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

There was a woman who was always explaining to me the structures of the world, of desire, of experience. Her analysis was brilliant. I have never met somebody so sure of the way things work. Between us, they didn’t. In the end, I learned, form was a problem. Well placed constraints can excite; they can also kill. Either way they tend to leave marks. A studied silence, breezy banter—these are not so convincing if she can take you in at a glance and see where you are still mottled from the pressure of her touch. But it is easy to adopt the position of the wounded lover. If you know what love is, like Nina Simone sings it, then you know that you, too, can leave, must have left, someone with lips that can only taste tears.

Nina Simone was not the first to sing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and her version is not the most famous. That honor probably belongs to Dinah Washington, with her bright and clear voice, or maybe Chet Baker, about whom I have little to say. Billie Holiday’s take, with her enchanting, off-kilter warble is also probably better known. But Simone’s is something else entirely. Hers was released much later on a collection of rare recordings. It is live, noisy, and the background hum nearly merges with the brushes sliding along the snare drum. That and the crowd’s murmurs lend the track a warmth that all the other versions lack. It speaks, in spite of itself, to love’s inexplicable optimism.

At the very beginning, Simone sings, “You don’t know what love is till you’ve learned the meaning of the blues.” That third word, know, hangs for nearly three seconds. She never loses control of her voice, but she makes the word tremble as does a heart, a hand, a jaw fixing itself in preparation for sentences that cannot be retracted. She performs the standard as a lament sung at the precise moment that mourning’s fog has begun to lift. It is not a warning meant to dissuade young lovers. The blues aren’t miserable; they’re knowing. Simone’s spare rendition comes with the wisdom of experience, of understanding that if love is faith, favor, desire, support, and—when it can be afforded—indulgence and forgiveness, then all of these add up. When it turns, you lose so much: a body to hold yours, eyes that blink too fast in pleasure, a voice that drops too low to even hear it, the rippling sensation that settles somewhere just below the chest. All of the things that accumulate in the miracle of that face besides yours in the morning. It is the loss of such a gift that makes clear what it’s worth.

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

I think the best love songs are simple. They’re simple because love isn’t, simple because we need to dream a little. Complexity, ambiguity, doubt—they can have their place in novels or in the movies. A love song lets you live in the fantasy of the absolute; maybe that’s also why they last only a couple of minutes. And that’s why we carry them with us, play and replay them until they wear out like old clothes. They stand for too much.

I have many songs that mark the time of particular relationships, both their highs and the lows of their dissolution. I’ve played songs on repeat enough to drive people crazy, and I’ve locked myself in my room to listen to late-period Billie Holiday with the lights off. But I have only one renewable love song, which I’ve brought with me through all my relationships: the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” That’s probably because, although it pains me slightly to say this, it began for me as a family romance. When my parents were young and childless and living in Seattle, they saw a sign for the movie Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film, at a theater near the Pike Place Market. I don’t think my parents were particularly interested in the hip music of the eighties—they just liked the name of the movie. They bought tickets on a whim and went inside.

So the cassette-tape soundtrack of Stop Making Sense was a sonic canvas of my childhood. But it wasn’t until I saw the movie for myself, in high school—watching it with a girl, making feeble couch-based sexual advances—that I was reawakened to the song. It’s unusual for the Heads, who are better known for blending angular, art-school/CBGB cool with African polyrhythm borrowings. The song is very straightforward. Sentimental, even. But a great love song should be sentimental. Why wouldn’t you try to feel everything you possibly can? The groove begins straightaway—simple drums, the bounce of the bassline, some light synth stabs. A perfect little loop. After a couple of repeats, a bubbling riff kicks in, with a soft, pipelike quality to its pitch-shifting. It reminds me of a calliope, although I’ve never listened to one in real life—it’s children’s music from some other, unlived existence: “Love me till my heart stops / love me till I’m dead.”

