This is a section of the diary I kept while writing my forthcoming novel, Enter Ghost, about a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

My world has shrunk dramatically. The benefit of lockdown for me is learning to live day in day out without constant change. This is life, time passing. This is how I imagine most people live.

I looked at the objects in the house

In a letter dated June 1, 1925, Upton Sinclair announced a revolutionary experiment: the petro-novel, a new category of fiction inspired by modernity’s most vexing paradoxes of fossil-fueled life. “This oil novel,” Sinclair predicted, “will be the best thing I have ever done.” Over the next ten months, that story poured out as a “gusher of words” to become the great American novel of petroleum power. By turns ardent family saga, scintillating potboiler, and anti-capitalist tirade, Sinclair’s 1926–27 tale warrants its exclamation mark. Oil! is an energetic tour de force whose plot goes everywhere. From ivory towers and gated estates to bleak frontiers of slow death, the book shows how a thirst for crude created new democratic dreams of freedom and their opposite. Through it all, the novel anticipates how the wreckage unleashed by big oil might lead to a greener, more inclusive world yet to come. It remains one of the most important critiques of fossil energy ever printed.

Today the earth is on fire, and fossil fuel corporations keep raising the heat. Recent years have been the warmest on record, sparking waves of mass migration and accelerating die-offs, with no real cooldown in sight. In a way, we’re all to blame. Climate experts agree that the extreme weather of our time comes from human energy use. Northern countries like the U.S. have burned eons of accumulated hydrocarbons since the twentieth century’s dawn—too much and too fast for the planet to absorb them again, leading to a carbon cycle that’s perilously out of whack. But vowing to scale back and buy less, to burn less, won’t kill the flames. The truth is that twenty-five fossil fuel giants are responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions now, and a huge fraction of U.S. workers already live hand to mouth while energy earnings soar. Dismantling these institutions and their pyromaniacal profit-motives will require concerted action. It will require new intimacies across economic, racial, and gender lines. And it will require alternatives to very old habits of thinking that make it hard to conceive a world without oil. To avert a dead-end future for humans and our planetary kin, we must reimagine who we are, and in no time flat.

Oil! is the novel that best illuminates how we got here and that leaves the blueprint for a more equitable future out of its ashes. At its core is the story of a whole new kind of society being born through the early twentieth century, when elites learned how to control a petroleum-powered system of production; that system allowed a few white men to get rich quick by exploiting everyone else below them. It’s a system that has turned the world into the private landfill of oligarchs who have taken our land and labor and would now, in a final move, take a habitable future from us as well. But the novel shows that the story of oil isn’t a tale for all time. We can contest an unsustainable system of energy and work that took hold not long ago, when deep-pocketed corporations combined to let the world burn. A hundred years after fossil capitalism kicked into high gear, the question at the heart of Sinclair’s novel remains: How may we transition to a postcarbon democracy now? Oil! provides an outline for this urgent mission, the unmet demand on which all future life depends.

***

What is this video? A plot summary might run something like this: A low-quality cell phone records, in slow motion, a small suburban lake being stocked with fish. A long, transparent inflatable tube runs the fish from a truck across a lawn and into the lake. They get stuck; they struggle; they clog the tube; they swim, weakly, upstream; and eventually men in aprons (the fish stockers?) pick up the tube and force the last fish out. Neighbors (I presume) have gathered to watch the process—children are filming, a lone man reaches out piteously to stroke the clots of confused fish through the tube, and a goldendoodle’s fluffy head bobs in and out of the frame. The video, by the artist Barrett White, borrows its grand title—“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”—from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and letters, in which that phrase describes the coexistence of apparently contradictory orientations to the world. White sets the video’s banal footage to Arvo Pärt’s solemn “Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten,” complete with periodically tolling bell.

The video’s appeal is its constant oscillation between tragedy and, well, bathos. At first, the video seems like a funny TikTok—grand music, slo-mo, grainy vertical footage, silly suburban fish situation. Ha. But then it goes on for almost eight minutes? Just as Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” becomes a gorgeous and resigned dirge when slowed down (recommend), something about the dilation of time changes the tonality of White’s video. It creates space for an aesthetically sensible movement between the video’s contradictory tonal cues. This extension of time allows for multiple and layered juxtapositions of grand and banal. You can really feel this circulation when you’re watching it—feel the way your own feeling turns into its apparent opposite, and back.

