To be British is a very complicated fate. To be a British novelist can seem a catastrophe. You enter into a miasma of history and class and garbage and publication—the way a sad cow might feel entering the abattoir. Or certainly that was how I felt, twenty years ago, when I entered the abattoir myself. One allegory for this system was the glamour of Martin Amis. Everyone had an opinion on Amis, and the strangeness was that this opinion was never just on the prose, on the novels and the stories and the essays. It was also an opinion on his opinions: the party gossip and the newspaper theories, the Oxford education and the afternoon tennis.

The British male! Or at least the British bourgeois male, with his many father figures, both real and acquired. From certain angles, in certain photos, Amis looked like Jagger, and so he became the Jagger of literature. He was small, true—I feel a permanent pang of camaraderie at his line in The Pregnant Widow about a character who occupies that “much-disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven”—but he was also hypermasculine. It wasn’t just his subjects: the snooker and the booze and the obsession with judging all women “sack artists.” It wasn’t even just the style: an inability to leave a sentence alone without chafing at every verb, the prose equivalent of truffle fries. It was also the interview persona, all haughtiness and clubhouse universality, however much that could be contradicted in private by thoughtfulness and generosity of conversation.

But most of all, his British maleness was in the purity of his comic perception of the world. He practiced a very specific form of oral literature—anecdote, putdown, punchline, alcoholic joke: monologues from the ruined-dinner table. This morning I picked up an old copy of Money taken from my parents’ house and there they were, the riffs: “You just cannot park round here any more. Even on a Sunday afternoon you just cannot park round here any more. You can doublepark on people: people can doublepark on you. Cars are doubling while houses are halving.” Or: “I should have realized that when English people say they can play tennis they don’t mean what Americans mean when they say they can play tennis. Americans mean that they can play tennis.” Or: “This guy had no future in the frightening business. He just wasn’t frightening.” A novel by Amis is an apparatus for each line to find its best exposure. ” ‘Yeah,” I said, and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.”

This summer, we’re launching a series called Overheard—which is more or less about what it sounds like. We’re asking writers to take their notebooks to interesting events or places; they’ll record what they see, but mostly what they hear. In the first of the series, Elena Saavedra Buckley goes to a TriBeCa gallery opening for an exhibit of collaborative paintings by two Swedish hip-hop artists, and surveys the scene.

The art show I was going to was risky to google, because it was called Fucked for Life and took place in the basement of a gallery called the Hole. It had been raining, and the humidity followed us downstairs, where the low-ceilinged room felt like the hull of a ship. The paintings reminded me of more focused, imaginative versions of the kind of thing your friend’s stoner older brother might make in his room—they had barely shaped demonic faces at their centers, orbited by tagged abstractions and blooms of neon, all lacquered and dripping. Some sat in ironic-seeming ornate gold frames; others hung against long stretches of loose fabric layered with graffiti, which had been made the day before and seemed to be releasing damp chemical wafts. 

This was the private opening of new collaborative paintings by Bladee and Varg2, whose real names are Benjamin Reichwald and Jonas Rönnberg—two Swedish artists affiliated with a Nordic brand of underground hip-hop that’s been gaining steam since the mid-aughts. The two collectives at its center are the Sad Boys—helmed by the fairly famous Yung Lean—and Drain Gang, which was started by Bladee. I didn’t know much about Varg2 before this weekend; he’s a techno producer who used to go by just Varg until a German metal band of the same name sent him a cease and desist. (He then released an album called Fuck Varg.) But I love the warbling, auto-tuned, alabaster Bladee—the second e is silent—who raps as often about Gnosticism and demons as he does about weed and being depressed. He has obsessive Zoomer fans like the rest of Drain Gang, though his are made especially rabid by how difficult he is to grasp. You can barely see him from behind his hair, hoodies, sunglasses, and blasted-out photo edits; one comment on a recent music video reads, “i don’t think i’ll ever get used to seeing high quality footage of bladee,” and a four-second clip of him saying “Drain Gang”—just the audio!—has 132,000 views. He says he was once struck by lightning in Thailand. 

