Jesmyn Ward fans, rejoice! We officially have a title and release date for her next novel. Let Us Descend is slated for an October 3rd release from Scribner, a Simon & Schuster imprint.

The book will tell the story of enslaved teenage girl Annis, turning an unflinching eye at the terrifying reality of a life violently robbed of physical agency. “It took years and multiple drafts to understand how Annis and enslaved people might have retained their sense of self, their sense of hope, in a time and place that attempted to negate both, day in and out,” Ward said in a statement from Scribner. Let Us Descend is described as “a blend of magical realism, historical narrative and Dante’s ‘Inferno.'”

This will be Ward’s first release since Sing, Unburied, Sing, the epic family saga and road novel set in rural 21st century Mississippi that won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2017. Ward’s Salvage the Bones, set in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, won the award in 2011, making her the only Black author to win two National Book Awards for fiction. Among her other notable works are The Fire This Time, Where the Line Bleeds, and Men We Reaped.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

In the fall of 2019 I was newly living in the Midwest. In my free time, I’d take long, aimless walks, trying to tune to the flat cold of the place. On one such walk I got a call from my friend Anya Zalevskaya; she was in Odesa, she said, working on a film, a documentary about the Ukrainian (but also Romanian, Jewish, and Soviet) director Kira Muratova. When Anya called, it was almost midnight in Odesa. She was sitting on a bench by the Black Sea; I could hear the waves, the inhale of her cigarette. What film of Muratova’s should I watch first? I asked her. Ah, she said, The Asthenic Syndrome, for sure. 

1990’s The Asthenic Syndrome takes us to Odesa, too, but this is an Odesa at the fraying edge of a Soviet time-space where, significantly, we never see the sea. The film is shot in places that suggest a borderland, an edge, a wobble: construction sites, mirrors, photographs, headstones, film screenings, cemeteries, a dog pound, a hospital ward, a soft-porn shoot. This in-between sense is temporal, as well: Muratova notes that she “had the great fortune of working in a period between the dominance of ideology and the dominance of the market, a period of suspension, a temporary paradise.” As with the asthenic syndrome itself (a state between sleeping and waking), the film is a realization of inbetweenness, an assembly of frictions and crossover states we feel through form: through Muratova’s use of juxtaposition; through her uncanny overpatterning of echoes and coincidences; through the shifts of register between documentary and opera. The film doesn’t proceed so much as weave itself in front of us, in a dazzling ivy pattern of zones and occurrences. You could call it late-Soviet baroque realism.

The film is really two films. The first, in black and white, opens out into a funeral. It’s for the husband of Natasha, we learn—a middle-aged woman possessed, in the ensuing scenes, to the very end of herself with grief. Because grief invents the road it travels, Natasha—like her audience—does not herself know what she will do next. With terrifying speed, she quits her job as a doctor, insulting coworkers in the process; takes a drunk home, tells him to strip, beds him; shoves and insults passersby. All this is captured in the camera’s eye, however, with a disinterested dignity. And then, abrupt as Natasha’s shoving, the first film breaks into the second (I’ll leave you to see the how and the why—it’s great). 

At the epicenter of the second film is the exhausted Nikolai, a schoolteacher who nods off in moments of emotional intensity. Occurrences flare up around Nikolai like religious antimiracles—a carp torn apart by female fingers as “Chiquita” plays, a high school boy imitating a game show host, the agonizing panorama of the dog pound. This is the social and inner world in abjection, yes: but because abjection is possible, the film seems to say, so is human dignity. The question of dignity binds the viewer to the film’s concern: what is the human when it is shorn of category, of psychology, of system? What are we when we are together? What are we when we are alone?

In the Goodreads monthly roundups of new books to watch out for, they often highlight eye-catching titles, whether they’re poetic, surprising, or particularly punny. Today, they gathered up some of the best new titles (August 2022 to January 2023 releases) in their own post.

Goodreads notes that titles long enough to be a complete sentence are in style right now. These kinds of titles have long been common in manga, and perhaps the popularity of that format has brought this convention over to North American publishing.

