There was an air of subdued anticipation at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine as we waited for Philippe Petit to take the stage. A clarinetist roved through the church improvising variations on Gershwin in spurts, making it hard to tell if the event, which was being held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers, had begun. Eventually, the lights dimmed and we were told to turn off our phones, as even a single lit screen in the audience might cause Petit to fall from his tightrope. Music started, but so quietly that it seemed like it was being played from a phone, while a candlelit procession made its way down the nave. Large boards were set up, on which footage of the Twin Towers being constructed was projected. A group of child dancers imitated Petit’s walk along the ground, and were followed by a professional whistler. After we were shuffled through this sequence that felt like a performed version of ADHD, Petit finally appeared and began walking, first meekly, then quickly, to Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” wearing a white jacket laced with gold.

The original Twin Towers walk took place on the morning of August 7, 1974, after Petit and a group of conspirators broke into the World Trade Center while it was still partially under construction, and used a bow and arrow to span a tightrope between the towers. Petit walked, ran, lay down, and knelt on the wire, a quarter of a mile in the air, as the city looked on from below. It had taken more than eight months of meticulous planning to carry out the performance, including creating a mock-up of the distance between the Towers on a field in France, studying their engineering, and using various disguises and fake IDs to gain access to them. These heist-like aspects (it is referred to as “the coup”) have made it ripe material for movies including Man on Wire and The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit and featuring CGI Twin Towers.

***

Three weeks before the performance, Petit held a reception in anticipation of the event on the eightieth floor of 3 World Trade Center. I exited the elevator into a space with perhaps the most impressive view of New York I’d ever seen. Under the influence of the height and temperature change (it was a hundred degrees outside that day), the vista was so impressive that it was almost addictive; it was hard to pull myself away from the windows, as though the space were designed to keep me there, like the interior of a casino.

Earlier this year, the visionary poetry critic Helen Vendler died at the age of ninety. After her death, the writer and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas—author of  The Shadow of the Object, Cracking Up, and Meaning and Melancholia, among many others—collected a correspondence between himself and Vendler that unfolded over email during the last two years of her life, which began as Vendler was clearing out her office at Harvard in 2022. These emails, which have been selected and edited by the Review (with spelling and punctuation left unchanged), touch on the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry; the experience of aging in all its forms; and the growth of a friendship, and understanding, between Bollas and Vendler. 

January 22, 2022

Dear Christopher Bollas,

A form of life that keeps itself in relation to a poetic practice, however that might be, is always in the studio, always in its studio.

Its—but in what way do that place and practice belong to it? Isn’t the opposite true—that this form of life is at the mercy of its studio?

***

In the mess of papers and books, open or piled upon one another, in the disordered scene of brushes and paints, canvases leaning against the wall, the studio preserves the rough drafts of creation; it records the traces of the arduous process leading from potentiality to act, from the hand that writes to the written page, from the palette to the painting. The studio is the image of potentiality—of the writer’s potentiality to write, of the painter’s or sculptor’s potentiality to paint or sculpt. Attempting to describe one’s own studio thus means attempting to describe the modes and forms of one’s own potentiality—a task that is, at least on first glance, impossible.

For millions of people in the Americas, our Indigenous heritage is something tinged with mystery. We look into a mirror and believe we see the Mayan, the Aztec, or the Apache in our faces. The hint of a high cheekbone; the very loud and obvious statement of our cinnamon or copper skin. We sense a native great-great-grandparent in our squat or long torsos, in the shape of our eyes, in our gait, and in the emotions and the spirits that drift over us at times of joy and loss. But the particulars of our Indigeneity, the weighty and grounded facts of it, have been erased from our history.

