| I'm not one for saying "best" or "favorite," but I did want you to click on this email. I read a lot, and usually the books are not brand-new, so I thought I'd share the ones that stood out, will be sticking with me, and are likely to appear in my work again in the coming months (or already have appeared). If you need a holiday gift for a literary friend or family member, consider it a guide. | | The Food Essay begins January 13. It will be five weeks of close reading, discussion, and considering how to approach different types of essays in our work. |
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| | The Bookshop.org links are, as always, affiliate links, meaning I'll earn a small commission if you buy through them. I've excluded books I've blurbed or that I've included in the book club and salons. |
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| The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus
It's perhaps a given that if Chris Kraus has written something new, that it's going to be my favorite book of the year. She's a writer whose own writing but also whose own taste, as an editor at Semitext(e), has formed so much of my own perspective on what writing can do—especially women's writing. This is a much more traditional novel, published by Scribner, and is told in three parts, with a protagonist named Catt Greene who is essentially Chris Kraus: the first in a Connecticut childhood with striving working-class parents who never quite get where they want to go and the rebellions available to a smart teenage girl of the 1960s; the second when Catt has grown up and become a successful writer when her first book I Love Dick has a renaissance, but she is dealing with a second husband who has substance abuse issues and attempted cancellations; in the third, Catt does true crime the way only she can, in a story where a young smart girl ends up involved in a horrible, meth-induced crime. It's a story of how the U.S. has changed for the worse, living next to addiction, and the precarity of the artist's life and popularity. I read a major review of it that called it disjointed. I think it's a great achievement. | I have an essay in my head that looks at this book, All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert (reminder that you don't get a medal for hating Eat Pray Love), and Care and Feeding: A Memoir by Laurie Woolever—all of these get into the nitty-gritty fucked-upness of addiction from different angles, and bring up a lot to think about for me about honesty, aging, gender, and, frankly, whiteness. When you read On Eating, you'll understand a bit more about the role of addiction in my family, but not the full story by any stretch—I wouldn't know it, anyway. I've defined myself against addiction, out of abject fear. | The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman
I devoured Schulman's book on solidarity, which takes us into fights for Palestinian liberation and the Act Up movement, and includes a great lesson from helping women get abortions during Franco's fascist rule of Spain. Schulman's clarity of thought and politics has always been of the utmost importance to me—from The Gentrification of the Mind to Conflict Is Not Abuse to Let the Record Show—and this is as clear-eyed, personal, and practical while also being beautiful and revelatory. | The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman by Didier Eribon
Here, Eribon—who in Returning to Reims "came out" as working class—tries to figure out an ethics and a politics of aging and care through the story of his mother's life and passing in an old-age home. It's far more emotional than his first memoir because of the tenderness he feels towards his mother (making the contrast even stronger when he despises her for racism) and his own impending aging. The lucky among us will age, but who will speak for us? That's the question here. I wrote more about how much I love Eribon's work in "On Fate" and recommend this brief ArtForum review of Returning to Reims from when it was published (I no longer read ArtForum but the archives…!). | Animal Stories by Kate Zambreno
I'm obsessed right now with the role of animals in women's climate-change-age art, because I think there's something there that I haven't yet wrapped my head around. I've been thinking about it in terms of Amelia Ulman's Magic Farm, the work of the artist Camille Henrot, and also Kate Zambreno's Animal Stories, which is a chronicle of the zoo and Kafka. Writers writing on Kafka is a favorite genre of mine to begin with, and Zambreno is a favorite writer, and so this is something I'm going to go back to again as I form my thoughts around current creative manifestations of ecofeminism. (I've got a copy of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs on my desk.) | Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood
Simply a stunner, a memoir with so much formal play and absolute ravishing intensity. Hood refuses victimhood through literary means and emerges bloodied but triumphant. I wrote a bit more about this book in "Against Relatability." | On the Calculation of Volume series by Solvej Balle
I wrote about these books in "On Seasons," but it's a literary sci-fi series in which a woman is repeating the same day over and over while most of the world keeps waking up to it anew. It's about time, climate change, and our duties to others, among much else, and the third volume just came out in English translation. New Directions used to rule my life in my early twenties so I'm happy to be back in the fold. (Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin is on my to-be-read list!) | Name by Constance Debré
Debré doesn't need you to like her, which is such a facile thing to say, but if you want to read a likable narrator, don't go here. This is the final book in the trilogy: Playboy, Love Me Tender, and then Name. It's about privilege and degradation, and I kind of love how horrible the narrator is, posturing as though you could ever truly reject privilege when it is built into your family's very name. I also liked this Lux review. | Care and Feeding: A Memoir by Laurie Woolever
The pattern in these books and the pattern in my taste is an honesty that isn't afraid of filth, dirt, the real unpleasant shit of life. Woolever—the former assistant and co-author of Anthony Bourdain—proves herself worthy of her own literary mantle here, as we follow her making her way in food and fumbling through a marriage, motherhood, and alcoholism. | Antimimemtics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nada Asparouhova
For something different! I loved this tight book put out on Metalabel that looks at various kinds of digital success as people learn to keep their mouths shut more on the public web. Good for anyone who's creating on the internet. I recommend The Art Angle's interview with Asparouhova. | | | | | | | The Holiday Giveaway | I like to sprinkle member giveaways throughout the year, but I thought I'd use the holiday season to give everyone a shot at a big stack of cookbooks. Comment on this post if you'd like to enter, and I'll choose a winner randomly on Friday and ship the books out the following Monday. U.S. readers only—I'm sorry. |
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