The title that got the most buzz this year has to be I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. It’s the kind of title, combined with the cover design, that stops you in your tracks in a bookstore. Paired with McCurdy’s fame and dry humor in her writing style, and this was a big bestseller of the year.

Here are some of the 36 recent releases Goodreads selected as the best titles publishing has to offer.

Dear Stephen King:

Last week, you had a tweet take off. I’ve seen it everywhere, including on several giant Facebook pages, Instagram pages, even on TikTok. The tweet, about book banning, is nice and sexy, attempting to break down the problem in under 280 characters. And you know, it was successful!

It got a lot of attention from your 7 million followers, as well as so many big names.

But, Stephen, this tweet, as thoughtful as I think you mean it to be, has done a lot of damage for the cause of anti-censorship in today’s world.

Nonfiction books are my jam, and nonfiction science books? Especially so. What I love is how broad the genre is. Science can include things like medicine, nature, ecology, marine biology, conservation, psychology, chemistry, microbiology, and much more. It can also include personal essay and memoir, and may weave in history. For me, that’s the beauty of science: its reach.

My shelves have been overflowing with books lately — there are so many great books out right now, and I’m still trying to catch up from 2022 — but my science bookshelves are particularly full. The diversity of science books right now is stunning, and it’s pushed me to read books in areas that I normally wouldn’t choose at first, like marine biology or ornithology.

This is just a small sampling of science books that have come out in the last few months, as well as some books that are coming out this spring. Topics run the gamut from cells to surgery, from diversity in conservation and environmental activism to the exploration of the possibility of aliens, and much more. You’ll notice that many of the books on my list blend science and memoir or personal essay, as opposed to a more straightforward nonfiction science book. I think this speaks to the power that science has for us, to push us to reflect on our own lives, and examine where we stand in the scheme of things and where we fit into the environment or universe.

Let’s take a look at some of the books you’ll definitely want to add to your TBR.

Daphne Du Maurier’s career was long and storied; her life was equally so. Her books were huge bestsellers when they were published, and many live on in edition after edition. Du Maurier was a novelist, a poet, a playwright, an essayist, a literary critic, a nonfiction writer, and a biographer. In short, she was a Writer with a capital “W.”

To begin, a short biographical sketch: Daphne Du Maurier was born in 1907 in London, England, into a literary and dramatic family. Her father was a well-known actor-manager, and her mother was an actress. Her maternal grandfather was a Punch cartoonist and is the author of Trilby (1894). Her cousins were the children that J.M. Barrie patterned the Darling children after in Peter Pan, and her father was friends with one Sir Alfred Hitchcock, who directed three of her works (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, and The Birds).

If Du Maurier were writing today, she would fall squarely in the “popular fiction” category. Her work has a quality of being easy to relish, fun to read, and also sticking with the reader. She was a master at leaving just enough strings still dangling at the end of a novel that the reader ends up batting like a kitten at them far after the reading is done.

She is at the top of my “favorite authors whose work I need to explore more deeply” list, so I’ve put together a primer for getting started with Du Maurier that we can all work through together.

I sometimes fear that if I don’t buy a book, I’ll forget about it and it will be lost in the great chasm of time and space. That even if I add it to my Want-To-Read shelf on Goodreads, it will fall into the depths, never to be seen again (which is a possibility; I have over 5,000 books on there). But really, how much do I remember about the books I already own, across three different formats and nearly ten different platforms? How many times do I see a book on social media and wander over to Amazon to buy it on Kindle, only to discover I had already bought it (sometimes years ago, sometimes only days before)? How many times do I grab a book from the library, only to discover I already have my own copy of either an advanced reader copy (ARC) or even one that I might have purchased in a different format?

This year, I’m taking that same energy that I have for new books to rediscover the ones I own. 

I have written many times about how many books I own. How many books I then proceed to borrow from the library and get from Kindle Unlimited. (P.S. I’m back on that KU train. Couldn’t stay away.)

You don’t need to read those articles to understand that…it’s a lot. A lot a lot. 