In my Guatemalan-immigrant childhood, the great Mayan jungle city of Tikal was a symbol of the civilization in our blood. Despite the humility of our present in seventies Los Angeles—my mother was a store cashier, my father a parking-lot valet—we were once an empire. My father suggested that a personal, familial greatness was there in our Mayan heritage, waiting to reawaken. I could not trace who my Mayan forebears were, exactly. But I knew the Maya were in me because I was a guatemalteco; or, in the hyphenated ethnic nomenclature of the time, a “Guatemalan-American.” Only now do I realize how deeply fraught the idea of being “Guatemalan” truly is. “Guatemala” is a way of glossing over the cultural collisions and the racial violence that produced a country centered in the mountain jungles and river valleys where Mayan peoples ruled themselves until Europeans came.

Men of Maize is Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mayan masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses, a deep dive into the forces that made and kept the Maya a subservient caste, and the perpetual resistance that kept Guatemala’s many Mayan cultures alive and resilient. Like most people born in Guatemala, Asturias more than likely had some Indigenous ancestors, even though his father, a judge, was among the minority of Guatemalans who could trace their Spanish heritage to the seventeenth century. When the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (later the subject of Asturias’s novel Mr. President) sent the future author’s father and family into an internal exile in the Mayan‑centric world of provincial Alta Verapaz, the young Miguel Ángel fell deep into the great well of Indigenous culture for the first time.

In the 1920s, Asturias left for Paris to study. Soon he would become a member of a generation of Latin American thinkers influenced by the Eurocentric aesthetics and worldviews of the time: modernism, surrealism, socialism. In his own artistic practice, these ideas would fuse with the Indigenous spirituality and consciousness of the Americas. The life stories and the mythology of common Mayan and “mixed” folk of Guatemala would appear in his work, and influence it, again and again. In Men of Maize, he rejected the superficiality and sentimentality to be found in so many works about Indigenous cultures written by outsiders. The Mayan families in the novel are not hapless, helpless victims living out one tragedy after another in the face of the relentless march of modernity. Instead, in a frenzy of surreal stories and images, their ghosts and folktales and visions take over the narrative. Darkness comes streaming out of an anthill. A postman transforms into a coyote. Fire sweeps across the corn‑covered landscape, both as a tool of ruthless capitalism and as an agent of peasant retribution. In this fashion, Asturias reimagined the birth of Guatemala as a mad, disorderly event that unleashed countless personal and familial passions: betrayal, mourning, love, loyalty, and revenge.

Anne Serre’s “That Summer,” which appears in the new Summer issue of  The Paris Review, opens with an anticlimactic claim: “That summer we had decided we were past caring.” But the story that follows is packed with drama. Over the course of three pages, it chronicles interactions among four characters in a family—two of whom are institutionalized. There are two deaths. Serre’s narrator’s reflections on her family dynamics, charged and nuanced, are the main attraction. They bring to light entire dimensions of experience; when life has such a finely wrought interior, death is literally the afterthought. 

“That Summer” previously appeared in French, in Au cœur d’un été tout en or, a collection of stories of similar brevity. That was not Serre’s first book of short-shorts, though her books available in English are made up of longer texts. They include three short novels—The Governesses, The Beginners, and A Leopard-Skin Hat—and The Fool and Other Moral Tales, a collection of novellas. All are translated by Mark Hutchinson, who is a longtime friend. Her untranslated works include Voyage avec Vila-Matas, which riffs on an experience of reading Serre’s Spanish contemporary, going so far as to feature a fictionalized version of Enrique Vila-Matas, and Grande tiqueté, written in a combination of French and a language Serre invented for the purpose. In her latest novel, Notre si chère vieille dame auteur, an elderly authoress whose death is imminent directs the process of assembling the manuscript that she has, already, left behind.

This interview was conducted primarily over email. A WhatsApp call was thwarted by “enormous storms” in the Auvergne region where, for two months out of the year, Serre lives, in a house that was also her grandparents’. As in Paris, she lives alone, something she has wanted since her adolescence. Asked if she would field a personal question, the author was encouraging. “Literature is personal,” she said.

