Park Slope Reader

Anna Storm

Best of Summer: Summer Reader (2018)

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Whether you’re looking for a fun beach read or a serious time that’ll keep your mind sharp in the heat, we’ve got you covered with 10 of summer’s hottest books.

1. Florida, by Lauren Groff

This collection of short stories from the acclaimed author of Fates and Furies is a dark dive into the minds of people struggling with themselves—and with the menacing strangeness of the weather in the Sunshine State. A vacationer who waits out a storm with a creepy shopkeeper; a grad student who becomes homeless; and an author who frets over her sons’ futures are just a few of the characters you’ll meet in this meditation on what Groff, who lives in Gainesville, calls a “reptilian, dangerous, teeming” state.

2. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh

A kind of Valley of the Dolls set in post-Y2K NYC, Moshfegh’s third novel follows a wealthy 20-something so tired of her lonely, vapid life, she opts for a year-long regimen of pills that will help her “drown out her thoughts.” But when her dosages intensify, our zonked heroine spirals down a darkly comic rabbit hole. Publisher’s Weekly calls her devolution, “challenging but undeniably fascinating, likely to incite strong reactions and much discussion among readers.”

3. French Exit, by Patrick DeWitt

What more could sophisticated bibliophiles want in a summer read than a “tragedy of manners”? Such is deWitt’s French Exit, which follows a wealthy widow from the Upper East Side and her emotionally stunted, adult son, as they flee New York City scandal (and impending bankruptcy) for the cultured sanctuary of gay Paree. Along the way, they meet a number of characters as bonkers as they are—a doctor who makes house calls accompanied by his wine merchant, and a terribly shy PI, for instance—and continue to self-destruct in entertaining fashion. From the mind that brought you the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted, The Sisters Brothers.

4. Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna, by Edith Sheffer

With Asperger’s Children, historian Sheffer probes the life of the Austrian pediatrician after whom the autism syndrome is named. Far from a compassionate champion of all children, Asperger may have been complicit in Hitler’s genocidal crimes, Sheffer alleges, trying to “mold” the minds of certain autistic children, while sending others, those deemed “untreatable,” to death camps. Though focused on the career of one man, her nonfiction account is large in scope. Says the NYT: “[Sheffer] shows how the Third Reich’s obsession with categories and labels was inextricable from its murderousness; what at first seems to be a book about Dr. Hans Asperger and the children he treated ends up tracing the sprawling documentary record of a monstrous machine…”

5. Lost Empress, by Sergio de la Pava

Publisher’s Weekly calls de la Pava a “maximalist worldbuilder,” and his latest novel does indeed seem to warrant the praise. Set in Paterson, N.J., Lost Empress centers on Nina Gill, a football strategist whose current job is an insult to her gifts, and Nuno DeAngeles, an intelligent convict who manipulates his way from Rikers Island to the comparatively nicer Bellevue Hospital, where he conspires with his fellows to commit a crime. As the story progresses, we glimpse the lives of other Paterson locals, such as telephone operators, EMT’s and mascots, via such diverse texts as phone transcripts, prison handbooks and sermons, to name just a few. New Jersey may not smack of exoticism, but with his signature talents, de la Pava makes it a world all his own.

6. I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put my Faith in Beyoncé, by Michael Arceneaux

With biting humor and unabashed frankness, Arcenaux has written 17 essays about his life as a gay black man raised Catholic in the South. Topics include a childhood in which he prayed to Jesus to “cure” him of his homosexuality; his misadventures as a young professional trying to make it as a writer (including the limited and limiting topics editors would assign someone of his race and sexual orientation); and his misbegotten dating escapades, with men who infested his apartment with fleas, and who—the horror!—worked for Fox News. A must-read for people interested in a witty take on the issues of our day.

7. Some Trick, by Helen DeWitt

Misunderstood geniuses and those who want to profit off them—primarily in the publishing world—are the subjects of this short story collection that has been garnering high praise. An author ditches a lunch meeting with an agent in favor of holding an imaginary conversation with a far more logical robot; a reclusive writer is menaced by the indefatigable industry players who want to publish his work; and a woman decides to go to bed with a man simply because she can’t summon the energy to refuse him… These are just a few of the characters and situations that will entertain and challenge you in DeWitt’s sparklingly intelligent stories.

8. The Good Son, by You Jeong-Jeong

This novel, the first from the writer who is popular in her native South Korea to be translated into English, is a gift for lovers of thrillers and crime stories. We open with our hero awakening to “the smell of blood.” From there, he, our law-student protagonist with a history of seizures, enters his kitchen to find his mother dead on the floor. He tries to remember what he did last night, but can recall little more than the fact he went for a run. Is it possible he killed his mother? The plot twists from there as readers must determine just how much they can reply upon their narrator.

9. Kudos, by Rachel Cusk

The final installment of Cusk’s masterful trilogy sees our writer protagonist, Faye, traveling through Europe to give a series of talks and interviews. As with the series’ previous two novels, Outline and Transit, Faye takes a backseat to the people she meets: Kudos is comprised of conversations and interviews with, as well as simply the monologues of, those she encounters on her journey. In form and structure, Kudos is another untraditional narrative from Cusk. It seems to illustrate the primacy, even as it deconstructs, the popular notion of, ‘The Stories We Tell Ourselves In Order to Live.’

10. This Mournable Body, by Tsitsi Dangarembga

The Zimbabwean protagonist of Dangarembga’s first novel, Nervous Conditions, has become a middle-aged woman tired of her dead-end job at an ad agency. After quitting, Tambudzai secures work as a biology teacher, all the while dreaming of the life she will one day lead. When her former boss offers her a glamorous-sounding job, she thinks her moment has arrived. But Dangarembga’s is no facile, make-you-feel-better-about-yourself fiction; Tambudzai suffers one blow to her fantasies after another until she must finally acknowledge the fact that her lived reality is nothing like her dreams. In addition to chronicling the journey of one remarkable character, This Mournable Body is a searing indictment of capitalism and post-colonialism.

Summer Reading

By Filed Under: Park Slope Reading

“Whether you’re looking for a fun beach read or a serious tome that’ll keep your mind sharp in the heat, we’ve got you covered with 10 of summer’s hottest books.” 

1. Florida, by Lauren Groff

This collection of short stories from the acclaimed author of Fates and Furies is a dark dive into the minds of people struggling with themselves—and with the menacing strangeness of the weather in the Sunshine State. A vacationer who waits out a storm with a creepy shopkeeper; a grad student who becomes homeless; and an author who frets over her sons’ futures are just a few of the characters you’ll meet in this meditation on what Groff, who lives in Gainesville, calls a “reptilian, dangerous, teeming” state.

2. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh

A kind of Valley of the Dolls set in post-Y2K NYC, Moshfegh’s third novel follows a wealthy 20-something so tired of her lonely, vapid life, she opts for a year-long regimen of pills that will help her “drown out her thoughts.” But when her dosages intensify, our zonked heroine spirals down a darkly comic rabbit hole. Publisher’s Weekly calls her devolution, “challenging but undeniably fascinating, likely to incite strong reactions and much discussion among readers.”