And I was feeling those numbers in late fall of 2022. I feel those numbers regularly, but I was sort of despairing about the obvious proof that I would never read all the books I wanted to. I was also in a horrible slump and hadn’t finished a book in a ridiculous amount of time, which for me could have been a few days or a couple of weeks. No books were going out, but plenty were coming in — whether they were retail therapy or review copies sent from publishers. I was starting to feel the pressure, but I couldn’t break myself out of it. 

Great historical fiction is immersive. As a kid, it often made me feel like I’d time traveled. Karen Cushman’s middle grade novels from the 1990s, The Midwife’s Apprentice and Catherine, Called Birdy, transported me. Historical fiction also made me realize what I had in common with people from the past and which social issues still existed in my own time.

The phrase “girl power” was everywhere in late 1990s pop culture, when I was in 4th or 5th grade, and I associated it with loud, angry rock bands. My family has always encouraged me to be independent and opinionated, but I probably thought independent women were a recent phenomenon. Although the aesthetics were totally different, Cushman’s novels helped me realize people have felt trapped by societal expectations and fought them throughout history.

Catherine, Called Birdy is an epistolary novel written in diary format. Birdy’s entries contain everything about her daily life in 1200s England, from mundane chores to saints’ days. As Sarah Rettger wrote about Birdy on Book Riot in 2013: “Wouldn’t you choose keeping a diary over doing your daily spinning?” The 1995 Trophy Newbery copy I read had a cover illustration of Catherine rigging a bucket to pour over a suitor’s head.

Lena Dunham adapted and directed Amazon Prime’s 2022 movie adaptation of Catherine, Called Birdy. She remembers the book as a childhood favorite. The movie, starring Bella Ramsey as Birdy, captures the character’s unique voice and rebellious personality. Her exclamation of “Corpus bones!” is repeated frequently in both the movie and the book.

Birdy is a vivid character — never vague. She’s ambiguous, though, because readers can interpret and identify with her for various reasons. She wants to be a monk, not a nun, demonstrating how thoroughly she rejects traditional gender roles. Her brother Edward, a monk, says she wouldn’t succeed at disguising herself as a boy.

One of the more remarkable things about being behind the wheel of a tour bus for Pavement is that you can easily kill Pavement if you want to. I bring this up with their driver, Jason, who responds only by smiling at me while driving at a professionally breakneck speed on the interstate somewhere between Saint Paul and Chicago at 4 A.M. as every one of the six members of the beloved nineties band lies asleep in their bunks in the cabin behind us. To my left, Jason’s freshly filled coffee mug—personalized to read LORDY LORDY, LOOK WHO’S FORTY above a beaming middle school graduation photo—jangles in its cup holder.

A fizz of dispatch comes through the receiver from the other driver, Jeff, who drives an identical bus bearing a platoon of tech and crew members that’s ripping down I-90 just ahead of us. Since we left Saint Paul, a relentless stream of consciousness has flowed from Jeff to Jason via CB radio, coursing through points of interest such as God and the best way to cook snake, to which Jason has responded only occasionally, if at all, with transmissions like “That’s a negative,” “Mmhmm,” or “Lord, that is crazy.” Jason has hardly taken a week off since his last nationwide tour (three months, Def Leppard) yet remains magnanimous, gallant, sweatless, surely underpaid. “I think it’s about time for a squirt in the dirt,” goes Jeff’s voice overhead. “All due respect, sir,” Jason says, seizing the mouthpiece, “but there is a woman in this vehicle. Please refrain from that sort of language. Over.” We pull over onto a shoulder and wait as Jeff’s crew bus deposits toilet runoff into scrubgrass with the push of a button. “I make it a point to listen to the bands that I’m moving around,” Jason offers as we watch the spot of sewage bloom, “and I think I get why people like these guys.” 

