Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Hillary Kelly on Michael Cunningham’s Day, Rachel Syme on Babra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, Ryan Chapman on Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn, Eliza Goodpasture on Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters, and Laurie Hertzel on Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“Michael Cunningham is possessed by a spirit, one whom a good deal of contemporary writers find it hard to shake: Virginia Woolf walks the hallways of his novels … with new emergencies rushing by us each day, I find it harder and harder to abide literature concerned with the pandemic itself, rather than its long-tail outcomes. (Woolf’s own Mrs. Dalloway—an obvious influence on Day—benefited from being set after, not during, the flu epidemic of 1919-20.) And yet, Day is not really about the pandemic at all, and its first section, set long before anyone besides virologists had ever uttered the word coronavirus, is by far its strongest. Cunningham scatters his characters to their separate emotional exiles with an aim to bring them together at day’s (and Day‘s) end. Dispersal is his forte … Cunningham beautifully pries apart the notion of what it means to have outgrown something, to be living in the liminal space between an earlier self and a future self, to be

unable ‘to reenter the orderly passage of time.’ Day is even set on a date New Yorkers will recognize as a kind of faux spring, when, in defiance of the calendar, the earth stays hard and the flowers huddle underground … In this novel that puzzles over the elasticity of all kinds of love—familial, parental, erotic, queer, fraternal, ambiguous—I yearned for Cunningham to forget his literary peers and stick with his own special talent … When Cunningham writes like himself, and not like an apostle, he is one of love’s greatest witnesses.”

–Hillary Kelly on Michael Cunningham’s Day (The Los Angeles Times)

“It has been a robust year for celebrity memoirs…There’s the sob story, the gallant bildungsroman, the louche chronicle of various addictive behaviors, the righteous making of an activist, the victory lap. Streisand’s book, in its sheer breadth and largesse, attempts to be all of these things, and thus becomes something incredibly rare. Call it the diva’s memoir, an act of bravura entertainment and impossible stamina. The diva’s memoir is, by definition, a somewhat delusional form, in that its author lives in a very different world from the rest of us, and has a different sense of scale …

If something interests her, then it is interesting, full stop. In a way, she draws on an old-fashioned idea of celebrity: to be a star is to be golden, and to make everything you touch look the same. And would we want anything less? Streisand has never thought it necessary to contain herself, and there’s no reason to start now. The audio version of My Name Is Barbra is forty-eight hours long—the longest author-read memoir at Penguin Random House. It is also, I would argue, the superlative way to experience Streisand’s opus. She ad-libs at will; she refuses to say the word ‘farts.’ Sometimes she sounds like a tired bubbe, sometimes a grand dame. But she’s her best, as ever, when she’s singing….The sound is pure, exultant catharsis. It will make you believe in something, if not quite as much as the singer believes in herself.”

–Rachel Syme on Babra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra (The New Yorker)

“Putting Rand in the title of one’s satirical novel feels like a dare, or at least—in a hyper-polarized time—a provocation. The good news is Freiman has written one of the funniest and unruliest novels in ages. It shakes you by the shoulders until you laugh, vomit or both … Freiman scratches at the difference between knowing and knowingness, and how our blind spots can subsume our personality … Rife with dissatisfactions—to its credit—and with self-aware jokes and serious questions about self-awareness. Also: serious questions about jokes … Ultimately, though, the author torques her contrarianism past trolling, past knee-jerk philosophizing and past satire, alchemizing a critique of literary culture in all its ideological waywardness.”

–Ryan Chapman on Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn (The Los Angeles Times)

“The feminism in this book challenges the idea that all art by women is feminist, and that all feminist art must be by or about women. It universalises, instead of essentialising. Elkin centres the book around second-wave feminism … Elkin seeks to demonstrate that any universal concept or theory about art is impossible. In a project that is fundamentally based on embodiment, there is only the individual’s reaction. The feelings we have in our bodies about what we see and experience are the truest theory—or perhaps they are beyond theory, and beyond the bounds of judgment … Instead of separating the art from the artist, she fuses the two together completely, provoking new, deeper questions about how feminism can and must evolve to engage with those who do things differently—the monsters in our midst.”

–Eliza Goodpasture on Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (The Guardian)

“The chasm between men and women is so vast in Claire Keegan’s story collection, So Late in the Day, that her characters might as well speak different languages. (In two of the three stories, they do.) Each of these tight, potent stories takes place over just a few hours, and each explores the fraught dynamics between two people, a man and a woman … Keegan’s stories are built around character rather than action, but they never flag. The tension builds almost imperceptibly until it is suddenly unbearable. As in her stunning, tiny novels, Foster and Small Things Like These, she has chosen her details carefully. Everything means something…Her details are so natural that readers might not immediately understand their significance. The stories grow richer with each read …

All three stories pivot on a clash of expectations and desires, with women wanting independence and adventure and men expecting old-fashioned subservience and feeling baffled when they do not get it. That bafflement carries an ominous undercurrent; a threat of danger runs through each tale … they have new and powerful things to say about the ever-mystifying, ever-colliding worlds of contemporary Irish women and the men who stand in their way.”

–Laurie Hertzel on Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day (The Star Tribune)

Lately, there’s been a lot of attention on how children learn to read, and I’m heartened that phonics is making a comeback. But sounding out words (also called “decoding”) can be laborious for young readers. As the mother of three and a veteran educator who believes passionately that a love of reading is foundational to a child’s success in school and life, I often recommend wordless books to parents of young “pre-readers” as well as older reluctant readers because these books are so accessible. They free children to use their imaginations to “read” the book without needing words to tell them what is happening.

You might think that a “wordless book” is just another name for ordinary “picture books,” but the selection I offer below is anything but ordinary. In teaching children to read and fostering their love of reading, the importance of choosing high-quality literature for them cannot be overstated.

The books listed here represent some of the most creative and captivating storytelling experiences available to young children. Many of these books are true works of art that present enchanting landscapes and richly imagined, magical worlds. The illustrations have a surreal quality that fascinates children and adults alike.

Without the need to decode the words, children build their reasoning and comprehension skills as they “read” the illustrations, discover details and clues, and infer what is happening on the page. Instead of you reading to your child, your child can tell you the story as they deduce it. The reading experience is more of a two-way conversation, which you can encourage with thoughtful questions: “What are the characters thinking and feeling? What are the clues that tell you that?” This can be empowering for them and a nice change of pace for you!

For example, the large, detailed watercolors in David Wiesner’s Tuesday, the first book on the list, take readers on a fantastical night-time journey of frogs riding on magic carpets of lily pads into the homes and backyards of a nearby town. Each page captures a surreal scene, both familiar and fantasy—a pajama-clad midnight snacker catching sight of the airborne amphibians in mid-bite, an old woman dosing in the glow of her tv while the frogs waft by, one gleefully flicking its tongue at her remote. Each page has so many details to discover and ponder. Figuring out the story taking place on this particular Tuesday will delight and activate your child’s imagination.

Having your child tell you the story can also lead to more complex conversation and promote more sophisticated vocabulary—because they are not restricted by words on the page to narrate the story. Children also gain confidence and independence as they determine the story they are seeing, and articulate it.

Children love exploring wordless books. By encouraging your child to “read” these books to you, you are helping them begin the process of constructing stories in their head from information on a page. Their attention to detail grows, and they develop a passion for books and get excited about trying to read for themselves.

Here are some terrific wordless or nearly wordless books. They all feature wonderful illustrations and richly imagined characters and stories that will provide you and your child hours (if not years!) of of engaging discussions:

David Wiesner, Tuesday

The first of his books to be awarded a Caldecott medal, Tuesday begins “Tuesday evening, around eight” as a bunch of comical-looking frogs levitate from a murky lily pond and take flight, scattering mischief and mayhem (and leaving a trail of inexplicable lily pads) that have detectives puzzling over “who done it.” The real surprise is the foreshadowing of what’s to come next Tuesday! For ages three and up.

David Wiesner, Flotsam

Another Caldecott winner, Flotsam explores delightful underwater mysteries and surprising perspectives of images supposedly caught on a camera that washes ashore. Ages three to seven.

David Wiesner, Sector 7

Yet another Caldecott-winning adventure, this one about a young boy who is whisked away by a mischievous cloud during a field trip to the Empire State Building and visits Sector 7, from which clouds are produced and dispatched.It’s a funny, touching story about art, friendship, and the weather. Ages five and up.

John S. Goodall, Creepy Castle

Young children enjoy this classic tale of good over evil as they follow two mice—a prince and princess—who happen upon a mysterious medieval castle and become trapped inside. Told through marvelously detailed watercolors and half pages that flip to reveal a shift in the narrative, this critically acclaimed story is a favorite of many families. Ages five to six.

Henry Cole, Unspoken: A Story from the Underground Railroad

Drawn in monochrome pencil on rough-textured paper, this Civil War story narrates the surprise encounter between a young farm girl and a runaway slave hiding in her family’s barn. Winner of multiple awards, including New York Times’ Best Illustrated Children’s Books, Unspoken has an austere, haunting visual tone that evokes the emotional response of both the girl and the slave, represented by a singular eye peeking from behind corn stalks or a knothole in the barn wall. A complex story of one girl’s moral dilemma told with spare beauty.  Ages seven to ten.

Aaron Becker, Journey, Quest, Return

Appealing to both younger and older kids, Aaron Becker’s captivating illustrations and story line pull you into each of the three volumes of this trilogy. Even young children have no problem narrating the stories that come to life in these magical illustrations. These books are such favorites at Success Academy that we have a copy in each of our eighty-plus first-grade classroom lending libraries.

Alexandra Day, Good Dog, Carl

First published in 1985, this classic tells the story of a dog named Carl who looks after a baby. Children love explaining the predicaments baby Madeline gets herself into, and how this favorite Rottweiler comes to the rescue, every time. Almost forty years later, twenty-four Carl books have been published, with over six million books in print.

Shaun Tan, The Arrival

Sublimely illustrated in vivid sepia and monochrome tones, The Arrival is an allegorical immigrant story of a man who leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. Ages twelve and up.

Raymond Briggs, The Snowman

A little boy rushes out into the wintry day to build a snowman, which comes alive in his dreams that night. This story of friendship as well as loss, beautifully evoked in Briggs’ illustrations, is best experienced while snuggling together with your little one. Ages four and up.

Bill Thomson, Chalk

Three children find a bag of magical chalk at the playground on a rainy day, and their drawings come to life, sparking a tale that is both charming and terrifying. Your child will be pulled into this magical masterpiece of visual story-telling—amazing paintings in acrylics and colored pencil. Ages four to seven.