I’ve returned to this video repeatedly since I first saw it last year. It has a total of 110 views as of February 1, at least ten of which are mine. Sometimes I notice the way the tumble of the fish’s bodies looks like a Renaissance etching of sinners tumbling into hell; sometimes I notice the bearded man’s camo pants; sometimes I notice the confused pathos of the man who leans out to touch the knot of disoriented trout—and I feel, like him, the terror of the fish, and sadness for them. Like the fish, I feel the force of the cues at play—for them, it’s water pushing one way; for me, it’s the music’s command to FEEL! PATHOS NOW!, which also has the ironic overlay of saying how silly it is, to feel that. But I resist: I don’t like being told what to feel, and if I do feel something like mourning, maybe I’m a fool. Maybe those feelings are out of scale, out of tune with the world as it actually is. Or maybe when I see this situation as ridiculous, and I’ve accepted a certain kind of banality, that’s when I’m out of tune with the world as it actually is. Maybe this tube leads to death. Or maybe it leads to another slightly larger holding tank that is just fine.

—Kirsten (Kai) Ihns, reader

Last week, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker delivered his State of the State address. It is the first time a governor in the country has directly spoken about the wave of censorship, book banning, and harassment being seen by schools and libraries. While some legislators in other arenas have addressed the topic — Jamie Raskin, a Congressional Representative from Maryland, for example — it continues to be a topic that not enough of those who have the power are using to discuss. Meanwhile, over a dozen bills have been proposed across the country that would remove queer books from libraries and schools and/or actively prosecute professionals who have that material in their collections.

While Pritzker sets up the state to be a book sanctuary and model for supporting public education, it should be terrifying to consider how each state may differ in terms of what and how students have access to truth, factual history, and voices of those who are marginalized. We already know that abortion being left to the states is creating dangers and life-threatening consequences for pregnant people, and we know that state standards and funding for education are already deeply disparate, depending on where you live.

Why should a student from Illinois who sits next to a student from Florida in their college lecture halls have had radically different access to voices, stories, and information professionals?

They shouldn’t.

Here’s the excerpt of Pritzker’s 2023 State of the State speech about the current rise of dangerous nationalism and the impact it has on schools and libraries. May this be the model for other states. Read it, share it, and use it to write to your legislators about why they need to speak up against this virulent nationalism and anti-intellectualism that denies students their First Amendment Rights.

One very easy way to learn about and discover new books and authors is through the cover reveal. This was not a possible avenue of discovery before the age of book talk on the internet, and in an era where visuals are becoming more and more important — and indeed, book cover designers are taking the reality of the online world into account when determining how to create a book’s image — covers can do a lot of service for readers. In this new weekly feature, we’ll round up some of the most interesting cover reveal news from the prior week.

These cover reveal news posts will share the covers, any credits to artists and designers given with the reveal (something which should be standard practice but still is not), and then the book’s publication date and description. That information will all come from Amazon, as they have the most robust and update descriptions at the time of cover reveals. Reveals sometimes happen 6, 9, or even 12 months in advance of an actual release.

Use these reveal posts to build up your TBR, to preorder titles that catch your fancy, or to begin placing library holds/requesting titles for purchase at your library. There will be something for everyone here, crossing genres and categories of reading interests.

This week’s cover reveal roundup includes a second chance quiz show romance, gender bending body switching, a radical leprosy community, and more.

One Piece is one of the most popular anime series out now. It got its start as a serialized manga getting published in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1997 and by 1999 it was made into an anime, and has since aired over 1,000 episodes. While it’s not quite the longest-running anime, there’s something to say about a series that can keep viewers interested past the usual dozen or so episodes anime have. Suffice to say that fans of the massive series have been rocking with Monkey D. Luffy on his quest to become the Pirate King and get the famous One Piece treasure for a while now. They’ve laughed and cried as he’s lost and gained friends, fought enemies, and avoided capture. Understandably, a series of this size inspires just as sizable a desire within fans to relive their favorite moments, and even to put out the beacon signal in the wild to other potential fans. For that, we’ve got the best One Piece merch below. In this list, you’ll find all manner of One Piece hoodies, Zoro merch, and other goodies that’ll have you thinking of the best moments in the show.

