland, Calif., home after attending her father’s funeral. The hills were burning; she unwittingly risked her life attempting to rescue her novel-in-progress, The Fourth Book of Peace. Nothing remained of the novel except a block of ash; all that remained of her possessions were intricate twinings of molten glass, blackened jade jewelry and the chimney of what was once home to her and her husband. This work retells the novel-in-progress (an autobiographical tale of Wittman Ah Sing, a poet who flees to Hawaii to evade the Vietnam draft with his white wife and young son); details Kingston’s harrowing trek to find her house amid the ruins; accompanies the author on her quest to discern myths regarding the Chinese Three Lost Books of Peace and, finally, submits Kingston’s remarkable call to veterans of all wars (though Vietnam plays the largest role) to help her convey a literature of peace through their and her writings.”

Michael Dumanis, Creature

Dorothea Lasky says about this collection: “Michael Dumanis’s Creature is the poetry book this year you have to read. Steeped in issues of morality, mortality, plasticity, and existence itself, Dumanis paints a picture of life that is as breathtakingly beautiful as it is terrifying. Just as Dumanis writes, ‘There’s more beyond / but not too much,’ the book asks us over and over again what it means to be a living thing and the answer we are given is not simple or easy to swallow. Each poem’s landscape of perfectly chosen and placed language is a land to wish upon. For just as ‘Everything will be taken away before it’s handed back,’ Creature tells us there is hope after loss, even if it is fractured. There is hope in this book, too, as it speaks: ‘I forget my life, but then I remember my life.’ After all, there is poetry still to write which replaces the silence of death: ‘When I grow up, I do not want to be a headstone./ When I grow up, I want to be a book.’ There’s no doubt that Creature contains the real poetry we have been waiting for for a very long time. Read it and feel your spirit cleansed with the truth of our present and our future—‘we, who are about/ to steer our dinghy/ into the open sea.’”

Caren Beilin, Revenge of the Scapegoat

I know I’ve brought up this podcast already in this post, but in her interview on Between the Covers, Beilin talks about the fact that her estranged father sent her painful letters he had written her in childhood. She explains her rage in response, and how she thought, “‘I will never burn these letters. I will burn them into a novel. This is my revenge.’ I felt full of anger and an incredible tenderness, and all these things, but then my horror was nobody can ever see these letters because if anybody says anything besides that they are horrible, then I will die. It’s such an attachment to what they did to me psychically at that age, that it was very hard for me to imagine sharing them. But I guess, as an artist, that’s one of the things I try to practice, like doing things that are very terrifying. I want there to be stakes in the things that I do and I care about that, so I just knew that was one of the things like, ‘I had to do this terrifying thing’…it was like exposure therapy. It really was. I went from these letters searing into my body, like feeling so tender, I went from that to, I don’t know, just going back and forth over however many emails with Danielle [Dutton editor of Dorothy] being like, ‘Let’s change this word here.’”

Nina McLaughlin, Winter Solstice

This seems like a great book to read as the days get shorter. Heather Treseler in the Los Angeles Review of Books writes, “In her new book, MacLaughlin slides a knife edge under the circadian rhythms of our fall into winter, tracking our inchoate urges—to feast and imbibe; to retreat into cozy hibernacula; to skate, ski, and sled, reveling in the dangers of ice and snow; to press naked skin tenderly against skin; and to ‘honor the dark with festivals of light.’ Drawing on poets and singers from Kobayashi Issa and Emily Dickinson to Will Oldham and Mary Ruefle, MacLaughlin reveals how our responses to the solstice, which means ‘sun-stilled,’ are patterned, ancient, and explicable, related to our deepest fears and yearning for survival.” You can read excerpts of Winter Solstice in the Paris Review.

Itzik Manger (translated by Robert Alder Peckerar), The Book of Paradise

The jacket copy for this recently published translation states, “Witty, playful and slyly profound, this story of a young angel expelled from Paradise is the only novel by one of the great Yiddish writers, which was written just before the outbreak of World War II. As a result of a crafty trick, the expelled angel retains the memory of his previous life when he’s born as a Yiddish-fluent baby mortal on Earth. The humans around him plead for details of that other realm, but the Paradise of his mischievous stories is far from their expectations: a world of drunken angels, lewd patriarchs and the very same divisions and temptations that shape the human world. Published here in a lively new translation by Robert Adler Peckerar, The Book of Paradise is a comic masterpiece from poet-satirist Itzik Manger that irreverently blurs the boundaries between ancient and modern and sacred and profane, where the shtetl is heaven, and heaven is the shtetl.”

Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body

The premise of The Second Body is that all human beings have two bodies,” writes Gavin Francis in The Guardian, “the one they have immediate autonomy over, made of flesh and bone, and another which is more diffuse. Hildyard struggles to define exactly what she means by the second body, but in one place calls it ‘the global presence of the individual body’. Elsewhere it is imagined as an entity shared and distributed across every aspect of the biosphere impacted on by humans.” In the book, Hildyard describes how a flood destroyed her home. Francis goes on, “The flood was part of this second body – an elemental retribution brought about not just by her, but by all the collective bad decisions of Homo sapiens: ‘My second body came to find my first body when the river flooded my house.’”

Lars Horn, Voice of the Fish

I saw Horn read and immediately bought, read, and loved this book. For anyone who loves detailed facts or histories and their potential to connect and make meaning of the moment, it is for you. Corinne Manning writes in the New York Times, “The book’s underlying narrative, layered with histories, myths and vignettes about sea life, is [a] serious injury: In 2014, the author tore the muscles from their right shoulder to their lower back while weight lifting, leaving them unable to speak or read for months — a forced stillness and quiet. They had endured such deathly stillness many times before. Horn was the only child of a single mother, an artist who posed Horn to appear dead for photographs and installations and had them sit for full-body plaster casts. The body always adapts, the book argues. As fluid as gender, as a changing tide, it shifts in response to pressures, which are detailed in vivid accounts here: transmasculine rebirth, transphobic locations in Russia and Florida, violence and injury, and the inevitability of disability. Horn wants ‘language and narrative to carry more physicality.’ ‘Voice of the Fish’ meets this desire with a narrative that swells and recedes, with intimate depictions of the writer’s life as well as more distant tales of Pliny the Elder, a 100-year-old manuscript found in the belly of a codfish, and the history of tattooing.”

Clifford W. Ashley, The Ashley Book of Knots

If you have read and know Moby Dick, you know New Bedford, Mass is one of the most important towns for whaling in the United States. This is where Ashley was born thirty years after that book’s publication. In the early 1900s, Harper’s had Ashley go on a whaling expedition, which he wrote about for the magazine. One of the officers of the boat said of the essays, “The illustrations are so true to life that even the Old Barnacles here cannot find fault with them.” Ashley became a whaling historian and wrote two books on the topic. Ashley worked for over a decade on his book of knots, which includes almost 4,000 knots and roughly 7,000 illustrations. He was the second person to ever receive a patent for a knot of his own making (and he has a couple with their own Wikipedia pages.) While just reading a bit about Ashley and knots, I discovered that “bitter end” is a nautical term for when the end of a rope is tied off—a likely source for the phrase “to the bitter end.”

Table of Contents

Literary Hub: 23 Dec, 2023

23 Dec, 2023

Lit Hub Weekly: December 18-22, 2023

The Ultimate Best Books of 2023 List

The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2023

The 10 Biggest Literary Stories of the Year

The 38 Best Books We Read in 2023

We Need Your Help: Support Lit Hub, Become a Member

22 Dec, 2023

Lit Hub Daily: December 22, 2023

Blake Butler on (Not) Finding Your Voice

Colm Tóibín! Geraldine Brooks! A guide to killing time! 19 books out in paperback this January.

“Dead Cats Continue to Meow.” A Poem by Nasser Rabah

The 15 Best Literary Adaptations of 2023

21 Dec, 2023

These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza.

Are you the Literary A**hole? Ask Kristen Arnett.

Lit Hub Daily: December 21, 2023

We Are All Witches: Elizabeth Willis and Nancy Bowen on the Contemporary Echoes of Centuries-Old Fears

All of Us Strangers Confronts the Dangers of Spinning Trauma Into Art

The Annotated Nightstand: What Sabrina Orah Mark Is Reading Now and Next