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A+ Parenting: The Surprisingly Fun Guide to Raising Surprisingly Smart Kids by Eva Moskowitz is available via Harvest.

In the wake of ongoing discussions about whether we can love monstrous writers, or whether we should even write monstrous characters, I have escaped into a personal library not of monsters, but of mischief. Over the last two years I have built what I call the feral shelf. It began in lockdown, when I was starved for other people and parties. I found solace and satisfaction in books full of sex, intoxication, sass and excess; that railed against wellness, against the proper, against the polite. The feral shelf’s protagonists (often the writers themselves, distorted) have sharp tongues and bad habits: they act with a lust for life and all its possibilities.

The shelf has a father, son and a holy spirit: Eve Babitz, Eileen Myles, and Edna O’Brien. It extends into books possessed of high velocity writing, whether fictional, semi-fictional, or pure documentary. It includes but is not limited to Diane di Prima’s semi-fictional Beatnik shagathon; the sass and gore of Gary Indiana; the speed-fuelled nihilism of Mary Woronov; the sexual freedoms and unreliable narrations of the young Harriet Sohmers Zwerling abroad in 1950s Paris; Cookie Mueller’s collected writing and Samuel R. Delany’s luminous fragmented memories of cruising in Motion of Light In Water.

Do not misunderstand me: this library is not about championing lazy subversion; it does not look to undo any recent progress; it does not use free speech as an excuse to trumpet rape and pillage. It is a library of authors with a white-knuckle grip on the wheel; who share with me the joy and ferocity of life coming at you fast. They might not always be getting it right, but they’re almost always getting some.

I wondered what I loved so much about these writers. I am not solely drawn to them as escape from the doldrums of life because frankly, I don’t live a life in the doldrums. It is perhaps more about the indulgence of gossip and the pleasure of a perfectly delivered anecdote. I called my sister, who loves deeply nihilistic books, to ask why we both might like this stuff. She has a particular taste for the grimmer end of the feral shelf – Gary Indiana’s Rent Boy and Mary Woronov’s Niagara – as well as the raw visions of horror in novels like Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I ask why she thinks she leans this way as a reader. “It’s all about brain stuff,” she replies gnomically, explaining that “experiencing terrifying brain stuff makes other things in life seem more palatable. Stuff that gets you out of your comfort zone is thrilling, but perhaps it’s also a comfort to see that other people have mad ideas, or horrid stuff rattling about in their brain and don’t feel afraid to get it down on paper.”

She articulates something I’d been struggling to understand – that no amount of wellness and self-care can eliminate the badness rattling around in one’s brain or the world around us, although some messaging seems to suggest this is possible. I’m interested in embracing the reality of this rather than eliminating it, and I want to read about it too, articulated with wit, sarcasm, and mastery, because there is too much ‘should’ in the world, that trickles down into the day to day. We should get 8hrs sleep; we should turn our screens off; we should exercise; should curb our unhealthy appetites in pursuit of this promised happiness under strict self-control. But what if our appetites are the engine of life? What if keeping them in balance is the ride?

The writers on this shelf always understand something of the fluidity of desire and of the intensity of our appetites. It’s not quite ‘never apologise never explain’ (The Queen or Kate Moss, depending on who you ask); it’s not ‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’ (Aleister Crowley). It’s the light and the dark; the party and the aftermath; it’s always telling a good story about the night before. Woronov got close to the atmosphere of the books on the feral shelf when speaking with Gary Indiana for Interview magazine: “Your books don’t seem therapeutic to me,” says Indiana. “No, they’re not,” she replies. “They’re like — what’s that word — detritus? They’re like stuff I’m trying to get rid of, like old dead skin or bad memories.”

The tyranny of “should” can turn not just life but reading into a joyless trudge. The feral shelf is a reaction against it. Your feral shelf will in this way look different to mine, because it ought to be partly informed by what is forbidden to you. Harriet Sohmers Zwerling gets it: Life is about “earthly delights,” she writes in her diaries. “Showers, singing, looking at myself naked, reading, sleeping, sex.” Eileen Myles gets it, too: “time is so short or so long that exchanging cigarettes, listening to the birds, watching the light, you must talk and talk so you won’t be scared by the length or the shortness of it or even its ferocious speed… Danger comes to me but some people are born full of it.”

The feral shelf champions making your own choices about how to live; about being free from social expectations and subsequent judgements that come from a failure to conform. Samuel R. Delany talks about it in A Motion of Light In Water when he’s bedridden with exhaustion, trying to understand his identity tags – being black, and gay, and an author – in 1961. Because for all the progress that has been made since my mother was my age and had not been allowed to go to university or order a full pint of beer for herself, digressions from a linear life of school, marriage, kids, remain transgressions in many quarters, particularly for women, and the writers on this shelf know it. I don’t conform to many of the more traditional emotional expectations of womanhood, and neither do most of these women writers: “I am sort of invincible looking and I never display any of those womanly qualities so praised through the ages like modesty, tact, or sweet vulnerability,” writes Eve Babitz, which I find deeply relatable. She speaks of the way I want to live, which is fast.

There are fuzzy edges here: what makes one writer qualify for the shelf and another be excluded? It is not about the embracing of evil so much as Dionysian excess. It is not censoring the risky, nor denying the difficult, but the feral shelf never goes out of its way to be controversial, or undermines the rights of another to exist. It’s being a bitch but not being a bigot. It is not about very bad lives or very sad lives – there must be light and humour in among the disastrous love affairs and art projects and parties.

Art and writing are a part of life – it has to happen somewhere, and writers on the feral shelf sit among the detritus of life, recording the dirty curtains and the old ashtray; the texture of sex with different people, what love feels like, what despair is, what art is for and when hedonism flips into addiction. There are risks to be experienced solely through the pages of a book and there are things to learn about the perplexing variation in the infinite possible lives of human beings.

I read these writers because they know that to be in control of their own life and destiny is the greatest luxury, whether it’s getting out of bed past noon on a Tuesday, fucking whomever you fall for past midnight in a bar, or heading out of the city to the countryside to recover. It’s laziness and it’s indulgence; the body and the intellect; it’s my feral shelf.

In the last 38 days, more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Another 190 have been killed by Israeli army fire and settler violence in the West Bank. Tens of thousands of people have been severely wounded and traumatized. 1.7 million have been displaced.

Throughout these weeks of mass death and dehumanization—to say nothing of the 75 years preceding—an incalculable number of Palestinian stories have been erased.

We wanted to create a list of books that would serve as a reminder of the precious individual stories and humanities of the Palestinian people, as well as an evergreen resource for all readers interested in engaging with the rich, vibrant tradition of Palestinian literature—both in this horrific moment and, hopefully, long after the current assault on Gaza has ended.

To do so, we reached out to several dozen Palestinian and Palestinian-American authors, as well as a number of other writers whose work and advocacy has focused on Palestine, to ask them to recommend their favorite works of Palestinian literature. We hope that the below list of titles serves as an illuminating introduction to that canon.

–Dan Sheehan

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Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani (trans. Hilary Kilpatrick)

I found this slim volume of short stories in the American University Cairo bookshop when I was 22. I had never heard of Kanafani. Whenever someone asks me about the transformative power of literature, I retreat back to the moment of reading this collection. “Men in The Sun,” the titular story of a deathly journey of Palestinian migrants to Kuwait in the back of a water tanker, and “Land of Sad Oranges,” articulated my heritage in a way I had never experienced previously. To explain: my father is from Jaffa, Palestine, and Kanafani is from Acre. Kanafani was two years older. Both of their families were expelled in 1948 and, together with almost a million other Palestinians, they both became refugees as children. My father once saw Kanafani, who was then an unpublished teenager, in a cinema in Damascus. He was, my father relates, serious for his age and incredibly keen on writing, but neither as good looking, nor as tall as my father was. My father, who was going through a phase of disaffection at the time, was envious of Kanafani’s notebook, his dedication, and his beautiful handwriting.

Thirty years later, as a disaffected teenager in Kuwait, literature was always my portal of escape. My preferences were for 19th century French and Russian literature, most notably Emile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. To me, literature was Great, but it was also European, Male, and Past. What Kanafani did was to communicate the immediate, emotional pulse of personal and political trauma, love and family bonds that ran through our lives, whilst also creating a collective sense of resistance in his work. He was assassinated in 1972 by a car bomb in Beirut. His niece died with him. Some of his more experimental works are less powerful, in my view, but this volume set me on my life journey, which sometimes I wish I could get off, but can’t.

–Selma Dabbagh

A collection of short stories about the plight of displaced Palestinians. The titular story, and the longest in the collection, follows three men as they make their way to Kuwait. There are also shorter stories that all illustrate some aspect of the hardship of displacement and dispossession. The translation from the Arabic original does full justice to Kanafani’s beautiful prose, and the introduction is extremely valuable for readers unfamiliar with the context of the stories.

–Nada Elia

The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye

Every day for the past several weeks, I’ve been reading poetry by Palestinian and Palestinian American writers. I turn to these poems for solace in the early morning, at my office at work, in bed at night. I read verses that celebrate the richness of Palestinian history and culture, and verses that demand justice and freedom for Palestine. Naomi Shihab Nye’s fiercely political collection The Tiny Journalist captures daily life under Israeli occupation: the unlawful incarceration of Palestinians; the terrifying airstrikes; the massive barrier wall that cuts through Palestinian land. The poem “ISRAELIS LET BULLDOZERS GRIND TO HALT” dramatizes the deliberate misuse of language in American reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict, language “covering the pain/big bandage/masking the wound” of Palestinians.

There are heartrending poems about Gaza, such as one told from the point of view of the moon, who looks down on the narrow strip of land and sees “no reason for the sorrows humans make” and dislikes “the scuffle of bombs blasting.” There are others about Jerusalem, “everyone’s city.” These unflinching poems aren’t told from the voices of the defeated. They’re voices that, despite their pain, speak out against Israeli occupation and violence. They’re human voices that refuse to be silenced.

–Ghassan Zeineddine

Memory for Forgetfulness by Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Ibrahim Muhawi)

This prose poem memoir bears witness to the ravages of the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 while simultaneously interrogating the role of memory. In this beautiful book, Darwish asks, what is the role of the poet in wartime? How do we save the soul beneath the deafening sound of rockets? Darwish writes in one passage: “Why am I looking for the paper when buildings are falling in all directions? Is that not writing enough?”