I’m accompanying the indie rock group Pavement for a thin slice of their hugely anticipated, nearly sold-out, four-month monster of a reunion tour. Founded in 1989 and nominally dead a decade later, Pavement belonged to the category of unsuccessful and confounding superstars—a band who was never really that famous, that scrutable, that glory-seeking or ambitious. None of their albums or songs ever got anywhere close to gold or platinum in the US. But they were treated as life-affirmingly, almost irritatingly influential by their big- and small-time rock contemporaries, knighted as “the finest rock band of the nineties” by Robert Christgau, and earned Pitchfork’s number one song of the nineties, back when people relatively cared about the opinions held by either Christgau or Pitchfork. They summed the epoch’s diffidence (its huge concern for “authenticity,” its allergy toward the idea of “selling-out,” et al.), were blessed and cursed with the idea that they were the vanguard of a loosely defined genre called “slacker rock,” and, for some among a population that remembers using the word hipster regularly, they are—as they were for the long-lionized English DJ John Peel—“one of the best bands in the world.” This is also a band that hasn’t written anything whatsoever together since their dissolution twenty-one years ago and whose last tour happened at the tail end of the aughts. 

As with most artists now granted the vague honorific of “cult band,” the enthusiasm for their reunion borders on unreasonable. Resale tour tickets in some cities were going for a ludicrous $500. Serious devotees have documented and color-coded each stop with spreadsheets that sort out setlists by album and frequency of track repetition. By the end of their North American leg, there had been a fan-made musical and a museum erected in their honor. Now, a feature-length film is purportedly in the works—one that (once again) imagines a universe in which Pavement is “the most important band in the world.” 

In May 2020 I began an intermittent diary, a notebook of infrathin sensations. I was housebound in a heat wave in London, in a pandemic, with my wife, A., and our daughter, R. S., who was then four. I started to notice what I was noticing in this reduced era: minuscule sensations, tastes. I was becoming obsessed with everything that was nonverbal. I started to seek it out. I was getting into perfume samples, which I ordered in batches from a perfume shop in town, the perfumes all decanted into miniature atomizers and sent in clear plastic sachets; and also natural wines I bought online, old music, tarot cards, the coffee I was drinking, the chocolate I was eating. I took photos of flowers as they faded. I was worried that if I tried to write down these impressions in the journal I was keeping for the novel I was writing at the time they would get lost. So I began a separate notebook. It was a very small notebook, made by a Japanese manufacturer, that I’d bought and had never known what to use for. Writing in it always felt like defacement. But now its miniature size could be useful. Each new entry took up half a page.

The more I wrote, the more I started to think about what these impressions represented. I decided that the category of experience I was describing could be extended to anything that lingered—tiny scraps from my reading, stray physical memories. I came up with different definitions for what I was after: old-fashioned words like nuance, or timbre … I liked nuance because in Barthes’s lectures, collected in The Preparation of the Novel, he describes nuance as the practice of individuation. “Nuance = difference (diaphora),” he wrote, and then added a literary analogy: “one could define style as the written practice of the nuance …” On the level of style, he continued, nuance constituted the essence of poetry, the genre of minute particularities; on the level of content, nuance represented life.

Life! I missed life very much.

Anyway, this infrathin diary lasted about six months, maybe a little less. Then the urgency of these feelings and of recording these tiny sensations began to dissipate and was overtaken with a new obsession, or a new version of this nonverbal investigation. I started manically buying paper and ink and colored pencils and pens—to make small drawings and diagrams. And so I abandoned that notebook and began another.

In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.

The second time I met my boyfriend, S., he told me he was getting divorced. I thought, Great. I liked the way it sounded. We were in our late twenties and so it made him and by extension me seem original, and I like people who have made mistakes. To me the marriage sounded unserious, and therefore unthreatening: it was a visa marriage, granted one that came out of a relationship. They met at work, were married after about a year, and divorced bitterly after fewer than three. I have never met his ex-wife but initially I pictured someone stylish and ethereal, and he had said she was a bit older so she was perhaps intimidating in that sense but, ultimately, good company.

The problems started with her stuff. For a brief period before they broke up, they both lived together in the house where he, and now sometimes I, live. Meaning that, as a result of the divorce happening long-distance in a kind of pandemic limbo period, and us meeting very soon after it, for the early stretch of our relationship many of her things were still in the house just outside of Belfast.

