Today’s weekly reading column looks at new books from Sam Pink, Noah Cicero, Kate Bernheimer, Michael J. Seidlinger, and Miranda Mellis.
The Zinophile: Reading Jenny Zhang’s “Hags”
I’ve written a lot about the excellent Guillotine series of chapbooks in this space, and so it’s probably not surprising that I was impressed with the latest entry in the series, Jenny Zhang‘s Hags. It’s best described as a long essay, blending candid observations from life with references to literature and folklore, and working it way towards a denouement that finds a political expression for all that’s come before.
#tobyreads: Catching Up on Modern Classics, and Savoring Plot
I’m pretty sure that most serious readers have a list of books that they should have read by this point, but haven’t. It might be mental; it might be in a word processing document or scrawled in the back of a notebook or stored externally in a service like Goodreads. Maybe it’s some combination of all of those things. This week’s column involves a look at two of those; it also involves misdirection, fantasy trilogies, and the enjoyment that comes […]
#tobyreads: When the Narrative Circles Itself
I’d heard Richard Hugo’s name mentioned for a while as a writer whose work I should check out. Most recently, I was reading Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering, due out in the fall on Tin House, and found a lengthy essay using Hugo’s poem “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” as the jumping-off point for a long meditation on America, economic collapse, and national anxiety. This was the mephorical straw to my to-read list’s camel’s back, and I ended up ordering his essay collection […]
#tobyreads: Islands & Isolation
I finished Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning earlier this week. It’s a fantastic novel, one that spans years and does interesting things with what is, on the surface, a familiar-looking kind of narrative: the one that follows a small group of characters over a span of decades, and finds them walking through a shifting society. And, yes, Yanique’s novel is set in the Virgin Islands, and yes, it does (mostly) follow two sisters as they witness and take part […]
#tobyreads: Portraits of Places
I’m speaking metaphorically here, in some cases. There’s certainly some geography involved here, and more than a little time, but either way: the trio of books I’m discussing today all veer in on a particular place, sometimes in time, sometimes not. And that sense of place is indeed neatly captured and relayed via the page in all three cases, with impressive results.
#tobyreads: Obsessions, Fixations, and Secret Crimes
Continuing in my read-through of Harry Mathews’s body of work, I recently delved into his novel The Conversions. It begins in a recognizable fashion: the narrator is invited to the home of a wealthy man, where he takes part in a competition; winning it, he’s given a mysterious adze. As the novel continues, the narrator must delve into the adze’s history in order to answer three fairly surreal questions. And while this might seem like the framework for an adventure story, […]
#tobyreads: Lost Landscapes and Secret Societies
Last week’s column involved some talk of landscapes. At around that time, I’d been reading Walden for WORD’s Classics Book Group–in this case, the edition with annotations by Bill McKibben. This is, somewhat inexplicably, the first time I’ve read it; I am apparently a bad reader of the Transcendentalists. (Really need to work on that.) What struck me–among the things that struck me, really, as there were plenty–was how accessible it still felt. Some works written in the 19th century seem […]