And, if you’re curious about getting into One Piece, but feel like starting it is too daunting, try this guide, then shimmy on down to this list of One Piece merch right after.

One Piece Clothing

This Zoro merch marks a time of great character growth for the swordsman. UNIQLO has it for $20.

Gain the power of devil fruit with this long-sleeved shirt. Just mark sure you stay out of the ocean. Head over to Crunchyroll for this one. $35

Rep the Straw Hat Pirates with this simple One Piece hoodie. $50

With 2023 moving full steam ahead now, it’s hit me that the early 2000s occurred a solid 20 years ago. The fact that there now exists a That ’90s Show in place of That ’70s Show feels like a surreal, out-of-body experience. How has the time sped by this fast? It’s like I’ve pressed the fast forward button on my family’s VCR and accidentally skipped further ahead in life then I intended, only to want to rewind back a bit.

Despite how much each generation likes to poke fun at Millennials — we are the generation of the Facebook “poke” feature, after all — we grew up in a truly unique era. We have straddled two distinct time periods: life before smartphones and the Cloud, and life after. We are the last generation to remember the way things were before this major technological shift. As I compare the days of my childhood to my life now, I find myself casting a glow of nostalgia over my ’90s and ’00s memories. Lately, I’ve noticed this nostalgia sneaking into my reading life too.

When it came to TV, online streaming was unheard of. If I missed an episode of Sailor Moon on Toonami, I was out of luck. I’d have to leave it up to fate and hope that it would air again someday on Cartoon Network, or I’d luck out and find a Sailor Moon movie to rent from Blockbuster.

Social media back then consisted of stressing over our Top 8 on MySpace and trying to figure out how to code theme songs onto our profile pages. For reference, mine was “Friends O’ Mine” by Bowling For Soup. Along with our Myspace woes, we were also debating what our AIM screen-names should be. I settled on SoccerPenguin243 for my first in a long series of questionable screen-names over the years.

There’s something fascinating about monster tales — something that keeps us humans coming back for more. And, let’s be honest: we’re the ones creating the monsters here. So what is it about monsters that’s so fascinating?

In the late 1990s, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen wrote an essay called “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” in the book Monster Theory: Reading Culture that kicked off the subfield of monster studies. In this essay, he posits that monsters are reflections of the cultural contexts from which they arise. So if we look at, for example, alien invasion novels from the 1950s, we can see the anxieties of the second Red Scare manifesting themselves in those oh-so-scary aliens.

Cohen also discusses how even though the monstrous might repulse us, it also attracts us so that we can’t look away. We love our monsters. We want them. And we want more of them.

If you’re interested in exploring the delightfully dark subfield of monster studies further, the recently-published The Monster Theory Reader is a smart and diverse collection of scholarly essays that’ll help you think about monsters and monstrosity in more ways than you would have dreamed of.

But if you’re looking for a good monster story, rather than theories about monsters, look no further. This list has everything from human-animal hybrids to folkloric creatures and beyond. It includes new monster novels and some which are a few years older.

Within the broader mystery category are so many sub-genres that, in my opinion, there’s something for nearly every reader. Some, like the locked room mystery or whodunit, focus on a puzzle that the reader must untangle alongside the sleuth. Others, like hardboiled or courtroom mysteries, explore social issues and human nature in thought-provoking ways. And many mystery novels, even within these sub-genres I’ve mentioned here, accomplish both!

Whether you’re new to the genre or you want to explore it on a broader level, read on for a primer on the most popular mystery sub-genres. Along with a description of the sub-genre and its conventions, I’ve included an example recommendation with each one to get you started for sub-genres you haven’t explored yet.