—Jacqueline Feldman

There is enormous pleasure to be had in maintaining at least two, if not several, parallel lives. Of course, there are the pleasures of concealment and control, but the true indulgence is in occupying the vast reaches of interior space, populated by all the aspects of yourself that don’t end up in any social circle, any relationship, any reputation, and so don’t really get expressed at all; a big, sumptuous, light-filled nothing, the real you. You find it especially at the age of, say, twenty-five, on an airplane between two major cities, one in which you live and the other in which your girlfriend lives, the latter being where she carries on flings she takes little trouble to conceal, and the former being where you’ve discovered the cover afforded by being mistreated and have decided to carry on a fling of your own. Up there, between clouds, the contradictions don’t really clash, they just float beside one another. It’s useful to float along with them, becoming comfortable with the illogic and the fabrication, particularly when, for example, you are seated beside your new fling at a dinner party, trying not to let on.

“Are you having an affair with ——?” Someone had put the question to me the day before the party, and the word affair had rung so hollow that when I answered in the negative it didn’t even feel like a lie. I was mostly struck by the use of the word itself, which gave the whole thing a certain sophistication. But still, I chafed. “Why are you asking?” “I wouldn’t care if you were.” “Why would you?” “I said I wouldn’t.” In those days, I would snap at questions or laugh them off. How badly I must have wanted to be found out.

Back then—all of us in grad school—we met weekly for dinner. It began as a way of observing Shabbat as my roommate rediscovered his Judaism, or rediscovered himself in relation to Judaism, or else rediscovered everything, concluding that within the world as it existed there was no way to disentangle himself from his religion. I am not Jewish but Catholic, by then more or less totally lapsed, and while spending most of my time around this brilliant, intense religious seeker certainly shunted me along toward my own reckoning with faith, what these dinners really inspired in me was a taste for dinners. But then, maybe there was something irrepressibly if obliquely religious about even this. Around a ruined table, confessions can be offered or extracted at will, friendships forged and sundered, and the truth, or what you believe to be the truth, can be loudly declared only to be shrugged off the next morning as drunken enthusiasm. You can fake it, and have it count, or you can mean it, and have it not count.

The Friday gatherings soon swelled to two-part binges: the first, small group who came early to eat matzo soup and drink blessed wine; the second, smoke-filled blowouts with whoever happened to drop by, filling our large apartment and terrorizing our anonymous neighbors with late-night shouting, nearly everyone disastrously drunk by the end. The first group would remain secretly intact throughout the second half of the party even if we dispersed physically among the larger party, silently faithful to the privacy we had shared before everyone else had arrived. I prided myself on always remembering to turn on a lamp when I went to bed, so that my roommate could read on Sabbath morning as I slept off the hangovers to which he seemed miraculously immune.

The following five letters were written by the poet Seamus Heaney, all in the spring of 1995. The Paris Review’s interview with Heaney, referenced in his letter to Henri Cole, is available here; two of his poems appeared in the magazine in 1979.

To Ted Hughes

March 14, 1995

First, some news of our own: Book Riot is hiring an ad operations associate. Know somebody who’d be a great fit? Please send them our way.

Now here’s a look at the headlines coming from inside the house:

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Know somebody who’s looking for a new gig? Book Riot is hiring an ad operations associate. Now let’s kick off the weekend with a round-up of the week’s best.

Utah Bans 13 Books From Schools Statewide

After passing one of the most restrictive book banning measures in the country, the state of Utah has released its list of books to be banned from schools across the state. House Bill 29 allows parents to challenge books they deem “sensitive material” while also outright banning books from public schools if those books have been deemed “objective sensitive material” or “pornographic” per state code in at least three school districts or two school districts and five charter schools statewide.

Overrated Sci-Fi Classics (and What to Read Instead)

Sci-fi fans’ staunch devotion to some things can make it hard to break away from books considered “classics.” In some ways, this makes sense: sci-fi as a genre has had to struggle against a lot of snobbery. Ursula Le Guin (among others) has openly rallied against this snobbery, but even in the contemporary heyday sci-fi seems to be enjoying, it’s there. So I get that saying some of the books widely considered to be sci-fi classics are overrated might cause some heat.

