I’d planned to write about one of my favorite James Schuyler poems in time for the centenary of his birth last November, but  

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field. 

The tiny, beloved “Salute”—which is not the poem that I mean to discuss—both gathers and separates, does and then undoes what the poem says Schuyler meant to do but never did. (And isn’t this, the play of assembly and disassembly, to a certain extent just what verse is? How part and whole relate or fail to as the poem unfolds in time is a basic drama of poetic form.) Schuyler’s enjambments—at once distinct and soft, like the edge of a leaflet or the margin of a petal—are sites of hesitation where meanings collect before they’re scattered or revised. 

For a second I hear “Like that gather-” as an imperative: Do it that way, gather in that manner, before the noun “gathering” gathers across the margin. I briefly hear “one of each I”—each of us is a field of various “I”s—as the object of the gathering before it becomes the subject who has “planned” it. (The comparative metrical regularity of “Like that gathering of one of each I planned,” the alternating stresses, haunts these enjambments, a prosodic past or frame the poem salutes and breaks with, breaks up.) I am always slightly surprised when “to gather one,” at the end of the seventh line, repeats “of each,” as opposed to modifying a new specific noun, at the left margin of line eight. (This break makes me feel the tension or oscillation between “each” and “kind”—and a kind is a gathering of likes—between the discrete specimen and the class for which it stands, the particular dissolving into exemplarity, when you write it down.)

1. The Divine Celebrity

“There isn’t really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does,” the artist Richard Phillips observed in 2012. “Something happens when she steps in front of the camera … She is very aware of the way that an icon is constructed, and that’s something that is unique.” Phillips, who has long used famous people as his muses, was promoting a new short film he had made with the then-twenty-five-year-old actress. Standing in a fulgid ocean in a silvery-white bathing suit, her eyeliner and false lashes dark as a depressive mood, she is meant to look healthily Californian, but her beauty is a little rumpled, and even in close-up she cannot quite meet the camera’s gaze. The impression left by Lindsay Lohan (2011), Phillips’s film, is that of an artist’s model who is incapable of behaving like one, having been cursed with the roiling interior life of a consummate actress. Most traditional print models can successfully empty out their eyes for fashion films and photoshoots, easily signifying nothing, but Lohan looks fearful, guarded, as if somewhere just beyond the camera she can see the terrible future. Unlike her heroine Marilyn Monroe, Phillips also observed in a promotional interview, Lohan is “still alive, and she’s more powerful than ever.” It is interesting that he felt the need to specify that Lohan had not died, although ultimately his assertion of her power is difficult to deny based on the evidence of Lindsay Lohan, which may not exude the surfer-y, gilded vibe he might have hoped for, but which does act as a poignant document of Lohan’s skill, her raw and uncomfortable magnetism.

“Lindsay has an incredible emotional and physical presence on screen that holds an existential vulnerability,” Phillips argued in his artist’s statement, “while harnessing the power of the transcendental—the moment in transition. She is able to connect with us past all of our memory and projection, expressing our own inner eminence.” “Our own inner eminence” is an odd, not entirely meaningful phrase, used in a typically unmeaningful and art-speak-riddled press release. What the artist seems to say or to imply, however, is that Lohan’s obvious ability to reach inside herself and then—without dialogue—vividly suggest her depths onscreen acts as a piquant reminder of our own complexity, the way each of us is a celebrity in the melodrama of our lives.

What makes Lindsay Lohan art and not a perfume advertisement, aside from the absence of a perfume bottle? The same quality, perhaps, that makes—or made—Lohan herself a star, as well as, once, a sterling actress. All Phillips’s talk of transcendence and the existential may be overblown, but then stars tend to be overblown, as evidenced by the superlatives so often used in descriptions of Hollywood and its denizens: “silver screen,” “golden age,” “legendary,” or “iconic.” “Muses must possess two qualities,” the dance critic Arlene Croce claimed in The New Yorker in 1996, “beauty and mystery, and of the two, mystery is the greater.” At first blush, Lohan might not have seemed like an especially mysterious muse, with her personal life splashed across the tabloids and her upskirt shots all over Google. In fact, her revelations are a trick, the illusion of intimacy possible because she has enough to plumb that we can barely touch the surface. We can see her pubis and her mugshots and the powder in her nostrils, but it is impossible for us, as regular, unfamous people, to know what it feels like to be her.