After the second or third time I stumbled across a wicker handbag or a drawer of beauty products or, once, underwear (polyester), I became alert to her things, seeking out and cataloguing items like they were pieces of evidence from a crime scene. Brown spray bottles labeled “citrus cleaner” and “disinfectent” [sic], with labels printed using a label maker. Patent beige open-toed stilettos with brittle-looking heels. Clothes, a couple of dresses, all slightly floral; she is thinner than me. A set of very large—I consider them comically large—cocktail glasses. A crate-size box of “environmentally friendly” toilet rolls with marketing copy reading “who gives a crap,” addressed to Mrs. T (Mrs.!). Wedding photos, in desktop frames bought from Next. A cheerful book on adult crafting for mental health. I could keep going, and for months, talking to friends, I did, until I could feel them start to try to edge me toward other topics or edge themselves away from this one. 

But then there were her plates. They were a set of around ten, made by her as gifts for him, vaguely artisanal craft-fair pieces in speckled white and muted blue. There is not a way to say this without sounding like a snob, but it feels relevant that she was not a potter or ceramicist in the sense that she made money from it or did it prolifically, or that the pieces she made were fully functional for their intended use. Pottery was an aspiration, a hobby that might become something more, and the plates reflected this. Tasteful but not imaginative, each one was a clear attempt at an ideal of a plate: marginally different sizes, visibly honed edges, glazes dripping slightly over rims. 

Last week, I watched my first Kurosawa movie: Kagemusha, or Shadow Warrior. One of Kurosawa’s final productions, Kagemusha takes place in sixteenth-century Japan and tells the story of a thief who looks uncannily like Shingen, the leader of the Takeda clan, and who is employed to impersonate him in the event of his death to keep the clan together and protect it from its enemies. Shingen dies: enter the shadow warrior. This three-hour insight into feudal Japan, its structures of power, and the paradigm shift enacted by the introduction of guns onto the battlefield in the Sengoku period is mesmerizingly beautiful. Almost every shot could be a painting—cavalry battle scenes; the many councils of leaders draped with patterned kimonos; the delicate, expressive face of Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays both Shingen and his shadow. My favorite scene was the dream sequence: the kagemusha dreams of Shingen emerging dressed for battle, like an armored bird hatching from a shell, from the urn in which his corpse was deposited. The shadow flees, terrified, against a hallucinogenically colorful sky. The river water that splashes around his bare feet is dark like paint. I am ready to watch Seven Samurai.

—Isabella Hammad, author of “Gertrude”

I am in a book club that has only two rules. The first rule: any novel we read must have at least one murder. Nada, by the French writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, has, by my count, at least eight murders—and flashy ones at that. Originally published in 1973 and set in the hangover after the uprisings of 1968, the novel follows a group of leftist revolutionaries who kidnap the U.S. ambassador to France as a political statement. I’m not spoiling anything by saying that the revolutionaries and their scheme are doomed. The race to the bloody end fuses discussions on the legitimacy of using violence to further political aims with action scenes so gloriously paced that the book feels like a single exhale from start to finish. The characters include a jaded professional who hops from one leftist uprising to the next and a high school philosophy teacher who punches a colleague in the throat, shouting “fuck your face!” There’s also a mostly silent man who “wanted to shoot himself or just go to work—it was hard to say which,” and a rich girl who supplies the country house where the group stashes the ambassador. Her self-description is iconic: “My cool and chic exterior hides the wild flames of a burning hatred for a techno-bureaucratic capitalism whose cunt looks like a funeral urn and whose mug looks like a prick.”