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

Parliament’s “(You’re a Fish and I’m a) Water Sign” is an unabashed ode to passion, to the base and the sensual, to the possibilities of love in the juiciest ways it can exist between people. The song moans into being, a beseeching follows, then there’s a bass so low you can’t possibly get under it, and finally the central question is posed: “Can we get down?” In true Parliament fashion, the tune doesn’t follow a traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure; it consists of an ever-evolving chorus that departs from the lines “I want to be / on the seaside of love with you / let’s go swimming / the water’s fine.” The arrangement is magnificent and the execution velvety, and the soulful, overlapping ad-libs of George Clinton, Walter “Junie” Morrison, and Ron Ford are just romantic lagniappe. Add the production of the track itself, with its big band-y rise of horns and whimsical flourishes atop the funky bassline, and the song is a liquid love affair that pulls you under and takes you there. It’s orgasmic.“Water Sign” is the B side to the much more well-known “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop),” from Parliament’s 1978 hit album Motor Booty Affair. While “Aqua Boogie” is told from the point of view of a person who is afraid of water, having never learned to swim, “Water Sign” shows us how beautiful and liberating it can be to get swept away.

Addie E. Citchens is the author of “A Good Samaritan,” out in the Review’s Winter Issue.

After two vodka tonics and a cosmo, my ninety-year-old grandmother lifts her glass and says, “But you know that Nietzsche is my boyfriend?” 

“He is?”

“He’s my boyfriend.”

It’s all right—we’ve shared boyfriends before. The actor Javier Bardem. Errol Louis, anchor at NY1. Her new neighbor. Her many doctors. She tells me that Nietzsche is her boyfriend because Nietzsche also hates the German composer Richard Wagner. I tell her Nietzsche hates a lot of people. She nods. “That’s good in a man.” 

Russell Books is an iconic new and used bookstore in Victoria, BC, Canada. It was started in 1961 in Montreal by Reg Russell and relocated to Victoria in 1991. It’s now being run by the third generation of the family: Reg Russell’s granddaughter, Andrea Minter, and her husband, Jordan.

It started as a 300 square foot, one aisle bookstore and has expanded over the years to two floors connected with escalators and 18,000 square feet. The aisles ares packed full of used and new books in every conceivable genre, and they also have a large collection of rare and antiquarian books.

Russell Books is a popular tourist destination as well as a favorite bookstore of locals for its large selection and discounted prices.

The night of February 8th, the store was broken into, and $55,000 of antiquarian books were stolen, including a signed Walt Whitman first edition worth $10,000 and a book published in 1600. The cases containing the books were also broken.

After nearly three months of striking, the HarperCollins Union, representing about 250 employees across sectors of the publisher, have reached a tentative deal. This happened quickly after the publishing giant agreed to meet with the Union to discuss their demands. It comes on the heels of the publisher also announcing a 5% reduction in its workforce over the next few months.

HarperCollins Union members began their strike in November. Among their short list of demands were an increase in the starting salaries from $45,000 a year to $50,000, as well as more robust policies to ensure the company would be a safe, healthy, and robust environment for marginalized employees. Until this week, the company did not engage with striking workers.

Details on the tentative agreement are light. Workers across the company will get one-time bonuses of $1,500, and starting salaries will be raised. To what remains unknown. Information about the ways the company plans to ensure a diverse workforce is not clear.

The agreement now moves on to the full Union for vote. If the Union accepts, the agreement will be in place until the end of 2025.

With the new legislative season in full swing, now is a crucial time to write to your representatives. We’re seeing unbelievable numbers of new proposals to outlaw intellectual freedom, to criminalize library workers and educators for providing queer and/or diverse literature to their communities, to ban drag shows (including drag storytimes), and to make being queer or a person of color even harder than it already is. You can track every single bill of concern to the freedom to read here, and you should.