As you read, keep in mind that some mystery novels may fall into multiple sub-genres categories. A book could, for example, be both a cozy mystery and a historical mystery if its set in a time period before the present day and describes no graphic violence.

But before I begin, let’s start with a quick definition of the mystery genre. Mystery novels feature stories in which the protagonist investigates a crime or unusual circumstance, usually but not always murder. They do so by interviewing suspects or witnesses and reviewing evidence, like the scene of the crime or items left behind by the culprit. The sleuth could be a professional detective, or they could be an amateur that uses seemingly unrelated skills from their personal or work lives to solve crimes.

Winter is my favorite season for reading. There’s no competition. It is also my favorite season, period, so I suppose this makes sense. I am most definitely biased. Even so, I think winter has a lot to offer readers, even if you are not a fan of cold and snow. So many of the things I associate with winter — slowing down, staying in, cozy afternoons spent under blankets — are also things I associate with reading.

I almost always read more books in January than any other month. And while (obviously!) I love reading in all seasons and in all weather, I am always more excited about books in the first few months of the year. For me, January, February, and March are sacred reading months. They set the tone for my year of reading. I feel extra enthused about all the new books I’m going to read during the year. I am still starry eyed over the various reading projects I’ve decided to take on. Everything feels possible.

I know winter is hard for a lot of folks, readers included. But it is also the best season for reading, and even if you don’t love the cold and the snow, maybe you can embrace some of the things that make winter reading so magical.

Because here’s the thing: beginnings can be super exciting! I love setting up my new reading spreadsheet. I love wandering through my house, selecting the books I’m most excited about reading, and lining them up on my TBR shelf. I love taking the time to reflect about what worked and what didn’t about the previous year’s reading, and then making adjustments — immediately.

We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won the 2023 ASME Award for Fiction. The Review is also nominated in the category of general excellence, with the winner to be announced on March 28. Read the three prizewinning stories—“Trial Run” by Zach Williams, “Winter Term” by Michelle de Kretser, and “A Good Samaritan” by Addie E. Citchens—unlocked this week in celebration.

Fictional wall texts, with thanks to the object labels at the Brooklyn Museum. 

A fight over pumpernickel bread results in tragedy. Quinto’s use of burgundy paint for the dried blood on the tip of the foreground figure’s machete is related to the shortage of crimson in the nineteenth-century pallet. Quinto died in Brooklyn in 1901.

Gallup Trenton’s wife of forty-two years, Anne Grace Bellington, was his muse and model for works that range from photography to poolside performance. But it was a Memorial Day weekend encounter with his mistress, Pierra de la Fucci, that led to this joyous exploration of romance, foreplay, and the artistic possibilities of plaster of Paris. An artist herself, de la Fucci gifted this sculpture to the Museum after Trenton’s death. The monumental scale of the nude, including its commitment to puckered lips and seductive eye roll, is the embodiment of female power.

The wood used to construct this early Dutch cabinet, including its secret compartment, comes from a genus of tree, Quercus, that is native to 10 percent of New York’s sixty-two counties. The latches are crafted from rose gold.

For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Peter Mishler’s “My Blockchain” appears in our Winter issue, no. 242.

How did you come up with the title for this poem? Were there other titles you thought about?

When “What even is a blockchain/an NFT?” was the subject of conversation everywhere you went, I got interested in the technology’s claim that it creates an “immutable record” of each transaction along the chain of a digital asset’s ownership. I wanted to write a series of personal statements that could not erase what preceded them. Then I noticed this idea was also connected to a certain type of statement—made by a certain type of man—that we’ve seen often, recently: a public apology by someone whose behavior grossly outweighs their supposed contrition. No matter how much they try to distance themselves from themselves, the mea culpa still contains something that can’t be undone: it’s an “immutable record” of all the actions that preceded their apologies, which sound far more like launching an asset than sincerity. So, I thought I would write in the voice of a corrupted consciousness that mirrors the workings of this new bro-corrupted mechanism of capitalism. 

I often save my drafts under file names that function as little code words or reminders about a feeling I was having during that day’s writing. “My Blockchain,” though, remained the official title, even as I played with other ways of reminding myself what I was writing.