–Hannah Lillith Assadi

His poetic prose reflection of the bloody 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut. The surreal precarity of life under siege and bombardment is captured in a dreamlike web of ideas and memories and observations by the masterful poet laureate of Palestine.

–Ismail Khalidi

Salt Houses by Hala Alyan

Hala Alyan’s debut novel, Salt Houses, is a beautiful, heartwrenching remedy to the rampant dehumanization of Palestinians. Telling the story of a single family over three generations, Alyan maps their lives, displacements, and migrations from Palestine to Kuwait and America to France. It is a poignant reminder of the way the Nakba and colonialism more broadly has shaped the histories, present(s), and futures of Palestinian people. Simply a must read.

–Nicki Kattoura

Read an excerpt from Salt Houses here

Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh

Because of course you want to scream. You want to shout. But as a writer, you know that the Screaming/Shouting Section of the bookstore is filled to overflowing, that none of the books are particularly interesting, and that customers never visit that section anyway. And so, in Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh doesn’t scream. He delivers instead a love letter to a place of natural beauty that is disappearing beneath his feet. He recounts six different sarhat—like a hike, but more delightfully aimless—that he has taken over the past twenty-six years in the Central Highlands around his home of Ramallah, where flora and fauna are increasingly displaced by checkpoints and guns. No screams, no shouts, just love and loss and longing: for a home, for nature, for a life of normalcy in this place of astounding beauty that has been torn through by an ever-widening river of tears. It’s enough to make you want to scream.

–Shalom Auslander

Freud and the Non-European by Edward Said 

At a time when tribal affinities tend to solidify and harden, this rich and surprising lecture by Edward Said reminds us that there is no such thing as pure identity, and that identity is inherently mixed and unresolved. Applying this non-exclusionary understanding of identity to today’s politics, Said proposes an exit from the duel, and hints at a possible future where Jews and Palestinians are parts of each other, rather than antagonists.

–Yasmin Zaher

Bab al-Saha or Passage to the Plaza by Sahar Khalifeh (trans. Sawad Hussain)

I recommend Bab al-Saha or The Passage to the Plaza by Sahar Khalifeh, which is set in the city of Nablus during the Intifada of 1987. This novel is a lively, rich, clear-eyed, and unsentimental portrait of the plight, struggle, and strength of Palestinian women living under a violent military occupation.

I’d also recommend everyone to read Ghassan Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza,” written in 1956. Israel assassinated Kanafani in 1972 with a car bomb when he was only 36, and yet during his short life he produced some of the most vivid and significant literary and non-fiction writings on the Palestinian experience.

–Isabella Hammad

Palestine +100: Stories From a Century After the Nakba edited by Basma Ghayalini

The Palestinian-British editor of this futurist collection asked 12 writers to imagine the world a hundred years from the 1948 Nabka or catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people. As of 2023, we still don’t know what the future portends, but the present moment continues to serve up more of the same oppression from Palestine’s overlords.

–Jordan Elgrably

Read a story from Palestine +100 here

Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury (trans. Humphrey Davies)

Elias Khoury is Lebanese, but his finest novel, 1998’s Gate of the Sun, draws on years of interviews with Palestinian refugees. It is a dizzying, masterfully spun epic about the Nakba, exile, memory, and loss. At its core is a massacre—the one that occurred in 1982 in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila camps—but also a refuge, a cave where a resistance fighter secretly meets his beloved, a hidden space of love and tenderness that is both inside and outside of history, and without which history cannot be understood.

–Ben Ehrenreich

It completely changed my perspective while I was writing The New Earth. The focus is Palestinian refugees and resistance fighters—fedayeen—in Lebanon at the time of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, but it opens up a history that goes back to the 1948 Nakba and the lives of Palestinians in the Galilee many generations before that.

–Jess Row

Born Palestinian, Born Black by Suheir Hammad

The first collection from the brilliant, boundary-breaking poet Suheir Hammad. Since she burst onto the scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she has been a trailblazer for younger Palestinian and Arab American poets and spoken word artists. Suheir’s work is fire, at once profoundly Palestinian and perfectly Brooklyn.

I would argue that besides being an excellent poet in her own right, Hammad also foreshadowed the intersectional moment of today, articulating anew for second generation immigrants (and beyond) the Palestinian-Black solidarity that they felt in their bones but which—despite having existed previously—had never quite been conjured in such an organically hybridized form.

–Ismail Khalidi

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman

This book by Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect who teaches at Goldsmiths in London and is the founder of Forensic Architecture, is indispensable to understanding the spatial violence of the Israeli occupation. From the illegal checkpoints and settlements, to the apartheid wall and siege on Gaza, he highlights the way that Palestinian land has been transformed into a militarized zone that controls every facet of Palestinian life. Reading this book truly exemplifies how the slow, invisibilized, daily violence Palestinians face is structural in nature and literally built into the occupation’s architecture.

–Nicki Kattoura

The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem (trans. Sinan Antoon)

When I first read The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem in 2014, I was haunted for days. The novel’s premise is the mass vanishing of Palestinians—tragically, a notion not so far-fetched as we bear witness to Gaza’s ethnic cleansing in real time. But this, along with seventy-five years of recorded displacement and death, does not diminish the profound effect of this contemporary work. Azem examines the inheritance and burden of memory, and how deeply it is rooted in our collective Palestinian psyche.

A main character named Alaa—in conversation with his dead grandmother, a survivor of the Nakba—bemoans: “I firmly believe now that all those who stayed in Palestine are mad. Otherwise how would they be able to bear the memory of those who survived, and those who didn’t? How can they live with this pain in the memory of the survivors.” Interspersed with Alaa’s story is Ariel, his Israeli friend, who must find ways to reconcile the sudden disappearance of his Palestinian neighbors. This raises a difficult, yet inevitable question: how might complacency turn into complicity? For its arrestingly layered storytelling of generational trauma and systematic erasure, Azem’s novel is an essential read. Now more than ever.

–Sahar Mustafah

Life in a Country Album by Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal’s facility with language is the stuff of legend. She is fluent in Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, and English, and her poetry has the feel of rare music; as though the native instruments from each one of the countries in which those languages are spoken, have come together to create a single symphony for the world. It is the world that she inhabits in Life in a Country Album, a collection that addresses all of our human fervencies as they are kept alive across borders: our citizenship, our foothold identities that straddle nations, our desire for each other, for belonging, and for freedom.

What is nation and what is identity when we are, above all else, who raised us and whom and what we love? Teju Cole wrote, of an earlier work (The Republics) that her poems are “full of hard truths, of things seen in extremis, and yet they do not leave us comfortless.” In a time when so many are awakening to the realization that change cannot come without acknowledging our present reality, and when so many of us also feel a wild despair, Handal’s poems are both crucible and balm.

–Ru Freeman

Read a poem from Life in a Country Album here

Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales

A collection of Palestinian folktales that is also a rich compendium of details about traditional pre-1948 Palestinian life and culture. At this moment when Zionist lies about the nonexistence of Palestine and Palestinians are everywhere in the media, this work of anthropology and folklore is more important than ever.

–Jess Row

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette)

Kuwaiti novelist Layla AlAmmar published a laudatory review of the English translation of Shibli’s novel in 2020, and even three years later, this slim volume continues to stack up accolades and awards, justly deserved.

–Jordan Elgrably

Read an excerpt from Minor Detail here

Velvet by Huzama Habayeb (trans. Kay Heikkinen)

Velvet is the story of a life. Hawwa, the novel’s central character, lives in a refugee camp in Jordan, and through an immense capacity for both sensory and emotional detail, Habayeb invites the reader into the contours of Hawwa’s daily life, the kindnesses and cruelties that in one way or another upend it. This is a deeply human book, concerned with the often-dangerous workings of want.

It’s not particularly political in any overt way, and yet it is deeply political. In this moment of outright genocide, when so many of the most powerful people on the planet seem more than happy to cheer on mass slaughter, the very act of protrayting those on the recieving end of such barbarism as human, as made of life, as capable of desire and joy and resilience, is sadly still a radical thing. Even if it wasn’t, Velvet would still be a masterwork.

–Omar El Akkad

Arabesques by Anton Shammas (trans. Vivian Eden)

Originally published in Hebrew in 1986, Shammas brings the story of his family and his Galilean village into the Hebrew language. Chosen by The New York Times as one of the best books of 1988, Arabesques remains an intricate and poetic Palestinian tale which through the revelation of family secrets tie together the trajectories of various Palestinian characters. Translated into several languages (but yet to be translated into Arabic), Arabesques is a unique masterpiece that—as the latest edition published by the New York Review of Books testifies to—continues to belong the canon of world literature.

–Maurice Ebileeni

Read an excerpt from Arabesques here

The Sea Cloak and Other Stories by Nayrouz Qarmout

What I appreciate the most about The Sea Cloak and Other Stories is the way it introduces us to the full spectrum of life in Gaza, dragging us by the hand to feel for ourselves the beating of the enclave’s heart. Reading these stories is like spending a day passing from one gracious home to another, being ordered to rest awhile and offered endless cups of tea while everyday tales are relayed to us by the bustling families we encounter. Thanks to the extraordinary sensory detail of Qarmout’s storytelling, we experience the political complexity of life in the Strip, but we also get to experience friendship and romance, parenting and childhood, in a context so colored by conflict.

In “Pen and Notebook,” we read about the young siblings who have to work to make ends meet after their father is shot through the spine—just one of the stories of survival in the “world’s largest open-air prison.” ­Still, nothing is more haunting than the constant reminders of the frailty of existence. In the book’s titular story, “The Sea Cloak,” a young girl is nearly pulled to her death by the dark waters, her billowing black dress a metaphor for the myriad burdens put upon Palestinians, burdens that threaten to suffocate them. “Maybe I wanted to die,” she thinks out loud to her rescuer, her voice echoing even more eerily today.

–Nashwa Nasreldin

“Revenge” by Taha Muhammad Ali (trans. Peter Cole)

It is hard to think of a work of literature that speaks more to this moment than the poem “Revenge” by Taha Muhammad Ali. It was written too late to be included in Taha’s final collection of poems, So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin. But it can be found in Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations, a beautiful collection of poems and translations by Taha’s close friend and translator, Peter Cole:

Revenge

At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!

[…]

But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

–Nathan Thrall

The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi (trans. Salma Khadra Jayyusi & Trevor Le Gassick)

From one of the great Palestinian-Israeli writers, this is one of the foundational pieces of fiction to understand the maddening (sur)reality of 2nd or 3rd class Palestinian citizens of Israel navigating impossible life choices in a country built on top of their own but not for them.