It’s rare that a crime novel takes as an epigraph a quote from Hegel (“The heart that beats for the welfare of mankind passes therefore into the rage of frantic self-conceit …”), but Manchette is hardly an ordinary writer. His terse, propulsive sentences recall, a little, John le Carré, if le Carré had a passion for philosophy and a loathing of capitalism. Lucy Sante’s insightful introduction to Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translation points out Nada’s “theoretical shortcomings,” which Manchette himself acknowledged: the book fails to connect the Nada group with larger social movements and to depict the state interference, COINTELPRO-style, that would almost certainly occur. The likely Manchette mouthpiece backs out of the kidnapping because “terrorism is only justified when revolutionaries have no other means of expressing themselves and when the masses support them.” Still, when an ex-comrade condemns him “to eat shit and say thank you and cast blank ballots” for the rest of his life, it’s hard to disagree that something’s lacking in his pacific leftism, too. If Nada proves anything, it’s that “political” novels can be as unsettled as the politics we live with.

I first met Charles Simic in 1994 at a dinner to celebrate the Harvard Review’s special issue dedicated to Simic. I had written an essay for the issue titled “He Who Remembers His Shoes” that focused on several of his poems and so was invited to this dinner and seated next to him. While we were eating, a small black ant started crawling across the white table cloth. Simic became mesmerized by this ant. We both wondered if the ant was going to “make it” to the other side, and then, suddenly, our waiter appeared and swept it up. Simic almost wept. (I later learned that ants were his favorite insect.) What an object lesson it was for me in Simic’s compassion for the smallest creatures, what Czesław Miłosz called “immense particulars.” I stayed in touch with Simic off and on after this night, inviting him to read at the M.F.A. program I cofounded in 2001. Simic declined at first, saying he was “too pooped” after a reading tour in Europe, but then agreed to come in 2005. He read at The Fells, John Hayes’ elegant estate overlooking Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire which New England College rented for the occasion. The indelible image of him with the lake and gardens behind him has stayed with me ever since.

On November 21, I interviewed Simic on Zoom after several failed attempts to meet with him in Strafford, New Hampshire, where he lived. He was already having health issues, then but assured me that he was well enough—and eager—to chat. For an hour and twenty minutes we talked about everything from his local dump to his childhood in Belgrade during World War II. He told me, for instance, about what a “blast” he had playing in the streets of Belgrade even as it was being bombed by the Nazis. While transcribing our conversation, I realized that he never stopped playing in those streets. What a genius he was at witnessing to horror with wit, humanity, and a cold eye. I so envied and admired the way he transfigured such “immense particulars” as a forks, shrimp, breasts, ants, “bare winter trees,” and an alarm clock at the dump into powerful synecdoches. 

We ran out of time to talk, and made plans to continue the conversation. But he was rehospitalized several days later, and died in New Hampshire on January 10. I can’t think of another contemporary poet who wrote with such stunning sprezzatura, wit, and compassion. There is no one who can replace him, and he will be deeply missed.

This journal will publish works of creative literature (fiction, poetry, theater) and essays on particular aspects and problems and tendencies exemplified by the works published in the same issue. It will follow the discourse of Italian literature as it unfolds, through the work of writers who are young or not so young, new or with something new to say.

The journal will make it clear that it’s a discourse—many discourses together, which can be articulated in a general conversation—that runs from book to book, from manuscript to manuscript, and will find the thread of this discourse even where it seems to be merely a messy tangle.

In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.

We were still in Colorado when we booked a first appointment with a realtor in Rhode Island. In the hour before our video call, my husband suggested we make a list of must-have and nice-to-have features in a house. He wrote “3 BR” in the must-have column on a page in his notebook, because we each wanted our own office, then leaned back in his chair. “Built-in bookshelves would be nice,” he said. We’ve always wanted built-in bookshelves. We didn’t yet know we were going to run out of space in the shipping container we’d rented and would have to throw out all the shelves we owned. “A fireplace,” he added thoughtfully. I went into my strident mode, a part of my bad personality that for some reason I cannot change. “A fireplace isn’t optional!” I said, taking the pen and writing “fireplace” in the must-have column. “I’m not going to buy a house without a fireplace.”