Regardless, sci-fi isn’t immune to certain issues — like racism and sexism, to name just two — that plague other facets of older literature. As sci-fi writer Carla Ra points out, this is simply part of how cultural production evolves. Importantly, she also notes that it’s possible to still enjoy older works even as we “notice the troublesome parts as something that we should, as a society, reject and get over.” In that spirit, read the sci-fi “classics” if you want. But I’ll offer you some contemporary works which I believe resonate more meaningfully with our current moment.

The Bestselling Books of the Week, According to All the Lists

There are no new titles on the bestseller lists this week, but there are still some things worth noting. Let’s start with the most fun to the least. First off, Gravity Falls was a cartoon that ended in 2016, but a new Gravity Falls book (The Book of Bill by Alex Hirsch) just came out, and it made the Publishers Weekly and USA Today overall top ten bestseller lists. I love this show, so it makes me happy to see it’s still got a strong contingent of fans.

When I was a baby queer, freshly out at 15, I dreamed of one day being a professional queer. You know, the kind of person whose brand is queer and whose day job doesn’t just tolerate their queerness but centers it. Running a Pride-themed B&B, say. Or starting an LGBTQ bookstore. Today, I get paid to write the Our Queerest Shelves newsletter (among other things). I’ve also been running a queer book blog of my own for over ten years, which occasionally makes money, so I can officially call myself a professional queer reader at this point.

Admittedly, the romance genre is not my particular expertise, but I’ve been enjoying the new abundance of traditionally published queer romances, and I have three that are absolute stand-outs. These are must-read queer romance novels, whether you’re new to the genre or a professional.

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I should probably end with a caveat that the “queer book professional” framing is tongue in cheek: these are just my personal favorites and aren’t actually an objective ranking of the best in queer romance, especially since I’ve read only a tiny portion of all the queer romances out there.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Before we get into the news, Book Riot is hiring an ad operations associate. Check it out, share with friends, and apply if you’re a good fit.

Authors Get In on Literary Activism

Book bans—and the issues of intellectual freedom and civil rights for people of color and the LGBTQ+ community that book bans aim to suppress—are on the ballot this November, and authors are getting in on the action. Roxane Gay and Gabrielle Zevin are among a group of well-known writers hosting Authors for Harris, a virtual reading being held on Monday, August 12th. Registration fees for the event serve as a fundraiser for the Harris-Walz ticket. (Did you know Walz signed a law banning book bans in the Minnesota?) We love two-fer, and what could be better than seeing your favorite authors read their work while you support candidates with a proven track record of fighting book bans and defending freedom? May their efforts succeed.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Thrillers

What do we mean now when we say a book is a thriller? For authors like Alma Katsu, the question is existential. Observing changes in readers’ preferences over the last decade or so, Katsu notes that the need for “increasingly frenetic, twisty stories” has given way to “greater tolerance from both readers and publishers for a slightly slower pace, but the need for unforeseeable plot complications.” So, what happened in the last 10ish years? My unhesitating answer would have been: Gone Girl, which came out in early 2012 and kicked off a trend of thrillers with unreliable narrators and shocking plot twists that is still going hard today.

Katsu pins the push for ever-increasing twisty-turny-ness on another early-aughts phenomenon that lingers on: binge-watching brought to us by Netflix, the 2013 debut of “House of Cards.” That would never have occurred to me when the book-related catalyst is so readily available, but it makes just as much sense, and the truth is probably that it’s both. Always nice to have a smart person with an insider’s perspective challenge my tidy explanation.

Out Now in Paperback

We’re hitting the point in an election year when new releases slow down because publishers (wisely) don’t want to compete with the news cycle, so it’s a great time to catch up on books you missed last year as they come out in paperback. The Guardian has rounded up some of the month’s best paperback releases, and friends, the getting is good. We’re talking Jesmyn Ward. We’re talking The Iliad as translated by Emily Wilson, who was the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English. We’re talking Mona Awad’s dark-and-twisty modern fairytales. And that’s just to name a few! Stock your last-gasp-of-summer beach bag and get to turning those pages.