–Ismail Khalidi

The Parisian by Isabella Hammad

The young British-Palestinian’s debut novel provides a panoramic account of Palestinian lives across much of the 20th century, with stints in Montpellier, Paris, and Palestine.

–Jordan Elgrably

Read an excerpt from The Parisian here

Palestine as Metaphor by Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché)

It is impossible to choose just one work by Darwish, but Palestine as Metaphor serves as a doorway to them all. The book is a series of long interviews with Darwish: conversations with a Lebanese poet, a Syrian literary critic, three Palestinian writers, and an Israeli journalist. Each took place in a different city and each discussion contains universes: political theory, history, memoir, criticism, and poetry—as well as Darwish’s personal history and relationship to his readers.

–M. Lynx Qualey

The Beauty of Your Face by Sahar Mustafah

Recounts an American story of Palestinian immigrants in the Chicago suburbs, and made the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books for 2020.

–Jordan Elgrably

Kaan and Her Sisters by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

This book is a praise song to the women in our Arab communities who teach life, through language and literature and song, despite the impossible catastrophes that constitute Palestinian living. “Repetition is a Nakba” is one of the lines from this book that has been ringing in my head non-stop. Through multi-lingual and formally inventive poems, Tuffaha has not only written a book that speaks to our moment, but carries us into a better, more loving future in and for language.

–George Abraham

Sharon and My Mother-in-Law by Suad Amiry

“Pain in writing can be hilarious,” Geoff Dyer once said to me. Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law demonstrates exactly this. The book is a series of diary entries and correspondences that detail the absurdities that accompany living under military occupation, witnessing two intifadas, and surviving a forty-two day curfew with her husband and his mother. Amiry brings levity to the familiar struggles of daily life for Palestinians by juxtaposing them against the universal tension of mother in-laws. In the process, she offers collective relief from misery. Sometimes, when life is so brutal, the best you can do is find ways to laugh at it.

–Zaina Arafat

Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh (trans. Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Fernea)

This is a classic novel and the first to recount the Palestinian experience in the West Bank under Israeli occupation.

–Jordan Elgrably

In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Sinan Antoon)

The prose of Mahmoud Darwish is no less significant that his poetry. This book, In the Presence of Absence, is a Palestinian epic in highly poetic prose. Darwish goes back to the essence of the Palestinian question, which is the Nakba, or the Catastrophe of 1948. My favorite of Darwish’s books, it is what the Palestinian cause could be as literature.

–Saleem Albeik

Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World by Edward Said

As a journalist in the the occupied Palestinan territories in 2005-2006, this book was not just a valuable tool, but a philosophical treatise on how we view people the Middle East, and how that configures into how we report on them. The battles are not just physical, but are wars of language, perception, and storytelling. Originally published in 1997, it could have been written yesterday. Of course, Said’s book Orientalism, is the mothership of how we see “others.” Why not buy both?

–Kerri Arsenault

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf

This is my ‘out of left field’ choice. While the list of nonfiction titles that are more specifically about the question of Palestine is long and illustrious (from authors such as Edward Said, Ilan Pappe, Noura Erakat, Avi Shlaim, Rashid Khalidi, Amira Haas, and Saree Makdisi to name just a few), I figured I would add one that probably won’t make it onto other lists. Amin Maalouf’s classic is a must read to grasp one of the most important periods in the history of Palestine and one that served as the bloody precursor to modern European imperial and (settler) colonial projects (and projections) in the region, not to mention the roots of European Islamophobia, anti-semitism, and orientalism—forces still very much at play as we speak.

–Ismail Khalidi

Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

Winner of the Arab American Book Award for 2021, from the author of Mornings in Jenin, Against the Loveless World was the subject of an extensive essay in The Markaz Review.

–Jordan Elgrably

Read an excerpt from Against the Loveless World here

Paper and Stick by Priscilla Wathington

Priscilla Wathington’s short book, Paper and Stick, was published in 2021, but it’s been on my mind a lot this past month. Her poems are stunning in their depiction of the lives of Palestinian children in Occupied Palestine. Wathington is well suited to write on this subject, as a former managing editor for Defense for Children International: Palestine, an independent organization dedicated to defending and promoting the rights of Palestinian children.

The poems, in both what they say and what they erase, document the terror endured by children in the West Bank and Gaza: “what happened to me was a mouth | white Kia pulled/ over |,” she writes in “White Kia,” “inside a wavecurl/ a common gnaw | kidnapped us without saying a word/ my ribs/prayer in its cavity.” In “Deadline Extended,” she writes about children who are jailed in military prisons: “they tied me to that chair every time/ 15 times, but I never/ only to find the muscle is wood/ air that was coming into the cell.”

Wathington’s voice is clear and powerful, and above all, it reminds us of the ways in which the occupation destroys and erodes the notion of a normal childhood.

–Susan Muaddi Darraj

All That’s Left to You by Ghassan Kanafani (trans. May Jayyusi & Jeremy Reed)

Anything by Ghassan Kanafani really, but one of my favorites is All That’s Left to You. Shorter and perhaps more difficult than his best known novellas Returning to Haifa and Men in the Sun, it nonetheless packs a punch and is at once very much of its period and ahead of its time. It is particularly inventive in its form, with its rotating narrators and a rhythm unlike the aforementioned works. Spanning a roughly 24 hour period (but with flashbacks), Kanafani paints an intimate portrait of a brother and sister in Gaza and the brother’s dangerous escape through the desert, which is itself a character. Kanafani just has this way of breaking your heart.

–Ismail Khalidi

Palestine: A Guide, ed. by Mariam Shahin 

It’s pretty difficult to find a guide to modern Palestine since most guides of Israel use different names for Palestinian towns and don’t include many other things of a Palestinian nature, like Palestinian roads, Palestinian history, Palestinian people, and so on. While the guide provides historic and cultural references, if traveling in the occupied Palestinian territories, you should get current maps from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in East Jerusalem that show Israeli road blocks, checkpoints, and other issues that prevent you from moving easily around.

–Kerri Arsenault

Out of It by Selma Dabbagh

In British-Palestinian Selma Dabbagh’s debut novel, Gaza is being bombed. Sound familiar? This is an insightful and powerful evocation of the contemporary Palestinian experience.

–Jordan Elgrably

Coriolis by A.D. Lauren-Abunassar

Easy as it is to uplift the truly unprecedented level of care and precision with which this book was crafted, a book like Coriolis never fails to return its readers to the body: “the body a thing / the body a tense / the body a prayer / of its own making,” where “each day [is] a study / of my body’s unbecoming.” These poems held my body, and lived in my body, through and beyond the winter days I spent with this book, therein dissolving the boundaries between world and poem, as easily as it dissolved the boundaries between states of consciousness. After reading Coriolis, I am emerging knowing I will be a devoted life-long reader of A.D. Lauren-Abunassar.

–George Abraham

How Israel Lost: The Four Questions by Richard Ben Cramer, and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt

Jewish author Richard Ben Cramer offers an unpopular critique of Israel and Zionism and its darker policies by asking four questions (in reference to the “four questions” asked at Passover): Why do we care about Israel? Why don’t the Palestinians have a state? What is a Jewish state? Why is there no peace? The questions are focused around Cramer’s assertion that over four decades of occupation and the subjugation of millions of Palestinians and the colonization of their land have corrupted Israeli policies and society, and formed a militarized country that asserts a brutal, apartheid-like regime. While Cramer critiques Israel, he’s simultaneously writing a love letter to it, marshalling the personal with the political. Another controversial but companionable book is The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. This book’s question is: why does the U.S. support Israel? And the answer is as complicated as the response to this book, which is as complicated as the situation unfolding in the Middle East today. Together both books ask questions that don’t seem to be asked—or answered—often enough.

–Kerri Arsenault

A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar

I would like to suggest my own first novel, A Map of Home. I recommend it because it is the first novel written in English about a queer Palestinian girl coming of age

–Randa Jarrar

On Zionist Literature by Ghassan Kanafani (trans. Mahmoud Najib)

For those of us in the imperial core (and many outside of it), colonial processes are embedded into the fabric of everyday life. Included in this, of course, is Zionism—from mundane references to krav maga in sitcoms to active military propaganda in billion-dollar budget films, art has always played a role in severing Palestinians from their homeland. Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature, translated from the Arabic by Mahmoud Najib, traces the proliferation of Zionist ideology in novels prior to the nakba, and how the canonization of these texts by literary and cultural institutions contribute to normalization. Kanafani succinctly theorizes, “…the Zionist novel positions itself carefully by disregarding half of the facts and exaggerating the rest.” As the propaganda engine attempts to manufacture consent in the midst of unfathomable violence unleashed on the people of Gaza, On Zionist Literature is a vital handbook for deconstructing those narratives—critiquing these literatures is a matter of life and death.

–Summer Farah

Oxygen is Not For the Dead by Heba Abu Nada

Novelist, poet, and educator Heba Abu Nada won the 2017 Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity for her acclaimed debut novel, Oxygen is Not for the Dead. A beloved figure in the Palestinian literary community, Abu Nada, in both her life and her writing, was preoccupied with justice, the uprisings of the Arab Spring, and the realities of Palestinian life under occupation. Heba Abu Nada was killed, along with her son, by an Israeli airstrike in her home in southern Gaza on October 20. She was just 32 years old. Neither Oxygen is Not For the Dead, nor any of Abu Nada’s poetry collections, have yet been translated into English, but that will hopefully change in the months and years ahead. Until then, here is a poem written by Abu Nada just ten days before her death.

