News and Recent Reading

Hello all! It’s been a little while since I’ve written, I know. Around this time last year I joined the National Book Critics Circle Barrios Book in Translation prize longlist committee and began reading books in translation like a mad woman, and then last fall I ran for the NBCC board and won a seat, and now I’m reading even more books like a mad woman. Plus my friend Kim McNeill and I started a reading group to read the books and translations of Kate Briggs slowly throughout the course of a year. Plus the One Bright Book podcast is still going strong. Plus I’ve joined a number of online reading groups. Plus regular life has been happening. So I’ve neglected this newsletter, but I miss it!

The winner of last year’s Barrios Book in Translation Prize was Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü, translated by Maureen Freely, from Transit Books — a fantastic short novel that richly deserved this prize.

Here are links to some of the writing I did last year and other projects I’ve got going on, and below you’ll find some of my favorite books of recent weeks.

• I wrote about Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia by Marie Darrieussecq for Words Without Borders.

• I published a review of Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno’s book Tone for the news journal Atmospheric Quarterly. It’s a lovely journal — check it out!

• You’ll find my newsletter for the #KateBriggs24 project here, and Kim’s website with an overview of the project plus a ton of links and resources is here.

• You’ll see all the One Bright Book episodes on our website, or you can listen to them on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcatcher. We recently discussed La Bête Humaine by Emile Zola and had a great time.

Recent/current reading:

• Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, by Marguerite Young (Dalkey Archive Press 2024, originally published in 1965): This book is 1,400 pages! I’m on page 78! Not only is it 1,400 pages, but each page is large and densely packed with words. It’s a beast of a book. I’m reading it very slowly, and I’ll probably still be reading it at this time next year, which is fine with me. The sentences are long and winding, but they aren’t hard to read, except that sometimes you have to go back and remind yourself of where the sentence began because you’ve landed in an entirely different place. The novel opens on a bus with Vera, the narrator, in search of her childhood nanny, Miss MacIntosh. Then it moves back to describe Vera’s childhood, her eccentric, dreamy mother, the people in her mother’s world, and Miss MacIntosh herself. But a description like this doesn’t capture the experience of reading the book: it’s wildly imaginative, decadent, full of lists that take you on a journey. It’s big subject (so far) is the relationship between dreams and reality — the mother is lost in a drug-fueled dreamland and Miss MacIntosh lives as fully in reality as she can. But then she disappears. I have no idea where this book is going, but I love it.

  

• It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken (New Directions 2024): This is a novel about zombies that broke my heart. The zombie narrator is just trying to survive, living as she is with an overpowering sense of grief and loss and a never-ending hunger. She remembers what it was like to exist in a fully-alive body and the feeling haunts her. Now she’s losing body parts — the novel begins with her arm falling off — and feeding off the bodies of living humans who have somehow survived. She finds a dead crow and carries it around in her chest cavity. It occasionally talks to her, although only in discrete words with no syntax or meaning. Then she decides to leave the zombie community she’s been living in and set off on a road trip, and we see a little more of the world around her. It’s a gorgeous book that’s as much about the feeling of loss and unreality as it is about zombies, although it has unforgettable moments of physical violence as well.

• Like a Sky Inside by Jakuta Alikavazovich, translated by Daniel Levin Becker (Fern Books, 2024): Those of you who like to read about art will love this. It’s maybe a memoir, maybe fiction, possibly autofiction — people say different things about its genre, no one knows — about the night the author spent at the Louvre. Alikavazovich writes so beautifully about experiencing art and the power it can exert over us and the world around it, and also about light and how seeing art in the dark or near-dark is its own very different experience from seeing it in bright museum light. She also writes about the meaning the Louvre had for her father and for herself as a child, and how their shared love of art — as well as art loves they don’t share — shaped their relationship. I’m pressing this book on anyone who will listen — it’s so good.

  

• There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House, 2024): A book about basketball that someone who doesn’t know much about basketball can love! I adored this … memoir? Abdurraqib writes about watching and playing basketball but also about cities and work and being unhoused and protests and family and love. It’s about so much, and it’s beautifully written. There’s something about the way Abdurraqib’s writing is both colloquial and preacherly that is so moving. He has a way of taking you on a journey through various subjects so you don’t know where you’re going, but you’re enjoying the ride, and then slowly things start to come together and you realize how everything fits, and you feel like you just had an experience. I loved it and want to reread it, this time on audio.

That’s all for now — hopefully I’ll be back before another long break happens. Thank you for reading!