These years, the only basketball I watch is the playoffs, but I take them very seriously, because they’re so fleeting, dramatic, and sublime. I love the ever-changing narratives. The pregame handshakes. The postgame interviews. The controversial tweets. The stupid commercials one can’t help but memorize. I love when a player “gets hot” and their teammates keep funneling them the ball. The rarely seen, silent green siren that flashes when a coach uses their challenge to dispute a call. The sudden announcement of a technical foul and the way the mood shifts during the single, solitary free throw.

I love catching glimpses of the players’ tattoos of babies, ancestors, dates, signatures, playing cards, angels, lions, phantoms, and crosses emitting sunbeams.

I like when the refs touch each other in any way, but especially when all three of them put their arms around one another, huddling to discuss a difficult call. I like watching endless replays of fouls, trying to decide whether something was a block or a charge, or who touched the ball last. I like when the commentators disagree with the refs and when the broadcast cuts to the former ref Steve Javie in some NBA warehouse in New Jersey, standing in front of TV screens, calmly hypothesizing what the refs are discussing.

I love the emotions, which in other sports are often hidden under the players’ helmets and hats. Jamal Murray’s arms outstretched in joy as he backpedals after nailing yet another three. Jimmy Butler’s and Grant Williams’s noses touching while they scream at each other like two feuding angelfish. Robert Williams’s head in his hands on the bench.

Over the last few years, I’ve been reading unappreciated and erased novels by Black artists from the twentieth century. They’ve helped me think about the idea of illegibility—about what the literary world has historically deemed too wild, complex, radical, experimental, or challenging to be included in the precarious and burgeoning Black canon. I’m also interested in why some promising writers give up after only one or two books. What conditions are required to be a writer over a lifetime? Some of these forgotten novels have since been rediscovered, like Nella Larsen’s twenties classics and Fran Ross’s 1974 Black feminist picaresque, Oreo. Others are still fairly unknown, like William Melvin Kelly’s dem and Willard Savoy’s Alien Land, his only novel, published in 1949, about mixed-race identity and passing. My most recent addition to this “shadow” canon is Alison Mills Newman’s Francisco. Originally published by Ishmael Reed’s press in 1974, it’s a California road-trip story about a Black woman artist, musician, and actress whose husband, the eponymous Francisco, is a Black indie filmmaker. Reading it, I can see how it rubs against that era’s prescribed notions of uplift, chastity, and even Black feminism in its celebration of Black love, sensuality, and joy. It doesn’t deal in the familiar tropes of trauma or alienation, and the female narrator is enthralled by her male lover at a time when narratives about Black men as absent or as abusers were more palatable to the mainstream. Thanks to New Directions, who reissued the book a couple weeks ago, it’s found its way back into the world in time for the author herself to experience its discovery.

—Danzy Senna

Read Danzy Senna on Robert Plunket here.  

The career of the filmmaker/playwright/novelist/actor Bill Gunn serves as both a cautionary tale about the racial and aesthetic narrow-mindedness of the American film industry and a still-visible signal flare to artists interested in pushing beyond conventional forms. His best known work, Ganja & Hess, which he wrote and directed, is a Black vampire movie with hints of Cassavetes and Jodorowsky, a rough-hewn, hallucinatory freak-out that lodges itself deep in your subconscious. It’s now considered a classic, but even with his increased recognition in recent years, being a devoted Gunnian requires a good deal of digging. His great soap-opera homage/parody Personal Problems, a collaboration with Ishmael Reed and a murderer’s row of excellent Black actors and musicians shot on early video equipment, is now in wide and official circulation. But his first film, Stop!, finished in 1970 but never released by Warner Brothers, requires luck and persistence to see. Having finally tracked it down this month in a fuzzy but perfectly watchable dub online, I can say it’s worth the effort. An improbable anticipation of The Shining blended with the free-flowing sexual gamesmanship of Nicolas Roeg’s then-contemporary Performance, Stop! would have been only the second released Hollywood film by a Black director, and surely the strangest for a long time to come. In its startling mix of genres and frank, often sinister sex scenes, it belongs in a dim, curious video store aisle of the mind.