–Dan Sheehan

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Further Reading

Nonfiction
Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine by Nada Elia
Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward Said
I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti
A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali
The Hundred Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
Nothing to Lose But Your Life by Suad Amiry
A Mountainous Journey by Fadwa Tuqan
The Drone Eats With Me: A Gaza Diary by Atef Abu Saif
In Search of Fatima by Ghada Karmi
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I by Raja Shehadeh
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé
Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco
Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation, ed. by Mateo Hoke and Cate Malek
Pay No Heed to the Rockets by Marcello Di Cintio
My Father Was a Freedom Fighter by Ramzy Baroud
Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, ed. by Sumaya Awad, Brian Bean
Palestine in Black and White by Mohammad Sabaaneh
The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine by Ben Ehrenreich
The Battle for Justice in Palestine by Ali Abunimah
The Question of Palestine by Edward Said
The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey by Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall
They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri
In My Mother’s Footsteps by Mona Hajjar Halaby
Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine by Noura Erakat
Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family by Najla Said
My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century by Adina Hoffman

Novels
The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi 
Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands by Sonia Nimr
Describing the Past by Ghassan Zaqtan
You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
Exposure by Sayed Kashua
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
In Search of Walid Masoud by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua
The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion by Akram Musallam
Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
Haifa Fragments by Khulud Khamis
My First and Only Love by Sahar Khalifeh
A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum

Short Story Collections
Out of Time by Samira Azzam 
The Book of Gaza, ed. by Atef Abu Saif
Jerusalem Stands Alone by Mahmoud Shukair
Jokes for the Gunmen by Mazen Maarouf
Palestine’s Children by Ghassan Kanafani
Her First Palestinian by Saeed Teebi
The Book of Ramallah, ed. by Maya Abu al-Hayat
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar
A Curious Land by Susan Muaddi Darraj

Poetry
Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah
You Can Be the Last Leaf by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
Journal of an Ordinary Grief by Mahmoud Darwish
Ever Since I Did Not Die by Ramy Al-Asheq
Nothing More to Lose by Najwan Darwish
The Butterfly’s Burden by Mahmoud Darwish
Birthright by George Abraham
Bitter English by Ahmad Almallah
Mural by Mahmoud Darwish
Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd
Before the Next Bomb Drops by Remi Kanazi
Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. by Noor Hindi
So What: New & Selected Poems by Taha Muhammad Ali
Sadder than Water: Selected Poems by Samih al-Qasim

Children’s Books
Thunderbird by Sonia Nimr
Watermelon Madness by Taghreed Najjar and Maya Fidawi
Farah Rocks by Susan Muaddi Darraj and Ruaida Mannaa
Where the Streets Had a Name by Randa Abdel-Fattah
Tasting the Sky by Ibtisam Barakat
These Olive Trees by Aya Ghanameh
Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine by Hannah Moushabeck and Reem Madooh
Sitti’s Secrets by Naomi Shihab Nye and Nancy Carpenter

With thanks to ArabLit, Palestine Writes, and all of our contributors

When you love books as much as I do, University Press Week, happening this year from November 13 to 17, is kind of like the Oscars. Not only is it a great time to reflect on the work that university presses are doing to advance scholarship around the world, but there are also dozens of events around the country with university press authors. Best of all, the Association of University Presses puts out a new reading list of books that I can’t wait to get my hands on.

This year’s reading this list comprises 103 publications, each submitted by a member of the Association of University Presses, chosen because they exemplify the Speak UP theme for this year’s University Press Week. We hope they will inform and shape conversations around the world.

As a longtime university press editor, the current director of Cornell University Press, and the president of the Association of University Presses, I can attest to the dedication of university press staffers in amplifying research of the highest quality. Ideas matter, and you can see ample evidence of that in this list, including books about everything from the environment and climate change to race, LGBTQ issues, Indigenous studies, science, philosophy, feminism, education, poetry, fiction and more.

If you love reading books that expand your mind and inspire you to think about issues in new ways, I know you will find something that will grab your attention and edify you. Below is a sample of 24 representative books. And visit the UP Week 2023 Gallery to explore more in each category!

*

Activism & Social Justice
Archive Activism: Memoir of A “Uniquely Nasty” Journey by Charles Francis
Available from University of North Texas Press

A gay Texan born in the 1950s, Charles Francis always knew that Research = Activism. When Francis help George W. Bush become President by reaching out to gay supporters, he becomes inspired to engage with deleted LGBTQ history by forming the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., a historical society with an edge. Archive Activism is both a memoir and a roadmap for activists armed only with library cards.

Anthropology, Ethnography, Archaeology
Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine by Greta Lynn Uehling
Available from Cornell University Press

Everyday War provides an accessible lens through which to understand what noncombatant civilians go through in a country at war. What goes through the minds of a mother who must send her child to school across a minefield or the men who belong to groups of volunteer body collectors? In Ukraine, such questions have been part of the daily calculus of life. Greta Uehling engages with the lives of ordinary people living in and around the armed conflict over Donbas and shows how conventional understandings of war are incomplete.

Biography
I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir by Susan Kiyo Ito
Available from Ohio State University Press

This complex and powerful memoir by a biracial Japanese American adoptee takes on themes of racial and cultural identity, shared generational trauma, reproductive choice, and everyone’s right to understand their own origins.

Black Studies
The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture by Courtney Thorsson
Available from Columbia University Press

The Sisterhood tells the story of how a remarkable community of Black women writers (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Margo Jefferson, and others) transformed American writing and cultural institutions.

Business
The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace by Kevin Woodson
Available from University of Chicago Press

The Black Ceiling speaks up about workplace inequality by offering a revelatory assessment of office culture that presents a new explanation for understanding a pernicious problem in many work environments: racial discomfort.

Disability Studies
Dispatches from Disabled Country by Catherine Frazee

Available from University of British Columbia Press

Change requires all of us to #SpeakUP, to unshackle from dominant narratives that equate disability with incapacity, tragedy, and loss. Catherine Frazee’s writings kickstart that process by revealing what has been unfolding for decades just under the radar of ableist society.

Education
Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education by Brian Rosenberg
Available from Harvard Education Press

Whatever It Is, I’m Against It exposes the entrenched structures, practices, and cultures that inhibit meaningful postsecondary educational reform.

Environment
Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene, edited by Ryan Hediger
Available from Bucknell University Press

Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene will appeal to overworked people everywhere. Its topic is urgent, at the center of contemporary life and the environment. The book’s crucial question deserves much more attention: Should we change how and why we work?

Ethnicity & Race
Mean Girls Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep and Girlboss by Kim Hong Nguyen

Available from University of Illinois Press

In this book, Kim Hong Nguyen argues that mean girl feminism encourages girls and women to be sassy, sarcastic, and ironic as feminist performance. Yet it co-opts its affect, form, and content, from racialized oppression and protest while directing meanness toward people in marginalized groups.

Fine Arts
First Meal by Julie Green and Kirk Johnson

Available from Oregon State University Press

Set against the backdrop of a flawed criminal justice system, First Meal is a combined work of imagination and reporting, showing and telling the stories of 25 wrongfully convicted people and what they chose as their first meals after exoneration and release from prison.

Gender Studies
The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex by Manon Garcia
Available from Harvard University Press

A feminist philosopher argues that consent is not only a highly imperfect legal threshold but also an underappreciated complement of good sex. Manon Garcia deftly reveals the hidden complexities of consent and proposes how to reconceptualize it as a tool of liberation.

Indigenous Studies
Coyote’s Swing: A Memoir and Critique of Mental Hygiene in Native America by David Edward Walker
Available from Washington State University Press

David Edward Walker exposes how the U.S. mental health system — especially the Indian Health Service — dramatically fails Native Americans. Many end up re-traumatized by practices that echo historical injustices and are foreign to Native values, and he wants that to change.

Jewish Studies
The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America by Sandra Fox
Available from Stanford University Press

The Jews of Summer looks at how postwar summer camps for Jewish youth were an expression of adult hopes about the Jewish future. But adult plans did not embody everything that occurred at camp: children and teenagers also shaped these camps to mirror their own desires and interests.

Latin American Studies
Speak Of It by Marcos McPeek Villatoro
Available from University of New Mexico Press

Speak of It is a testament to the healing power of language, books, and identity. Marcos Villatoro recounts channeling his Latino roots to come to terms with childhood sexual abuse suffered in his home in Appalachia, along with his ensuing struggle with trauma and mental illness.

Legal Studies
We’re Here to Help: When Guardianship Goes Wrong by Diane Diamond
Available from Brandeis University Press

Ill-understood by most until the case of pop star Britney Spears, the state-run guardianship system has become an epicenter of exploitation and abuse. We’re Here to Help draws attention to the humans behind these headlines and their ongoing fight for justice in an unjust world.

Media Studies
The U.S.-China Trade War: Global News Framing and Public Opinion in the Digital Age, edited by Louisa Ha and Lars Willnat
Available from Michigan State University Press

The U.S.-China Trade War sheds light on the media’s role in the 21^st century’s most high-profile contest over global trade to date.

Middle East Studies
An Exodus From Turkey: Tales of Migration and Exile, edited by Ahmet Erdi Öztürk and Bahar Baser
Available from Edinburgh University Press

Exodus from Turkey gives a voice to those in exile, featuring interviews with former politicians, artists, journalists, academics and activists. Both heartbreaking and informative, this book provides a snapshot of a new layer of intellectual diaspora in the making.

Performing Arts
Beyond Ridiculous: Making Gay Theatre with Charles Busch in 1980s New York by Kenneth Elliott
Available from University of Iowa Press

This book by theatre director Kenneth Elliot illuminates the artistic landscape of 1980s New York during the AIDS epidemic, as well as the struggle for mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ theatre during the reign of President Ronald Reagan, and the exploration of new ways of being a gay theatre artist.

Poetry & Fiction
GHOST :: SEEDS by Sebastian Merrill
Available from Texas Review Press

Incorporating elements of magical realism and myth, GHOST :: SEEDS puts a queer spin on the Persephone myth to explore conceptions of gender and identity. In a unique approach to storytelling, the book features a dialogue between a trans speaker and the “girl-ghost” of the self he left behind to become the man he is today.

Politics & Culture
To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care by Christopher Paul Harris
Available from Princeton University Press

When #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it ushered in the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Drawing on his own experiences as an activist and organizer, Christopher Paul Harris takes readers inside the Movement for Black Lives to chart the propulsive trajectory of Black politics and reveals how the radical politics of joy, pain, and care, in sharp contrast to liberal political thought, can build a Black future that transcends ideology and pushes the boundaries of our political imagination.

Religious Studies
The Tilson Case: Church and State in 1950s’ Ireland by David Jameson
Available from Cork University Press

The Tilson Case tells the story of an extraordinary Irish legal dispute, which followed the marriage of Ernest Tilson, a Protestant, to Mary Barnes, a Catholic, in 1941. Although the couple had pledged to raise their children as Catholics, nine years later, Ernest decided to educate his sons as Protestants. Mary took a case to the high court and won. Based on archival material, previously unseen documentary sources and oral testimonies, this engaging book offers fresh perspectives on the vexed issue of mixed marriages in Ireland, and the intimate relationship between the Catholic Church and the state at the time.

