Over the years, Einstein received a lot of letters from children. “I am a little girl of six,” one announced in large letters drawn haphazardly across the full width of the writing paper. “I saw your picture in the paper. I think you ought to have a haircut, so you can look better.” Having given her advice, the girl, with model formality, signed it, “Cordially yours, Ann.”

“I have a problem I would like solved,” wrote Anna Louise of Falls Church, Virginia. “I would like to know how color gets into a bird’s feather.” Dear Mr. Einstein was asked the age of Earth and whether life could exist without the sun (to which he replied that it very much could not). One child asked him whether all geniuses were bound to go insane. Frank, from Bristol, Pennsylvania, asked what was beyond the sky—“My mother said you could tell me.”

Kenneth, from Asheboro, North Carolina, was more philosophical: “We would like to know, if nobody is around and a tree falls, would there be a sound, and why.” Similarly, Peter, from Chelsea, Massachusetts, drove straight to the heart of human inquiry: “I would appreciate it very much if you could tell me what Time is, what the soul is, and what the heavens are.”

Other questions were not quite so fraught. A boy named John informed Einstein that “my father and I are going to build a rocket and go to Mars or Venus. We hope you will go too. We want you to go because we need a good scientist and someone who can guide a rocket good.”

Occasionally, skeptical correspondents emerged, such as June, a twelve-year-old student from Trail Junior High School in British Columbia, Canada. “Dear Mr. Einstein,” she wrote. “I am writing to you to find out if you really exist. You may think this very strange, but some pupils in our class thought that you were a comic strip character.”

In a similar vein, Myfanwy from South Africa had thought Einstein dead:

I probably would have written ages ago, only I was not aware that you were still alive. I am not interested in history, and I thought you had lived in the 18th c., or somewhere around that time. I must have been mixing you up with Sir Isaac Newton or someone. Anyway, I discovered during Math one day that the mistress was talking about the most brilliant scientists. She mentioned that you were in America, and when I asked whether you were buried there, and not in England, she said, Well, you were not dead yet. I was so excited when I heard that, that I all but got a Math detention!

Myfanwy proceeded to tell Einstein how she and her friend Pat Wilson would sneak around the school at night to carry out astronomical observations, and about her love of science. “How can Space go on forever?” she wondered. “I am sorry that you have become an American citizen,” she finished. “I would much prefer you in England.” Einstein was obviously taken with Myfanwy’s exuberance, as he sent her a reply in which he praised her nighttime escapades and apologized for remaining alive. (“There will be a remedy for this, however.”)

On his seventy-sixth birthday, Einstein was sent a pair of cuff links and a tie by the fifth-grade children of Farmingdale Elementary School in Pleasant Plains, Illinois. “Your gift,” he wrote to them, “will be an appropriate suggestion to be a little more elegant in the future than hitherto. Because neckties and cuffs exist for me only as remote memories.”

This was one of Einstein’s last letters. He died around three weeks after writing it.

*

In December 1925, the young Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger was holed up in the village of Arosa, Switzerland, with one of his mistresses. He was there for his health: suspecting a mild case of tuberculosis, his doctors had ordered him to rest at high altitude. There, among the calm of the mountains and deep snow, placing a pearl in each of his ears when he wanted quiet, he developed a theory that became known as “wave mechanics.”

Schrödinger’s theory was inspired by the ideas of Louis de Broglie, a physicist who in his doctoral thesis of 1924 had showed how to calculate the wavelength of a particle based on its momentum. In 1905, Einstein had demonstrated that waves can act like particles. What de Broglie argued was that particles can act like waves.

Wave mechanics provided a set of equations that prescribed how wavelike particles could behave. On first encounter with the theory, Einstein and many others were impressed and pleased with its useful- ness, but it was soon noticed that some implications of Schrödinger’s mechanics were a little problematic. For one thing, the theory stated that the waves it described would, given time, propagate over a very large area, much like a ripple on the surface of a lake spreading out and out, making for the shore. But Schrödinger’s waves were, of course, also particles—they were electrons and other subatomic objects. To Einstein it seemed almost nonsensical to say that an electron would propagate over such enormous distances. It simply didn’t accord with reality.

So Schrödinger’s mathematical description of waves raised a question. If it didn’t represent literal waves, waves in the real world, what did it represent? Einstein’s good friend Max Born, a professor at the University of Göttingen, devised an answer: it represented the probability of a particle’s location. Which is to say that each particle has what’s called a “wave function,” and one can use this to predict the likelihood of finding a particular particle in a particular place.

Put an electron in a box. According to this idea, the electron has a number of potential locations spread throughout the box, and it exists in a kind of muddled-up mixture of all these possible positions. This mixture is mathematically represented by the electron’s wave function, which gives us the various different probabilities of detecting the electron at the various different locations within the box.

Einstein, consistently throughout his career, was unhappy with quantum mechanics’ reliance on probability. In fact, he did not like it at all. He strongly believed, even though evidence suggested otherwise, that at a deep level the universe was not run on chance and that the order apparent in the observable universe was built on order in the subatomic realm.

When debating with the theory’s various advocates, he would often tell them, “God does not play dice.” To which Niels Bohr had a rejoinder: “It cannot be for us to tell God how he is to run the world”—or in other words, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”

*

In the summer of 1925, when he was twenty-three years old, Werner Heisenberg traveled to the tiny island of Heligoland in the North Sea, hoping that its beaches and sheer cliffs would allay his bad hay fever. There, in one intense night, he finalized his interpretation of the difficulties of the quantum realm. Heisenberg worked from the premise that he could completely ignore what could not be observed, measured, or proved to be true. This sounds quite reasonable, but in this instance it meant that, in order to develop his theory of the laws that govern the behavior of electrons, he made no effort to describe, or really even to think about, the motions or orbits of electrons, as they could not be observed. Instead, he looked at the light emitted by electrons under different circumstances. If you bombard an atom with light or disturb it in other ways, an electron will produce light. Heisenberg looked at what went in and what came out, and didn’t concern himself about what happened in between. The result was a paper so mathematically complicated that he couldn’t fully understand it himself. He gave the paper to his supervisor, Max Born, and then went camping, hoping that Born might be able to figure it out for him. Born did just that, and had the paper published.

Einstein didn’t like Heisenberg’s approach any more than he liked Schrödinger’s wave mechanics. He called it “a big quantum egg” and declared outright to one of his friends that he didn’t believe in it. The problem, as far as Einstein was concerned, was that Heisenberg had skipped over the need to actually understand what was happening. The mathematics didn’t really require you to “know” anything about what the electrons were up to between the input and output—they could be doing anything, and it wouldn’t affect Heisenberg’s theory. To Einstein that wasn’t a good enough description of reality.

In 1926, Heisenberg came to Berlin to give a lecture. Einstein, who had already exchanged a few letters with the radical young man, invited him to visit his house, where they soon fell to arguing, as was only to be expected. Heisenberg thought that he would be able to win his host around to his way of thinking, precisely because it had once been Einstein’s way of thinking. With relativity, Einstein had done away with seemingly logical but—crucially—unobservable concepts, such as the ether or Newton’s absolute space and time, and produced a sweeping, progressive theory. Heisenberg felt he was up to much the same thing.

“We cannot observe electron orbits inside the atom. A good theory must be based on directly observable magnitudes,” Heisenberg insisted. “But you don’t seriously believe that none but observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory?”

“Isn’t that precisely what you have done with relativity?”

“Possibly I did use this kind of reasoning, but it is nonsense all the same.”

Einstein was at least consistent in his contrariness to his old beliefs.

To his friend Philipp Frank he made a similar complaint.

“A new fashion has arisen in physics,” he rumbled, “which declares that certain things cannot be observed and therefore should not be ascribed reality.”

“But the fashion you speak of was invented by you in 1905!” Frank reminded him with amused disbelief.

“A good joke should not be repeated too often.”

 __________________________________

Excerpted from Einstein in Time and Space: A Life in 99 Particlesby Samuel Graydon. Copyright © 2023 by Samuel Graydon. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

There has always been a gap between the English-language author Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Yiddish writer who published under at least three pseudonyms: Yitskhok Bashevis, Yitskhok Varshavski, and D. Segal. The publication of Singer’s wartime writings presents one of the first attempts to close that gap. Singer’s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945, the first of three volumes, covers the period between his first appearance as Yitskhok Varshavski in the Forverts—the world’s largest and most influential Yiddish daily—just months before the outbreak of World War II until the end of 1945, when Singer started publishing the Yiddish original of his first major literary memorial to the life of Jews in Poland, The Family Moskat. While the average Yiddish reader of the Forverts may not have known that Yitskhok Varshavski was Yitskhok Bashevis—the younger brother of Yiddish writers Esther Kreitman and Israel Joshua Singer—it is possible to imagine that same reader wondering about the identity of this “Isaac from Warsaw.” Whoever he was, he had a lot of opinions about the situation of the Jews in both Europe and the United States, before and during World War II, as well as the future of Jewish life in America. He was an unknown entity, but anyone reading his work could tell that he was deeply invested in his topic.

Singer’s writing during the period of World War II developed considerably, from pieces on various Jewish customs followed by Jews being targeted in Europe, to questions of how the Jewish spirit would survive the war. During those years, his own life also underwent radical changes. In 1939, his mother and younger brother, who remained in Poland after he and his older siblings had left, were sent by the Soviets in cattle cars to Jambyl, Kazakhstan, where they later died of illness and starvation, likely around 1942. His older sister survived the Nazi blitzes of London with her son, Maurice, and was struggling with mental health aggravated by the trauma of war. And his older brother, who had helped him immigrate to the United States and supported him during his first years, died of a heart attack in early 1944. His ex-lover, Runia Pontsh—who had given birth to Singer’s only son, Israel Zamir, in 1929—was expelled from the USSR by the Soviets and, after a sojourn in Istanbul, Turkey, settled in Palestine in 1938, where a few years later Zamir became a young member of Kibbutz Beit Alfa. Singer himself, in 1940, married a German-Jewish refugee, Alma Wassermann, who had fled with her husband and children from Munich, and who, after meeting him at a Catskills summer resort, began an affair that led to leaving her husband and starting a new life with the unknown Yiddish writer. In 1943, he became a citizen of the United States, solidifying his commitment to finding a path in literature as an American writer.

He wanted to get it all on record—not only the customs but also the immediacy of the loss that he realized was taking place at that very moment.

This biographical background is helpful in understanding the intensity of Singer’s writing during this time. The topics, while covering various aspects of Yiddish culture and Jewish life, are all infused with his personal perspective and experience at the time they were written. This makes his wartime writing fundamentally different from almost everything published to date—nearly thirty books for adults and more than fifteen for children in English translation alone. It opens a new phase in the translation and publication of Singer’s writing, exposing an immediacy and rawness that were, during his lifetime, mediated by the length of time that passed between the writing and translation of a given piece, as well as editorial and cultural concerns reflecting his contemporary American context. The gap between Singer’s Yiddish and English publications, which greatly influenced his decisions, is partly lifted, offering readers more direct access to his perspective on life in the old country from which he came, and the new country where he settled.