3. French Exit, by Patrick deWitt

What more could sophisticated bibliophiles want in a summer read than a “tragedy of manners”? Such is deWitt’s French Exit, which follows a wealthy widow from the Upper East Side and her emotionally stunted, adult son, as they flee New York City scandal (and impending bankruptcy) for the cultured sanctuary of gay Paree. Along the way, they meet a number of characters as bonkers as they are—a doctor who makes house calls accompanied by his wine merchant, and a terribly shy PI, for instance—and continue to self-destruct in entertaining fashion. From the mind that brought you the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted, The Sisters Brothers.

4. Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna, by Edith Sheffer

With Asperger’s Children, historian Sheffer probes the life of the Austrian pediatrician after whom the autism syndrome is named. Far from a compassionate champion of all children, Asperger may have been complicit in Hitler’s genocidal crimes, Sheffer alleges, trying to “mold” the minds of certain autistic children, while sending others, those deemed “untreatable,” to death camps. Though focused on the career of one man, her nonfiction account is large in scope. Says the NYT: “[Sheffer] shows how the Third Reich’s obsession with categories and labels was inextricable from its murderousness; what at first seems to be a book about Dr. Hans Asperger and the children he treated ends up tracing the sprawling documentary record of a monstrous machine…”

5. Lost Empress, by Sergio de la Pava

Publisher’s Weekly calls de la Pava a “maximalist worldbuilder,” and his latest novel does indeed seem to warrant the praise. Set in Paterson, N.J., Lost Empress centers on Nina Gill, a football strategist whose current job is an insult to her gifts, and Nuno DeAngeles, an intelligent convict who manipulates his way from Rikers Island to the comparatively nicer Bellevue Hospital, where he conspires with his fellows to commit a crime. As the story progresses, we glimpse the lives of other Paterson locals, such as telephone operators, EMT’s and mascots, via such diverse texts as phone transcripts, prison handbooks and sermons, to name just a few. New Jersey may not smack of exoticism, but with his signature talents, de la Pava makes it a world all his own.

6. I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put my Faith in Beyoncé, by Michael Arceneaux

With biting humor and unabashed frankness, Arcenaux has written 17 essays about his life as a gay black man raised Catholic in the South. Topics include a childhood in which he prayed to Jesus to “cure” him of his homosexuality; his misadventures as a young professional trying to make it as a writer (including the limited and limiting topics editors would assign someone of his race and sexual orientation); and his misbegotten dating escapades, with men who infested his apartment with fleas, and who—the horror!—worked for Fox News. A must-read for people interested in a witty take on the issues of our day.

7. Some Trick, by Helen DeWitt

Misunderstood geniuses and those who want to profit off them—primarily in the publishing world—are the subjects of this short story collection that has been garnering high praise. An author ditches a lunch meeting with an agent in favor of holding an imaginary conversation with a far more logical robot; a reclusive writer is menaced by the indefatigable industry players who want to publish his work; and a woman decides to go to bed with a man simply because she can’t summon the energy to refuse him… These are just a few of the characters and situations that will entertain and challenge you in DeWitt’s sparklingly intelligent stories.

8. The Good Son, by You Jeong-Jeong

This novel, the first from the writer who is popular in her native South Korea to be translated into English, is a gift for lovers of thrillers and crime stories. We open with our hero awakening to “the smell of blood.” From there, he, our law-student protagonist with a history of seizures, enters his kitchen to find his mother dead on the floor. He tries to remember what he did last night, but can recall little more than the fact he went for a run. Is it possible he killed his mother? The plot twists from there as readers must determine just how much they can reply upon their narrator.

9. Kudos, by Rachel Cusk

The final installment of Cusk’s masterful trilogy sees our writer protagonist, Faye, traveling through Europe to give a series of talks and interviews. As with the series’ previous two novels, Outline and Transit, Faye takes a backseat to the people she meets: Kudos is comprised of conversations and interviews with, as well as simply the monologues of, those she encounters on her journey. In form and structure, Kudos is another untraditional narrative from Cusk. It seems to illustrate the primacy, even as it deconstructs, the popular notion of, ‘The Stories We Tell Ourselves In Order to Live.’

10. This Mournable Body, by Tsitsi Dangarembga

The Zimbabwean protagonist of Dangarembga’s first novel, Nervous Conditions, has become a middle-aged woman tired of her dead-end job at an ad agency. After quitting, Tambudzai secures work as a biology teacher, all the while dreaming of the life she will one day lead. When her former boss offers her a glamorous-sounding job, she thinks her moment has arrived. But Dangarembga’s is no facile, make-you-feel-better-about-yourself fiction; Tambudzai suffers one blow to her fantasies after another, until she must finally acknowledge the fact that her lived reality is nothing like her dreams. In addition to chronicling the journey of one remarkable character, This Mournable Body is a searing indictment of capitalism and post-colonialism.

Spring Reading

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Spring has sprung, which means it’s time to head to the park for an afternoon—or several of them—of outdoor reading. Below, our recommendations for the best new books to read under a Prospect Park tree:

 

1. The House of Broken Angels

by Luis Alberto Urrea

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Urrea (The Devil’s Highway) comes a multigenerational saga of loss, love and the borderlands between cultures. The family of Miguel de La Cruz, or “Big Angel,” has gathered to celebrate the dying patriarch’s final birthday, when, unexpectedly, Big Angel’s elderly mother passes away. As the weekend unfolds and the Mexican-American clan recounts its family legends, Big Angel’s half-brother, “Little Angel,” wrestles with his half-Mexican, half-gringo identity. Urrea, whose brother was dying of cancer when his own mother passed, has said the sprawling narrative is based on true experiences.

 

2. The Chandelier

by Clarice Lispector

This sophomore novel of literary giantess Lispector is available in English now for the first time. Initially published in Portuguese in 1946, The Chandelier is a stream-of-consciousness account of the life, loves and densely worded thoughts of our protagonist, Virginia. We follow Virginia through her childhood with her brother and best friend, Daniel; across the years with a group of aesthetes; and as her heart breaks when Daniel becomes engaged. Lispector would go on to write such classics as The Passion According to G.H., and to be remembered by American author Benjamin Moser as the most important Jewish writer in the world since Kafka.

 

3. The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

When ambitious Greer Kadetsky lands her dream job at the foundation of her feminist icon, Faith Frank, her future could not seem brighter. But as time passes and Kadetsky is forced to contend with twists and tragedies, her understanding of Frank the woman, as well as what it means to be a woman at all, changes. Wolitzer’s first book for adults since her 2013 hit The Interestings tackles the female zeitgeist with, according to TIME, “a gimlet eye.” 

 

4. Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

A coming-of-age novel set in Britain just after WWII, Warlight tells the story of Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, who, as children, were left by their mother to the care of a mysterious man named “the Moth.” They soon learn their mother lied to them when she gave her reason for leaving. Years later, Nathaniel pieces together all that he failed to understand as a child, taking us along for the unconventionally written ride through recollections, facts and speculation. Ondaatgje previously won the Booker Prize for the romance, The English Patient. 

 

5. Islandborn

by Junot Diaz

The acclaimed author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao makes his first foray into children’s literature with the picture book, Islandborn. Everyone in Lola’s class is from somewhere else. When their teacher asks that they draw “the country you were originally from,” Lola becomes anxious. She knows she’s from “The Island,” but she doesn’t remember the place. Soon she’s embarking on a quest to understand her heritage, interviewing family, friends and neighbors, who describe a beautiful, vibrant land, which was yet rife with fear and turmoil. Questions of belonging and collective memory give this slim book, illustrated by Leo Espinosa, novelistic heft.