Science
The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning by Peter J. Hotez, MD, PhD., edited by Robin Coleman
Available from Johns Hopkins University Press

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, renowned scientist Dr. Peter Hotez appeared daily on major news networks to keep the public informed. During that time, he was one of the most trusted voices on the pandemic and was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his selfless work, yet he became a target of the anti-vaccine movement. In this book, Hotez shows how the dangerous anti-vaccine movement gained traction and offers solutions for how to combat science denialism.

U.S. History
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk
Available from Yale University Press

Hailed as “a sweeping, important, revisionist work of American history that places Native Americans front and center” (New York Times Book Review), this national bestseller acknowledges the essential role Indigenous peoples played in shaping the United States. Named a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction.

Women’s Studies
Childfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Women’s Reproductive Choices by Courtney Adams Wooten
Available from Utah State University Press

Delving into how childfree women position their decision not to have children and the different types of interactions they have with others about this choice, Childfree and Happy also explores the formation of communities between childfree women and those who support them.

Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, and Ed Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

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Fiction

1. The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
(Riverhead)

6 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an interview with Sigrid Nunez here

“Animals and uncomfortable topics: Count on these in a Sigrid Nunez novel. Her slim, discursive, minor yet charming new one, The Vulnerables, is no exception … This one comes across as a Covid diary, with a light scaffolding of incident to hold its meditations up. The narrator’s interactions with the parrot are funny and moving … I can do without animals, most of the time, in novels. But Nunez is a closer observer than most, and she is wittier … Like certain storms, this novel churns intensely in one place. There is a bit more plot … I am committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez’s novels. I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative, funny—good and strong company … You don’t have to follow her all the way, and start digging the novel’s grave, to sense that she is onto something. It has always been true: Being told about life, by a perceptive writer, can be as good as, if not better than, being told a story.”

–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)

2. How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney
(Biblioasis)

3 Rave • 6 Positive • 2 Mixed
Read an excerpt from How to Build a Boat here

“Feeney effortlessly combines the overwhelming ebb and flow of life with her boat-building plot … Feeney’s prose is both careful and relaxed—detailed in its description of place and character and of the effortful human urge to find order in the natural world; casual in its approach to storytelling, the point of view shifting throughout scenes … the difficult winter carries the reader into a hopeful spring. Life is random; our connections are as essential and uncontrollable as the tides, the book seems to say. All we can do is learn how to float.”

–Sophie Ward (The New York Times Book Review)

3. Same Bed, Different Dreams by Ed Park
(Random House)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Park’s follow-up, Same Bed Different Dreams, arrives a full decade and a half later [after Personal Days], with all the heft, complexity and ambition such a lengthy interim suggests. The author has greatly expanded his literary scope and complicated his narrative technique, though certain fundamentals remain … Braids three plots together in a bewilderingly layered structure … Absurdly complex … Although Same Bed Different Dreams is one of the most circuitously structured novels in recent memory, the reader is never confused about what’s happening in the practical sense. The path is always clear. It’s the connections between the disparate parts that make Same Bed Different Dreams succeed so powerfully yet enigmatically.”

–Jonathan Russell Clark (The Los Angeles Review of Books)

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Nonfiction

1. A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice by Paul Caruana Galizia
(Riverhead)

7 Rave • 2 Positive

“Paul Caruana Galizia is a superb storyteller. His book reads at times like a thriller, at times like a detective story, and at times like the work of an investigative journalist uncovering webs of corruption, with levels of detail that will be most interesting to those who understand Malta, its systems and flaws. His mother emerges as no saint either. She was clearly not the easiest of women to live with. Highly determined people rarely are … This is Daphne Caruana Galizia’s legacy. Her son’s book is a moving testament to the life and work of an extraordinary woman and the country-changing power of journalism.”

–Christina Patterson (The Sunday Times)

2. Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food by Fuchsia Dunlop
(W. W. Norton & Company)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Another food writer might be suspected of trying too hard, but such is the range and depth of Dunlop’s erudition, and so infectious is her enthusiasm, that she is above suspicion on that score … Dunlop has developed a vocabulary equal to the daunting challenge of conveying the huge range of values, ambitions and experiences embedded in Chinese gastronom.”

–Isabel Hamilton (The Financial Times)

3. My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand
(Viking)

3 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed

“A 970-page victory lap … Details may be familiar to fans, but for the most part they ring out more resoundingly in Streisand’s chatty, ellipses-strewn telling. She may possess megawatt fame …but between these covers she’s just Bubbe Barbra at a kitchen table … Future editions, then, might excise some of the long block quotes of praise from her peers … There’s something exuberant and glorious, though, about Streisand’s photo dump of self-portraits and party pics. Indeed about this whole dragged-out banquet of a book. You might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.”

–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)

Douglas Melville’s book, Invisible Generals: Rediscovering Family Legacy, and a Quest to Honor America’s First Black Generals, is, in part, defining in its title. Four generations ago in his family leads Melville to America’s first Black general, Benjamin Oliver Davis, Sr. Three generations back? His great-uncle Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr.—American second Black general. The inspiration for Melville, beyond the trailblazing progenitors who “utilized systems designed to hold them back” was he went and saw the film Red Tails. The dramatization about the Tuskegee Airmen left Melville shocked—his great-uncle had been scrubbed from the narrative. This essentially is the inciting incident for Melville to begin his journey in restorative history work regarding his military family members. Kirkus writes of Invisible Generals, “Melville traces the travails his ancestors faced while building records of excellence in a military that, it often appeared, only grudgingly accepted them. Moreover, he recounts his own efforts to be sure they are properly recognized and honored. ‘I can see how the quest never ends,’ Melville writes, and one aspect of that quest is for his military ancestors to be thought of as they wished: Americans, period.”

It just so happens I have found myself encountering several texts and installations on this subject. I recently read Chad L. Williams’ The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War, and, some months ago, Steven Dunn’s excellent water & power based in part on Dunn’s experiences in the Navy. This fall I paid a visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which has an extensive exhibit on the long legacy of Black people fighting for the U.S. military. (It goes back further than you think.) While all, along with Melville’s book, were powerful examples of the complicated and often downright fraught history of Black military service for a racist country, one letter from Williams’ text stuck with me most. It was penned by William Hewlett to Du Bois during World War I, just before the soldier’s return home. Hewlett writes:

If democracy in the United States means—disfranchisement; jimcrowism; lynch-law; biased judges; and juries; segregation; taxation without representation; and no representatives in any of the law making bodies of the United States; if that is the White American of true democracy—Then why did we fight Germany; why did we frown [on] her autocracy; why did black men die here in France 3300 miles from their homes—Was it to make democracy safe for white people in America—with the black race left out.

Melville tells us about his to-read pile, “My nightstand pile is an intersection between inspiration, personal growth, the past, the future and business. I have a habit that I call ‘checklisting’ where I let my mind wander and write down the words, thoughts and subjects that come up. This practice inspires the subjects for my reading habits. Being a diverse author, I like to read, and re-read a wide range of perspectives and hear a variety of voices to ensure I’m open minded and fine-tuned personally and professionally. For me, it’s important to either wake up or go to bed—with daily thoughts that help set my dreams and my reality.”

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Todd Moye, Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II
In its review, Publishers Weekly writes of Moye’s book, “Despite official skepticism and occasional hostility, the Tuskegee Airmen successfully demonstrated ‘that racial segregation of troops was inefficient and… hindered national defense.’ Their record helped persuade the air force—largely for ‘reasons of operational self-interest’—and President Harry Truman to seek the immediate desegregation of the military after the war. The author directed the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project and mined some 800 interviews for his exhaustive research. Moye’s lively prose and the intimate details of the personal narratives yield an accessible scholarly history that also succeeds as vivid social history.”

Charles Francis, The Tuskegee Airmen: The Men Who Changed a Nation
As Melville’s book attends to the Tuskegee Airmen, it’s not a surprise we see a few books on the historical group. In World War I, Black men hoped to act as aerial observers (no ammunition), but were denied because of their race. One went as so far to serve for France air force during that time as his own country rejected him. It wasn’t until World War II that Black men were able to fly, albeit in segregated units. The Army Air Corps (now US Army Air Force) created remarkable restrictions for what allowed them to select potential Black pilots, believing there would hardly be enough to scratch together a squadron. Unbeknownst to them, many went through the government-sponsored Civilian Pilot Training Program (specifically made in order to help bolster military numbers in the war). By 1941, the 99^th Pursuit Squadron was the first all-Black flying unit in the United States.

Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
Rachel Boccio, in her review of Benjamin’s book in Configurations, writes, “That digital code—the interminable combination of binary numbers underwriting our high-tech age—can be apolitical, unbiased, and colorblind is a techno-utopic fantasy undercut by decades of data-driven and encrypted inequities. In Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin analyzes the mechanisms behind a digital caste system that she calls the ‘New Jim Code’: the reproduction of historical forms of discrimination by modern technologies that are perceived and promoted as objective or progressive. Benjamin considers the ambitions and methods of a wide range of programmers and initiatives, including some with democratic aims. And yet, as she argues, even ‘technical fixes’ to systemic inequalities in housing, education, healthcare, and policing lead, very often, to more insidious forms of racism, insidious in that the perpetrated wrongs become harder to recognize.”

Kim Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
Erin Vanderhoof, in her Vice review of Scott’s book, writes, “With little hierarchy, institutional memory, or bureaucracy beyond ideas, start-ups begin their lives in disarray. Anybody who has seen The Social Network can tell you that, and Scott affirms this stereotype when she mentions that she was generally older than her managers at Google and Apple. She seemed to be the person you called when you needed an adult in the room.” Vanderhoof goes on to say, “[Scott] assumes that everyone who isn’t good at overseeing a schedule, working with others, setting priorities, and managing workflows never becomes a boss. Anyone who works in the real, mediocre world knows that is not the case. In Silicon Valley, your ability to be a founder is based entirely on your ability to have an idea, convince investors to give you money, and attract media attention. None of these qualities ensures that you will be even a passable manager.”

Danyel Smith, Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop
In her book, Smith attends to the known and not-so-known great singers such as Cissy Houston, Sister Rosetta Sharpe, Janet Jackson, and many others. Smith’s book received a starred review in Library Journal, where Lisa Henry writes, “This book is the culmination of years of interviews, research, and personal appreciation for the music that shaped the author’s own life. Smith explores famous musicians as well as those who may have been forgotten… Smith interweaves heartfelt stories of her own life as she provides evidence of the continual erasure of Black women’s contributions to the evolving music industry, even as they upended all cultural norms and created unprecedented sounds.”

Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt, The Gift of Forgiveness: Inspiring Stories from Those Who Have Overcome the Unforgivable
Schwarzenegger Pratt interviews a series of famously wronged people including Elizabeth Smart, who Margaret Talbot describes as “a member of a tiny sorority of women who have escaped from modern-day Bluebeards and shared their stories.” There is also Sarah Klein, who on her law firm’s page is profiled as “an advocate for victims of sexual abuse, and a former competitive gymnast. Sarah is also one of the first known victims of former Olympic Women’s Gymnastics Larry Nassar, and in July 2018, at the ESPYs, Sarah accepted the Arthur Ashe Courage Award on behalf of herself and the hundreds of other survivors of Nassar’s sexual abuse.” And, also, Sebastián Marroquín who, Paul Imson explains, “At just 17, Mr. Marroquin, who changed his name from Juan Pablo Escobar, was effectively heir to the largest drug trafficking empire in history.” In short, all the people interviewed have had remarkably horrible things done to them by specific people and who, as survivors, have written about it and/or do lectures. Some, it seems, are more successful than others.

Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
Chouinard reentered more American minds recently when he announced in 2022 that his family’s company Patagonia, worth $3 billion at the time, was put into a trust so that the entirety of its $100 million annual profits go toward fighting climate change. This isn’t the first time Chouinard or Patagonia engaged in serious activism, but it certainly raised its fair share of money-havers’ eyebrows. Chouinard was famously a climber who ended up wildly wealthy—and apparently uneasily so—as the subtitle of this memoir tells us—because of the success of his business. What got Chouinard into rock climbing was actually his love falconry as a youngster and his desire to find falcon nests. He eventually started to make his own climbing equipment, teaching himself how to so, then starting a company specializing in climbing gear. Check out this amazing photo of him on Mt. Hood in 1975. It’s clear from the start Chouinard’s activism was part of his approach from the start. In 1970, he discovered the pitons he sold—and comprised 70% of his income!—was harming Yosemite. He and his business partner created new tools and advocated for “clean climbing” to avoid further destruction in Yosemite and elsewhere.

Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause
In John Reeves’ review of this book in the Washington Post, he writes, “Seidule tells the story of his transformation from a believer in the Lost Cause to a critic. Growing up in Virginia and Georgia, he worshiped Lee. It was only later, as the head of the history department at the U.S. Military Academy, that he discovered the truth about Confederate myths. Seidule writes: ‘I grew up with a lie, a series of lies. Now, as a historian and a retired U.S. Army officer, I must do my best to tell the truth about the Civil War, and the best way to do that is to show my own dangerous history.’ Seidule has written a vital account of the destructiveness of the Lost Cause ideology throughout American history. He shows how films, textbooks and memorials promoted white supremacy by glorifying traitors and enslavers like Lee and other Confederate leaders.”

Rob Schwartz, 52 Fridays
Melville explains this one: “One of the books—the all-black spine fourth from the top—is titled 52 Fridays. It’s an independent book written by Rob Schwartz, 2016. Upon becoming CEO of Madison Ave Agency TBWA\Chiat\Day NY in January 2015…each week he wrote a sometimes funny, sometimes inspirational, often quirky creative email to keep the week, advertising and our culture in perspective.”

Erwan Rambourg, Future Luxe: What’s Ahead for the Business of Luxury
“Luxury” is a word we have in English, like so many, from French because of the Norman Invasion. In Old French, luxurie meant “debauchery, dissoluteness, lust.” So, in the 13^th century, in Middle English, luxure or luxurye specifically described sex. By the mid-14^th century, it became “lasciviousness, sinful self-indulgence.” It is derived from the Latin lūxus, or excess—this derives from luctari (“to struggle”). In the OED, it states “In Lat. and in the Rom. langs. the word connotes vicious indulgence.” It didn’t become the word we think of today until the 1700s.

Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Alexandra Jacobs on Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, Becca Rothfeld on Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives, Kevin Lozano on Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, Fiona Maazel on Paul Auster’s Baumgartner, and Jess Bergman on Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“Of course Barbra Streisand’s memoir, 10 years in the making if you don’t count the chapter she scribbled in longhand in the 1990s and then lost, was going to approach Power Broker proportions … For one thing, she is—fits of insecurity notwithstanding—a bona fide power broker…For another, as Streisand writes in My Name Is Barbra, a 970-page victory lap past all who ever doubted, diminished or dissed her, with lingering high fives for the many supporters, she does tend to agonize over the editing process … There’s something exuberant and glorious, though, about Streisand’s photo dump of self-portraits and party pics. Indeed about this whole dragged-out banquet of a book. You might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh. There are just so many scintillating Streisands to contemplate over so many years: singer, actress, director, producer, philanthropist, activist, lover, mother, wife, friend, autobiographer. ‘I would make a very good critic,’ she suggests at one point, and as I struggle to put a button on this, all I can reply is: Barbra, be my guest.”

–Alexandra Jacobs on Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra (The New York Times)

“What if ghosts return not to haunt or hector, but because they cannot bear to relinquish the common pleasures of daily life? … Smith…writes prose at once dazzling and exacting. On nearly every page of this book is a phrase or sentence to marvel over, a word (usually an adjective) so unexpectedly apt that it freshens familiar language … So luscious that it often reads less like a collection of essays than like a work of prose poetry. Its six long sections and brief coda are not neatly contained narratives or discrete arguments, but threads in one continuous web of reminiscence and observation … Many of Smith’s flights of fancy are attempts to imagine all that the historical record conceals — to endow skeletal statistics with flesh and blood — and her lively lyricism is an antidote to the slick obfuscations of bureaucratic language. Over and over, she pits the dead rhetoric of institutions against the vibrant hum of human speech … Nothing could be less like institutional abstractions; nothing could be more lavishly particular.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives (The Washington Post)

“That discomforting riddle—what these business machinations contribute to the actual publication of actual books—is the central question of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction...Sinykin argues that the corporate ethos that dominates the modern publishing house has exerted such an overwhelming influence on the way books are written and published that it has inaugurated a new epoch: ‘the Conglomerate era.’ As he sees it, the consolidation of the industry that began in the nineteen-sixties and seventies transformed American fiction and ‘changed what it means to be an author.’ The stakes of Sinykin’s inquiry are to explain ‘how we should read’ fiction published in the U.S. during the past half century or so, a period during which every book, no matter its preoccupations or themes, could be said to reflect a greater entity: the corporation … Today’s publishing house is closer to a hedge fund than a tastemaker. Every book that it acquires is a bet on profitability. The financialization of the acquisition process functions like an index of risk, creating a ‘system in which homogeneity . . . is encouraged’ to minimize bad bets … Sinykin sidesteps the question of whether this system has made books worse. He wants to demonstrate something trickier: how the process of authoring a book has become subsumed by a larger and larger network of interests, changing what it meant to be an author. Critics and scholars, Sinykin contends, are uncomfortable displacing the author when studying literature. His book is an earnest attempt to focus attention on the non-authorial figures involved in a book’s creation. Instead of individual writers, he wants us to think in terms of a ‘feedback loop’ .. The clumsiness of these readings points to the limitations of works like Big Fiction…These are daring attempts to map the larger structures that shape how books are written and published, but their attention to the big picture can obscure how novels operate on a visceral, textual level. Still, Sinykin’s study is valuable because it speaks to the same fear that Gerald Howard voiced in 1989: that the balance of culture and commerce at the heart of publishing is increasingly weighted toward profit.”

–Kevin Lozano on Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (The New Yorker)

“I can hear the whingeing already: Nothing happens in this novel. It’s too slow, it’s boring, it’s not high concept or high event. And in a nod to how conditioned we—or at least I—have become to expect high event, I spent the first 25 pages of Baumgartner waiting for its namesake to be kidnapped, maimed or just locked in a closet by the meter man. When it was clear this just wasn’t going to be that kind of novel, I had to start over. What kind of a novel is Baumgartner, then? It’s lovely. It’s sweet. It’s odd. But maybe not so odd for Auster fans who will immediately want to locate Baumgartner in his body of work (he’s written 20 novels) and to look for leitmotifs and signature moves. There are plenty…So it’s definitely a Paul Auster novel. Albeit more tender and less playful than some of his other work … The novel walks us through what he thinks about and, more important, how he thinks. How his thoughts assemble and fall apart, how they produce a kind of cumulative power that dissipates just as powerfully in the face of life’s little intrusions … Sy is old, lonely, frail, and his life is starred with these small events in a constellation that proves explosive enough on this morning to push him out of his emotional impasse. It also pushes the novel into gear to begin exploring and excavating Sy’s memories … There are a lot of books out there about grief, and it’s hard to say what kind of conversation Baumgartner is having with them—every grief is its own. Still, Sy’s experience puts me in mind of C.S. Lewis, who at 61 lost his wife to cancer, and who wrote about the loss in A Grief Observed...As Lewis put it: ‘Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.’ Baumgartner, for its quiet and thoughtful meandering, reads the same way.”

–Fiona Maazel on Paul Auster’s Baumgartner (The New York Times Book Review)

“At the time the novel was published, Italian literary culture revolved around neorealism. The practitioners of this style…spurned elegance, artifice, and the pomposity of Fascist propaganda, using plain language to convey the devastation of the war and the fractured society it left behind. Lies and Sorcery is in many ways neorealism’s inverse. The novel, a melodramatic saga of social climbing and doomed romance, is a deliberate anachronism in both its themes and its style. Its Belle Époque setting, sweeping cast of characters, frequent asides to the reader, and grandiloquence place it firmly in the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel. It is not concerned with truth but with lies: glittering surfaces, concealed identities, and foolish pretensions.​​ As Morante reminds us again and again, however, appearances are often deceiving. Despite its nineteenth-century veneer, Lies and Sorcery could have only been written in the twentieth century. The novel is animated by Morante’s hatred of the selfishness and superficiality that she saw in her countrymen. In their masochistic worship of hierarchy, tendency toward idolatry, and susceptibility to kitsch, its characters embody the traits that she believed had enabled Mussolini’s rise.”

–Jess Bergman on Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery (The New Yorker)

The story of Noah’s ark has, across the ages, inspired retelling and reinvention. Try to imagine what building an ark actually entails, and what decisions must go into it, and you might come to the realization, as we did, that the worst thing you can do is to imagine that you are no longer on an ark.