One of the most important aspects of this access is the chronological order in which the pieces have been organized. It is the usual practice, for authors who write in the language of the country in which they live, to publish their work in the order that it is written. But as an emigrant writer first publishing in Yiddish and much later translating his work into English, American readers were less often able to engage with Singer’s work chronologically. His first short story collection, Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957), featured stories that were published, in order of appearance, in 1945, 1957, 1945, 1956, 1956, 1945, 1956, 1943, 1932, 1956, and 1943. Anyone trying to get a sense of Singer’s development as a writer from the arc of the stories as they appeared in the collection would go dizzy bouncing back and forth between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s, making a pit stop in the early 1930s, all without an inkling of what he wrote in between. This non-sequentiality lent a sense of mystery to Singer’s writing. But it did little to offer readers a coherent view of the author’s artistic vision.

Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt takes the opposite approach, following the order in which each article appeared in the Forverts. This offers readers a sense of how Singer’s thinking developed over time while grounding each one in its immediate context. The twenty-five pieces included in this volume were selected from a pool of over one hundred and fifty potential articles. These numbers make it clear that the selection is representative rather than comprehensive—an embarrassment of riches. 

The articles vary across several themes connected to Jewish life and Yiddish culture, including history, customs, the influence of particular individuals, social tendencies, and critiques of the moment in which Singer was living and writing. The themes that emerge most tangibly during this period are the anger and anxiety that Singer felt over the apparent indifference of the Jewish sphere—including in the Yiddish world—over the cultural treasures that were in the process of being lost during World War II. Understanding his literary mission in the years during and after the Holocaust involves a reading of those concerns that he articulated during the time that it was actually taking place. It is no surprise, reading these pieces, that his first literary project after the end of the war was to write The Family Moskat, an epic novel about Jewish life in Poland. For him, Jewish life in the old country was not an abstract idea. It was a visceral loss, not only of the environment in which he grew up, but also of the two figures most directly associated with his own personal upbringing: his mother, who spent the most time raising him, and his older brother, who, in many senses, was the closest figure he had to a father.

These circumstances imbue Singer’s wartime writing with an intensely urgent tone. Singer did not have time to waste in writing the articles that he published during this period. He wanted to get it all on record—not only the customs but also the immediacy of the loss that he realized was taking place at that very moment. Knowing that a whole world, a whole way of life, a whole cultural treasure bound up with Yiddish and Yiddishkayt—knowing they were all going up in flames before his very eyes—this knowledge was crushing for Singer. It also drove him to put pen to paper and write.

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From Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt, The War Years, 1939-1945. Edited and translated by David Stromberg. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted with permission from White Goat Press. 

Montréal is a city of parallel universes, often most at ease ignoring each other. Across linguistic, cultural, and generational orbits, it’s also a city that’s shown tremendous appetite for German author Jenny Erpenbeck’s work, in great part due to De Stiil, an anglophone bookstore in the heart of francophone neighborhood Le Plateau. Owner Aude Le Dubé’s carefully curated shop features literary fiction and books translated into English—and it serves as a kind of headquarters for what Le Dubé affectionately calls “the cult” of Erpenbeck fans.

Erpenbeck’s six books—five of fiction, and a memoir in essays—are as interdisciplinary as reality itself: economy, archeology, architecture, political history, musicology, psychology, sociology, mythology. Or a more contemporary articulation of academic inquiry: Trauma Studies. From the immeasurable devastation of the Third Reich to the enduring reverberations of Red Army soldiers’ desecration, from the upheaval that awaits within a numbered Stasi file to a modern Berlin accounting of what’s untaxed and undeclared in an inheritance, Erpenbeck’s writing defies appraisal. Her work resists summary, just as her most injured characters, with intractable agency, resist straightforward victimhood. Is her most recent novel, Kairos, about an increasingly destructive affair between married 58-year-old Hans and 19-year-old Katharina, or is it a reimagining of the control, betrayal, and collapse of a state? Both, of course, and then some.

A few weeks before my conversation with the Berlin-based author, I sit down with Le Dubé beside one of De Stiil’s huge windows to get a better sense of this Erpenbeck cult.

Originally from Brittany’s Lorient, a seaport town once occupied by the Germans, Le Dubé situates Montrealers’ fervor for Erpenbeck, an East Berliner who was twenty-two when the wall came down, within the Quebec context: “She speaks to our beliefs: socialist principles, sharing, and that building a better society includes immigrants and refugees.” The pre- and post-Wall Germany of Erpenbeck’s work offers helpful analogues for the complexities and clashes of Montreal’s adjacent universes, each building from distinct cultural-political models, yet supposedly the same people.

Beyond historical and metaphorical walls, though, Le Dubé, who prefers to read in English, emphasizes the moral urgency of the Erpenbeck oeuvre. At the time of reunification of Germany, Le Dubé describes, “All of a sudden the future was dead. Everything they’d been taught to fight for was gone. When everything is collapsing, how do you build a fair society?” Climate catastrophes, xenophobia, pandemics, occupations, wars, not to mention the proto-fascist policies of Quebec’s current premier—the concerns are unyielding, for any person who enters De Stiil. “I think it’s important for people to read her. While we don’t sell her to everybody, we always mention her work.” For the uninitiated, she first recommends Go, Went, Gone. “They buy that book, but they always come back for the rest.”

When New Directions published the English translation of Kairos earlier this year, Le Dubé contacted their Canada publicist to see if Erpenbeck, who some say is on her way to a Nobel Prize, might have travel plans to North America. Once on the continent, Montreal’s not that far, right? An agent got looped in, then Montreal’s Goethe Institute, then the Consulate General, then the Ottawa Embassy. At each stage of escalating bureaucracy, though, was a champion of Erpenbeck’s work. In the early evening of October 26, the outside of De Stiil resembles a night club more than a literary writer meet-and-greet. Dozens and dozens of readers, lined around the block, await their entry. In advance of the event, I sit down in a quieter corner of the bookstore to speak with Erpenbeck.

*

Ellen Adams: In re-reading your work, I was struck by how often infidelity comes up. Across your books, what new discoveries have you made about betrayal, whether in intimacy, or infidelity of values or the state?

Jenny Erpenbeck: When I first started to write, I didn’t know what my subject would as a long-term author. But, as it turned out, you are right. Betrayal and lying are at the center of my work, as are the layers of truth: how the same thing can be revealed again and again, or looked at from other perspectives, without being a lie, but rather a different kind of truth. If you look at Book of Words, her childhood is made up to be a good, easygoing childhood, then all of the sudden you can see that there’s something underground, not told to her, and eventually her father’s true profession is revealed. Even in The Old Child, my first main character, she’s lying to her classmates, to everyone, about her age. There’s a lot of hiding in my books. It’s always interested me. Hiding gives a certain kind of freedom because you can try something on without telling anyone, an experiment you undertake. And there’s always the question of what is the truth? In The Old Child, the truth is not revealed at all, not even in the end, so you don’t know where this lie comes from. And of course in Kairos, lying in the very middle of everything, as is the question: Who’s lying to whom, and in which way? Sometimes it’s shocking, with how little we can be content because we expect a certain truth. And if this is given to us, we are content. If someone believes a lie, it’s also sad, because it tells us that he or she is lacking the instruments to even doubt. But perhaps if you are young, it’s a blessed state of mind, to be so trusting.

EA: It makes me think of that initial rendezvous with Hans in Kairos, where Katharina thinks, “How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything?” The self-deception, the self-erasure that allows for their connection to exist.

JE: I think almost everyone has had this experience once in life, that of betrayal. If we were to see all the complexity all the time, it would drive us mad. And there’s always the question behind it: How could I take a half-life for a whole life? Was I content with so little that I couldn’t even see there was something missing, there was something hidden from me? In Kairos, all the things that are hidden, earlier or later, are revealed in the course of the book, earlier or later. What also interests me about hiding and revealing secrets is—in The End of Days, for instance—is if someone dies, a different kind of talk can happen, real, serious talks when someone perhaps reveals what’s been kept secret. Or in sorting the household of someone who’s died, a character might run into a secret by chance. This is also interesting to me, that there are some moments when you can speak about what has been hidden, after years in which it was not the right moment to speak about the secret.

In Kairos, you also have to—well, you don’t have to, and you don’t need to, but it’s nice if you manage to enable someone to tell the truth without being punished. And of course, we are cowards.

(Erpenbeck cracks up.)

If you ask your lover to tell the truth, but in the very moment when he or she does, you start arguing or punishing or playing some bad games with him or her, he or she will learn the lesson that if “I tell the truth, I get punished.” Kairos is a slow process of how something meant as a kind of truth actually transforms into a relationship with lying at its center. As it was in the political history of the GDR. Ideas were received enthusiastically in the beginning, a new start after fascist times. Slowly, a certain vocabulary was forbidden, a certain exchange of opinions not allowed. People started to deliver ready-made sentences—how to bring it into good English?

EA: Catch phrases, party lines?

JE: Yes. Perhaps I shouldn’t say so, but sometimes I have the feeling that we are coming to a similar time now, because there are certain sentences that you are supposed to deliver and others sentences that you are not supposed to deliver anymore. It’s a core question to art, because we are also responsible for the ugly children among the sentences. We should love all sentences, the ugly ones as well as the beautiful ones.

EA: And to let them be heard.

JE: Yes. Because if you want to describe reality, you cannot make a detour. Reality is reality is reality, and that’s it. So if you want to describe a bad experience, perhaps you need to use bad words to bring it to life, to let the readers feel something about it. If it’s not ugly enough, it doesn’t work. If Richard III is a nice character, you might as well throw the play away.

EA: (pointing to Go, Went, Gone) Or Richard the—

JE: Or Hans the Third!

EA: The first time I read Kairos, I found myself shouting on my couch, “What an asshole!” “Piece of shit!”

(Jenny laughs.)

I wrote it sometimes, too, in the margins: How awful!!! And yet, it was very liberating to see—in such amazing sentences—experiences that many of us have had behind closed doors.

JE: The women were much less shocked than the men. The women somehow experienced similar things. Some had periods in life when they were obsessed with such a Hans character. The men were really shocked! The nice readers, you know, the nice men. “Does such a person exist? I got so angry about him!” They hadn’t faced such a thing before, as it seemed.