Do Everything in the Dark was the last of three novels I wrote while mostly living in houses in upstate New York or at the Highland Gardens Hotel in Los Angeles. It began as a collaborative book project with a painter, my extraordinary friend Billy Sullivan: I was to write very brief stories to appear beside portraits of his friends and acquaintances, many of whom were also friends of mine. The stories would not be directly about the portrait subjects, but fictions in which some quality or characteristic of a real individual was reflected, stories about characters they might play in a film or a theater piece.

This project was never entirely certain, the prospective publisher having had an opacity comparable to that of Dr. Fu Manchu, and somewhere in the summer of 2001, Billy and I realized our book was never going to happen. By that time I had written most of what appears as the first third of this novel, though, and in this instance I had written past Kafka’s “point of no return” much sooner than I normally did. (I have abandoned many more novels than I’ve ever published, usually realizing after 50 or 60 excited pages that they were heading nowhere I wanted to go.)

One early title I considered was Psychotic Friends Network. At the time, an unusual number of people I knew were experiencing crises in their personal or professional lives, having committed themselves to relationships and careers that, however bright and promising for years, were suddenly not working out. The binary twins, “success” and “failure,” were negligible concerns in what I was writing about, though some of my characters tended to judge themselves and others in those terms; I was far more interested in depicting how things fall apart and reconstitute themselves in the face of disappointment. My overall purpose in writing Do Everything in the Dark was to discover, if I could, what some would call paranormal ways in which a lot of monadic individuals and couples are connected to a vast number of other people, how networks of money, emotions, and wishes overlap across the shrunken geography of a globalized world. I also wanted to write a novel in which the two Greek concepts of time, chronos and kairos, were at work simultaneously, chronos being linear, consecutive, and irreversible, while kairos, “the moment in which things happen,” offers people an opportunity to employ time as a flexible medium—to write books, paint pictures, fall in love, or walk away from unfavorable situations.

When you live alone with characters you’re making up, you are more alone with yourself than you realize. Re-reading this book after twelve years, I see more clearly than I did then that it’s a hall of mirrors. Not everyone in it is me, but I distributed my own insecurities and madness quite liberally among the figures I modeled after people I knew. And the book I thought I was writing from such a dissembling distance from real life situations turns out to be transparently about people whom a great many other people reading it could readily identify. That doesn’t matter. I wasn’t indicting anybody in front of a grand jury. It isn’t a cruel book, or a score-settling one. In certain places, I did defend my side of a few long-recounted, wildly distorted stories people told about me, in a veiled way, but I wasn’t moved by any animus about them; they were just more material when I needed some.

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Romance and heartbreak are promised before they are experienced. As a child I was filled with a sort of yearning that preceded any actual object of desire. It was a desire for desire itself, one that, like many girls who grew up speaking Spanish in the late nineties and early aughts, I conjured by listening to  Shakira’s 1995 album, Pies Descalzos. The first song was my favorite. “Estoy Aquí” begins with a teenage Shakira’s lilting voice over an acoustic guitar: “I know you won’t return,” she sings with quavering melancholy, and then the song explodes into a saccharine tempo unbefitting of a lovelorn person. But how would I have known that? I sang along in my room, imagining that one day I would love someone but also one day I would lose them, and that was even more thrilling. To be alive! And drowning amid “photos and notebooks and things and memories.” I could hardly wait. 

In adulthood I have found that intense pleasure and intense grief are startlingly similar experiences—both ecstatic states of being, from the Greek word ekstasis: “entrancement, astonishment, insanity; any displacement or removal from the proper place.” “Estoy Aquí” articulates the specific contours of feeling left behind in a great love’s wake. But, also in adulthood and much to my disappointment, I have found that most affairs end in anticlimax. Twice I have been overcome by the obsessive conjuring of a lost lover; countless times, a budding romance has fizzled out unspectacularly. Infatuation often fails to coalesce into substance. As a child I knew no anthems for the guilt that comes with ghosting or, worse, for the blunt anxiety born of receiving text messages with decreasing frequency. I must admit I feel a little ripped off. “The letters I wrote, I never sent,” sings young Shakira, but what about the pages you leave blank because passion would be unwarranted? 