In addition to keeping an eye on that legislation, no matter where you are in the country, you need to write your representatives about the importance of intellectual freedom and First Amendment Rights for all. Right now, there are very few public officials championing these freedoms nor proposing legislation that would further enshrine these rights to those from whom they’re being not-so-slowly stripped. Whether you’re in a state facing book ban laws or not, each letter sent is one more voice added to the chorus demanding for better.

This weekend, spend 15 minutes to look up the person who represents you both in your state government and D.C. You can look up everyone who works on your behalf right here by inputting your full address. Once you’ve done that, you have a couple of options: write to the primary decision makers who represent you, including your state congressional and senate representatives and those senators and congress people working for you in D.C. (so you’d send a few emails) OR choose to contact every single person listed who would be appropriate to reach out to (your local sheriff might not be useful here, but maybe enough emails land in the inbox of a lower-ranking politician or one who represents you at the county level might draw some attention).

Then, you’re going to compose a letter for each individual you’ve identified. But never fear: you don’t even need to do the work to compose the letter. Below is a template you can use. Change details where appropriate, and feel free to add anything else which you feel may be worthwhile. You can cut, too — this is a longer letter meant to help you have handy access to statistics, data, and relevant court cases that bolster your message.

Don’t feel limited here. Set yourself a reminder every other week or every month to reach out. Continue to send these emails periodically, and if you’re invested, make a phone call. You can use the template here as your script. Yes, it’s scary. But what’s a hell of a lot scarier than making a phone call that an assistant answers is not having books on library shelves…and knowing you could have done something to help save the lives of marginalized people blatantly targeted by bigotry.

Where the heck did January go? Who cares, it’s February, and there are a ton of exciting books coming out. It’s looking like a great month for fantasy, which is perfect to escape into when it’s cold and still a bit dreary outside. I’m personally already looking forward to National Discount Chocolate Day on February 15, which will provide me with eat-while-reading treats for many months to come. May the odds be ever in all of our favor when it comes to the candy shelves.

Here’s just a selection of what’s coming at us over the four glorious Tuesdays of February. It’s nine books out of the many that are being published, so please don’t mistake this as an exhaustive of all-inclusive list. It’s mostly fantasy with a sprinkling of sci-fi, and there’s romance, there’s darkness and horror, there are retellings and reimaginings of classic stories, and, best of all, at the end of the month there are pirates. I’ve also got you a mix of sequels, standalones, and new series starters. Hopefully there’s something on this list for everyone to love!

As always, you can find a full list of new releases in the magical New Release Index, carefully curated by your favorite Book Riot editors, organized by genre and release date.

As I write this, January is drawing to a close. I cannot believe that we are already one month into 2023. But whether I like it or not, time happens, and once again, the season of love is upon us. Though I never really celebrated Valentine’s Day in any significant way, irrespective of whether I was single or paired up, I have always loved the explosion of cute DIY literary Valentine’s Day crafts for kids and other projects on my Pinterest home page around this time. We crafters love a good theme, and love, hearts, and flowers are about as delightfully theme-y as it can get.

Valentine’s Day is also a perfect occasion to share your love of DIY with the kids in your life – be it in the classroom or at home. Crafting is a wonderful way to keep kids engaged and occupied, while teaching them a thing or two about recycling some of the material that they may have lying around in playrooms and classrooms. Add a literary twist to your Valentine’s Day crafting plans, and you are sure to win the approval of the bookish kids in your life. Here we have collected a list of some literary Valentine’s Day crafts for kids to get you started.

The romance genre, especially steamy enemies-to-lovers books, is a vast and steamy place, full of communication shenanigans, tissue-paper bodices, flowing locks of all colors that belong to all genders, and a disproportionate number of English dukes, people with piercing eyes and the ability to raise one sardonic eyebrow. One of the major reasons readers flock to romance is the steam factor. It is a place where readers can experience the joys and heartaches of any relationship arrangement without consequence to our hearts (or our joints, given the variety of possible…er…configurations).