 

6. Tomorrow Will Be Different

by Sarah McBride

McBride may be only 27, but the eventful life she has led to date more than justifies this publication of her memoirs. For those who can’t place the name, McBride is the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign as well as the first transgender person to speak at a national convention. Tomorrow Will Be Different chronicles her struggle to come out while acting as American University student-body president, her political fights for equal rights, and her relationship with the transgender man who would become her husband before tragically dying of cancer. Alternately political and personal, Tomorrow Will Be Different is a stirring account of one remarkable woman’s life and loves.

 

7. The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

The author of The Empathy Exams returns with this nonfiction examination of her journey toward sobriety. Interwoven among autobiographical accounts are reflections on famous alcoholic writers, including John Berryman and Raymond Carver, as well as works of reportage and literary criticism. The book’s erudition and, yes, empathy, have earned the writer, who has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, high praise.

 

8. Not That Bad

Edited by Roxane Gay

Bad Feminist’s Roxane Gay edits this anthology of essays—some previously published, others issued here for the first time—on rape and sexual assault. Writer-contributors include actors Gabrielle Union and Ally Sheedy and authors like Amy Jo Burns and Bob Shacochis. Not That Bad is an unflinching examination of a world in which women who speak out are, in the words of Gay, “routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied.”

 

9. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”

by Zora Neale Hurston

A remarkable literary achievement, Barracoon is Zora Neale Hurston’s nonfiction account of American slavery, based on her interviews with one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. The author of Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of elderly Cudjo Lewis, whom she met in 1927, and who was abducted from Africa before being taken to the United States 50 years after the U.S. officially abolished the slave trade. From his childhood in Africa, to the horrors of abduction and The Middle Passage, to life in America and the founding of an African-centric community in Alabama, Cudjo’s story is told in Hurston’s inimitably compassionate style.

 

10.  The Opposite of Hate

by Sally Kohn

With this book, CNN commentator—and Park Slope resident!—Sally Kohn has set herself a difficult task: “to discover why we hate and how [we] can stop it.” She speaks with researchers and scientists in an effort to learn about the cultural and evolutionary roots of hate, travels around the world, from Rwanda to the Middle East and around the United States, profiling people commonly associated with notions of hatred: white supremacists, terrorists and Twitter trolls, to name a few. And she probes several shameful moments from her own past, when she failed to do what, with this book, she hopes to help others do: wander out from “this wilderness of hate.”

Our Conversation With Jacqueline Woodson

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Park Slope resident Jacqueline Woodson is staggering. In 2014, her childhood memoir-in-verse, Brown Girl Dreaming—which she wrote at the local Du Jour Bakery—won The National Book Award, as well as the Coretta Scott King Award (she has two), a Newberry Honor (she has four), the NAACP Image Award, and a Sibert Honor. A year later, the Poetry Foundation named her the Young People’s Poet Laureate. A year after that, her adult novel, Another Brooklyn, became a National Book Award finalist. And only months ago, Jacqueline was chosen as the new National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, a role she will hold for two years as she travels the country and discusses the importance of young people’s literature. These are only a few of the accolades she has earned over a career that has spanned nearly three decades. Although Jacqueline admits she was a “reluctant ambassador,” given what is happening in our country, “whether or not I’m ready, the world is ready for me. So, I need to show up.” Below, Jacqueline shares some thoughts on her new ambassadorial duties; the power of literature as it relates to hope, change and identity; her favorite Park Slope hangouts; and why parents should let their kids read picture books all the way through high school.

PS Reader: In your new role as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, you’re traveling around the country speaking to students in schools, libraries and underserved areas. What will you be discussing?

I’m hoping to be discussing the power of literature and the power of literature to change the narrative of lives and countries and places, and just how important it is for us to have bigger conversations, and how literature allows us to have those conversations. Until I meet the people I don’t know how the conversations are going to go, so I can’t say I’m going to talk about this one blanket thing. But I’m hoping to have decent, meaningful conversations about the power of literature to create hope in our lives, and also how that hope becomes part of the change.

And will you be approaching these students with a lesson plan, or will you leave it more open-ended?

Open-ended. I’m not trying to teach. I don’t think my role as ambassador is to teach. It’s a kind of gospel of literature and how important literature is in the narratives of our lives. How would you describe your platform, “READING = HOPE X CHANGE (What’s Your Equation)”?

In terms of what? In terms of what you are hoping to elicit from the students when you broach the subject. I know you want to discuss the power of literature.

I’m not only speaking to students. I’m going to prisons, I’m going to juvenile detention centers, I’m going into community centers, I’m speaking to adults, I’m speaking to young people. So it’s not just going into classrooms and speaking to students. Although there will be that. I’m going to conferences. And, basically, I think it’s simply that. When you read a book, you meet characters. You fall in love with those characters, or you don’t. But you exit a book differently than how you enter it. And that exchange, and that time of going from opening a book and having an experience, to closing it and having had that experience, you’re a different person. And that different person is able to have different conversations. Is able to talk about different themes and thoughts and characters and situations. Everything, from social situations to economic situations to talking about race and talking about sexuality and gender. All of these themes that get introduced in books allow you to have more hopeful conversations with a bigger community of people, because you have more information, and less fear, and that’s the hope. My hope is that these are the kinds of conversations we will have, and I think these are really important conversations at this moment in time. At all moments in time.

And what books will you be discussing? Do you know yet?

I don’t know, because I don’t know a lot of things. I don’t know what books we can get donated if they’re underserved communities. There are going to be different books that we use for young people than we use for grownups, maybe, or there’ll be more mother-daughter or adult-child reading groups. Or if they’re literacy programs, they’re going to be reading something different. But hopefully, there is a common theme that I can bring in there, and say, look, here’s this narrative, here’s Owl Moon or Show Way or whatever the book is, let’s read it together and then let’s talk about everything it represents, and what it means to you, and what you find in common, and what’s enlightened you, what you find enlightening about the narrative, and all of that. But again, it so much depends on the room. Some rooms I’m going to go into, the young people have been reading, right. They’ve been reading a common text already, so whatever the teachers choose as the text, that’s fine with me. I’ll read it before I get there so we’re all on the same page.

In Brown Girl Dreaming you mention that when you were younger you were sometimes admonished for reading too slowly or for reading books that were too “babyish.” On the website for the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, you say that “young people should not be judged by the level of their reading, but by the way a book makes them think and feel.” Did your experiences as a young reader inform that belief you hold today?

Oh, definitely. I think it’s not only my experience as a young reader but also what I’ve seen being an author for the past 30 years, and what I’ve seen happening in classrooms and institutions of learning in ways that haven’t changed from my own childhood. So, definitely.

And how do you think that can be corrected, today?

I don’t know. I don’t like to use the word ‘corrected,’ cause it assumes something being done wrong. I think we can think differently, and think about reading differently, and think about reading as an engagement and a social engagement and a means of having a conversation. The book is having a conversation with the reader, the reader is having a conversation with the book, and the reader is having a conversation with another reader or a teacher, and all of that is not something that needs to be graded or judged for how well or intellectually it’s done. But they should just be part of the continuum of the engagement.

I read somewhere as well that the graphic novelist Gene [Yuen Lang], who was the national ambassador before you, had to talk you into saying yes to this position. Why is that?