EA: And yet there’s so much complicity between some of the male colleagues in your books, whether it’s a Richard’s colleague who’s dating a 20-year-old—

JE: This is not what I’m judging. The age difference is not the point. The point is the character. Even if Katharina could have met a version of Hans when he was 20 years younger, he would have been the same character. The character is what matters—if someone is manipulating, or hiding a big part of his life. An older man looks at a young woman with a certain kind of pleasure? This is normal. You admire beauty. You are happy to look at some young person, man or woman, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a crime. Only if you use your experience to manipulate someone, like Hans does with Katharina.

EA: I’m curious about the idea of using sensuality or romance to lure someone as an agent of the state—for example, the “John” essay in Bits and Pieces. Or Richard looking up his own Stasi file to find that his state-declared “areas of weakness include habitual arrogance and documented marital infidelity.” And of course, Hans uses his sexual influence to surveille.

JE: To spy for the Stasi—that’s bad!

EA: Mixing spying and romance and the state—which returns us to the idea of infidelity.

JE: It seems this kind of surveillance spying is a specialty of dictatorship systems! After partition, people worked for the Stasi for a variety of reasons, and not all of them were bad. Especially in the first years of the GDR, people entered the Stasi in order to find fascists who were hiding under false identities. Or people freed from the concentration camps entered to find those who had treated them so badly.  Later on, it became more complex, to put it briefly. People were trying to gain power over others by stepping out of the system and looking in on it. This is the core of spying: you position yourself outside to look in. You look at your community, a group of friends, your family, or your colleagues, all from outside, from the very moment when you start reporting on them. (Even in Western structures where there is no Stasi, there are still people who would like to surveil. The bad characters still exist. They just aren’t given the chance to do so!) Again, it’s a question of character, as is lying. You know, Katharina is also lying. Perhaps not that badly, but she’s lying, too.

EA: And her diaries become this archive of lying—or not.

JE: We all lie to ourselves. We manipulate with what phrases we leave behind. If I make a diary entry, I might write one thing on one day, and the next day I might describe the same scenery in a different way. Is this a lie? Or if you are afraid that someone will find your diary, so you leave some things out. So it’s not all about the bad Other. It’s also about us. And of course, Katharina is not true to herself. This is the main mistake she’s making. Otherwise, she would just go away with this young guy and be happy, you know? Why is this obsession with Hans is so much stronger? And I have no answer! If any reader does, give me an answer, please!

EA: Yet there is a logic to it! In Kairos, as in other works, the logic and inner worlds of your characters feel full, flush with associations and fleshed-out subconscious. In your process of developing a book, does that ecosystem of meaning arrive to you from the onset, or do you write your way into it and then trim back?

JE: Normally, I start from the beginning, and I just write my way to the end. I have a center for every scene or chapter. I put all the material that I collected, all the thoughts that I had on it, and then I try to put it in connection to the chapter’s center. Some things about your characters will just happen in the writing process. When I had already written half of Kairos, for example, I did some research on the guy on whom Hans is based. I got this Stasi file. It became a major problem for the structure of the book, one I didn’t expect! When I studied opera directing, a famous director—one of the most famous opera directors in Germany at this time—she always said, “If you are facing a problem, don’t make a detour. Go right through the middle of it.” I think this is a basic law for all art. Even if something is destroying your initial idea or plan, you have to deal with it.

EA: Which reminds me of what you mentioned at the beginning, of not making a detour around the truth. Instead, really looking at it—while also exploring characters who are lying to themselves, or having to shed lies that they’ve told themselves.

JE: I think we are all trying to produce ourselves as like—Wait.

 (Jenny goes to the back of her bookstore to fetch her smartphone, then searches the word Heil.)

We want to produce a sound picture of ourselves, a picture that makes sense. A whole that works well with our idea of what we want to be. We want to have not only smooth outsides, but also smooth insides. And this doesn’t work, of course. We have dark corners.

EA: Speaking of which—I’m curious about Eros in your writing. Obviously in Kairos, it’s a powerful force, but it’s present in many of your books. Eros and violence, or Eros and control. Eros and compliance. What draws you to look at sensuality through those lenses?

JE: You might be right. The erotic scenes in my books are not the happy ones. I don’t know where it comes from. Of course, it has a lot to do with power. When I think of the Red Army soldier in Visitation, I thought it would be interesting to put it differently than how it is normally put, so that you cannot clearly see who is the one with the power and who is the victim. It switches many times during this erotic scene. You cannot say this is a Red Army soldier raping a German woman. It could also be a German woman raping a very young Red Army soldier. It’s not clear. The erotic in Kairos is also a deeply disturbed. When Hans is first tying Katharina to the bed, she’s thinking about how she forgot to buy onions. This is not erotic. I would say it’s the opposite of erotic. Perhaps only women can see that. A man would perhaps rather say that Katharina’s obsessed with him and she cannot leave him because she’s so obsessed with his sexual potency. But a woman reader, I think, can clearly see that Katharina’s not interested in him sexually. There’s one passage where he asks her, “Are you looking for a father?” She says, “No.” But in the end, she herself says she would have liked to have someone without all this sex, just as a good companion. If Hans had offered her friendship, perhaps she could have accepted to leave him. But he didn’t offer friendship, because he wanted to use her, abuse her. Ahh, I don’t know where it comes from. I’m not an American author. I don’t have a psychotherapist! I would say I had a lucky youth, and everything was okay. But in a way, it took me a long time to find men in my life who are not—freaks. I don’t know why.

EA: There’s an element of chance, and also an element of tolerance.

JE: Yes, and sometimes you are drawn to the freaks without knowing it. When you’re young, things happen. Now it’s been a long time that I’ve been very happy, you know?

EA: I certainly related to the onions moment. Been there! Which leads me to humor in your work. Humor appears in such subtle ways, or more head-on, like the Go, Went, Gone scene with the barrister, that owl-man lawyer. I was just cracking up. So theatrical, almost like it could have been a cartoon. Yet he’s the person who’s invested in reviewing these folks’ asylum files. Does humor come to you on intuition, or do you find yourself going back to the heart of a chapter and saying, “Maybe I should add some in?”

JE: I really have so much fun, actually, but very rarely do people see the humor. Perhaps it’s not so obvious. Of course my books are about serious issues, so it’s not much fun in general. But I do think I have a kind of humor, and I enjoy it. Sometimes it just takes me away!

EA: In Go, Went Gone, women are really on the periphery. I know that writing this book included experiential research, not to mention years-long friendships, with many men arriving initially through Italy as refugees. In the novel itself, we see and hear children. In the hellish waiting room of asylum claims, however, the women are spatially and narratively on the outskirts. One is up a tree at Oranienplatz, and the others appear via a second-hand account of sex work along a rural Italian road. What was your intention in writing these women only at the periphery?

JE: The journey from an African home country to Europe is really hard. Not so many women make it to Europe. Of course, some women do, and during my research, I met several, but then I thought: the absence of women is a screaming one. This is a story I want to tell. A connecting bond between Richard and the refugees is that all these men are missing women. It’s not just about sex, of course. It’s also about family, children, to have someone you feel close to, in a different way than a friend. This is what Richard is missing, after his wife passed away, and it’s also what these young men are missing. So the finale of the book is the men speaking about the women who they knew, who they are missing. The loneliness. It’s a major aspect of the problem. They are missing children so desperately! Many of them told me they had never slept in a room all alone. Many of them are used to sleeping in a room with their family, children, grown-ups, sisters, brothers, cousins, etc. They adore children. And then you put them into such isolating houses where they cannot meet women and they cannot have children. You forbid them to work, so you don’t let them learn the language. What would come out of it? This is a desperate situation, and it can only end badly. And if it doesn’t end badly, they are heroes for withstanding all this. These young men should be given a chance to move forward, to move, to get out, to find his own life, to find his family, to get a job. The absence of women means much more than just having sex. For most of these men, it means that life is starting. And their lives are not starting.

EA: That line—“It means that life is starting”—interests me in the context of Go, Went, Gone, given the abortion revealed at the end, from a time when young couple Richard and Christel’s life would be starting. The couple’s life comes to a halt thereafter.

JE: I am absolutely for the right for abortion. But in this case, Richard made a mistake, and it couldn’t be taken back. I thought for Christel, it would have been the right moment. For Richard, because of his career, he says no. For their marriage, that proves sad and irreversible. To come back to your earlier question, how I make the characters. In the beginning of Go, Went, Gone, I mentioned that Christel drank too much. After I wrote the whole book, I thought, “Hmm, there is one question waiting for me. Why did she drink?” Only in the very end, I had to answer that for myself. It’s a strange thing, because, of course, I’m the one inventing the story. On the other hand, my subconscious put something in the beginning that I didn’t want to go back to for a long time. I could see that she was physically and mentally wounded by the whole thing, in part due to abortion being illegal at this time. I know women who almost died—put on some kitchen table in a private apartment of someone who may or may not have even been capable of performing the medical procedure. As a friend of mine says, if you don’t allow abortions, it doesn’t mean that abortions don’t take place. It only means that abortions are made illegally and put the woman in danger.

EA: Pregnancy, abortion, and paternity are weaponized elsewhere in your writing. In Kairos, Katharina wonders which patriarchal affiliation allowed her access to the West. Her grandfather, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War? Her older male employer, who takes a bit too much pleasure in sitting next to her? Her father’s status as a professor? Paternity, and paternalism, is the go-to rubric to vouch for Katharina’s mobility. Yet in other gorgeous pages, we learn about matrilineal Tuareg traditions where kids “belong” to the mom. I’m curious to hear your thoughts: Who does a child, who does a life belong to?

JE: Hmm. It’s an interesting question. I think I will write another novel about it.

EA: Let me know if you need a reader. I’ll start studying German ASAP!

JE: You are a tough questioner! Of course I already told everything, but nobody sees it so clearly! It’s always interested me, how much you inherit by your genes versus how you’re brought up socially. In The Book of Words, the young woman ends up on the wrong side, if you look at her true parents. She’s on the enemy’s side, the one who killed them. Often, you define yourself by feeling either like a natural part of, or in opposition to, your family. You always feel you have power over who you are and why you are that way. If there’s a sudden revelation, like the sad truth about the young woman in The Book of Words, it’s like that power is taken from you. You become a victim, perhaps of your parents’ mistakes, or all the things they went through so that they couldn’t bring you up themselves. Likewise, I’ve always been interested in people who are looking for their biological parents—what exactly they are they looking for.

EA: One last question. I love that Richard has to come up with a slogan to get the protest permit.

JE: Ahh, yes! That’s one of my funny scenes!

EA: If you had to come up with a slogan for your work, what would it be?

JE: Oh God!

(She laughs.)

A slogan is a difficult thing.

EA: Maybe even the opposite of what you’re doing. Your work seems like an anti-slogan.

JE: The shorter the text that someone wants from you, the more difficult it is to write. Whenever I’m asked for a blurb for a book, I work two weeks on it! I keep looking for how to get to the very essence. Hmm. The essence.

