I don’t respond to cold calls much and I’m trying to get out of the book-review racket, but when Maggie Umber wrote me about her nearly wordless book Chrysanthemum Under the Waves, something told me to answer.
The jumping-off point was a piece Umber made for an anthology of graphic work inspired by the writing of Shirley Jackson. Her story, “The Tooth” features a malevolent stranger named James Harris. Soon Umber was seeing Harris not only in Jackson’s stories but also in her own life.
“All is illusion” is a mantra Roger Orr picks up on a spiritual pilgrimage to India but the meaning of the phrase gains resonance far beyond the metaphysical realm—nothing and no one in Orr’s world is what or who they appear to be. They are ever mutable and evolving as is the person at the center of this story.
Tom Gauld loves books and reading so much. His new collection of comic strips Revenge of the Librarians is replete with love letters to books as physical objects and to all the people involved in producing and preserving them. Librarians, editors, bookshop clerks, and writers are each dealt with in multiple strips. The remarkable thing is how little rancor and bitterness is to be found within these pages. There’s sometimes weariness and, on odd occasion, despair. But neither are indulged in and both are dealt with with gentle irony rather than caustic wit. Gauld doesn’t seem to have a mean bone in his body.
Chris Brokaw is one of the most searching, prolific, expressive musicians I know. Switching between guitar and drums, he’s left an indelible impression in bands like Codeine, Come, Charnel Ground, and The Martha’s Vineyard Ferries. He’s also been a sought after sideman with the likes of the Lemonheads and often tours the world playing solo, in between scoring independent films like I Was Born, But…
If Luc Sante wrote the phone book I’d read it. Twice. Happily, Sante’s new book Maybe the People Would Be the Times gathers pieces about music, art, and city life from the last twenty-plus years, so what he writes about is as compelling as the style with which he does it. Sante stubbornly refuses to write a stale line. Whether paying tribute to the young Patti Smith or imagining the subsequent lives of the original owners of 45s in his collection or recalling the long-gone businesses and denizens of the Lower East Side, he puts the reader right there, seeing what he saw, thinking what he thought.
Leah Hampton isn’t fucking around. You don’t call a short story collection what she called hers if the plan is to be indirect. But for all its bluntness, her writing is subtle and multilayered. As great as Hampton is at sketching out living, breathing people, she’s at least as adept at using symbol and metaphor. Even when I could see a plot cocking its fist back, I was helpless to dodge the blow to my gut. The worst part is I was laughing out loud moments before getting clobbered.
There’s so little to be happy about these days that when something comes along that sparks some joy we cling to it like a life raft. The Tiger King didn’t do shit for me but I couldn’t put Sam McPheeters’ book Mutations down. I tore through it in a day and a half, skipping meals and work along the way. I doubt I would’ve read it any slower if there was no plague outside my door or if we had a human being for a president, it’s that good.