Yeah. I was reluctant. I was definitely a reluctant ambassador. I was concerned about how much traveling I would do. I was concerned about how far it would take me away from my writing and my family. It wasn’t the work that I wanted to do right now. And then I think about so many people who are asked to do the work they’re not ready to do, and the time is ready, whether or not they are. So I think in terms of looking at where our country is right now and what’s happening to young people, and what’s happening to people of color, and what’s happening to queer people, what’s happening to poor people, you know, whether or not I’m ready, the world is ready for me. So, I need to show up. When Brown Girl Dreaming had gotten The National Book Award I was traveling a lot, and I have a 15-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son, and it was hard to be away from home, so I think that’s where most of the reluctance came in. I was like, ‘Oh, no, I don’t want to go out on the road, I don’t want to have conversations, I just want to stay home and write and be mom.’

Now that you have accepted the position, are you happy for having done so?

I am, I am. I think it’s worth it. I’ve figured out how to do it and write. It’s made me be very clear about what I can say ‘yes’ to and ‘no’ to, so I can make the time to do what I need to do and also be a good ambassador.

You were speaking about the point at which our country is at the moment. I was reading another interview you gave to NPR. In it, you say you have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things, or “no tolerance for people not being a part of the world and being in it and trying to change it.” My question is: What would you say to those who live in precisely that way—that is, people who do not advocate or agitate for change?

You know, I think I would ask them, ‘Why?’ I think that’s the biggest question, is ‘Why?’ What keeps you here in this moment as it is, and I’d be interested in hearing their answers. I think that’s what having a conversation means, is to ask the questions that are going to make people introspective. And I think some people are very comfortable to live in very small worlds and there is very little I can do to change that, but once I know what the answer to that ‘why’ is, then I can begin to have a conversation. But, I don’t know. I don’t know what to say to someone because I don’t know who they are, I don’t know why they make the choices they make.

When you go speak to these students and other people, will you try to draw a connection between social change and the ways in which literature can help bring that about?

I hope so. I hope so. I think that I have such a deep respect for young people. And I think they know that they are the future and I think young people are pretty unhappy with a lot of stuff that’s happening now and ready to change that. Grow up and change it in the way they can. I think it’s going to be interesting.

Did you attend The March [For Our Lives] this past weekend?

We were at the one in Vermont.

And what did you think when you were there?

I think it would have been nice to be in New York or D.C. where there were a lot, a lot of people, but it was very sweet. It’s just nice to know that in every state there are people speaking out against what’s going on right now.

Along similar lines, in an interview you gave to The Brown Bookshelf, again speaking about the injustices or the unkindness and the fear that is in the world, you said you can’t afford to be one of those people who ignore it, because that would mean not growing, and if you can’t grow, you can’t write. You said, “So some days I’m like this big bruise walking through the world. And it’s a bit awful, but it comes with what it means to be a writer.” Could you expand upon that thought? What, to you, does it mean to be a writer? In this day and age in particular, as well as at all times?

I think it means to be woke. And to be really in the world and to really see it, warts and all, and to really see its possibility. So I think it means walking through the world very pessimistically and optimistically at the same time. Which feels like a contradiction, but it’s true. Just to be able to see the hope in the world and then articulate what that hope could look like is really important. But, in order to get to that, you also have to see the way the world is. Things are not working for so many people and that’s painful.

I know it’s your job as a writer to articulate that hope, as you said, but do you ever find that difficult?

It’s always difficult. It’s always difficult. But, you know, something being difficult shouldn’t be the thing that stops somebody.

How do you push past the difficulty?

Cause I know the only way through it is through it. To just stay where I am means that nothing is going to change. I know there are days when writing is very cathartic for me, so it feels empowering. When things feel the hardest I know that I can sit down and imagine the change I want to see in the world.

This question might sound a little naïve, but I would love to hear the answer in your own words: What about the experience of seeing oneself represented in fiction is so powerful? How would you describe the feeling?

I think what it does is it legitimizes you, your experiences. Even though it’s fiction, it means that someone else has imagined and/or lived what you’ve lived. And that means that there are more people like you in the world. And that’s empowering because I think a lot of times, we question our own existences and our own legitimacy when we’re not represented on a bigger screen. And so to open up a book and find someone who looks like you or thinks like you or eats what you eat or prays the way you pray or has the same family makeup you do, it’s like, wait a second, I matter, and I’m in the world, and here I am, again and again and again. And I think if you’ve walked through the world always seeing mirrors of yourself in it, then it’s hard to imagine what it would be like not to. But for someone who’s never seen that mirror, it’s just huge.

That reminds me of the article you recently wrote for Vanity Fair when you spoke with [“Master of None” Emmy-winning actress] Lena Waithe. Could you talk about that? What was it like, to speak with her?

She’s great. She’s phenomenal. And she’s so smart and it’s so great to have a conversation with her and to realize all of these ways in which our lives overlap and how we both got to our calling, through television and through literature. But I just think she’s phenomenal.

I would love to know what you’re currently reading.

I just finished re-reading Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, which I loved. I’m reading a book by Daniel José Older that’s not out yet, but it’s phenomenal. And it’s a middle-grade book, I’m reading it to blurb it. There’s a woman named Imani Perry who just wrote a book about Lorraine Hansberry. I’m in the middle of reading that, I’m reading a number of books at once. And I’m just so excited about this Lorraine Hansberry story, because I love A Raisin in the Sun and I just loved her so much as a person, even though I never knew her. And to be able to sit for hours with her life…And Wade in the Water, which is a collection of poems by Tracy K. Smith.

Do you set aside time to read every day?

I don’t, I figure out how to. I was doing a Scholastic interview and then reading a little bit before you called, because it ended early, and then I always read at night. And when I’m writing, I’ll try to stop writing for a while and read a little bit, just because it clears my mind. So if I’m writing something more literary, I’ll read more poetry, and that helps.

What can you tell us about your two new books that will be coming out? I believe there’s a picture book and a middle-grade book?

The picture book is called Harbor Me and it’s about six kids in a specialized classroom in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. And the picture book is called The Day You Begin and it’s about walking into a room and feeling like you’re the only one like yourself in that room, and then realizing it’s not true.

[As] a Park Slope resident, what do you love about the neighborhood?

I love that I can walk anywhere, I love that I can leave my house and go right and be at the park in two blocks, I love that. Or three blocks. I love that I can go left and be on 5th avenue in no time and go have lunch with friends or go grab a coffee. So I love that it’s a walking neighborhood. And I love my backyard, because I love gardening.

How would you say it compares with your experiences in Bushwick growing up?

It’s whiter. [Laughs] It is far, far, far—less diverse than my childhood neighborhood. I don’t know, it’s hard to compare. There are things I love about Park Slope and things I struggle with. Bushwick was much more alive. Strangers said ‘hi’ to each other. That doesn’t happen so much here. And there were lots of languages spoken, so you grew up speaking lots of languages. I grew up speaking Spanish and English. That doesn’t seem to happen so much here. Or, there’s not the intersection of people speaking across languages. And Park Slope is definitely a quieter neighborhood, but it has a lot more cars than my childhood neighborhood.

Do you have any favorite spots around here?

I like [Café] Martin’s, around the corner. And I used to go to Du Jour [Bakery] all the time. I wrote Brown Girl Dreaming at Du Jour. Sometimes we go to Blue Ribbon for dinner when we don’t feel like cooking, which is a spot my son loves. And I love the library here. Cause I can walk to it. And where else do I hang? I love my stoop. Which I hang a lot on.