 (She taps the table, then looks up.)

Keep being curious. Everything depends on the point of view. And the truth is never just one thing. It is a complex, living entity, moving, growing, shifting around. But these are not good mottos, because a motto should be clear about what truth is, and I am not.

EA: Maybe that is the truth, that it’s not clear?

JE: Clearly. Okay, one more slogan: Everybody should be given the chance to live.

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Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated from the German by Michael Hofmann) is available from New Directions.

This spring, I fell in love with John Gower, who died in 1408. For months I’d been reading his poems in their modern print editions with a scholarly disinterest. Then at the Huntington Library one morning, my stomach fluttered when I opened the cover of a fourteenth-century manuscript of his most famous work, Confessio Amantis, to a blurry illumination of a dreaming Gower, asleep. Since that day in Pasadena I’ve been talking about him breathlessly, chasing him through centuries of scholarship, tracking his records across continents in archives from California to Kent.

What is it about the archive that makes us fall in love? Why is it, as Saidiya Hartman puts it, that book supports and acid-free boxes make us dream of “a romance that exceed[s] the fictions of history—the rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive”? No doubt, archival research is occasionally extremely tedious—transcribing difficult handwriting can be a more effective sleep aid than melatonin—but most of the time it’s a unique thrill. Turning over folios or examining the wax seal of a medieval charter is a sensual encounter; Arlette Farge calls it a “physical pleasure [in] finding a trace of the past.” Parchment, the predominant material for medieval writing, is made of animal hide, so studying Gower’s manuscripts and life records means I’m often encountering him, literally, through the touch of skin on skin.

I’m far from the first person to swoon at the masses of papers, documents, and manuscripts that populate historical and cultural institutions across the globe. A smattering of novels has emerged in the past quarter century that stage a quest for knowledge in the low lighting and tense intimacy of a quiet study room, “unbashedly interpret[ing] the past through its material traces” and constituting a literary genre that Suzanne Keen calls the “romance of the archive.” In these books—A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, Isaac Fellman’s Dead Collections, to name a few—the narration of history often intertwines with personal love stories until the two threads become virtually indistinguishable. Lately, I’ve been reading as many as I can get my hands on.

While the researchers (or archivists, depending) almost always fall in love with each other, on some fundamental level, these love stories are always unrequited: a research object can entrance a scholar, but it can never really belong to her. Any encounter with a document in the archives—whether a nineteenth-century letter or a medieval court document—is an attempt to reconstruct the past from fragments that are only touchable and holdable in the reading room for an hour or two. Byatt plays on this paradox in her 1990 classic Possession, when one of the main characters, Roland, finds himself “seized by a strange and uncharacteristic impulse” to pilfer the previously undiscovered letters of a nineteenth-century poet out of a special collections library, catalyzing the adventure that will lead him to become equally possessed by his fellow scholar, the cold and beautiful Maud. Neither knowledge nor love should be mistaken for ownership, Byatt seems to suggest, though Maud ends up with the letters at the end of the day. Scholarship and romance can operate according to similar logics of jealousy and compulsion.

A quixotic longing underlies these books. Characters may have special access to collections and libraries, but the pursuit of history is nonetheless ingrained with a gnawing sense of loss. Archival romance novels often center on a search for someone or something that is missing; to quote Sol, the trans archivist at the center of Fellman’s fan-fiction-steeped 2022 novel, “in general what you find in archives is the absence of a body, the chalk outline of a life… You can almost taste the closeness of the body sometimes, almost feel the glossy heat of it, but never quite.” Historical research is always a kind of heartbreak; the more I learn about Gower’s works and life, the more I nurse a yearning for all I’ll never understand. And the past can be tremendously brittle; much of what we can know rests in records and account books and literary manuscripts that exist in fragile, finite copies. Perhaps it makes sense then that both Sol, whose love story with Else, a grieving donor to the archive, will lead him to uncover the source of a preservation issue, and the blood-sucking antagonist of Kostova’s book are vampires. Every time we use archival material, the ink fades a little from light exposure, the internal structure of the book weakens a little, no matter how gently we handle the spine. Like parasites, those of us who work with archives slowly leech life out of our materials, loving our subjects to death.

Given that the personal and romantic is always also historical, these novels are often intensely political. For Keen, who focuses on contemporary British literature, the romance of the archive necessarily constructs itself in relation—whether affectionate or antagonistic—to England’s imperial legacy. The multigenerational The Historian (2005), to give another example, centers on the story of two young researchers, Paul and Helen, who fall in love during a sprawling, trans-European quest to uncover the identity of a mysterious stranger who murders Paul’s academic mentor. Along the way, sedimented history, from the vestiges of the Ottoman Empire to the conflicts of the Cold War, constantly shape their lofty pursuit of knowledge and justice. The past and the present mutually construct each other, Kostova reminds us, inseparable from the passions that incite both love affairs and geopolitical strife.

Yet the archive’s sparkle can also leave us misty-eyed, occluding a political vision. I’ve been guilty of this myself. Gower was (it would seem from the texts he left behind) a morally stuffy money-grubber, with a vicious attitude toward peasants, who may have married a woman half his age. If I knew him when he was living, I probably wouldn’t have liked him at all. But from a distance of six hundred years or so, I find myself constructing enemies-to-lovers plotlines. Perhaps it’s just impossible to pay this much attention to someone and not catch an “archive fever,” as Jacques Derrida calls that fierce and consuming nostalgia for the past. Or maybe in a profession as solitary and quiet as academia, it’s all too easy to forget the present and become enamored of an intellectual figment or a ghost.

Last week, at the Lambeth Palace Library in London, I read Gower’s last will and testament, recorded prior to his death, then walked along the bank of the Thames to visit his final resting place. Pushing through the crowds at Borough Market sampling fruits, paella, and jams, I ducked into Southwark Cathedral. The tomb, to the left of the nave, is a wooden effigy of Gower’s supine body, painted in green, red, and gold. His eyes are open, and his head rests not on a pillow, but on books of his poems. I thought of a line from the Confessio, when Gower imagines his books will endure when he is “dede and elleswhere” for future readers to find in some “tyme comende after this” (time coming after this). I felt shy then, implicated in his transhistorical glance.

Eventually, my boyfriend came to collect me on his way home from the British Library. On our way out of the cathedral, I turned and blew Gower a kiss. My boyfriend laughed at me, then reached out and brushed a piece of hair behind my ear. I was alive, the year was 2023. His skin was warm and soft; it felt nothing like parchment at all.

In their combination of intensity and geographical extent, the 1848 revolutions were unique—at least in European history. Neither the great French Revolution of 1789, nor the July Revolution of 1830, nor the Paris Commune of 1870, nor the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 sparked a comparable transcontinental cascade. 1989 looks like a better comparator, but there is still controversy as to whether these uprisings can be characterized as “revolutions.” In 1848, by contrast, parallel political tumults broke out across the entire continent, from Switzerland and Portugal to Wallachia and Moldavia, from Norway, Denmark and Sweden to Palermo and the Ionian Islands. This was the only truly European revolution that there has ever been.

But it was also in some respects a global upheaval, or at least a European upheaval with a global dimension. The news of revolution in Paris had a profound impact on the French Caribbean, and the measures adopted by London to avoid revolution on the British mainland triggered protests and uprisings across the British imperial periphery. In the young nations of Latin America, too, the European revolutions galvanized liberal and radical political elites. Even in far-off Australia, the February Revolution created political waves—though it was not until June 19, 1848 that the news of the February events reached Sydney in the Colony of New South Wales—a reminder of what the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey once mournfully described as “the tyranny of distance.”

The revolutions involved a vast panorama of charismatic and gifted actors, from Giuseppe Garibaldi to Marie d’Agoult, author (under a male pseudonym) of the best contemporary history of the revolutions in France, from the French socialist Louis Blanc to the leader of the Hungarian national movement, Lajos Kossuth; from the brilliant conservative liberal social theorist, historian and politician Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville to the Wallachian soldier, journalist and agrarian radical Nicolae Bălcescu. From the young patriot poet Sándor Petőfi, whose recitation of a new national song for the Hungarians electrified the revolutionary crowds in Budapest, to the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, whose ultimately unsuccessful struggle to reconcile his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from the writer George Sand, who composed “revolutionary bulletins” for the Provisional Government in Paris, to the Roman popular tribune Angelo Brunetti, known affectionately as Ciceruacchio, or “Chubby,” a true man of the people, who did much to shape the unfolding of the Roman revolution of 1848–9. Not to mention the countless women who sold broadsheets and newspapers in the streets of the European cities or fought at the barricades (they are very prominent in the visual depiction of these revolutions). For politically sentient Europeans, 1848 was an all-encompassing moment of shared experience. It turned everyone into contemporaries, branding them with memories that would last as long as life itself.

These revolutions were experienced as European upheavals—the evidence for this is superabundant; but they were nationalized in retrospect. The historians and memory managers of the European nations absorbed them into specific national stories. The supposed failure of the German revolutions was sucked into the national narrative known as the Sonderweg, or “special path,” where it helped to power a thesis about Germany’s aberrant road into modernity, a road that culminated in the disaster of the Hitler dictatorship. Something similar happened in Italy, where the failure of revolution in 1848 was seen as pre-programming an authoritarian drift into the new Italian kingdom and thereby paving the road to the March on Rome in 1922 and the fascist seizure of power that followed. In France, the failure of 1848 was seen as ushering in the Bonapartist interlude of the Second Empire, which in turn anticipated the future triumph of Gaullism. In other words, focusing on the supposed failure of 1848 also had the consequence of allowing these stories to be channelled into a plurality of parallel, nation-state-focused narratives. Nothing demonstrates better than these connected upheavals and their fragmentation in modern memory the immense power of the nation-state as a way of framing the historical record—we are still feeling that power today.

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Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark has been shortlisted for the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

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There were three phases to the events of 1848. In February and March, upheaval spread like a brush fire across the continent, leaping from city to city and starting numerous spot-fires in towns and villages in-between. The Austrian Chancellor, Metternich, fled from Vienna, the Prussian army was withdrawn from Berlin, the kings of Piedmont–Sardinia, Denmark and Naples issued constitutions—it all seemed so easy. This was the Tahrir Square moment: one could be forgiven for thinking that the movement encompassed the entirety of society; the euphoria of unanimity was intoxicating; “I had to go out into the winter cold and walk and walk until I had worn myself out,” one German radical wrote, “just to calm my blood and slow down the beating of my heart, which was in a state of unprecedented and baffled agitation and felt as if it were about to blow a hole in my chest.” In Milan, complete strangers embraced each other in the streets. These were the spring days of 1848.