A couple of weeks back, I shared a roundup of pending legislation across several states and at the national level which would ensure the right to read. There is another bill worth highlighting during this legislative session that is making positive progress in Connecticut.

Senate Bill 2, called the Act Concerning the Mental, Physical, and Emotional Wellness of Children, is a wide-ranging one covering everything from children’s mental health coverage to public libraries. Most pertinent to the ongoing removal of books from public and school libraries, though, is the bill’s creation of sanctuary libraries across the state. The bill would allow every community within Connecticut to designate a public library as a sanctuary library, wherein books which have been banned, challenged, or censored will be readily available to anyone who would like to borrow them.

The bill would open up small grants for libraries which choose to take on the distinction as sanctuary libraries, coming in at about $1,200 annually. The bill has made its way through committees and has been slated for discussion on the Senate floor for this week. You can follow the progress here.

Senate Bill 2 signals to libraries across Connecticut that the legislators find access to information so vital that it belongs under the state’s child wellness bill. Connecticut’s Ferguson Public Library in Stamford was the second library in the country to declare itself a sanctuary library in January 2023, following the lead of Chicago Public Library last fall. Under the new bill, any city could designate one library a sanctuary. Those cities with more than one public library may meet criteria to become eligible as sanctuary libraries or may choose to remain “nonprinciple” libraries; the difference would be in ability to receive the grants earmarked for the purposes of sanctuary libraries.

The bill was a surprise to the Connecticut Library Association and to librarians across the state. It emerged following a meet-and-greet hosted by the Ferguson Library following its designation as a sanctuary library; Senator Cici Maher attended the event, and two weeks later, after hearing from constituents that book bans were among the biggest concerns of library workers, she returned to session and her committee and began drafting the proposal.

Why do I pay attention to AAPI Heritage Month? As a school librarian, I spend a lot of time thinking about the diversity of my collection. I’m a white woman working in a school where white kids are a slight minority. I know that my ingrained racism keeps me from selecting books that are appropriate representative of the world unless I make a serious effort. One reliable way to naturally encourage diversity is to pay attention to heritage months. Of course, we need Black and Native American literature year round. We need to be centering gay and disabled authors from September to May, and in the summer, too. But these occasional focuses help me design displays and chose read alouds with intention.

Below, I’ve gathered some picture books that celebrate cultures from around Asia. All books are created by AAPI authors and illustrators, and feature characters interacting with their culture in some way. Whether you’re seeking a story about the act of grappling with your heritage or simply looking for a story where an AAPI culture is a complement, there is something to enjoy.

If you’re looking for more AAPI stories, especially ones for older readers, I’ve linked to some more recommendations below. Hopefully you’ll find a story to either make your readers feel seen or to help them understand how much there is to see in the world.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic circa 2020, there came the rise of virtual book clubs. With the strict adherence to social distancing rules, many started virtual book clubs in schools, libraries, or even just among friends. These virtual book clubs work in a similar way as those from Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon.

But here’s the most intriguing thing that came out of the pandemic: businesses that are not necessarily bookish in nature also started their own virtual book clubs. One such company is MUD\WTR, a coffee brand that launched its book club back in January with self-help book sensation Atomic Habits by James Clear as the first title. There was even a Q&A for their 1,467 members and guests after the session.

“We came up with the idea of a book club when planning for a big campaign in Q1 2023. The idea was around ‘healthy habits create healthy minds’ and my task as community manager was to find a way to make this come alive for our community. I knew from research that our community loves to read, and I used to work at a bookstore, so that helped,” says MUD\WTR’s Community Engagement Manager Britney Haddad. “We’re more than just a product — we’re about encouraging people to rethink their habits. When making positive changes in your life, it helps to surround yourself with people doing something similar, and our book club did just that.”

Chico’s, a clothing brand, also took a leaf out of someone’s book. The clothing store for women relaunched its Chico’s Book Club in March with the first title No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, a collection of essays by model Paulina Porizkova. The book club’s rules are more lenient (they want you to do it on your own terms), and most sessions can be done online or in-person.

These brands pivoting toward bookish territory definitely sparks some intrigue and so it raises the question: what’s the deal?