Is there anything else you would like our readers of The Park Slope Reader to know?

I think it’s really important that parents know that they should let their kids read picture books all the way through high school. I think a lot of times, people think that, ‘oh, my kid has moved beyond picture books,’ but it’s a way to learn about poetry. All of my picture books are written in a poetic form. It’s a way to learn how to write a novel. Cause in 32 pages, you get a beginning, middle and end. You learn about character. There’s all this stuff that they might miss learning about if they skipped that stage of picture books. And I always get a little sad when I see people pushing their kids toward chapter books and not letting them have the experience of picture books. So, let them have that. The library has great picture books and reading picture books does not mean they’re reading at what people call a quote-unquote ‘lower grade level.’ They’re just reading as writers, and respect that.

Are there any picture books that you would recommend?

I love Owl Moon by Jane Yolen. I love When I Was Young in The Mountains, by Cynthia Rylant. And then she has another one called The Relatives Came. And she’s just such a thoughtful writer. And what other picture books? I love anything by Mo Willems, an ex-Park Sloper. And anything by Javaka Steptoe. So, my list could go on.

Park Slope Reading: Our Winter Reading List

By Filed Under: Books, Local Literature Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The weather outside is frightful–and we couldn’t be happier for the excuse to stay inside and read. Here are our picks for the Top 10 Books with which to hibernate this winter. 

 

Eat the Apple

by Matt Young 

This formally inventive memoir by ex-Marine Young comes specially recommended by Community Bookstore’s Ezra Goldstein. Young had only recently graduated from high school when he joined the Marines back in 2005, a decision that would, as Publishers Weekly describes it, change him into a “dangerous and damaged man.” Sections written in the third person, in the second person, as screenplay, and as imagined dialogues, as well as with a host of other techniques, give this account from an ex-grunt-turned-creative-writing-professor a singular power.

 

What Are We Doing Here?

By Marilynne Robinson

A favorite of Community Bookstore’s Stephanie Valdez, Marilynne Robinson returns this winter with a collection of essays on the little things in life, such as culture, history, and human decency. Among other topics, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author writes eloquently on our political climate and the “human capacity for grandeur.” For those who like their ideas as deep as they are expansive.

 

Feel Free: Essays

by Zadie Smith

‘Tis the season for lady authors with formidable intelligences. This second collection of essays from celeb (one who is celebrated as well as a celebrity) author Smith includes her thoughts on cultural touchstones from Facebook to global warming. It is divided into five sections—In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free—and is certain not to disappoint her numerous fans.

 

Sunburn

by Laura Lipmann

This highly anticipated novel is no. 23 from the bestselling Lippman. A former reporter and author of the popular series about “accidental PI” Tess Monaghan, Lippman has written Sunburn as a noir in the vein of James M. Cain (of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity fame). A young mother up and leaves her husband and daughter while on a beach vacation. Who she is and just how many skeletons she is hiding in that closet of hers filled with items to complement her sexy red hair are just two of the questions that drive the twisty plot.

 

Madness is Better Than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

A Hollywood crew intending to shoot a film on the location and members of a New York corporation who want to ship it back to the U.S. simultaneously descend upon a Mayan ruin in 1930’s Honduras. Twenty years later, they’re all still there. This raucously comic novel from the Man Booker-nominated Beauman (for 2012’s The Teleportation Accident) is filled with the author’s trademark wit and features a host of colorful characters, incident, and a wrestling match with an octopus.

 

The Man of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

This is the sort of true tale for which the phrase “stranger than fiction” was invented. Eggers’ nonfiction story centers on Mokhtar Alkhanshali, an American raised by Yemeni immigrants in San Francisco. At 24 and unable to afford college, Alkhanshali was working as a doorman when he learned that coffee originated in his native Yemen. He traveled to the country determined to revitalize its coffee industry—and was still there when civil war broke out, leaving him unable to return home. A real-life hero’s journey.

 

The Children of Blood and Bone

by Tomi Adeyemi

This 600-page fantasy novel earned Adeyemi a hefty payday that included seven figures and a movie deal. Not too bad for a 23-year-old debut author. In this first installment of a planned trilogy we meet 17-year-old Zélie. She embarks upon a quest to retrieve the magic that has been banished from her homeland by an evil king. The Nigerian-American Adeyemi draws heavily upon the West African mythology she studied in Brazil after graduating from Harvard, and speaks to timely issues of race, power and oppression.

 

Jagannath

by Karin Tidbeck

WIRED calls this first collection of English-language short stories from the Swedish Tidbeck “weird in all the right ways.” Her influences range from Jorge Luis Borges and Ursula Le Guin to H.P. Lovecraft. Strange creatures lurking in the Swedish countryside, strange reproductive facilities operating inside the belly of an aircraft, strange happenings between sisters and the fairylike beings they encounter…For those who like their literature to transport them far off the beaten path.

 

Extraordinary People

by Michael Hearst

This latest from Park Slope local Hearst includes mini profiles of 50 fascinating and fairly off-kilter individuals. Curious about the man who agreed to jump Niagara Falls for a whopping $75? How about the woman who walked to the North Pole solo, or the guy who MacGyvered his own personal version of Up using helium balloons and a lawn chair? For the full effect, purchase the book-and-CD (called Songs for Extraordinary People) combo.

 

Unraveling Rose

by Brian Wray

In this children’s book by Wray of Windsor Terrace, a stuffed bunny named Rose loses interest in all the things she once loved when a tiny loose thread dangling from her arm becomes all that she can think about. The author hopes his book can help parents and teachers discuss with children the effects of obsessive thoughts, as well as be a helpful tool for kids who suffer from anxiety disorders. A charming and timely offering.

 

The Art of Bookselling • The Reader Interview

By Filed Under: Books, The Reader Interview Tagged With: , , , , ,

Stephanie Valdez and Ezra Goldstein of Community Bookstore

 

“You’re really catching us on quite a day,” said Stephanie Valdez when I met up with her and Community Bookstore co-owner Ezra Goldstein one afternoon early in December. Not only was the usual holiday rush upon them, there were last-minute children’s book fairs to coordinate (“it’s almost like setting up two more stores”), book orders to be completed without delay, and sniffles to be suppressed as best one could. (All sneezes have been omitted from the following conversation.) Yet the staff was in good cheer. When I arrived, Ezra was standing by the front register regaling several employees and a customer with a story. Stephanie laughed as she typed busily at the computer, while store mascot Tiny the Cat lounged with characteristic disinterest inside his basket in a corner of the window.

At the back of the store by several bowls of cat food Stephanie and I chatted before Ezra, busy with orders, joined us partway through the conversation. They spoke of current bestsellers, the books that should be selling better, that episode of “Louie,” the charm of Karl Ove Knausgaard, and a man, his chicken and Tiny the Cat.

To begin, it would be great if you could describe how you found the store when you first took over in 2011.

Stephanie Valdez: How we found it? In what condition?

Exactly, how you would describe the space.