Yet the divisions within the upheaval (already latent in the first hours of conflict) soon became glaringly apparent: by May, radical demonstrators were attempting to storm and overthrow the National Assembly created by the February Revolution in Paris, while, in Vienna, Austrian democrats protested at the slowness of liberal reforms and established a Committee of Public Safety. In June, there were violent clashes between the liberal (or in France republican) leaderships and radical crowds on the streets of the larger cities. In Paris, this culminated in the brutality and bloodshed of the “June Days,” which killed at least 3,000 insurgents. This was the long hot summer of 1848, gleefully diagnosed by Marx as the moment at which the revolution lost its innocence and the sweet (but deceptive) unanimity of spring made way for the bitter struggle between classes.

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Excerpted from Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark. Copyright © 2023. Available from Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

I first heard of Willa Cather as a teenage bookseller in North Denver, at a new, used, rare, and antiquarian bookshop that had once been a mechanic’s garage. At the bookstore, there was an entire section of Cather’s famous works, which I had labeled meticulously with colored markers on scraps of printer paper. I don’t remember hearing of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Instead, I sold heaps of used copies of O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and occasionally The Song of the Lark. Years later as an English major, I would hear these books re- ferred to as “the Nebraska Trilogy,” and despite my father being born and raised in Omaha, I still found them to be of little interest based on the pastoral covers with their willowy fonts and watercolor prairies. Perhaps in that unconscious way we often do, I decided that Cather, as a white woman writer of the Midwest, was simply not for me: a Colorado Chicana, a mixed person of Filipino, Indigenous, and Euro-pean ancestry, a young woman trying and often failing to find herself in the pages of books. What could Cather and I possibly have in common? A lot, I was to find out.

After my first book, Sabrina & Corina, was published in 2019, I traveled throughout the United States reading from my short stories and discussing some of my ancestors’ origins in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. I was also at work on my novel, Woman of Light, a reimagining of the lives of my ancestors between 1868 and 1934 and based on our family oral tradition. When crafting the official synopsis for Sabrina & Corina, my publisher settled on the term Indigenous Latinas to describe the cultural identity of my characters in hopes of distilling some sense of their and my deeply complex history. Despite these attempts, I still encountered an abundance of confusion from readers outside of my own culture and region who could not fathom my ancestors’ existence in the American Southwest before the founding of the country. We have always resided in these lands north of the current US-Mexico border, my own roots extending to Pueblos of northern New Mexico. This is where we are from, El Norte, which is also the setting of Willa Cather’s ninth novel, the masterpiece Death Comes for the Archbishop.

While it is set shortly after the Mexican-American War, Death Comes for the Archbishop opens far from the American Southwest. Cather briefly transports us to Rome in 1848, where three cardinals and a missionary bishop dine in the lush gardens of a villa overlooking the ancient city. On my first book tour, I would mention this time in American his- tory. While many readers in my own region were familiar with the Mexican-American War and the resulting Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the majority of people I met outside the Southwest were unfamiliar with how this conflict shaped the fate of millions. It seemed surprising to many audiences when I told them that California, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Texas, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming had once been Mexico, and before 1821 a territory of Spain, and before that and forever and always it is Native land. There is a saying, “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us,” which I used time and time again to help illustrate the geopolitical forces that had shaped my family’s destiny. Despite these efforts, I came home from my first book tour exhausted and made lonely by the sheer amount of historical explanation.

I was living in my former childhood bedroom when I first spotted Death Comes for the Archbishop. While writing late one night, my gaze wandered toward the bookshelf and landed upon a cover illustration of an old adobe church in the desert, red mountains in the distance, and an endless blue sky. What, I thought, is that? Outside was my parents’ neighborhood, dark with early Colorado fall. I stood from my lap- top, drifting toward the book, and then held it for a long while. It was as if the novel and I had made eye contact, a hold- ing of one’s gaze. It was a meeting, I decided, destined to be.

I read Death Comes for the Archbishop in a few days. I carried it with me to waiting rooms and in long lines at the post office. While I was used to scrolling the shallows of Instagram in the spare moments of my day, Death Comes for the Archbishop held my attention with Cather’s magnificent descriptions of the American Southwest and close psychological observations of religious figures I had often thought were narratively off-limits: priests. The novel reminded me of my insatiable childhood reading habits—the all-nighters locked in a bathroom, the only place where I could keep a light on without detection in a household of seven children. Cather had awoken in me a type of pleasure-reading that over the years had eroded with deadlines, assignments, and the long list of reasons why we do not read out of desire but instead out of duty.

Soon after reading the novel, I spoke at a college in Winter Park, Florida. A student asked what I had been reading lately. Emphatically, I spurted out, “Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop. I’ve never seen the history of my ancestors glimpsed this way before in a novel. It’s not from our perspective or anything like that, but there we are, alongside these priests in the lands of my ancestors.” Afterward, the poet Billy Collins surprised me at my book signing table. We had met briefly years earlier in Key West, and I wasn’t sure if he remembered me, but he did, and, more important, he also had been reading Death Comes for the Archbishop. I can’t remember exactly what he had said, but there was a sense of shared discovery of greatness. “It’s wonderful,” I had said. “I hope more people read it.” It became a mission of mine that day, a project of sorts. I wanted my readers to read Cather. It was as simple as that. I had been startled into attention at seeing my own history on the page.

The prologue for Death Comes for the Archbishop feels like the narrative equivalent of eavesdropping on a nearby table at a lightly populated restaurant. There is little context, some guiding dates and descriptions of the men and their at- tire. Cather is not overly generous in her atmospheric details. She is a stylist who at least in her age predates Hemingway in her proclivity toward sparsity. “But is not realism,” Cather wrote in her 1922 essay “The Novel Démeublé,” “more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague definition of the sympathy and candor with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?”

They were talking business: had met, indeed, to discuss an anticipated appeal from the Provincial Council at Baltimore for the founding of an Apostolic Vicarate in New Mexico—a part of North America recently annexed to the United States. This new territory was vague to all of them, even to the missionary Bishop. The Italian and French Cardinals spoke of it as Le Mexique, and the Spanish host referred to it as “New Spain.”

Within the prologue, Cather mentions the physical realm: the stars coming out at night, the garden and hills, glasses of wine emptied and refilled, but the focal point is the tenor of the conversation. There is a land newly acquired by the Americans through force of war, there are some “thirty In- dian nations . . . each with its own customs and languages,” and there are also the “Mexicans, a naturally devout people.”

Us, I thought. She is describing us.

This feeling of recognition, of being glimpsed at the periphery of a great American writer’s consciousness, was not an experience accustomed to me. It had occurred more directly in the pages of Rudolfo Anaya and Arturo Islas, but their seminal works are set well into the twentieth century. Entering the world of Death Comes for the Archbishop was perhaps the first time I felt the narrative universe of my family’s oral tradition converging with the novel form. Is this what it feels like, I had thought, to read as the majority? To see yourself and your history in books nearly every time you crack open a spine?

It wasn’t a perfect match, as I would discover throughout the course of reading the novel. Cather was not necessarily my literary ancestor. She was closer to something like a neighbor, my fellow literary countryman.

Willa Cather was born in 1873 into a landowning family in Virginia and was the eldest of seven children. Her family moved to Nebraska when Willa was nine years old, eventually settling in Red Cloud, a railroad town and farming community in the rolling prairie of Pawnee lands. She was a precocious child who delighted in literature and art. In the relatively crammed house she shared with her family and an intellectually disabled domestic worker named Margie Anderson, Willa was allowed her own sanctuary in the either frigid or blazingly hot attic, a small nook formed into a bed- room and covered in wallpaper of her choosing. Her ambition was not yet to become an author. She wanted to be a surgeon, but it was a profession reserved at the time for men. As a teenager, Willa arrived at the University of Nebraska with short hair and dressed in masculine clothing, preferring the name William. In fact, one of her mentors, Sarah Orne Jewett, later criticized Cather for her tendency to write fiction from male perspectives, labeling it a form of masquerade. Despite these outward influences pushing Cather toward a life of more commonplace femininity, the young writer sought work in the predominantly male world of publishing. She began her writing life with essays and reviews in Nebraska, which led to an editorial job in Pittsburgh and eventually New York City, where she worked as managing editor of McClure’s, one of the most successful literary magazines of its time. During these formative years, Cather also met her lifelong romantic partner, Edith Lewis, who would first ac- company her to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915, a trip that would later prove monumental in its influence.

Death Comes for the Archbishop at its heart is an adventure tale inspired by the real lives of Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and his vicar, Father Joseph Machebeuf. Following two French missionary priests, distinct in their complementary personalities, there’s reserved Father Jean Marie Latour and outgoing Father Joseph Vaillant. They journey throughout the American Southwest, the farthest reaches of the Santa Fe Trail, as power moves from the Mexican diocese in Durango to that of the recently arrived Americans in Santa Fe. The priests seek to spread the faith and build a cathedral in the desert while the land transitions, from one nation to another, with Old World European ideals butting against a newly asserted American dominance, but there is a deeper, more com- plicated cultural undercurrent to nearly every chapter of the novel. Throughout the novel, the narrative again rests at the junction of French, Spanish, Indigenous, Mexican, and Middle Eastern, a cultural tapestry born out of layered conquest. In the chapter “A Bell and a Miracle,” this convergence is exemplified in the pleasant music of the Angelus bell.

“[T]he inscription [on the bell] is in Spanish…It must have been brought up from Mexico City in an ox-cart…and the silver of the Spaniards was really Moorish, was it not?… The Spaniards knew nothing about working silver except as they learned it from the Moors…The Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors.” 

While reading the novel, I found myself asking how Cather knew such depth of nuanced information about the American Southwest. Cather, who so often wrote of the Midwest and its European immigrant communities, had a fascination with the region, the Southwest first appearing in her work in 1909 with the short story “The Enchanted Bluff.” The region would emerge again in her writing in The Song of the Lark (1915), The Professor’s House (1925), and, of course, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). We currently exist in a time when writers are asked to almost exclusively write of our own experiences. This made me wonder: how had Cather embodied characters and landscapes so different from her own? She was a meticulous observer, I came to realize, of both human psychology and place. Take, for example, Father Latour’s journey to Santa Fe with his Navajo guide Eusabio and a pack mule. Latour is struck with splendor at the sight.

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

A voracious tourist, Cather first visited the American Southwest in 1912 on a trip to see her brother in Winslow, Arizona. During that trip, Cather wrote a friend, “The West always paralyzes me a little . . . I always feel afraid of losing something, and I don’t in the least know what it is.”4 Unlike Cather, I cannot recall my first experiences with the land—it is the mode of my existence. Born in a Denver hospital, I must have been only days old when I was first carried beneath that vast and brilliant blue sky. I cannot recall feeling a sense of loss or fear at the landscape in the way Cather could coming to the West at nine years old. Instead, I feel wholeness. I am of this place, and despite these differences in our backgrounds and perceptions, Death Comes for the Archbishop still amazes me with its enlivened depictions of landscape.