I suppose it is apt that, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, “Estoy Aquí” ends not with a bang but a whimper. The song fades with no resounding note, just a watered down repetition of what has already been stated, a languid dissolution of something that started off so strong.

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

In her 1993 memoir Exteriors, drawn from seven years of journal entries, Annie Ernaux describes overhearing a familiar pop song at the supermarket. She is struck by the pleasure she experiences—and by a “feeling of panic that the song will end.” This prompts her to consider the relative emotional effects of books and music. While certain novels have left a “violent impression” on her being, the impact hardly compares to the “intense, almost painful” feeling produced by the song. “A book offers more deliverance, more escape, more fulfillment of desire,” she writes. “In songs one remains locked in desire.” The structure of pop music is inherently erotic; the repetitions of rhythm and melody continually summon and satisfy aching anticipation. Love songs bring this otherwise sublimated longing to the surface: some through grand, theatrical gestures, others by drawing out the dialectic of desire embedded in everyday life—say, the feeling of being alone at a party, sad and self-conscious, desperately missing someone.

This is the premise of “Slow Show,” a somber but rousing midtempo track from The National’s 2007 album Boxer. The narrator spends the verses separated from his lover, surrounded by people but unable to reach them, confined to the claustrophobic quarters of his own mind. Guitars flutter frenetically over foreboding squalls of feedback, while Matt Berninger’s mumbling baritone evokes the narrator’s recursive, dead-end thoughts: “Standing at the punch table, swallowing punch”; “I leaned on the wall, the wall leaned away”; “I better get my shit together, better gather my shit in.” In the choruses, an atmospheric sweetness swells as he briefly spans the distance, if only in his imagination: “I want to hurry home to you,” Berninger croons, “put on a slow, dumb show for you and crack you up / so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain.” His halting syntax smooths out into the simple, fluid choreography of a fantasized intimacy, which disrupts his anxious solitude.

But even the utopic space of the chorus is marred by doubt in its final lines: “God, I’m very, very frightened / I’ll overdo it.” The same fear that strands the narrator alone in the midst of a party gnaws at the edges of his reverie, manifesting now as a terror of spoiling the moment. (In the roiling “Conversation 16,” released a few years after, Berninger intensifies this same dread: “I was afraid I’d eat your brains / ‘cause I’m evil.”) Within each gesture of mutual understanding between lovers there lurks the possibility that the bond might break; the separation that shapes desire shadows every tender encounter.

My first real lover was dumb, virile, hilarious—I didn’t trust a word he said. Certainly nothing he recommended. This is why, for years, I stayed away from his favorite book, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Until now. I’ve given in, and the epic Western is, predictably, blowing my mind, and, perhaps less predictably, my groin. 

I am never sure when carnage might strike—when I might find men whose naked bodies have been “roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes,” when I’ll come across a “charred coagulate” of bodies or a decapitated man whose severed neck “bubbles gently like a stew.” While reading, my muscles stay flexed. Blood pulses through dilated vessels. Awaiting climax, I am in a state of constant tension. Groin on vibrate. I never uncross my legs. This is reading as grotesque edging.

It doesn’t help that the novel’s landscape is excitingly predatory: “The sun rose … like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.” McCarthy’s pulsing, penile sun has been making its way into my dreams. So have men—naked, dangerously erect, charging off cliffs, their bodies bursting into constituent parts on the way down, blood running after them in silken crimson ribbons of … But fuck, I can’t do it like him. I wake frustrated.

Adding to the tension is McCarthy’s syntactical cadence. No matter the content, the persistent beat of his language (biblical, oratory, metaphorical, parodic, straightforward) generate a steady thrum—a rhythm that seems to emanate from the throbbing, carnal core of the earth itself. Or perhaps it’s a lover’s incantation—or weapon. You might say that, while reading, McCarthy’s language functions like straps fastened over my body. Hard as I might writhe, those straps are never tightened, they are never loosened—and even though I’ll finish, I will not be released.