SV: The store was much different then than it is today. Ok, how would I describe it. The owner, who’s a friend of ours, her name is Catherine, she’d moved to Albania, and she was going back and forth between here and Albania on a regular basis, and the store was being run by a couple of college students who were here trying to do their best under the very difficult circumstances. The store was in debt; it was filled with animals. We had two dogs, two cats, a bearded dragon, a bunny, and two turtles. Which made it chaotic. And physically, the store was sort of a labyrinth of shelves and nooks and crannies, and it was in need of some work. We actually bought it in 2011, but we took over in 2010, so we spent some time just fixing it up. And it was really wonderful, in a way, because the work that needed to be done was so clear. Every day you’d come in and you’d just tackle a corner. It was sort of like a fixer-upper project where you’re renovating a house, where every day you can tackle a project and turn it around and make it better. And that process was sort of a gift to us and part of why we decided to buy the store.

What would you say is the most interesting event that you have hosted?

[pullquote]We are very lucky because we are one of the few independents that we almost only sell books, we don’t have to entice people in with toys to get them to buy books. We just focus on books. We’re very lucky our audience is made up of very avid readers. We don’t have to convince them that books are a necessity[/pullquote]SV: That’s a really tough question. I’d have to think about that a little bit. Certainly our most packed ever was when we had Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s when he suddenly got very famous, and we knew it would be packed, but it ended up being like, wall-to-wall standing-room-only for 200ish people. We’ve never hosted anything like that, before or since.

Was it in this space, in the bookstore?

SV: [Nods affirmatively] There was a line outside the door. To get him into the space we had to move people aside in order to go through. There’s actually a picture on The New York Times site of him parting the crowds to walk through this completely packed space. That was also very charming, because he ended up staying and hanging out with us for the whole evening in the garden, drinking cheap beer, which is unlike what most authors do.

What do most authors do?

SV: Especially touring authors, when they come to New York they have dinner with their agent or they go out with their friends that are local. It’s rare that they sit in the Community Bookstore garden and drink cheap beer.

Is there a writer whom you have never hosted that you would love to?

SV: I always wanted to host Marilynne Robinson. And then we actually did host Marilynne Robinson and I was judging a literary prize. And of all days, it’s the day we were hosting Marilynne Robinson that I had to be in another city, judging a prize. And I tried to make it work and there was just no way to be in two places at once, and so, I missed hosting Marilynne Robinson. Which was unfortunate. But I have hope that we will host her again.

 

 

Do you have a favorite Park Slope author?

That seems fraught.

It does!

SV: It seems like if I do, I shouldn’t say. [Pause] Probably Siri Hustvedt.

And why is that?

SV: I just love her books. They’re brainy and complex and feminist and brilliant.

Are you yourself a writer?

SV: I dabble a little bit, but I’ll say no, not currently.

I know you also manage Terrace Books. What are some of the challenges you face as you try to manage these two spaces at once?

SV: Time. Time is the biggest. Terrace Books is sort of my side-hustle. My husband runs that shop. But I do most of the book-buying. And I also do a bit of rare books out of that space, and so, that’s my side project. Bookstores require a lot of time. I mean, it’s a small space, you think, how complicated is it to run a bookstore? Somehow there are always new books and there are always new events. So, however much time we have, it doesn’t ever seem to be quite enough.

How would you describe a typical day at Community Bookstore?

SV: A typical day involves coming in, feeding the cat, turning on all the lights and the computers, and then, Ezra orders books every day, every weekday, so he works on book orders. And then the thing about working in a bookstore is that you never know what the day will bring. You never know who will show up and what questions they’ll ask and what conversations will ensue. There’s a lot of email in my job, between events and ordering books and all sorts of things. And tending the shelves, shelving books. I do less unpacking than I used to, but we get boxes and boxes of books, five days a week. So, this time of year, it can be 40 boxes of books.

Do you read all the new books that come in?

SV: Oh, I wish. We try to read as much as we can, but that just depends.

Do you try to set aside time to do so?

SV: Reading is not part of our day-job. It’s all extra-curricular. So, just like anywhere else, we have to fit it into our after hours’ time. I have a one-year-old, so, currently my after hours’ time is a little more limited than usual.

Are you reading any books to your one-year-old?

SV: Oh, yes. He’s a very avid reader so far. He’s now at the phase where he tends to want to repeat the same books.

Which can be both fun and a little maddening, I would imagine.

SV: Yeah, I’ve already memorized a shocking number of children’s’ books, which makes me realize I could have been memorizing all kinds of things all along.

Does he have a favorite?

SV: What’s his absolute favorite right now? He really likes The Quiet Noisy Book, by Margaret Wise Brown. She’s famous for Goodnight Moon. This is sort of a lost book of hers that’s been republished. And a book called Hooray for Birds [by Lucy Cousins]. Which is just about birds.

I know you mentioned [Tiny] the cat earlier as well. I’ve read a few different stories about him. Do you have a favorite?

SV: Well, my favorite was when I was hosting a story-time for an author and there was a group of toddlers sitting here on the floor and a man walked into the middle of the event and pulled out a chicken from under his coat, and put the chicken down on the ground. And within an instant, Tiny was chasing the chicken and we were chasing the chicken and Tiny to try and prevent disaster in front of this group of toddlers.

Why did this man bring a chicken to the store?

SV: I guess there was a chicken in the book and they thought it might be fun if he just showed up and brought a chicken. It was a show-and-tell type thing. But we weren’t warned about the chicken, and cats and chickens don’t really mix. And I guess he had a cat at home as well as a chicken, so, as far as he knew, cats and chickens cohabitated just fine. But our cat, Tiny, does kill birds with some regularity, so, this was not your average cat.

These were not characters from a children’s story.

SV: Exactly.

[Ezra joins]

What is your current bestseller here in the store?

SV: Is it Jennifer Egan?

Ezra Goldstein: It would be close between Manhattan Beach [by Jennifer Egan] and Sing, Unburied, Sing [by Jesmyn Ward], I think.

Are there books that you believe ought to be selling better than they are? 

EG: Well, there are a lot of books like that. But there are a couple of books that I’ve read recently that are really outstanding that didn’t make any of the best lists that should have been on the lists. One of which I’m reading now called Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor, terrific book. Another is Solar Bones [by Mike McCormack], really good book. But that’s up to us, because a lot of books that we think are really good don’t get the publicity that they deserve, because they come from small presses or they go under the radar. In general, small presses don’t get the publicity they deserve, so that’s why we exist, to put those books in people’s hands.

How do you try to find the smaller under-the-radar books?

SV: We talk a lot to those small publishers as well as talk to other readers, whether it’s other booksellers, customers who come in. We read reviews. You try to keep your ear to the ground for good things coming out.

EG: The book Reservoir 13, one of our customers told me I had to read it. And she was right.

Do you have customers coming in and asking you for books that are not currently stocked?

SV: Every day. We do a lot of books by special order, because we’re such a small store, and we can often get books within a day or two. So, yes. We often have people special-order books. And then we often take a look at them to see if that’s something we should carry.

EG: I think it’s also that it’s connected to our reputation, that we can get books and we’re really good at getting books. And also our clientele tend to be people who go very deep into backlist books, you know, books that came out 20 years ago or 30 years ago. Those are the kinds of readers that we have.

SV: Our customer base is filled with just great readers and they often recommend us books, so it is a two-way conversation.

Have you ever had a particularly unusual request?

SV: For a book?

Yes, for a book, something that was very difficult to find, that was very old, or very rare. Speaking of Terrace Books as well.