I’ve mentioned this already, but there just wasn’t enough horror rep in the NYT‘s top books of the 21st century. So as I share with you some of my personal picks for the best books of this century, you had to know more horror was going to come up. This one is another one from Paul Tremblay, who I mentioned a couple months ago. But why not read two Paul Tremblay books this summer? Especially when this one is, again, one of the BEST BOOKS of the century. Hear me out.

Like much of the Internet population, I have been thoroughly enjoying all of the “Midwestern Dad” memes popping up around Tim Walz. But I am also very much enjoying this clip of him at the Wisconsin rally telling Republicans, “I sure the hell don’t need you telling us what books we’re going to read.” More of this energy, please!

Libraries & Librarians

News Updates

The Queens Public Library opens a new branch in Far Rockaway.

A group of far-right rioters set the Spellow Hub Library in Liverpool on fire, but an appeal for donations has raised over £120,000 in two days.

Worth Reading

5 strategies to verify facts in the age of AI.

Book Adaptations in the News

Everything to know about the new Game of Thrones prequel spinoff series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

Before I dive into your bi-weekly mystery goodness—which includes new releases, backlist titles featuring cold settings, and news—I have a new mystery film for you to watch. If you’re in the mood for a heist comedy starring Matt Damon, you can now stream The Instigators on Apple TV+. Watch the trailer here.

Bookish Goods

New Releases

Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill “learned to use a gun at eleven, got his first motorcycle at twelve, his first sailboat at fifteen, started studying medicine at sixteen, by twenty-three he was a sociologist, by thirty-eight a millionaire adman, and by forty he was broke,” the Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero once wrote. Fogwill was born outside Buenos Aires in 1941 and lived until 2010; as Guerriero illustrates, he was precocious as a young man, but it wasn’t until 1980, at the age of thirty-nine, after he’d lost the fortune he made in advertising, that his story “Muchacha Punk” won a prestigious writing contest and his literary career took off. In 1982, he wrote his most famous novel, Los pichiciegos. Set during the Falklands War and published while the conflict was ongoing, this sardonic exploration of the absurdities of war, a kind of Slaughterhouse-Five for Argentina, was an immediate sensation, and it cemented Fogwill as a touchstone for the literary resistance to the military dictatorship. A writer of short stories, novels, poems, and cultural criticism, he went on to publish more than twenty books across a thirty-year career.

Drawing on his background in advertising, Fogwill cultivated an iconoclastic public persona and turned his surname—Fogwill, just so, like Prince or Madonna—into a brand. He pursued controversy and manufactured scandal, relentlessly excoriating the sanctimony of the institutional and cultural elite. He wrote high-profile columns attacking and satirizing both the military dictatorship and what he called the “horror show” of Argentina’s transition to a neoliberal democracy. Described by contemporaries as “a holy terror,” with an “almost alien intelligence,” Fogwill’s exhibitionism belied, as Francisco Garamona writes, “an unassailable body of work, an idea, an inimitable way of being, and above all, an ethics.” Known as a generous friend and mentor, he guided younger writers and helped launch the careers of figures as notable as Osvaldo Lamborghini and César Aira.

Like his persona, Fogwill’s writing is provocative and irreverent. He absorbed the different strands of the Argentine tradition and produced a literature that defies classification: a literature of ideas and the body, the political and the personal, the ordinary and the ineffable. Nimbly traversing form and genre, he employs myriad styles while maintaining a singular and inimitable sensibility.

When asked if there was “a close intimacy” between him and his sister, André Weil replied, “Very much so. My sister as a child always followed me, and my grandmother, who liked to drop into German occasionally, used to say that she was a veritable Kopiermaschine.” Biographers have emphasized—overly so, according to André Weil—the episode described by his sister in a May 1942 letter to Father Perrin, known as her “Spiritual Autobiography”: “At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair which come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me.”

