I haven’t done a comics-focused column in a while; seems like it’s the right time to remedy that. While none of the three books here is exactly what I’d call holiday weekend beach reading, there’s plenty to entertain in these volumes–and more than a little to unsettle as well.
A couple of weeks ago, I was out with friends talking books. My friend Jeremy recommended that I check out Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses on Art and Class; from his description, it sounded intriguing, and I ordered it that night via WORD. The title is pretty self-explanatory: you’re going to get a lot of musings on art as it relates to class here. Given that I’m fond of smart writing on both subjects–which can be found in abundance here–this is not […]
I spent the weekend in central New Jersey, watching friends get married on a farm and doing a bit of exploring in and around Bordentown, New Jersey. Highly recommended: Randy Now’s Man Cave, a shop run the man responsible for booking Trenton’s City Gardens for many years, where I bought soda from Detroit and found a Huggy Bear 10″. Also? I did some reading.
Today’s weekly reading column looks at new books from Sam Pink, Noah Cicero, Kate Bernheimer, Michael J. Seidlinger, and Miranda Mellis.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]