Inside the Palais d’Iéna, it was dark-colored carpets and dark-colored walls. Chocolaty and rust-colored and warm. There was music that was playing and it was ambient, it was a shudder of synthesizers, it sounded like a womb. A loop of a video made by the Belgian American artist Cécile B. Evans was projected on screens set up on all sides of the room. I was not sure what to do during this time before the show started. I decided that a good thing to do while waiting for the fashion show to start was to orient myself in the space. I watched girls take selfies. I walked past the pit where photographers organized themselves, setting up their cameras. I was pacing, you might say; I was walking fast and with very little purpose.  

Photographers swarmed actresses and actors walking in to the venue wearing full Miu Miu looks—things like teeny-tiny plaid shorts and a navy blue blouse with a puritan collar, or a red two-piece with a miniskirt that is kind of like an evil badminton uniform. Miu Miu girls and theys, I observed, are chic in a way that is like, I’m a pixie, I know my angles, I’m very charming about it. I have never felt like that in my life. Speaking of knowing your angles, I kept getting in the photographers’ shots. Sorry miss, do you mind moving, you’re in the shot, they said to me. I was happy to oblige. Sydney Sweeney walked in with her handlers, glamorously wearing sunglasses inside. Raf Simons, the legendary Belgian designer and co–creative director of Prada, got caught up in the photoshoot of a famous K-pop star, and a friend I was talking with swore she heard him say, Jesus Christ. I wrote a note in my phone that said: have u ever watched a really famous person being interviewed b4? its rlly weird lol. They enter a room and they are swarmed by a whole swath of people. How do they come up for air? I was having trouble with that at that moment, coming up for air. 

I also felt, among other things, that I had a new appreciation for the music of Drake, the chanteuse. How does the song “Club Paradise” go again? No wonder why I feel awkward at this Fashion Week shit! No wonder why I keep fucking up the double-cheek kiss! Ha ha ha.

Last June, the Review published Jamie Quatro’s “Little House”—what appears at first glance to be a quiet, traditional story about childhood and family life. Gentle in tone and careful in construction, it leaves the reader discomfited to realize that the narrator has left the thing that drove her to tell it—the real story—almost entirely unsaid. The story is part of a triptych by Quatro, the second part of which, “Yogurt Days,” was published in The New Yorker; in that story, the same narrator remembers her evangelical mother taking her along as she attempted to save the spirit of a man suffering from a mysterious (to the narrator) illness. The third story, “Two Men, Mary,” published in our most recent Winter issue, completes the triptych, and is itself structured in three parts. Anna recalls herself first at sixteen, working in a frozen yogurt shop, and her first sexual encounters with older men; then, decades later, as a published writer on a plane to a literary conference, who has a rendezvous with the man sitting next to her; and finally, in the present, where she turns to a very different kind of surrender. We exchanged emails about the uses of autobiography in fiction, how these stories came about, and what we are to make of their singular narrator, Anna.

Which of the stories in this series came first? Were they published in the order you wrote them?

This originally appeared in our Today in Books daily newsletter, where each day we round up the most interesting stories, news, essays, and other goings on in the world of books and reading. Sign up here if you want to get it.

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Why Does Every Famous Woman Have a Book Club Now?

Of course, it is not every famous woman, and in fact, that hyperbolic headline actually does the very real trend a disservice. A more interesting question is: why is it these kind of famous women? Mostly white. All in the entertainment industry. Mostly between the ages of 27 and 47. I think Gould’s ultimate conclusion is largely the right one: the cultural currency that comes with being seen as aligned with books, primarily upmarket literary fiction, matters to these women. Which is great! Except that it doesn’t seem to matter to the books who get a turn, ever so fleetingly, in an Instagram Reel.

Higher Prices. Fewer Books Sold.