I’ve seen the term “disaster girl novels” floating out there in the ether. In particular, BookTokker Mari (mynameismarines) used the label to describe one of her recommendations, Luster by Raven Leilani. Luster is about a young Black woman who gets involved with an older white man in an open marriage. And it’s messy. The book is designed to make you uncomfortable, like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Reading disaster girl novels is a fairly divisive experience, as you’ll see if you look at reviews. But love ‘em or hate ‘em, these kinds of books elicit strong emotions.

What makes disaster girl novels popular? So many of us are just trying to keep a low profile and get by. Life is hard enough when you are following the rules. So someone who’s blowing up their life, especially someone who thinks it’s a good idea, fascinates me. I am similarly captivated reading disaster girl novels as I am reading nonfiction about cults and scammers. These people just go for it?! The audacity! I could never imagine it in myself (or maybe I’m afraid to?), so I am eager to understand what makes these people tick.

So these are the books for people who like women’s rights and women’s wrongs. Whether the characters are genuinely behaving badly or just making the most questionable decisions, you’ll have a window into a mind pushed to its limit and leaning into its worst impulses.

Young adult fiction has a certain reputation with people who don’t normally read it. Since the books are about teens, the themes must be juvenile, right? What literary adult wants to read about whiny teenagers with their naive problems? Admittedly, some YA books are wall-to-wall with whiny teenagers. That isn’t what defines YA, though. In fact, there are many books that prove nothing is off limits for YA.

First, let’s look at how to define young adult fiction. The target demographic is 13- to 18-year-olds, sure. But authors and publishers are aware that adults read these books, too. Really, there are two pillars that define a YA book. The first pillar is that the protagonist or protagonists have to be in the aforementioned age range. The second pillar is the presence of the bildungsroman or coming-of-age story.

That’s it. There’s no requirement for whiny teenagers or angsty relationships. While some of their problems are very teenage and seem insignificant to adults, others are very real-world, grown-up problems being faced by people too young or experienced to have to tools to deal with them. Wars happen. Friends and family members die. Monsters attack. If conflict can arise in an adult novel, it can certainly rear its head in a young adult novel. Here are 12 books to prove that.

The social horror genre takes societal issues and exaggerates them, turning them into a major source of horror in the story in order to make it all the more obvious how broken society is. This can include things like sexism, racism, or other oppressive systemic issues facing the protagonist(s) and the world they live in.

Think about Parasite’s discussion of the cruelty of the wealthy and the ever-worsening gap between the wealthy and the impoverished. Think about Promising Young Woman’s depiction of rape culture and victim blaming and the way women are often punished in society for the actions of men.

The list goes on and on, but you get the idea. These are all movies in which a societal issue was pushed to its limits narratively to reveal just how drastic the issues are in reality.

Whenever I need a break from high-stakes, action-packed, angsty reads, I choose a cozy manga from my shelves. I just know they will provide easy, homely stories that feel like warm hugs and chill afternoons on your days off. But they won’t only give you that though! You can expect kind-hearted stories with lovable characters who will easily charm you until the very end. I’m certain that cozy manga are the perfect companions to everyday life. If you’re looking for that kind of read, check out 10 of the best cozy manga you can fall in love with.

The word cozy is added to many genres: cozy fantasy, cozy romance, cozy mystery, etc. When added to them, you can expect a light read in terms of what you usually would get in those genres. For example, if it’s a cozy mystery, overly violent scenes won’t be present in the book. Sometimes whenever you find a “cozy read,” you can expect a gentleness that you won’t be able to find in any other type of read. You know that, when you pick up a cozy read, you can spend a relaxing night at home and you will be taken care of.

In this list, I tried to compile a few of my favorite cozy manga. Personally, they feel cozy to me because they are light, they don’t have a lot of angsty plots, and they provide such a good time. You’ll be able to find all kinds of stories, from experiencing your first love to getting the chance to live once again…but now as a cat. Even if they provide all types of different narratives, what you can definitely expect to encounter in the hearts of the stories is a warm and safe place that feels like home.