Speaking of configurations, romance readers are statistically around 86% women. And while most readers discover the romance genre between ages 11 and 17 (no surprise there, given puberty, preteen, and teen curiosity around relationships and sex), the average romance reader is ~37 years old, heterosexual (82%), female, and white (86%), according to the Romance Writers Association. That is all to say, this is not a widely diverse readership, but as the genre embraces more diverse expressions of race, gender, and sexuality, I expect those numbers will shift.

More diversity in authorship and characters can only lead to more diverse ways to make us blush in public. With diversity in mind, I’ve done my best to include many different types of steamy enemies to lovers books — including a yaoi manga — to expand your steamy horizons.

February 10 is author E.L. Konigsburg’s birthday, and while most people are familiar with her classic children’s book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, she wrote more than 20 books, including picture books. Born to two Jewish immigrants, Konigsburg grew up in small towns in Pennsylvania. She was valedictorian of her high school class, majored in chemistry at Carnegie Mellon, and was the first person in her family to earn a college degree.

Konigsburg started writing in the mornings after her third child went to school. In 1968, she won the Newbery Medal for Mixed-Up Files, and was also awarded a Newbery Honor for her book Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. She is the only author to be awarded both in the same year. Almost 30 years later, in 1997, she won the Newbery again for her novel The View From Saturday.

In 2006, she was a U.S. nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen award, for her contributions to children’s literature. She died in 2013 at the age of 83, from complications of a stroke that she had the week before.

Konigsburg tackled many topics that other authors might not have touched in children’s literature more than 30 or 40 years ago: antisemitism, racism, classism (About the B’nai Bagels), pornography (also B’nai Bagels), mental health (George), and diversity — many of her books have racially diverse characters or disabled characters — to name a few. Was this always handled the way we would expect it to be handled now? Of course not, because these books were written decades ago and our language and use of language has changed and evolved, as it should constantly be doing. I have cringed when reading some of her writing. But there are also some amazing scenes where characters point out the explicit racism or ableism of other characters, and where mothers don’t hesitate to dress down their entitled, sexist sons and husbands. Keeping the time period when these were written in mind when I reread (and read for the first time) many of her books, it felt a bit groundbreaking to me.

In that respect, while I absolutely love Mixed-Up Files, I think it’s a shame that more of her work isn’t mentioned or taught. Other books of hers are much more diverse and layered, diving into some pretty deep topics.

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

Someone once accused me of being unrealistic about love’s aftermath. This was in the middle of an interminable argument, one in a long series of interminable arguments. I am not really someone prone to interminable arguments, which probably should have told me something about this person and myself sooner than it did, but at the time I was experiencing a new experience and not every aspect of it was entirely unpleasant. What he said was something like this: “You think there are never any consequences! You think you can go around hurting people, and that everyone you hurt will still want to be in the same room as you, having a drink!” I thought about this for a second. It wasn’t true but it wasn’t not true either. Then I said something stupid, which was, “Do you know the Bob Dylan song ‘Mississippi’?”

Is “Mississippi” a love song? Yes and no. I think it is among the most romantic songs ever written and also among the most ambiguous, which are not disconnected qualities. It is not even clearly about a romantic relationship—some people hear it as a sociopolitical song about the state of America, which isn’t wrong. It might be about a guy who has literally stayed in Mississippi a day too long. Yet it contains, I think, every important kernel of wisdom about love and the loss of it; it hits every note that matters. Is that too much to believe about a single song? “Mississippi”—and I am talking about the Love and Theft version, the heart likes what it likes—is about the love that outlasts love. I think often of the line: “I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.” And I think, Yes, that’s how I feel! This is true!

