Basic Recon July 2023
new reads (ingalls, ginzburg, whitehead, hayes), good pieces, books I liked
(If you want to read extremely good long-form criticism, check out Cleveland Review of Books, the magazine I publish and work on with a “dedicated and brilliant” staff.)
I’m a bit late on this one, so my apologies. This newsletter is in three parts: classic book preview as I’ve been doing, some articles I read and enjoyed (I’m just going to post ones I’ve read today and one that I liked from last week, but in the future I’ll compile my favorites from the whole month and be more curatorial…although I might tap in on a weekly basis and share articles from the previous week. Ideally I’d like to chop this enterprise into a more bite-sized form, not least because I can be more thorough that way), and finally a few books I read in June that I quite liked and recommend, without regard to when they came out.
I’ll preface this first part by saying that July, by all accounts, seems like a really slow month for publishing, which is reflected by the relatively low amount of books I chose. Anyways, here goes.
Kate Zambreno. The Light Room: On Art and Care. Riverhead. / Gonna kick it to Hannah Bonner in the corner for this one (spoiler: she calmly drains the shot, aka wrote a great piece on the book for us at CRB)
Colson Whitehead. Crook Manifesto. Doubleday. / Opus on Harlem in the 70s.
Natalia Ginzburg. The Road to the City. New Directions. Translated from Italian by Gini Alhadeff / Apparently her first book. A good friend me turned me onto Ginzburg last month so I’m super excited for this. A “slim volume” in “story book” form via New Directions.
Rachel Ingalls. In the Act. New Directions. / Came across
Ingalls same exact way I came across Ginzburg. I’m slightly more excited for this than the Ginzburg since there is so much Ginzburg already out there. Predictably, a black comedy with science-y aspects and a bad husband (“inventing new forms of infidelity",” according to the publisher’s copy).
Fernando Pessoa. The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos. New Directions. Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello. / Pessoa had all sorts of pseudonyms he wrote under. Here is some poetry he wrote under the pseudonym “Álvaro de Campos.” I guess the pseudonyms allowed one of the most beautifully unhinged writers ever to be even more unhinged. The freest people aren’t content, devising ever more ways to gain more freedom, a constraint placed on them by their own discontent (not free?). Or something, I’m kidding.
John McPhee. Tabula Rasa: Volume One. FSG. / McPhee’s Draft No. 4, a book of essays on craft, has been an integral guide for my writing and countless others. He’s written countless profiles, stories, and books, and mentored many influential writers in his teaching career. So of course I’m tuned into his “reappraisal” of his career, on work unfinished, etc. McPhee taking himself as his subject. For the heads, I wonder what the ABC/D looks like here…
Terrance Hayes. Watch Your Language. Penguin. / Essays on prominent but perhaps underappreciated African-American poets by a prominent and increasingly appreciated and becoming-canonized poet. Exercise in re-writing/claiming the canon. Probably the most universally looked forward to book of the month amongst serious readers.
Per Petterson. Men in My Situation. Graywolf. Translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey. / Graywolf has kinda earned my stamp of approval without me even knowing a lick about whatever it is their putting out. They rarely miss. Book seems to be a Norwegian guy struggling to process the death of his parents, and his wife (in Knausgaard fashion) leaves, with their three kids, him.
Rikki Ducornet. The Plotinus. Coffee House. / Everything I said about Graywolf also applies to Coffee House. This book seems a bit more like a “novel of ideas” and it’s giving “prison notebooks.” Dude in a dystopian future arrested by a robot and reflects on his previous reading, life activities with his “group,” and “the pleasures of life’s small freedoms.”
Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya. The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos. Two Dollar Radio. / Another press I love (Ohio!). Soccer, Latinx identity, re-fashioning the self, alive specters of colonialism, and uh, love.
Yana Vagner. To the Lake. Deep Vellum. / If there’s one thing that Deep Vellum knows how to do, it’s publish a Russian-in-Translation book. That’s Will Evans’ scholarly specialty. Seems like political dissidence x (Bonnie and Clyde? couple on run) x “a harsh Russian winter.” Shout out to my friend Elina Alter who translated another Russian-in-Translation book for Deep Vellum, It’s the End of the World My Love.
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Pieces:
Percival Everett on the Real in Fiction in Yale Review
Brian Dillon on August Blue by Deborah Levy in 4Columns
Grayson Scott on “Drone Realism” in The Baffler
Jack Hanson on Mario Vargas Llosa in The Nation.
Patricia Lockwood on DFW for LRB
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Books I’ve read and liked.
Natalia Ginzburg- The Dry Heart
Kazuo Ishiguro- Artist of the Floating World
Claire Dederer- Monsters
Roland Barthes- Camera Lucida
Amia Srinivasan- The Right to Sex
Michael Clune- White Out
Roberto Bolaño- Distant Star
Andy Hines- Outside Literary Studies
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Thank you for reading,
BL xx