It’s not just your imagination. Books are getting more expensive. More expensive enough apparently to offset that fewer books are being sold. South Africa, strangely, exemplifies both trends, with a 7.7% drop in 2023 number of units sold but a price gain of 9.6%. Is anyone out there trying to correlate this? Are fewer books being sold because the prices are going up? Would the number of books sold be higher if books were cheaper? And if not, why aren’t prices even higher?

Introductory Book Fair Etiquette

I’ve read/followed Rebecca Romney for a long while, and though I am not a buyer of rare books, I find the world completely fascinating. She recently posted a thread, now blog post, about etiquette at rare book fairs (this is aimed at institutional buyers, fwiw). I never articulated this way, but I love reading about the “etiquettes” of micro-communites, be it rare book dealers or baseball players or art dealers or professional fly-fishermen or whatever.

Akira Toriyama was one of the most influential mangaka: he created Dragon Ball in 1984, which would later become the hit series Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super. This action fantasy comedy franchise inspired many other series, like One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach.

On March 7th, the official Dragon Ball Twitter/X account shared that Akira Toriyama had passed away at 68 from acute subdural hematoma. He was still working on several creative projects at the time of his death. He had a small funeral with family.

It’s hard to believe Lyn is dead, because her mind, her spirit, if you will, was always so full of life. The last time I saw her, when she was already quite ill, she talked about the comical way the Hollywood writers’ strike had affected commencement speeches, and about what she’d learned about AI from a scientist she knew on the Berkeley faculty. She was still engaged with the world, in other words, despite her situation. She was a very private person, yet she opened herself up to other people and to new experiences again and again. As she says in her book The Fatalist, ”I adventure and consider fate / as occurrence and happenstance as destiny. I recite an epigraph. / It seems as applicable to the remarks I want to make as disorder / is to order.” It was like her to see opposites (order/disorder) as part of a whole—which is not to say she couldn’t take sides against oppression. She could and did.

As a girl, she loved reading the journals of explorers. She was a kind of explorer herself. For example, in the late eighties, she taught herself Russian and traveled first with other poets and then alone to the Soviet Union to translate the work of outsider poets such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. (And she was scheduled to spend a winter with scientists in Antarctica when she was diagnosed with breast cancer some twenty-odd years ago.) She didn’t believe in borders or in endings. As she says in My Life, “But a word is a bottomless pit.” She didn’t think that was a bad thing. It made her curious.

She had a unique combination of generosity and discernment, equanimity and élan. I admire her more than anyone I know. Her generosity was utterly without self-interest; her curiosity was never intrusive. These traits shone in her poetry as in her life. When I had cancer in 2006, she helped to organize a kind of private fundraising campaign among friends and sent me several thousand dollars. Because of her discretion, I don’t know who had contributed what exactly, but I’ve always suspected she was a major contributor herself.

She has influenced countless other poets, but no one else could come close to writing a “Lyn Hejinian” poem. I was impressed, influenced perhaps, by the way her poetry was, to quote one of her titles, a “language of inquiry.” The first book of hers I read, back in the mid-seventies, was called A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking. Back then the consensus seemed to be that “thought” was the province of philosophy. But as I’ve said, Lyn didn’t believe in borders. Her “October 6, 1986” poem in her book The Cell presents resistance as a kind of measuring device: “resistance is accurate—it / rocks and rides the momentum.” It is like her to cast resistance as a form of exploration, of appreciation even. That poem concludes with her characteristic humor: “It is not imperfect to / have died.” Those lines strike me with full force now. I want to scream that it is far from perfect that Lyn is dead, but she knew best.

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes, these books are brand-new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. This week, we’re looking at a blockbuster hit from Māori author Rebecca K Reilly.

Higher education is not immune to this current onslaught of censorship — but not in the way that right-wing media claims. As they speak out of one side of their mouth about “cancel culture” on campus, they use the other side to implement egregious policies and laws that actually impede the rights of students, staff, and faculty at these institutions.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has been a right-wing target over the last several years, and that has shown up in spades with book banning related to books written, published, or studied for/by those under the age of 18. So-called “Critical Race Theory” books, alongside books deemed as “Social Emotional Learning” or “Comprehensive Sexuality [sic] Education,” have been pulled in schools and public libraries nationwide amid the manufactured fervor.