Rather than a mere backdrop, the physical lands of the novel are imbued with emotional resonance. Upon looking back at Santa Fe, Father Vaillant takes in the sight of the town “rosy in the morning light, the mountain behind it, and the hills close about it like two encircling arms.” The desert wind does not simply blow across the earth but makes “a hollow sound as it sucked down through the deep arroyo.” Cather insisted that words like arroyo and adobe were not altered for translated editions of the novel. There is no other way to say it, she insisted. In a letter to Knopf, objecting to errors in the French translation, Cather wrote, “How can one paraphrase a landscape which one has never seen?” But alongside the priests’ deep reverence for the land, they often reveal a sense of terror and incomprehensibility. It is a place that feels to them so featureless it is “crowded with features.”5 In one of the most affecting passages of the novel, “Snake Root,” a Pecos Pueblo man named Jacinto seeks shelter in an underground cave with Father Latour during a great and blinding snowstorm. The cavern is described as lofty and gothic, almost chapel-like. It is a moment charged with mystery and Father Latour’s fear at the unknowns of ancient custom and beliefs that predate Christianity on the continent.

Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.
“It is terrible,” he said at last, as he rose.

Terror, it should be said, does enter the narrative on more than one occasion. There is confusion about the landscape, fear of starvation and thirst, violence and massacres, villains of the highest Western order. In a novel that is woven with episodic moments of significance, the harrowing scene of a Mexican woman named Magdalena and her serial killer American husband reverberates long after one has finished reading the book. Near the village of Mora, the priests find themselves traveling into the night as their mules wither with exhaustion. They come upon a “wretched” adobe house where an American stranger appears at the door, inviting them to stay the night. Inside they find a home where dirty clothes and wet socks hang from chairs, and in that dark space she appears: Magdalena, a woman who at first the priests assume is “half-witted” with a “stupid face.” It is not surprising to read such frankly racist depictions of Mexican women in a novel written by a white writer in the 1920s, but what is surprising is what happens next. Magdalena, without utter- ing a sound, warns the priests that her husband will in fact kill them in the night.

Instantly that stupid face became intense, prophetic, full of awful meaning. With her finger she pointed them away, away!—two quick thrusts into the air. Then, with a look of horror beyond anything language could convey, she threw back her head and drew the edge of her palm quickly across her distended throat—and vanished. The doorway was empty; the two priests stood staring at it, speechless. That flash of electric passion had been so swift, the warning it communicated so vivid and definite, that they were struck dumb.
Father Joseph was the first to find his tongue. “There is no doubt of her meaning. Your pistol is loaded, Jean?” 

There is a tension throughout the narrative of what can be conveyed through language and what cannot. Magdalena, who at first is reduced by the priests to shorthand, a stereotype of intellectual ineptitude, proves to be a savior. I couldn’t help but wonder if Magdalena was somehow related to the many women of my community and family history, Mexican- American women who have fallen victim to brutalization at the hands of white American men.

When I learned that I had the opportunity to write this introduction, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to visit Red Cloud, Ne- braska, Willa Cather’s foundational home. Throughout my childhood, my family drove the long stretch of I-80 across Nebraska to visit our grandparents in Omaha. My father was born there, and my mother was relocated by her single mother in the 1970s to Grand Island. Our family in Nebraska, besides being Catholic, was not the same as my vast Chicano and Filipino side in Denver. For one, they are white, of Polish and German descent. What I knew of Catholicism is that it was one of the major roots to my family tree of several ethnicities and ancestries. Save for a Jewish maternal grandmother raised in a Catholic orphanage, of my varied ancestors their great commonality was religion.

In Nebraska, my ancestors were bakers and salesmen, and the cultural mode of the family was much more distant and silent than that of my maternal side. I can define this relation- ship through a prominent childhood memory. It is of my father standing in the driveway of his parents’ west Omaha home. He is saying goodbye to my grandfather, who is dying slowly of Parkinson’s disease. It is late November, and that flat world is cast in a great gray screen. The two men do not em- brace and there is no laughter or declarations of affection. My father does not utter, “I love you, Dad,” and his father does not utter, “I love you, Son.” They discreetly shake hands and that is that, and we are on our way, back home to Colorado.

While I was in Red Cloud, it was early summer and I was taken by the prairie scenery, the endless green and the way the wind rippled across the high grass. Birds lifted into flight and the town itself felt charged with stories. I stayed the night in the Cathers’ summer house and walked the hardwood floors, imagining a young Willa visiting her family on trips home from her busy life in New York City. Before leaving town, I made it a point to stop at Mr. Shimerda’s suicide grave from My Ántonia, but I never made it. A tornado warning came over the radio and the air turned acrid and grim. I raced along county roads, hoping to avoid the storm, and as I charged out of Red Cloud, I couldn’t help but notice that the sand hills oddly reminded me of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. When I arrived to meet my parents later that night, I asked my father, “How did your people, my people, arrive in Nebraska?”

My American story and the history of my ancestors is one of convergence. It does not begin in 1776. Our stories start elsewhere, in the center of our world. Death Comes for the Archbishop speaks to the idea of nation building. How are a people formed? Who gives us our common stories and how do those tales permeate into the collective? Perhaps it is through missionary priests, or a public school system, media, literature, art, but there is a guiding mythology that is curated to fit the needs of the nation. As a Chicana of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, defining my cultural heritage and the historical framework that created a person like me often proves difficult. Death Comes for the Arch- bishop made an aspect of my own history tangible through story. I have been confounded for much of my life by the American desire to place identity neatly into one box. I have been asked to narrow my cultural heritage, to make things easier, streamlined, avoidant. One of the most surprising aspects of Death Comes for the Archbishop is the way that Cather seems to predict the emergence of future generations born out of convergence. That shared glance, the acknowledgment of something destined to be. It’s as if the furthest reaches of the Cather imagination are somehow, nearly one hundred years later, meeting with my own.

Now it is with great pleasure that I invite you, dear reader, into the Southwest lands of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Perhaps this novel will teach you something new about human nature and the layered conquest of our nation, who gets to tell stories and who doesn’t, but more than anything I hope this masterpiece informs a deeper understanding of yourself and of your own history. But if not, Death Comes for the Archbishop is still one heck of an adventure, a novel that has endured for a century, and in a hundred more years, I would wager that Father Latour and Father Vaillant are still riding their mules throughout the imaginations of readers across the globe, even in the most desolate of deserts.

__________________________________

A new introduction by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.  From Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, published by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Introduction copyright © 2023 by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.

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

*

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

**

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

Nine hundred pages, 1,233 dramatic characters speaking 844,421 words, but the most notable statistic is 36, as in the number of plays which appear in the first folio of William Shakespeare. Printed by the father-and-son pair of William and Isaac Jaggard at their shop near St. Paul’s Cathedral, 750 copies of the first folio would be produced and sold in 1623. Never before had works of drama been compiled into one compendium such as this, an elaborate (and heavy) anthology – the playwright himself having passed away seven years before – which divided his corpus between tragedies, romances, and histories. The volume was designed to be a keepsake, something taken care of, treasured, and passed down, an estimation of drama’s importance that was comparatively novel. There were a variety of valedictory poems affixed to the beginning of the anthology; the iconic woodcut of the author as rendered by the relative novice engraver Martin Droeshout, the resultant picture of a balding man with an egg-shaped head becoming Shakespeare for most people. The folio was, in many ways, the book where as readers and thinkers, people first met him.

If we’re still considering dimensions, then the most important number just might be 18 – the number of plays which appear for the first time ever in the folio. Slightly over half of Shakespeare’s plays had been previously published in the far more expendable quarto form, but the rest saw printers’ ink for the first time in 1623, which means that had the folio not been published, we might never have been able to read Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest. Of those 750 copies of the book in that initial run, around 233 are known to still be extant, with the largest bulk of them in a single location being the 82 held by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, directly across from the Capitol Building. A temple established for a single volume (and some other things as well, of course) Few printed books have ever exerted as much of a charged aura as Shakespeare’s first folio, arguably not even Guttenberg’s Bible. There is, obviously, the issue of relative rarity and thus price – just this year one of the few remaining folios in private hands sold for a little under eleven million dollars.

Yet as Shakespeare writes in Cymbeline, “All gold and silver rather turn to dirt!” for the value of the folio has always been in more than its price tag, rather there is a certain mysteriousness to the enchantments which the collection has cast for four hundred years. Often his adversary and sometimes his friend, Shakespeare’s fellow playwright Ben Jonson enthused in an introductory poem to the folio the oft-quoted contention that the Bard was “not of an age, but for all time.” The details of such a claim can obviously be debated, which the several scholarly experts whom Literary Hub has assembled on the occasion of this anniversary very well might do. Still, the fact that we’re discussing the folio such an incredible distance after it was first published at least answers that question partially, for it may be worth considering if that collection didn’t just introduce Shakespeare to the world, but that it also invented him.

Joining me in a discussion of Shakespeare’s folio on this auspicious anniversary are four of the most esteemed Shakespeare scholars working today, whose writing encompasses questions of how we read the Bard in his own context, issues of race and gender in the plays, and the manner in which the reception of the playwright over the centuries has evolved. They include Brandi Adams of Arizona State University, an expert on book history; Tiffany Stern at the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom who is a specialist on early modern editing; Farah Karim-Cooper of King’s College London, who is also the director of education at the Globe Theatre; Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library; and Emma Smith of the University of Oxford who has written widely on Shakespeare’s reception.

—Ed Simon

Just seven years ago various publications and cultural institutions recognized the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s passing. What makes the posthumous publication of the first folio of all of his plays seven years later an event worth memorializing? Why should the printing of a book merit significant attention?

Tiffany Stern: Shakespeare wasn’t writing plays while he was being born in 1564 or dying in 1616. So those are anniversaries of a person. But Shakespeare isn’t famous as a person, he’s famous as a playwright. This Folio anniversary is a celebration of what we actually admire Shakespeare for: a set of extraordinary plays. That’s why the Folio’s anniversary is so significant.

Brandi Adams: People (particularly those who are fans of Shakespeare’s) seem to attach a great deal of meaning to the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare plays as an apotheosis of sorts–a culmination of all of his work into a single fancy volume. The book itself, I think, functions as a living memorial to him, and one that is very tangible (thanks to the efforts of librarians, archivists, administrators, and other staff in university, public, and private libraries as well as other institutions to exhibit the book). For many people seeing the book is perhaps much easier to get a glimpse of the book than making a pilgrimage to Stratford to visit Shakespeare’s grave. I think it can be a reminder to people of a set of plays that have special meaning to them, whether they’ve seen or acted in memorable performances, have learned from influential teachers, or have enjoyed reading the plays on their own.