SV: Well, we don’t do rare or used special orders. So mostly, it’s just things that are out of print. I think the most frustrating thing is when there’s something that’s out of print that shouldn’t be. There have been various points in time when certain books are just out of print, and it seems like it shouldn’t be out of print.

EG: With some regularity we’ll track down a book in England that we order for people. It’ll take a month to get, but, you know, we’ll get it.

SV: We don’t really have a zany story. It’s mostly pretty prosaic.

EG: One of the great stories was that Laura Ingalls Wilder book, the original one that came from the South Dakota historical society. It got written up somewhere and became this surprise bestseller.

SV: In The Times, yeah.

EG: This poor tiny historical society in South Dakota was cranking out books. So I was calling South Dakota and we actually got—I think we got just about every copy they had. [Laughs]

What is the book that you’ve been recommending the most recently?

EG: Well, you know, it depends on who the person is. But, the Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won all the prizes, deserved them. It’s a very fine book. But it’s not for everybody because it’s a very grim and hard book. That’s the art of bookselling, is trying to match the recommendation with what people want.

I also saw that Community Bookstore was featured in an episode of “Louie” a few years ago. Have you had customers coming in and asking you about that?

SV: I actually haven’t had any inquiries lately.

EG: Not lately.

SV: Since the scandal.

EG: But a lot right after the show came out. A lot. People would come in and wander around and say, ‘Nah, this isn’t the store. It’s not big enough.’ [Laughs]

SV: It’s unfortunate. We weren’t necessarily fans of his, and a couple of years ago quite a few rumors were flying around about these allegations. So we haven’t really used that footage as publicity or anything and we met him in passing once. I don’t think we have anything especially interesting to say about him or the scandal.

EG: Although I did get to hang out with Parker Posey, so.

Is she cool in real life?

EG: Oh, yeah. She’s really neat. Yeah. She’s really nice. She was in the episode.

SV: And Chloe Sevigny as well.

EG: Yeah, Chloe Sevigny, that’s right. Both very nice.

SV: Both readers.

Did they buy anything?

EG: Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah. And the producer, who’s a wonderful woman, bought a whole big stack of books.

SV: We’ll probably continue to just keep our distance and move on.

You read a lot about the resurgence of independent bookstores nowadays, in spite of Amazon. To what would you attribute your continuing success here?

EG: A very loyal customer-base. And just being fortunate to live in a neighborhood where people like to shop small and like to see what they’re buying and like books, love books.

SV: Dedicated readers. We are very lucky because we are one of the few independents that we almost only sell books, we don’t have to entice people in with toys to get them to buy books. We just focus on books. We’re very lucky our audience is made up of very avid readers. We don’t have to convince them that books are a necessity.

 

 

Park Slope Reader Fall Reading Recommendations

By Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , ,

“With the arrival of chillier weather comes a new batch of books with which to curl up. Here, a list of 11  titles to enjoy this fall.”

 

Sing, Unburied, Sing

— by Jesmyn Ward —

In her first novel since 2011’s National Book Award-winning Salvage The Bones, Ward tracks a mixed-race family through rural Mississippi. Jojo is a lonely 13-year-old who helps his grandparents raise his baby sister, while his mother, Leonie, struggles with drug addiction, visions of her dead brother and an obsessive love for Jojo’s white father, recently released from prison. Combining allusions to The Odyssey and The Old Testament with elements of magical realism, Ward has written a book, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, whose “Southern gothic aura recalls the dense, head-spinning prose of William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor.”

 

The Origin of Others

— by Toni Morrison —

Nobel and Pulitzer-winning Morrison draws on her 2016 Charles Norton Lecture series at Harvard for six essays that try to answer the question, “What is race (other than genetic imagination), and why does it matter?” As she engages with historical events and literary texts, from those of Hemingway to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Faulkner to Flannery O’Connor (and several of her own novels), the author examines the process of “othering” and racial dehumanization. Foreword by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

 

A Legacy of Spies

— by John Le Carré —

Fans of the indubitable master of the spy thriller, David Cornwell, aka, John Le Carré, rejoice: the author has returned with his first George Smiley novel in over 25 years. The focus here is on Smiley’s aged colleague and disciple, Peter Guillam, who has been living on a remote farm in Brittany when a letter from the British Secret Service arrives to summon him to London. It seems his Cold War past has returned to haunt him…The novel deftly weaves past with present, so one may want to revisit its predecessors, including The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, first.

 

Tales of Two Americas

— edited by John Freeman —

If the bombast and vitriol of today’s news cycle has gotten you down, or if you’re someone who understands large questions best when they’re distilled to human scale, you may enjoy this collection of essays, longform journalism, short stories, and poetry that addresses contemporary American inequality. Heavy-hitters including Roxane Gay, Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Patchett, and Karen Russell, among others, contribute their insights as they “look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation.”

 

Manhattan Beach

— by Jennifer Egan —

This novel recently longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, from the author whose A Visit From the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and

National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, is a noir-like tale set during WWII. Our heroine is Anna Kerrigan, a young woman who has taken advantage of the employment opportunities that a country at war has newly afforded women, and become the first female diver. One night she runs into an old friend of her father’s, a man who may help her understand the reasons for her father’s disappearance. Publisher’s Weekly raves, “the novel is tremendously assured and rich, moving from depictions of violence to deep tenderness.”

 

The World Goes On

— by Lázló Krasznahorkai —

The Hungarian Krasznahorkai is a favorite of none other than Krauss herself, who calls him “one of the finest writers at work today.” In this collection of what could best be described as short stories, although their form, like many Krasznahorkai tales, defies categorization, a narrator addresses the audience directly before telling 11 stories. Krasznahorkai explains, “Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or narrative.” A must for those who like their fiction with an overtly philosophical bent.

 

The River of Consciousness

— by Oliver Sacks —

This posthumous collection of essays from the late scientist, bestselling author and polymath explores several of the grand themes with which Sacks engaged throughout his life’s works: memory, time, consciousness, and creativity among them. It is one of two books on which he was working at the time of his death, and includes reflections on misheard words and the importance of Darwin’s botany.

 

Mrs. Caliban

— by Rachel Ingalls —

This reissue of the 1982 novel centers on suburban housewife Dorothy, who, while doing chores and waiting for her husband to return from work, hears a radio announcement warning of a monster that has escaped from the Institute of Oceanographic Research. Naturally, a romance between the lonely woman and the lizard-like creature ensues. Reviewers have compared the book to “King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., Richard Yates’ domestic realism, B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter.” How could you resist?

 

Five-Carat Soul

— by James McBride —

From the author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird comes a collection of short stories that treats our “struggle to understand who we are in a world we don’t fully comprehend” with humor and inventiveness. The stories themselves follow, among others, an antiques dealer tracking a toy once commissioned by the Civil War commander, Robert E. Lee; Abraham Lincoln himself; and the members of the titular Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band, each of whom recounts a tale from his entertainingly messy life.

 

 Keeping On Keeping On

— by Alan Bennett —

The man who wrote The History Boys, The Madness of King George and The Lady in the Van returns with his third collection of prose. Included are expanded versions of the diaries he publishes annually in the London Review of Books, and which address fame, public libraries and “tweeness.” He takes witty aim at his public persona: “I am in the pigeonhole marked ‘no threat’ and did I stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a Teddy Bear.”