But as much as the rhetoric has been about “protecting the kids,” it is very much not about the kids at all. If it were, then DEI departments or programs at public universities — where students are near-universally no longer minors — would not need to be disbanded. Texas outlawed DEI programs at all public universities, as did several other states. In Florida, the dismantling of higher education has an incubator program at New College. Last year, the state’s governor implemented new leadership at the public liberal arts school, which included installing completely unqualified political agitators to the institution’s advisory board. Students and faculty reported on the chaos happening in the school to begin the 2023-24 academic year, and even more recently, the institution saw sanctions leveraged against it by the American Association of University Professors for standards violations. Only 12 other institutions have ever been given these sanctions over the last 30 years.

Winter might be coming to an end, and the sun might be shining for longer, but believe me when I say March is about to get dark. This month’s horror novels are probably the creepiest of 2024 so far. Whether you’re in the mood for short stories, novels, or horror manga, March’s new horror releases are sure to fulfill your need for chills and thrills.

Get ready for a new take on Frankenstein, one of the first horror novels ever, set in a near-future version of America. Prepare yourselves for a short story manga collection featuring bone-chilling illustrations from Junji Ito. March is also bringing you a highly-anticipated horror sequel you’re not going to want to miss. And if you love a good haunting, March is full of haunted villas, haunted roads, haunted woods, haunted hills, and even full towns that are just straight-up, all-the-way haunted.

Serial killers, ghosts, scary body parts that move on their own. Readers, beware. March is going to be a scary month. And honestly, would we want it any other way? Here are ten books coming out this month that will have you scared no matter what time of day you read them. But you’ll be glad the sun is staying out a little bit longer.

The weather is getting warmer, and the flowers are blooming, which makes March a great month for reading outside (though if you have allergies like me, maybe pack a box of tissues with you!). I often bring along a children’s book on our outdoor excursions, and there are lots of March children’s book releases to choose from.

While March always has a lot of book releases, this March has just SO MANY. I know I say this every month, but because of the unusually high number of March children’s book releases, I had an extra hard time narrowing this list down to ten books. All this to say, if you want to read my reviews of even more awesome March children’s book releases, you should subscribe to Book Riot’s kidlit newsletter. Several books I review this month are inspired by the author’s experiences or the author’s family’s experiences, whether it’s about growing up Deaf, housing Korean War refugees, or grappling with mental illness in middle school. Several of these March children’s book releases made me cry, and just as many (and sometimes even the same ones) made me smile and laugh out loud. I include historical fiction, fantasy, novels-in-verse, funny read-alouds, and more.

There’s something for every reader! I hope you enjoy these March children’s book releases as much as I did.

I’m a big reader of historical fiction, but I have a soft spot for books that go way way back in time. Reading books set in ancient worlds is often purely escapist, but also brings me a specific kind of comfort. This might not make sense to some since the thing about ancient civilizations is that they tend to sort of…collapse. But reading about people living, loving, losing, and ultimately persisting in antiquity helps me make sense of the world I live in now. It reminds me that the problems of my own life mostly aren’t new and that, in general, they too shall pass.

You may be wondering what “ancient worlds” means, exactly. This is where I’ll confess that I’d written half of this post when I second-guessed whether my picks technically made sense or if I’d really just run with “set a long-ass time ago.” The answer is a little bit fluid, but generally, ancient civilization “refers specifically to the first settled and stable communities that became the basis for later states, nations, and empires,” beginning with the invention of writing about 3100 BCE and lasting for more than 35 centuries. And while this definition makes sense since writing made historical record-keeping possible, humans, of course, existed long before writing did.

There are thus many, many ancient civilizations in our global history (this Britannica list is almost 90 entries long ), and it turns out my “long-ass time ago” rubric aligns pretty well with reality. Huzzah! The books I present you with below range from mythology retellings to history-inspired fantasy. They will whisk you off to ancient India, Greece, and Egypt, to the Pre-Columbian Americas, to ancient China, Pompeii, and more.