As for the printing of that particular book meriting attention,  I think that it is a way for the general public to get an introduction to the complex nature of the printing of all early books–and Shakespeare’s 1623 folio provides the opening to that discussion. Learning the history of how the book was constructed is vital to understanding that this was never just Shakespeare’s work. This 1623 Folio had so many people involved in its creation and we should acknowledge their active work in the collection’s production–whether it was  setting the type, completing onsite copyediting, rolling ink over the type, pulling the horizontal levers to press the platen in order making the impressions on the paper, ordering the pages, sewing them together, and then eventually sending the copy off for binding–all of these steps involved intense physical labor that went into this process. And it is also necessary for readers to know that even with all the care that people put into this work, no two copies of the 1623 are alike because of the complexities of the process. The book is not perfect. For me, it makes it more interesting because it is not perfect. In the end, this invites us all to think about the instability of the text that so many readers, actors, directors, and scholars hold dear.

Michael Witmore: There is no doubt that the First Folio was conceived as a memorial of sorts, an idea that was carried over into the design of the Folger Shakespeare Library itself, which in 1932 was understood as a living memorial to Shakespeare. (Few people know that the original full name of the Folger is Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library.) If one looks closely at the Paul Cret building that houses the collection, one can see the typography from the Folio that was adopted for the inscriptions on the building. Having an architectural memorial enclose a bibliographic one is an intentional feature of the design. Quotations chosen to appear outside and inside this deliberately “bookish”  building further reinforce the idea that the Folio is a monument surviving time, just as the lyric poet preserves the beauty of the beloved in verse..

Farah Karim-Cooper: I agree that the 400th celebration of the Folio marks an anniversary of the works, which from a theatrical point of view, is what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare. But I think the Folio is also significant in that it invited and encouraged a readership of Shakespeare, and while this is accompanied by the danger of him being seen as a static monument or the works untouchable, preserved in aspic, it enabled Shakespeare to be read widely, and therefore more performed and translated globally. It actually created more opportunities for Shakespeare to be interpreted and adapted and owned by everyone who comes into contact with the plays.

Emma Smith: I think what’s significant about this anniversary is, as Tiffany says, it’s the anniversary of the work not the life. I’d add to that: it’s the moment when these plays leave behind their author, their original actors, audiences, and playhouses, and make a bid for freedom. Ben Jonson’s famous ‘not of an age but for all time’ is a kind of envoy – sending this book into the future.

The folio may have been the first comprehensive volume of Shakespeare’s plays, but it wasn’t the first time that he was printed. What would be different about what we know about Shakespeare and how he is remembered had the folio never rolled off the printing press four centuries ago?

Brandi Adams: Christopher Marlowe would have been able to shine brighter throughout the longue duree (I am only partially joking here). I think that the study of early modern English theater would have included Shakespeare as one of many playwrights who added to a vital and exciting time in theatrical history. Collectively, without the 1623 Shakespeare Folio, we might know even more than we already do about other truly exciting playwrights working at the time. (Or at least we might get to teach them more often.)

Michael Witmore: The inclusion of a Catalogue page that divides the plays into three genres – comedies, histories, and tragedies – is hugely important. That single act of classifying the plays  into three types is full of information, and researchers have been using these judgments from true domain experts) to identify linguistic features specific to individual genres. Without this initial labeling of the 36 plays, most analyses would be circular in ways that make the results uninteresting.

Tiffany Stern: Before the Folio, eighteen of Shakespeare’s solely written plays had been published in little quartos or octavos (books made from sheets paper folded into four or eight). Those plays were sometimes in a good state, perhaps coming directly from the acting company, and sometimes, like The Contention of York and Lancaster (a version of 2 Henry VI) and Richard Duke of York (a version of 3 Henry VI), in a pretty corrupt state, apparently illegitimately acquired (a rough draft; a text scribbled down from notes and/or memory). So without the Folio, over half of the plays we love wouldn’t exist, and Shakespeare would not be ‘Shakespeare’. But the Folio also made the works of Shakespeare famous as reading texts. That became important when theatres were closed from 1642 to 1660; over those eighteen years people relied on reading Shakespeare’s Folio to remind them about what good theatre had been. Then, when playhouses opened afresh and there were no new plays – none having been written for eighteen years – people returned to Shakespeare’s Folio, amongst other plays, to kickstart their new theatre. So the Folio not only gave us Shakespeare, but kept him in circulation, both on page and stage. It’s because of the Folio that we still read and act Shakespeare today.

Emma Smith: Two things in particular: no attested image of the playwright – that’s done a huge amount for Shakespeare’s ongoing recognizability and, perhaps, perpetuated the (unhelpful) idea that this book is a kind of personal biography. And if you look at the spread of Shakespeare’s pre-1623 print presence, it’s particularly located in plays about medieval English history. As we know, these are plays with ongoing resonances about power, populism and succession, but they might also have suggested that the no-Folio Shakespeare was a more local figure, less likely to go global.

Farah Karim-Cooper: We would think of Shakespeare, as Emma says, as a more local playwright, but also as a less theatrically daring one. During the Restoration period not everyone agreed that Shakespeare’s use of the supernatural and special effects was worthwhile. But plays like Julius Caesar with its cosmic and storm effects produced by fireworks and Macbeth with its thunder and lightning, owl screeches and witches give us a Shakespeare who was aware of the dynamic relationship between dramaturgy, language and theatrical effects.

A book is arguably a collaborative product—what type of creative decisions did those responsible for the folio make which should be better known and understood? Men like the editors John Heminges and Henry Condell, or the printer William and Isaac Jaggard and publisher Edward Blount – how were they partial creators of the Shakespeare mythos? 

Michael Witmore: There is so much that is known about the book, and so much that is not. If creativity is expressed in choices, we have reasonably satisfying explanations of the biggest choices that were made by the many responsible for this book. But we might learn more about the meaning of some of these choices, for example, the choice of a folio as both a practical solution to gathering 36 plays and as an expression of cultural prestige; the choice of a portrait as the predominant element on the title page; the choice to bundle or segment the plays by generic type. It is also interesting to ask about the ways in which the creation of the Folio is not creative. How does the First Folio unconsciously carry over conventions from theatrical practice or from earlier forms of play publishing, including Jonson’s folio? You can learn a lot from what people do automatically or unconsciously, and these aspects of the books design and production are necessarily de-emphasized when the book is characterized as a singular publishing event.

Brandi Adams: Although I cannot definitively say that Heminges and Condell were the editors (at least in the ways we might think about the work in contemporary terms), their dedication of the book to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery helped to establish it as important– one that needed to be shepherded into the world in a specific way. Presenting the 1623 collection as a monument to their deceased friend was indeed creative; it helped set the stage for how later editors of Shakespeare (including Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and Edward Capell’s ten volume edition of 1768) would begin to shape him into the figure readers and scholars are continually engaged with today. As for William and Issaac Jaggard’s and Edward Blount’s contributions, I highly recommend Ben Higgins book Shakespeare’s Syndicate that addresses the group of men (including John Smethwik and William Aspley–as well as some women including Isaac Jaggard’s wife Elizabeth) who made important decisions that lead to innovations in the creation, marketing and life of the 1623 Shakespeare Folio.

Tiffany Stern: The Folio was published seven years after Shakespeare died; it is therefore ‘by’ people who put time and effort – that Shakespeare did not – into preserving his work. Brandi mentions above Ben Higgins’ excellent Shakespeare’s Syndicate on the four publishers who financed the Folio, Jaggard, Blount, Aspley and Smethwick, some of whom lost money as a result. And there were many other people involved in putting the Folio together too: the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell who gathered the plays; the scribe Ralph Crane who wrote (some of) them out in neat for the printers; the compositors who rendered them into type; the people who inked and pulled the pages. I’m particularly interested in the compositors (typesetters). We don’t know many of their names, and yet they were Shakespeare’s first ‘editors’. They had to read the pages of handwritten playtext that were pinned above their cases of type, and then determine how to spell, punctuate and capitalize each line, on the fly, while also making the same set of decisions for the next line. In a time of unfixed spelling, that’s tricky: and their decisions have shaped aspects of the layout, sound and rhythm of the Shakespeare we have.

Emma Smith: Agree with everyone here! Someone put the history plays in order of the chronology of their kings, not of their composition, and reordered the titles to make what the theatre director Trevor Nunn has called ‘Shakespeare’s box-set’. That decision has shaped these plays in quite different ways from the experience of reading or seeing them as individual dramas. Since they went to that trouble on the histories, is there a logic to the order of the plays in the other two sections that we haven’t yet been able to discern?

Farah Karim-Cooper: I agree with everyone too! What the editors and publishers of the Folio did was to establish a monument, not to a theatrical moment nor to the writer’s process, but to the imagination that emerges from the plays and to the man himself. We’ve spoken of the readerly identity of the Folio that was deliberately crafted and articulated clearly in the Epistle to the Reader. The collaborative effort to produce this book did indeed contribute to the Shakespeare mythos—it helped concretise ideas of his genius; for example, when the editors describe in the Epistle that Shakespeare’s hand and mind went together, they mean he barely made any errors. He was next to perfect.

An imposing six foot by six foot steel box in mid-century medical gray with two projectors on either end and a pair of binoculars in the middle, the Hinman Collator looks more like something used by neurologists to diagnose brain tumors than a machine for analyzing Renaissance literary texts. The eponymous invention was fashioned by Charlton Hinman, a former Second-World-War-cryptologist-turned-Rhodes-Scholar who enjoyed tremendous success as a bibliographer and scholar of what’s come to be known as “book history.” Employed at various points by both Johns Hopkins and the University of Kansas, Hinman’s celebrated “Collator” deployed a combination of mirrors and lights to give scholars the ability to compare superficially identical pieces of print. The inventor himself noted in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America that his device was “at once awesome and a little ridiculous,” comparing it to a Rube Goldberg machine and admitting that it “presents an especially odd spectacle when in use.” The Collator was designed so that when somebody peered through the binoculars they would be presented with the optical illusion of the two different pages being superimposed upon each other, a trick that would make any variations between those works immediately obvious (as opposed to the laborious work of comparing those texts letter-by-letter). “Trust not my reading nor my observations,” writes Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing, “Which with experimental seal doth warrant/The tenor of my book.” Perhaps, rather, trust the Collator.