 

Forest Dark 

— by Nicole Krauss —

Krauss’ fourth novel follows two Americans – the wealthy retiree, Jules Epstein, and the Brooklyn novelist, Nicole – as they travel to Israel in search of new meaning. What the LA Review of Books calls Krauss’ “most inward-looking novel” and The Guardian “a brilliant achievement” is a meditation on self-transformation and that which lies beyond the visible world.

Larger Questions: Our Conversation with Nicole Krauss

By Filed Under: The Reader Interview Tagged With: , , , ,

The characters in Forest Dark are neither “empathetic people from the first page,” as they were in The History of Love, nor are they quite those “who, from the first, were difficult people, as people are,” such as populated her Great House. They defy easy categorization while tempting you to draw connections between their own journeys through parts unknown with what you might think you know of Krauss. They include the elderly Jules Epstein, a wealthy and formerly gregarious New York attorney who has begun selling off his considerable possessions. On page one we learn he has disappeared from the rundown Tel Aviv apartment in which he had been living alone. And we have the protagonist of a parallel story that, in true Krauss fashion, is recounted in alternating chapters, a novelist living in Brooklyn with two sons, and a husband from whom she feels increasingly distanced. Ostensibly to research a new book, she, too, leaves for Tel Aviv. Her name is Nicole.

When asked just how autobiographical are those sections that feature a character who is a Brooklyn writer named Nicole? “Oh, I mean of course, it’s usually the first question people ask me,” the “real” Nicole says in response. The similarities between creator and creation are many: They share a name, a home, two sons, one religion, a friend named Matti Friedman (a journalist in real life, as he is in the story), and a failing or failed marriage (Krauss divorced from author Jonathan Safran Foer several years ago), among other details.

“I totally get it,” Krauss says of the desire to ascertain what is true and what is invention. “But my hope is [the book is] also tempting you to sit with the question of, why does it matter so much to us? It matters to me, too,” she’s quick to add. “I’m fascinated by where the supposedly real ends and the imagining begins.”

But a concrete answer she will not offer. Instead, and without referring to the novel specifically, she makes like Forest Dark — a book that traffics more overtly in abstract ideas through its discussions and inner monologues than its predecessors — and cites a larger concept. “When you write, for example, in the

first-person voice of an old man, like in The History of Love with [the character] Leo Gursky . . . if you’ve had the experience of sitting down and trying to write an old man, you would know that you’re going to draw from your own experience, and naturally you can only make him out of some aspect of you. Part of it is your observations of old men, but much of it, like the really deep value of it, is you. So once you understand, like, oh, I also contain an old man . . . you understand what is called ‘the self’ is largely something that is a construction and it’s an ongoing creative act.”

She continues, “I was aware when I was writing this that this would be a question that would be tripped, and I hope it asks a larger question.”

Large questions make for the foundations and furniture of all great fiction. Forest Dark explores what happens when two people reject their previous understandings of reality and begin to embrace the uncertain. For Epstein, this means engaging with Jewish mysticism and poetry; for the Nicole character, it means, among other things, acting with an uncharacteristic lack of planning. (“I didn’t want to see things as they were. I had grown tired of that,” the character says.)

The work of the Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel became important to Krauss as she was thinking through the book. In his Man is Not Alone, Heschel discusses “turning away from wonder, and what is lost when we live in a society that doesn’t value wonder, is almost afraid of wonder,” says Krauss. It was this line of thought that “woke up or fed” the questions she was forming: “why is it that we have made such a religion out of factual, rational knowledge, and in what ways is it good for us, and in what ways does it make us feel a little bit ill, and what do we lose when we can only think of the unknown or uncertainty with anxiety?”

Among the more mystical elements addressed within the narrative is Heschel’s idea of menucha, or, simply put, peace. Alongside this theory stand several others that allude to universal feelings, universal sensations, universal doubts and hopes, but which are described in terms of the characters’ engagement with religious texts and called by their Hebrew names: Tzimtzum, Tikkun Olam and Tikkun ha’nefesh, Gilgul. (With them, too, is the not particularly Jewish concept of the unheimlich, or uncanny, which was, however, first posited by the Jewish Freud.) These concepts so fundamental to the discursive book and its human evocations are rooted in a specific culture, as are the protagonists and the people whom they meet.

Krauss, who was named to Vanity Fair’s 2009 list of young Jewish authors the magazine deemed the “New Yiddishists,” recalls an event she once attended while a student in the mid ‘90s. The Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski “was talking about how he no longer was interested in making films anymore because under Communism there was a secret language, and a gesture could be made among his films that all his audience would

know what he was talking about,” says Krauss. “So what I would say about that is, in terms of being Jewish, there’s something really, really wonderful and profound to feel, on the one hand, that maybe you have a deep, deep language with a people.” However, although this connection is “rich,” when it comes to her readers, “I don’t feel like I’m thinking about Jews in the way that Kieslowski was thinking about only those people” among his viewers who could decipher his code. Krauss insists she’s “not here to serve any party line” nor to speak “for anyone except myself.”

“So I guess those feelings are in conflict with each other: one is gratitude to have that richness of cultural belonging and language, and the other one is an absolute instinct, the freedom often not to write about it.”

And yet there’s no denying both the richness and ambivalence associated with her heritage are things she is able to mine for emotional effect. Take, for instance, Forest Dark’s Israel, the country to which the novel’s two American protagonists flee. Krauss says she has always felt at home there. “I feel at home here, too, but it’s surprising to feel at home in a place where you didn’t grow up.” In thinking about why “some aspect of it feels native to me,” she muses: “is it some aspect of the Jewish upbringing that always teaches you about here and there, where there’s always a there to your here? . . . What is it to grow up in a culture that somehow at its core teaches you that you are from someplace else, and no matter how well you’ve assimilated or roots you’ve put down, that other place, that there, whether you’ve touched it or kissed it or not, will always draw you — is that true, you know?”

This notion of a “there to your here” recurs throughout the book, and not only as an echo of Jewish thought. The first time we meet the Nicole character she is recounting a childhood memory of watching television and feeling so certain that a girl in the TV audience is her, that is, that she is both there on that television set, as well as where she is, in her parents’ bedroom. Yearning for a state of being different from how you are is, for Krauss, indelibly human. “Have you ever known a person who hasn’t grown incredibly tired of oneself and one’s life and one’s limitations and just wouldn’t love to be free of all the constraints, both self-imposed constraints, of which there are always far more than the constraints that people place on you,” and those that “the life you live force on you?” It’s no wonder that as Forest Dark explores the theme of transformation, the writer of The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, who also gives the work its epigraph, comes to play a prominent role.

Given the many themes, the many texts, the many ideas at play in Forest Dark, the novel may at first appear to stand apart from Man Walks Into a Room, The History of Love, and Great House as the most cerebral of the Krauss quartet. The narrative line is, perhaps, of less of a concern than ever it was. But though Krauss has sometimes been labeled “difficult,” cerebral is not how she would choose to describe her latest creation. Or, not only.

“I don’t know if it’s more cerebral. I mean, it feels emotional to me, but those things go hand in hand, cerebral and emotional.” Nor would she want to spoil the sense of the unknown that greets every reader at the onset of a new story by offering a neat summary of her Forest Dark. “In an ideal world, I would see that people are OK with the fact that it can’t be described . . . I would love it if it were OK to just say, here’s how the book made me think or feel, but I can’t really give you a synopsis of what it is, or what it’s about. You have to read it.”