A sign on the dried grass in front of my apartment building named it the Isles of Charm, a label that suggested—correctly—the irony of the complex’s eventual decay. I moved in on a COVID-era deal, meaning I could afford a studio unit in Los Feliz, though only the kind with communal laundry machines that smelled like Tide pods and urine. The walls were thin, and that was how I met my neighbors.

I shared a hallway and one tiled wall with Brian and Luciana. Brian and Luciana kept their door open all the time, to let the wind in. The distance between their lives and mine was a door screen and the stuttering hum of my air conditioner. I heard everything. They were older than I was, in their mid-thirties or forties. It wasn’t sex, though their arguments occasionally seemed to have an erotic fervor.

“I never loved you,” he would scream.

“You’re a garden-variety narcissist,” she would yell back.

In the high noon heat of the big hot sun, the intersection of Broadway and Lafayette was an ouroboros. A snake eating its own tail, a snake that was not a snake at all but actually a line of mostly women—who were nearly all young and definitely all well dressed—waiting to go inside a NoHo loft to go shopping. But okay—this was not some sort of run-of-the-mill sample sale. No one waiting in that line was there just because they were looking for a little something to do on a Sunday morning in May. These girls were in line because inside that loft was a woman named Chloë Sevigny. She was there because she was selling her clothes. These girls were waiting in line because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was Chloë’s stuff, at an event quite literally advertised, in the promotional materials, as the Sale of the Century.

It is not that insane to wait in that ouroboros of a line for three hours, when you think about it. She’s Chloë: Harmony Korine’s muse, wearing bleached eyebrows in the movie Gummo. Dancing to the O’Jays’ “Love Train” in a subway car in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco. Appearing naked and pregnant on the cover of Playgirl. She’s the kind of celebrity who can get her one million Instagram followers to wake up early on a Sunday to buy her toothpaste. The second the sale began, it was already a viral event—like Black Friday for fashion-school freaks. TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram were flooded with vibey haul videos, memes implying sartorially motivated violence, posts about new female friendships forged in line, allusions to the Bush presidency, and suggestions that maybe you could find a girl to date among the racks? And most importantly: a reminder that “if you’re in line for Chloë Sevigny’s storage-unit sale, please stay in line.” It is true that a specific subset of New Yorkers seemed to be saying (or posting), “chloë sale! chloë sale! chloë sale!”

To be clear, I am one of these girls, a lover of Chloë, someone who has spent years showing the stylist at the hair salon a picture of her in Kids. But I did not have to stand in the ouroboros of girls, for a few important reasons. The first is that Chloë wasn’t the only person selling clothes in NoHo that afternoon. The Sale of the Century was actually put together by Liana Satenstein, a former Vogue staffer who organizes closet clean-outs for fashion icons. In addition to Chloë’s stuff, the sale also featured selections from the closets of Sally Singer, the former creative director of Vogue who now heads fashion at Amazon; Lynn Yaeger, a Vogue contributing editor known to wear whimsical Comme des Garçons frocks; and the longtime Paper magazine editor Mickey Boardman. I was Sally’s assistant at Vogue when I first moved to New York, once upon a time. Therefore, when I arrived at 676 Broadway at 11:55 A.M., I sent her a text and floated to the front of the line with my friends Anika and Sage. The other reason we got to skip the line is because it was my twenty-seventh birthday, and sometimes when you turn a new age you get lucky. 

William Blake once wrote to a friend that he conversed with the Spiritual Sun on Primrose Hill. Today his words saying as much are carved on the stone curb atop the grassy knoll where the Druid Order has gathered for the Autumn Equinox since the poet’s times, and today still do. For the Druids, the primrose wards off evil and holds the keys to heaven (in German the cowslip primrose is appropriately called Himmelschlüsselchen). For herbalists it is a sedative, pain reliever, and salve. It keeps depression at bay. The primrose is the flower of youth, love, lust and sweetness, rebirth and poetry. Eating one can manifest fairies. In Albion it is among the first blooms of spring. The “rathe Primrose” is the opening flower Milton notes to strew upon the “laureate hearse” of Lycidas.