The machine allowed Hinman to compare fifty-five supposedly identical copies of William Shakespeare’s first folio—the 1623 comprehensive printing of thirty-six of the Bard’s plays, with nineteen of them reproduced for the first time, now celebrating its four-hundredth anniversary—and to conclude that there were slight variations across all of these individual books. None of the folios were identical; sometimes a letter or word would be different, evidence of the typesetter at William Jaggard’s London printshop tinkering with errors throughout the process. Or, because every soft tin and lead sort would degrade a bit with each printing due to friction, Hinman was able to ascertain the rough order in which each individual book rolled off the press by charting that degradation to individual printed letters over time. With lenses, light bulbs, mirrors, glass, and metal, Hinman was able to illuminate (literally) the particulars of Shakespearean book production. A 1950 New York Times article notes that “During a six weeks’ period in the summer of 1949, Dr. Hinman worked in the Folger Library and compared 3,000 pages from the First Folio. With his Collator he completed in six weeks a job it would take one man two years of careful reading to accomplish.” Helpful mostly to bibliographers, fifty-nine of the devices were manufactured by Arthur M. Johnson, a former Naval officer based in Silver Spring, Maryland, who sold them to libraries, universities, and according to legend, the CIA, the agency having noted Hinman’s expertise during the war in analyzing aerial bombardment photographs using a similar mechanism.

Nobody in my generation of Renaissance scholars, or the generation who trained me, or even the generation which trained them, has ever worked with a Hinman Collator, and today, a quantitative humanist would undoubtedly use digital technology. Despite having long since become obsolete, both the Hinman Collator and its inventor—the ingenious nuclear age humanist who worked like a scientist—have developed a quasi-mythic reputation. Once while in Scotland, I heard the influential  Shakespearean and materialist literary theorist John Drakakis wax rhapsodic about the Collator in a manner that was almost sensual, and I have to say that I get it. Having never worked with a Hinman Collator, I have had an opportunity to examine one, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University’s exhibit “Inventing Shakespeare: Text, Technology and the Four Folios” where I unsteadily approached the metal creature with both deference and awe.

Hinman’s research led to the 1966 publication of The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, whereby the scholar picked through the material dross to produce a Platonist fiction, a “corrected” work that reproduced an ideal version of the first folio which appears like none of the 233 copies of that book which still survive, or presumably of the 750 that constituted that initial 1623 print-run. More interesting than that edition itself was Hinman’s observation that none of the folios themselves were identical, that their uniformity when compared to manuscripts was superficial: each book is its own material individual. What the Hinman Collator represents to me is an understanding of literature which is estimably physical, that locates the grandeur of the written world not in some abstracted, transcendent, ineffable place, but very much in the material realm, in the body.

Literature is a thing produced, revised, disseminated, and preserved through material means; even in the case of spectral electrons zapping down the circuitry in your smartphone, which are as material as the first folio’s paper made of rags and oak gall ink. The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a point when he claimed that Shakespeare’s writing emerged from the “unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind,” but it was also produced by his ink-stained hand, by the contortions and positions of his performers, and the judicious decisions of his printers laboring in a hot and loud shop “at the sign of the Half-Eagle and Key in Barbican,” as F.E. Halliday wrote in his biography of Shakespeare.

My own materialism, fervent though it may be, veers into a type of wooly, incarnational mysticism that I imagine would be anathema to my more sober Marxist friends, but for me the book very much is the thing. I’ve had a few opportunities to actually touch the crinkled, brown paper of a first folio, the fine threads of the rendered rags which compose the individual pages visible and slightly textured to the touch, the individual fraying of faded black letters indicative of the sorts wearing down printing after printing. I’ve been able to turn the page of a first folio to the frontispiece of MacBeth at Lehigh University’s special collections, and to slowly paw through Carnegie Mellon University’s first folio and linger over lines like “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” from The Tempest in its earliest printing. At the risk of sounding sentimental, there are many things that go through one’s mind, not least of which is a sense of reverence for the sterling craftsmanship of what was still a mass-produced object; startling to consider when most of our contemporary books will transform into an acidic pulpy mass before the end of the century. Skill is why the book survived, why people wanted to pass it down, why so many still remain, especially when compared to other books from the time period. I’ve worked in the archive with sixteenth-century books where there is only one remaining copy, far fewer than the first folio’s 233 extant copies. Monetarily, these are worth far less than a folio, and the librarians scarcely paid me any attention, even though I could have suddenly lost my mind and began ripping pages and eating them.. That’s because nobody cares about Thomas Crashaw, but Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Maybe initially the binding and pages and cover, the thread and paper and leather, can explain the endurance of the folio, but it’s fair to say that if we think of a folio as a material object, then it’s certainly a relic, too. By definition, all relics are physical, and if the relic is where matter finds its apotheosis, then it’s hard not to see the folio as a sacred object.

Consider a poetics that acknowledges how embodied literature is, where reading and writing are as much of the body as they are of the spirit. Literature is more material than otherworldly, for in the form of the book—whether hand-written or printed, on a computer screen or even just held within the matrix of neurons and their synapses which is the human brain—we experience the Word become flesh, or at least paper. Which is why on this four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s first folio, that tremendously important physical book that was as responsible for the invention of the Bard as the words within it, it’s worth meditating on the physicality of his literature. There were other folios (that name, incidentally, referring to the full size of the paper used, which is simply folded in half, as opposed to quartos which are folded four times, octavos folded eight times, etc.) of Shakespeare, a second edition in 1632, a third in 1663, and a fourth in 1685. Then the innumerable editions of his complete works over the centuries; today there is The Norton Shakespeare with its bible paper and its mottled jester on the cover, The Riverside Shakespeare with its soft, effeminate portrait of the author on the front, The Arden Shakespeare and the Complete Works prepared for the Royal Shakespeare Company, blessed with the imprimatur of Captain Picard and Magneto themselves. There are innumerable editions of cheap paperbacks and deluxe coffee-table books, open-source academic websites and annotated scholarly works. But the folio was the first, and the first is the one that matters. As Jonathan Dollimore noted in the introduction to his landmark Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, “culture does not (cannot) transcend the material forces and relations of production,” and this anniversary of the first folio allows us to consider something wholly more important than a mere man dead for four centuries.

What must be remembered is how much of what made the folio important—why it had such a high print-run and why so many copies survive—is due to economics. Jaggard’s folio was intended to be a keepsake, an expensive keepsake, and its massive nine-hundred pages was unprecedented in theatrical history. Lacking in prestige as a form, at least compared to the elevated modes of epic and lyric poetry, plays had previously only been published in hastily set and cheaply printed quartos, small pocket-sized paperbacks which could make an author or a troupe some money should the theaters be closed due to the plague or Puritans. Slightly under half of Shakespeare’s plays were published during his lifetime in that format, though they are frequently radically different from the “authoritative” versions in the folio (Lear lives, Hamlet says “To be or not to be, aye, there’s the rub”). The 1623 folio indicated that those who mattered believed that the posthumous Shakespeare warranted such a costly volume. Well-set and well-bound with a handsome engraving of the author by the Flemish artist William Droeshout and a host of valedictory poems by poets like Ben Jonson which functioned like blurbs, the investors who funded this initial printing felt that it was worth the financial risk. The upshot of this was two-fold, for the appearance of the folio also helped to manufacture Shakespeare, in the very literal sense of preserving almost half of his plays that had never before appeared in print as quarto or otherwise, as well as announcing the author himself as a mind worth preserving.

For that reason, Shakespeare’s first folio remains a touchstone of bibliography, a book fabled for both its importance and its price. Monetary value seems a gauche criterion to judge a book by, yet it’s inescapable when it comes to the folio. Only a handful of printed books—as opposed to hard-lettered manuscripts, which can often occupy an entirely different stratification of expense—really compare in price to a complete folio. A first edition of James Audubon’s gorgeously illustrated The Birds of America, published serially between 1827 and 1838, sold at Christie’s for 10.27 million dollars in 2010; The Bay Psalm Book printed in Boston in 1640 went for over 14 million dollars three years later. By comparison, should a Gutenberg Bible come up to auction anytime soon, it’s estimated it could fetch a cool 35 million. Of course, Shakespeare’s is the most expensive work of literature ever sold, even if scripture and ornithology have pocketed more:.

As evidence of the enchanted aura which the physical book possesses, consider how libraries so often advertise their possession of a folio, a physical book unnecessary at this point for generating new scholarship. The J.P. Morgan Library owns two, both on display at its Midtown Manhattan location, as does the staid Newberry Library, just outside of the Loop in Chicago. The Victoria & Albert Museum has three behind its rococo façade on Cromwell Road in London’s tony Kensington, while the Huntington in sunny Los Angeles has four, and the red-brick modernist monolith that is the British Library has five. The dreaming spires of Oxford and Cambridge each have four, while the University of London has only one. In the grand patriotic war of Shakespeareana between his native country and the United States, the latter firmly outpaces the former—fifty remain in the United Kingdom, while there are 149 in the United States. The granite lions of Fifth Avenue guard six at the New York Public Library, the Gilded Age Boston Library in puritan Copley Square has one, and the Free Library of Philadelphia has a copy annotated in John Milton’s hand. Even the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library has one. Thirty-one institutions of American higher education are in possession of a copy, including all the usual Ivy League suspects (not Dartmouth though, or Cornell). For sheer chutzpah, nothing compares to the Folger Shakespeare Library in terms of uncorrupted, undistilled, unadulterated Bardolatry, a veritable secular temple to Shakespeare with an astounding 82 copies, the single largest cache in existence, and 32 more than the entirety of Great Britain. All of those folios, purchased with money gained from Standard Oil and named for a distant relation to the coffee fortune, housed in a gorgeous silvery-grey art deco bunker on 2^nd and East Capitol in Southeast Washington DC, only two blocks from the Capitol Building whose giant eggshell dome dominates your view after departing from the dark, cloistered Tudor environs of the library within.

But while the first folio may be a symbol, and an icon, and a relic, it is a material object before anything else, and it reminds us that all literature must be written on the body and through the body and with the body. Shakespeare’s plays are a static reminder of what was once physical, of the movement of performance, of blocking and staging and an actor’s comportment. The folio is record of breath and heartbeat rendered into the idiom of rag and ink. It is not some absolute and perfected soul, but rather each folio is a different body, linked only in their diverse and beautiful imperfections, gesturing towards that imagined spirit of Literature to which we aspire but never reach. Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford infamously reads that “cursed be he that moves my bones,” but he was never really buried there, not really. The actual tomb of the playwright can be found in these first folios, where with material accuracy and anatomical precision, the printers declared that Shakespeare had been “cured and perfect of their limbs.” If you seek his body, here it is.

Shakespeare’s First Folio Title Page

Shakespeare’s First Folio Table of Contents

Shakespeare’s First Folio — The Tempest

Shakespeare’s First Folio — The Tempest (page 2)

Shakespeare’s First Folio — Henry V

Shakespeare’s First Folio — Romeo & Juliet

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Images © The British Library Board, excerpted with permission from Shakespeare’s First Folio: 400th Anniversary Facsimile Edition: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, Published According to the Original Copies, published by Rizzoli in the USA and The British Library Publishing in the United Kingdom.