Of course, it isn’t true. It isn’t any more true for me than it is for anyone who harbors their own bitternesses toward me. I have plenty of things besides affection—wells of pain, streaks of anger, pain and anger about things so long past you would think they would have disappeared rather than calcified. And yet when I hear that line I think about everyone I have ever loved and everyone who has ever loved me—I think of us on a boat together, maybe drinking martinis. But it’s almost like we are ghosts, like the dead children in the final book of The Chronicles of Narnia, because I know this is a wild, impossible fantasy of the past and the present colliding. Still, it’s beautiful and in its own way even comforting.

It’s easy to feel happy for a friend who has suddenly, and seemingly irrevocably, fallen in love. It’s just as easy to wonder, privately, if they might, one day, fall out of it. Love stories, like rhymes, are initially generative. Both begin with the promise of infinite possibility: the couple—and the couplet—could go anywhere! But anywhere always winds up being somewhere, and that somewhere is very often a dead end. 

Couplets, Maggie Millner’s rhapsodic debut, is officially described as a novel in verse, but the poems that comprise it buck constantly against their generic container. Some are in prose, others are in rhyme and meter, and all are spoken by a young woman straddling two relationships and a shifting sense of self. Affair narratives are all about reversed chronologies: they end where love begins. But when the speaker leaves her long-term boyfriend for a first-time girlfriend, her timelines get all mixed up: she becomes a “conduit / between them: a conversation they conducted / with my mouth.” 

Couplets is preoccupied by triangulations. The speaker is intensely jealous of her new girlfriend’s other girlfriend, a novelist who every other weekend also has a “tryst” with a married hedge fund manager and his lover, who is a novelist, too. When he ejaculates into one of the novelists, the other pretends that she is a voyeur, peering in on her competitor, the hedge fund manager’s wife. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a poet, finds that her own love triangle produces shifting meaning. She and her lovers are bound together, but she can’t seem to harness them. “Our own story made no sense / to me and twisted up whenever I tried / writing it.” 

At the end of January, Maggie and I spoke over Zoom about the language that attends love and the desires that animate the life of any writer, who will always find herself, no matter the genre, struggling between the impulse to act and the compulsion to self-analyze.

This one time, my dad bought me a house in Providence, Rhode Island. It was a two-story fake Colonial with yellow aluminum siding on Hawkins Street. We bought it from the bank for $55,000; it was one of many properties under foreclosure in the city in 2009. Dad and I had spent a few days driving around and looking at these houses. In one driveway, I found a dirty playing card depicting the biggest penis I could ever imagine—I still have it. In one basement, the realtor had to disclose, the former owner had tied his girlfriend’s lover to a chair, tortured him, and then shot him in the head.

The man who had lived in my house on Hawkins Street had owed more on the house than it was worth. It was in an undesirable part of town, or so I was told, but I loved the neighborhood. The houses were small. There was a permanent lemon icee stand a block away. I was about twenty steps away from a bodega that functioned as the neighborhood grocery store. My next door neighbor was an elderly lady from Portugal who spoke almost no English and yet complained to me about all the dogshit in my backyard while bragging about the tomatoes in her garden, which looked exactly like her breasts beneath her housedress, heavy and sliding. We were separated by a chainlink fence.

The layout of the house was nothing special. When you walked through the front door, you could go up the staircase on the left. Or you could walk straight down the hall, past the small living room, to the kitchen, and from the kitchen you could take a u-turn and step down to the side-door to the driveway, or continue on down to the basement. I had never had a house of my own. When we signed the papers, I felt myself moving into a new phase of my life, a rite of passage with my father in the chair next to me. It was a beautiful and slightly terrifying experience I know I was very lucky to have, and I loved the house, I loved the light and the intimacy of the rooms, and I loved writing in that house. I wrote McGlue in that house. But more than anything, I loved that house because Dad and I renovated it together. Every day for months, he drove down from Massachusetts with his tools. We’d work all morning sanding and painting, breaking down walls, laying tile, whatever, then go have foot-long Subway sandwiches at the Walmart, hit the Home Depot, and go back to work until it was dark and the rush hour traffic had died down. This was the most time I had ever spent with Dad. It was fun and emotional and felt like the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy.