The largest part of the known correspondence between Simone and André Weil dates from the period when André was imprisoned for being absent without leave from his military duties; he was held first in Le Havre, then Rouen, from February to early May 1940. These circumstances gave Simone Weil an opportunity to explore scientific, and particularly mathematical, questions that were significant to her. In particular, one must note the importance given to the crisis of incommensurables in her correspondence. The reason this moment in the history of thought plays a central role at this point in Simone Weil’s reflection on science is well defined by André Weil in a letter dated March 28, 1940: “A proportion is what is named; the fact that there are relations that aren’t nameable (and nameable is a relation between whole numbers), that there have been λόγοι ἄλόγοι, the word itself is so deeply moving that I can’t believe that in a period so essentially dramatic … such an extraordinary event could have been seen as a mere scientific discovery … what you say about proportion suggests that, at the beginnings of Greek thought, there was such an intense feeling of the disproportion between thought and world (and, as you say, between man and God) that they had to build a bridge over this abyss at all costs. That they thought they found it … in mathematics is nothing if not credible.”

The crisis of reason that Simone Weil apprehended in contemporary physics led her to revisit the birth of the scientific spirit. The relationship between this crisis of science as a crisis of reason and her interest in the question of incommensurables is clear. Rationalizing irrationals was at the heart of the mathematical problem of incommensurables. According to Simone Weil’s interpretation, the same difficulty was encountered in her day with quantum theory (see her study “Classical Science and After,” as well as the article “Reflections on Quantum Theory”). How do we rationalize what appears—according to her interpretation—to be an “irrational” of this theory, in particular its uses of discontinuity and probability, notions on which the new physics rested? Could the crisis of reason, which is also a crisis of the notion of truth in contemporary physics, cause the same mental aberrations as the one produced by incommensurability, an aberration that led the Sophists to be skeptical of Logos and truth? Simone Weil’s references to Plato and her constant appeal to a new Eudoxus represent a desire to escape the skepticism of a new sophistry. She would write to her brother: “The popularization of this discovery casts discredit upon the notion of truth that has lasted to this day; it … contributed to the appearance of the idea that one can equally well demonstrate two contradictory theories; the Sophists spread this point of view among the masses, along with knowledge of an inferior quality, exclusively aimed at the conquest of power.” This marriage of a purely operative and combinatory science with the quest for power is what Simone Weil feared.

I think I am temperamentally a mystic. I feel very drawn to this form of experience and this mode of conceptualizing and, in particular, the deepening and layering of concepts with experience and experience with concepts that can be seen in mystical traditions. Skepticism is not an instinctual or default response for me. If someone tells me something, I am inclined to believe it, no matter how strange it sounds. Maybe I’m just gullible, particularly when it comes to profound experiences that I have never really had, or never had in the way that I would really like. Maybe I’m just a bad philosopher. The thought has certainly crossed my mind.

For example, I believe that Julian of Norwich had Showings, or revelations of Christ; that George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was carried up to heaven; that William Blake was visited by Angels in his dark little dwelling off the Strand in London; that Wordsworth had a total sensuous apprehension of the divine in nature during his ascent of Mount Snowdon; and that Philip K. Dick had an intellectual intuition of the divine in February 1974. This list could be continued. In fact, it could be nicely endless.

I don’t doubt these things, at least not at first, and I sometimes wonder whether I (as someone who teaches philosophy as a day job) should always be cultivating skepticism or praising the power of critical thinking. There is a defensive myopia to the obsession with critique, a refusal to see what you can’t make sense of, blocking the view of any strange new phenomenon with a misty drizzle of passive aggressive questions. At this point in history, it is at least arguable that understanding is as important as critique, and patient, kind-hearted, sympathetic observation more helpful than endless personal opinions, as we live in a world entirely saturated by suspicion and fueled by vicious judgments of each other. I’m not arguing for dogmatism, but I sometimes wonder whether philosophy’s obsession with critique risks becoming a form of obsessional self-protection against strange and novel forms of experience. My wish is to give leeway for strange new intensities of experience with which we can push back against the pressure of reality. All the way to ecstasy.