“Primrose for X” opens with Fanny Howe “tracking Blake on Primrose Hill” and twelve quatrains later ends with her on a high-speed train that “raced away from London / and Blake’s theophanies.” What she finds in the lyric interim are no golden pillars of Jerusalem or celebrity sets. No St. Paul’s Cathedral, Shard, or Wharf highlight the skyline as they do for visitors in relief on the metal panoramic sign at 66.7 meters high. Here the “unsteady skyline” is “like a graph that measures / markets, snails and heartbeats”—one of many instances in Fanny Howe’s poetry of her in-dwelling similization of the world around us, as if these comparative truths always existed as air to breathe. Meanings break free with snails and “shucked” at the end of the line that contrasts the brain with the “slippery” heart that also slips across the stanza. And how the vital heart monitor beats with the little line’s cadence “How am I still here / at every thump?”—the question posed to herself or Thou of her own life’s longevity answered by the steady pulse of spirit-touched heart, along with doubt’s silence.

“Every word must come from my acts direct,” Howe writes of poetry’s impossible task in “Philophany,” an earlier poem in her most recent collection, Love and I. “Primrose for X” comes toward the end of the book before two final poetic sequences. The placement of individual poem-to-poem sequences through the whole takes on the shape of neumatic notation, rhythm pitched to love’s life. Here lines move within snail-paced thought, the measure of attention where, as Buber describes it, “love comes to pass.” Here lines move in a spark with the restless “I,” who finds the X subjects of love’s gift among the poor immigrant women in Victoria, impoverished children, “drugged and dirty and crushed” boys of Kentish Town, and the victims of a father’s violence, half-allegorized by a machete. Catherine Sophia Boucher Blake belongs here, too, in the hidden vision—she who learned the secrets and practice of her husband’s illuminations and signed the Parish Register as bride with an “X.”

Blake loved quatrains as much as the fourteen-syllable line. “Primrose for X” is only one of three poems in Love and I written in consistent quatrains, and the longest of the three. Its symmetry doesn’t follow any set metrical or syllabic pattern like the iambic tetrameter of Blake’s “London.” Instead each quatrain’s short line-to-line syllabic variation counters the overall symmetry, unsteady rhythm bound to beating image and thought and the needs of the heart. Only one stanza is composed entirely of trimetric lines, in the alien description of the “boys hunched,” as if to heighten the nightmarish fairy-tale quality of “What is created by humans / is almost always alien.”

In January 2016 I was given an extraordinary gift. Underneath brown paper that had softened with age and molded to the shape of the object within, I discovered a treasure almost two centuries old that revealed the life of one woman and her broader network of family and friends. It was a book, a ledger of sorts, covered in a bright magenta silk that was frayed along the edge so that a glimpse of its marbled cover was just visible. The shape of the book had distorted—it was narrow at the spine but expanded at the right edge to accommodate the contents, reminding me of my mum’s old recipe book, which had swelled over the years as newspaper cuttings and handwritten notes were added.

This book, measuring some twelve and a half inches long by eight and a half inches across, contained pale blue pages, which were unlined and unmarked. As I carefully opened the front cover and looked at the first page, my breath caught: this was indeed a marvel. Carefully pasted in place were four pieces of fabric, three of them framed in decorative waxed borders—these were scraps of silk important enough to have been memorialized. Accompanying each piece of cloth was a small handwritten note inked in neat copperplate, including a name and a date: 1838.

As I turned more leaves, a kaleidoscope of color and variety unfolded. There were small textile swatches—sometimes only two pieces at a time, and sometimes up to twelve—cut into neat rectangles or octagons and pasted in rows that blossomed across each page. The notes were written above each snippet of fabric, sometimes curving around the shape of it. I knew from the outset that this was something precious, an ephemeral piece of a life lived long ago. It was a beautiful mystery.

The elderly lady who gave me the book explained to me what she knew of its provenance, which was very little. While she was working in the London theater world in the sixties, a young man assisting her in the wardrobe department found this unusual curiosity on a market stall in Camden. He thought that the pages of the scrapbook, filled as they were with colorful textiles, might be of interest to the wardrobes of the theaters where she worked. The book remained in this lady’s possession for fifty years until she passed it on to me.

In Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, the narrator, Adam, goes to the Prado every morning to stand in front of the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross. On one particular morning, another man is standing in his place, looking at the painting, and this man suddenly bursts into tears. Adam is irritated and confused: “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew.” I too have worried about this; a painting has never moved me to tears. A poem has never changed my life. This is why the opera came to me as a surprise—both my love of it and the fact that, the first time I saw La Bohème, I cried through the whole fourth act. The pathos! I was deeply moved by the tragic story and by the register of the musical spectacle, but it was something more primal, too. Here was an art form that seemed not to shy from melodrama but move into its absolute depths, and then transcend and transform them.

I love opera not as an expert, or even as an informed connoisseur. I love it as an amateur, a near-total beginner. And despite its reputation, I think opera is surprisingly accessible, in part because of its absolute embrace and elevation of human feeling. I’m sure that as I spend more time in the Family Circle seats at the Met, I will learn more, and I might even become discerning. But for now I am going for pure pleasure.

This week, we’re publishing a series of pieces on opera. Colm Tóibín shares a letter to his mother, written from the moment when he fell in love with opera; Nancy Lemannconsiders the contenders for the greatest Don Giovanni of all time; Andrew Martin recounts a visit to Nixon in China; Adam Kirsch comes to the defense of Faust. Plus, two reviews of recent opera productions, a piece adapted from Patrick Mackie’s Mozart in Motion, a dispatch from our poetry editor, and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Michael Bazzett’s poem in our Spring issue.

Don Carlo is the kind of opera that has gone out of fashion. I cruised through half-empty rows when I saw it last fall, just days after attending a packed-to-vibrating weeknight production of The Hours – the two-act opera adaptation of a 1998 novel and its 2002 film adaptation. Verdi’s four-hour-long political tragedy, set during the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century, feels more like eating your operatic vegetables. Its place in the canon was actually secured by the Met, whose onetime general manager Rudolf Bing fished it out to open the 1950 season.   

Based largely on a historical play by Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlo imagines a backstory to some real events in the life of Carlos, Prince of Asturias, who was briefly engaged to Elisabeth of Valois before she instead married his father, King Philip II of Spain. Schiller invented an anachronistic friend for Carlos: Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, who distracts the heartsick prince with the political cause of Flemish independence. Meanwhile, Philip, bitter and paranoid over his loveless marriage, contemplates getting rid of his son and his treacherous friend with counsel from the blind and ruthless leader of the Inquisition. 

Among the work’s Shakespearean qualities—Anglophone audiences might especially recall Hamlet—is the fact that there are multiple versions of it, in both French and Italian. Verdi revised it several times between 1866 and 1886. The original libretto is in French—Don Carlos—but its five-act runtime tested even nineteenth-century audiences. Verdi then lopped off the entire first act, which shows Carlos and Elisabeth’s coup de foudre in the forest of Fontainebleau. Act 2 of the original, which became Act 1 of the more widely performed Italian translation that I saw, starts soon after Philip’s wedding, when Elisabeth has become the queen of Spain—and Carlos’s stepmother. The Met experimented with the five-act French version last season, but has since backtracked to its repertory standard. Skipping the first act deflates the opera’s romantic plot—turning the love triangle between Carlos, Philip II, and Elisabeth into mere inciting incident—but heightens its political and religious drama.

Eponym aside, Don Carlo is more vessel (for Rodrigo’s ideas) and pawn (in his father’s power games) than protagonist. Crucially, in this drama of Enlightenment values, he appears deeply irrational. He loses his composure within the first act and practically faints onto his stepmother, singing, “I love you, Elisabeth! The world is nothing!” Freeing herself from him, she counters, “Well then! So, wound your father! Come, soiled by his murder, drag your mother to the altar!” Into this void enters Rodrigo, who radiates s Reason and extols liberty, particularly for the downtrodden people of Flanders. “Lend your aid to the oppressed Flanders!” he exclaims. As they pledge their commitment to the cause in a spirited duet, Carlo seems barely conscious that he’s signing on for treachery against his own family.