Noah’s Arkive re-examines the master myth for the narration of survival during climate change. Arguing against the routine, attenuated versions of the ark story we tend to repeat whenever we imagine a future of rising seas and drowned peoples, Noah’s Arkive uncovers a rich and millennia-long counter history in which Noah’s resignation to an ark of exclusion and limited preservation is questioned, rethought, rebuked, rebuilt. We offer a counter-archive of images, poems, novels, plays, songs, and building projects that salvage the possibility of capacious refuge from the ark. The writers, artists, composers, builders, and ark-reenactors we assemble are all careful readers and visualizers of the Genesis story, transforming its tropes and iconic scenes of landfall and rainbow into resources for refuge making.

Here is a suggested reading list for books about arks and the price of being saved during ecological catastrophe:

Julian Barnes, The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

Julian Barnes offers an alternative archaeology of the Genesis account of Noah and the ark by way of stories about stowaways and their offspring, evangelical ark-seekers, and more, that intersect or glance off one another like strangers on a train. Barnes multiplies perspectives on the story of the Ark in a fractal retelling that takes readers on a tour from the beginning to the end of time. Highlights include talking woodworms and an astronaut who hears the call of the ark from the moon.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Is there a more brilliant, strategic, and careful fragmenting of the story of Noah and the Ark than the Earthseed novels by Octavia Butler? Early in Parable of the Sower, Lauren Oya Olamina recalls a sermon on the story of Noah  given by her father and interprets the sermon to mean that she has a lot of refuge-building work to do. Forced from the safety of her walled community, the indefatigable “hyper-empath” frames a new religion that grounds the afterlife in literal space travel. She builds a community of the found on the road North through California. As the series progresses, from the fully-realized Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, elements of the ark story return in dispersed forms but now put to very different use.

Countee Cullen, The Lost Zoo

The Lost Zoo is subtitled “a rhyme for the young but not the too young.” Cullen’s anthology of poems tells the story of his collaboration with Christopher, his cat, who offers tales of all the animals left off the ark. Offering a story of collaborative recovery of lost songs, Cullen’s poem builds something like a multispecies counter-ark of queer companionship. It might be an allegory of black authorship; of queer domesticity; a story about a writer and his cat; it might just be about all three.

Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem 

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diazcontains a masterpiece of a poem called “It Was the Animals.”  From its opening line of “Today my brother brought over a piece of the ark / wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag” to its closing vision of flood, ruin, and familial care, the poem offers a meditation on the difficulties of history, refuge-making and saving those who will not be easily saved. The poem presents the Genesis story of the ark as a broken frame in need of repurposing, understanding that making a life raft of an ark is no easy labor and that love of this world is no easy commitment.

 Timothy Findley, Not Wanted on the Voyage

Not Wanted on the Voyage is a thoroughly 1980s queer retelling of the ark story – as well as an allegory of survival against homophobia in a time of pandemic. “Everyone knows it wasn’t like that” is the first line of the novel as it begins staging a counter-story to the Genesis narration of Noah’s ark from the perspective of Mrs. Noah Noyes and her companion blind cat Mottyl. Not Wanted on the Voyage dwells with the left-behind, the unwanted, the lost. It teaches us that refuge forms in spite of the cruelty of the ark’s exclusive walls. It teaches us that instead of the severe endings that a rainbow promises we might be better off to “pray for rain.”

Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston is an account of deluge as observed at ground level, by a woman who was never invited into any ark of safety and yet found a way to create repeated refuge. The storm at its center drowns many and transports others to a resurfaced Jim Crow America where those with white skin enjoy the safety of bridges and those with black skin are forced to bury the undifferentiated dead. This is not a story of uplift, nor a story of trauma, but a narrative delivered by Janie on a comfortable porch to her friend Pheoby about making one’s way through a world where security never lasts long.

N. K. Jemisin, “Emergency Skin”

“Emergency Skin” by N. K. Jemisin is an elegantly efficient short story that undoes the entire narrative of Noah and the ark by imagining a world in which arks have become quaint. In the form of spaceships the arks left Earth long ago and transported with them the best of the humans – which is to say, the worst. Representatives must return periodically to what they imagine will be a deserted planet only to be surprised by how well we are all living and getting along. Come the story’s end, Earth exports a genre of emancipation and revolution into space. Jemisin’s story detonates the idea that everything outside the ark dies. Perhaps, instead, an ark that does not return removes from the world what most prevented it from thriving.

Rebecca Solnit, Paradise Built in Hell

Rebecca Solnit coins the phrase “disaster utopias” and shows us that what environmental upheaval reveals is that the true disaster was the preceding social arrangement. Solnit alerts us to the insufficiency of our accustomed ways of modeling disaster and the disastrous results of stories insufficient to the task. With its emphasis on hope, care and collaboration during times of challenge, Solnit provides an optimistic view of how communities react in a catastrophe’s wake.

Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners

Boating for Beginners is a thought experiment, imagining Genesis as rewritten by Mary Shelley reincarnated as a writer of comic cautionary tales. Noah runs a pleasure cruise on the Euphrates; ghostwrites God’s autobiography; plans a film version with the help of a rainbow-loving romance writer. But God decides to do the Flood for real and were it not for an orange demon and a quartet of young friends the screenplay for Noah’s film might have been forever lost. Hilarious and poignant, this book wrestles with what it means to survive the forces of patriarchal history.

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Noah’s Arkive by Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates is available now from University of Minnesota Press.

Every society, civilization and culture has mythologies and cosmologies; they make up a corpus of ancient and sacred narratives that help give meaning to the world. Passed down through generations, myths educate and clarify our place in a world full of things and forces that are larger than us.

At their most simplistic level, myths explain the historical, psychological, and the natural world – but they can also elevate these things, imbuing them with new significance or making them divine which helps give a sense of order to a chaotic world.

Most importantly, myths are where we first learn the power of storytelling. As Ben Okri so eloquently put it, “The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans…they wrestled with mysteries and transformed them into myths which coded the world and helped the community to live through one more darkness, with eyes wide open and hearts set alight.”

What we call mythology today can overlap with an active religion or belief system in some communities, with adherents and believers to various degrees of devotion. This is especially true in many parts of Africa, where there are many rich traditions of storytelling and mythmaking that have long been an integral part several cultures—with roles like the Sarungano or Griot or Jeli dedicated to the purpose.

Mythologies are important in understanding the past of a society, but they can also be useful for analyzing and the present and projecting the future. Especially in fantasy fiction where these myths can be retold, reimagined, remixed, and taken as inspiration to tell stories for modern audiences.

When writing my fantasy novel Shigidi And The Brass Head Of Obalufon, I took inspiration from Yoruba mythology, from the pantheon of gods, which I reimagined as a modern corporation trading in faith. But I also had this reimagined pantheon interact with other mythological figures from all over the world, to mirror the impact of globalization on modern society. This is one of my favorite uses of myth-inspired fantasy literature—to critique aspects of our modern world.

Below is a reading list of books by African authors that take inspiration from mythology to tell sophisticated fantasy stories for a modern audience using very different approaches.

Namina Forna, The Gilded Ones

Set in the fictional secondary world kingdom of Otera which requires all sixteen-year-old girls to subject themselves to a blood-letting ritual to prove their purity, this YA story takes inspiration from West African mythology and history, as well as events from its more recent history like the Sierra Leone Civil War, culminating in a powerful feminist narrative. It follows Deka, who bleeds the gold of demons yet cannot die. She is forced to choose between fighting for the emperor or torture. She enlists and eventually gets sucked into a larger plot involving the emperor himself.

Forna takes a thoughtful, feminist approach to constructing a remixed mythology for her world based on the female-forward elements of several West African mythologies (there are references to Mami Wata, Woyengi, etc.) and the result is a nuanced, socially conscious book full of action and with a lot to say about the way modern society treats women.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Kintu

The story of Kintu, whose action in a moment of anger unleashes a curse that plagues his family for generations, is essential reading. Makumbi blends oral tradition, retellings of myth, folktale, and history with ecclesiastical elements to tell the story of one cursed family through two hundred and fifty years.

Somewhere between historical fantasy and a historical literary fiction, it’s a heady and engaging novel exploring the power of belief. The long lens of the book which goes from the early history of the Buganda kingdom to the birth of modern Uganda frames all its mythological elements with a modern edge.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa, David Mogo: Godhunter

There are many ways to use mythology as inspiration. David Mogo: Godhunter does it loud and proud and with technicolor flair much like the way I do in my own novel Shigidi And The Brass Head Of Obalufon. This godpunk/ urban fantasy story follows the eponymous David, a sharp and cynical demi-god living with the Babalawo that adopted him after his mother’s disappearance. He takes odd jobs for people plagued by the supernatural. When he takes a high-profile job for a local sorcerer, it ignites three-part story with consistently escalating stakes.

This novel reimagines the pantheon of gods from Yoruba, Edo, and Igbo mythologies in a new context to deliver an action-packed novel that is as delightful and dangerous as the streets of Lagos where it largely takes place.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi

A pillar of African literature, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o work has always leaned on the mythic and speculative but this, his first venture into retelling myth in epic verse, is spectacular. Possibly because it was written first in Gĩkũyũ before being translated by the author himself, this origin story told in flowing verse narration tells the tale of the Perfect Nine—the ten daughters of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi—who become the mothers of the ten Gĩkũyũ clans of Kenya. As their parents try to select the right partner for each daughter from a pool of ninety-nine suitors, we are treated to an adventurous journey to the Mountain of the Moon.

But Ngũgĩ doesn’t just recount the myth; he retells it from a feminist perspective, alive with history and culture and Kenyan customary practices, in the tradition of those very first bards and griots who intimately knew the power of story. Grafting modernity onto myth, ancient history onto contemporary memory, and feminist power onto the etiological myth of the Gĩkũyũ people, The Perfect Nine does more the just retell the myth but does something brand new with it.

Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ, Dazzling

The immensely talented Emelụmadụ’s first book is a coming-of-age story about two girls: Ozeomena, chosen by a spirit to be the first woman initiated into the magical Leopard Society and thus connected to the goddess, Idemili; and Treasure, whose father has recently passed away and who has made a bond with a spirit. Their stories converge at a boarding school where girls have been going missing.

Dazzling powerfully draws upon Igbo mythology, spirituality, and storytelling tradition to tell the story of these girls and use it to illustrate so much about modern Nigeria society—a world of contrasts existing side by side. Christianity and traditional beliefs shaken together and running over. Large differences between social classes (reflected in the changing voice from each girl’s perspective). And so much more. All of which is reinforced using Igbo mythology to deliver a personal, modern story about children learning to carry the burden of inheritance.

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Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi is available via DAW Books.