The biggest issue that needed to be addressed—the thing that made the house unlivable—was the nicotine. I don’t mean that the place smelled of cigarette smoke or old cigarettes or ash or the butts stubbed out on the greasy parquet floor. I mean that there was nicotine syrup soaked into the walls. Have you ever smoked a cigarette in a small room in Providence in the summer, in the still of the night? Cigarette smoke is distilled in the lungs, and upon exhalation, the nicotine adheres to the moisture in the environment, the droplets land, the nicotine is absorbed, and the poison never leaves. The interior of the house had a layer of nicotine varnish that made everything sepia and gross. You cannot scrub this stuff off anything except, maybe, stainless steel. So Dad and I had to rip out all the walls.

For most of my life, I took quiet to mean a kind of shortcoming. I had heard it used too many times as a description of how others saw me. But then I realized that in the work of writers I love deeply are many kinds of quiets—those of catharsis, of subversiveness, of gaping loss or simple, sensual joy. I came to think of quiet not as an adjective or verb or noun, but as a kind of technique.

The books I chose for the syllabus below expand how we think about black expression, intimacy, interiority, and agency; about black quietude. I began with the work of Kevin Quashie, whose voice, like a tuning fork, set a tone for my reading of other books. For the nonfiction books on this list, I looked for thinkers who are deeply attentive to the everyday. For fiction and poetry, I selected writers who allow us to glimpse more clearly our own selfhoods via the unknowability of others. In all cases, these are books that are richer for asking us to listen more deeply. We might return from each one dazzled, dazed even, but always with renewed, sharpened perception.

Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture

Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior

Toni Morrison, Sula

Over the past year I have read and reread Angelica Nuzzo’s book Approaching Hegel’s Logic, Obliquely, in which Nuzzo guides the reader through Hegel’s Science of Logic. Nuzzo presents the question of how we are to think about history as it unfolds amid chaos and relentless crises. How, in other words, are we to find a means to think outside the incessant whirr of our times? The answer she provides is one I find wholly satisfactory: it is through the work of Hegel that we are best able to think about and think through the current state of the world, precisely because his work is itself an exploration of thinking—particularly Science of Logic, as Nuzzo eloquently explains:

Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic is the only one that aims at—and succeeds in—accounting for the dynamic of real processes: natural, psychological but also social, political, and historical processes. It is a logic that attempts to think of change and transformation in their dynamic flux not by fixating movement in abstract static descriptions but by performing movement itself. 

By tracking the movement of the mind, a movement that is incessant and fluid, we are best equipped to study the crises of our time as they occur. In particular, we are best able to examine and analyze the structure of capitalism itself, a structure which is formed by exchange value and is thus a system of infinite repetition and reproduction. A system of infinite plasticity—appropriating everything it comes in contact with. A system, in other words, akin to that of the mind. Hegel does not merely explain how the mind works but enacts its very movement. He places us in the center of its whirr. 

—Cynthia Cruz, author of “Charity Balls”

A few times a year, the writers Yiyun Li and A. M. Homes sit down to lunch. As friends, they often find themselves talking about almost anything but writing. Often, though, as they ask each other questions, something interesting and unexpected happens: “The thin thread of a story might be unearthed,” Homes recently told us, “or the detail of a recent experience, or a gnawing question one finds unanswerable. Somewhere between the menu, the meal and the coffee, maybe the story begins to form.”

Last year, Li and Homes both published new novels. In Li’s The Book Of Goose, she tells the story of a complex friendship between Agnes and Fabienne, farm girls, who each have been in some way neglected by their families. Homes’s latest book, The Unfolding, is a political satire that explores the fault lines of American politics within a family. 

At the end of the year, the two friends sat down for one of their lunches—and what follows is a bit of what they talked about.