We’d spent eleven years in Denver, all in the same apartment, not because we liked the apartment so much, but because every year, when our lease renewal came up, we never felt much like moving. We had moved out there from Boston with eighty or ninety boxes of books, and we didn’t want to pack them up again. We kept hitting that snooze button. Finally John convinced me to move back to New England—he was born in Connecticut, and he never stopped missing it, the trees and the stone walls and all that. What pushed us over was the housing market, which was more reasonable in Providence than in Denver. John kept showing me listings for adorable Colonials with mortgage payments not much higher than our rent. They looked cozy, and I thought I could be happy in New England if we had a little house to settle down in—one last move for us and for the books—if we could cozy up together on a couch and read by the fire.

We drove across the country at the end of March 2022, arriving in John’s hometown in early April—an old mill town in Southeastern Connecticut, an hour from Providence. Our plan was to stay with his mother for a few months. This had a dual purpose. We’d save money on rent and recoup the costs of moving while we looked for a permanent place to live. We could also help Linda with some things around the house, and keep her company—John’s father had died the previous fall. We felt useful, helping her clean out the basement, which had flooded the previous summer, and manage the yard, and so did she—on nights when we had to work late, Linda made dinner.

It’s strange to return. I lived in Boston in my twenties, and now I’m in my forties. One weekend in April we visited friends in Cambridge, then stopped in Harvard Square to buy Linda a Mother’s Day present. There was still a bitter chill in the wind that morning, and as we drove around looking for a spot to leave the car, we kept passing places where I remembered being cold. Once I slipped on some ice coming out of a bar on Mass Ave. It must have been 2007. There was frozen, jagged snow all over the sidewalks, and I tore my jeans and scraped up my knees and the palms of my hands. A couple days later I got food poisoning—it was particularly miserable, vomiting while down on my wounded knees.

In Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House, a group of former theater collaborators reunite at the bar they once frequented together. They’ve since all gone their separate ways, some making good money in TV; others have cobbled together livings from various odd jobs. But when their sad-sack friend Dick (played by Shawn himself in the New York premiere of the play) arrives late to the party, face bruised and crusted with dried blood, the play reveals its insidious side. At first, Dick acts as if nothing has happened, but then, when pressed, he earnestly explains, “I was beaten, rather recently, by some friends, but you see, I actually enjoyed it very much, in the end. Really, it was great. No—I loved it!” Dick does what just about all the play’s characters will go on to do: compulsively excuse horrible ideas and horrible actions. Act like nothing happened. Act like everyone else is making too big a deal out of something. The play glides along so blithely that its evolution into a genuinely frightening horror story might catch you by surprise. A year after it premiered in New York, the ensemble cast, led by Shawn and Matthew Broderick and directed by Scott Elliott, recorded their performances for the podcast Intercepted. It works beautifully as a radio drama, especially since one of the most perverse and hilarious pleasures of this play is to hear those voices argue so pleasantly and so reasonably in favor of cruelty, as if they’re kindly injecting you with a needle full of poison.

—Lucas Hnath, author of “Old Actress”

I’ve been following the rise of Julia May Jonas since her debut novel, Vladimir, came out last year. When I learned that Jonas had written a new play, Your Own Personal Exegesis, I leaped at the chance to see it at LCT3. Exegesis is a memory play—a reconstruction of the memories of one of the characters, Beatrice (Annie Fang). Set at “Redacted Church in Redacted, New Jersey” in 1996, it follows the church’s youth group, which meets on Friday nights for Bible study, danceathons, and performances of liturgical plays. Beatrice is the group’s youngest member. There’s also Chris (Cole Doman), the “Jock Rebel Sensitive Everything guy”; and Brian (Savidu Geevaratne), who was raised in the church and lusts after Addie (Mia Pak), whose disordered eating causes her to grow lanugo and eventually sprout black wings. Overseeing the group is Reverend Kathy Redacted, or Rev. Kat, as she’s known to her students. Her name and the name of the church, which are literally blacked out on the church bulletins the audience is given as we’re ushered to our seats, are our first clues that something sordid is in the offing. Having read Vladimir, in which the narrator develops a passion for a younger colleague in her department, I expected a similar story of illicit desire. Exegesis is cleverly and precisely structured, beginning with a call to worship followed by an invocation, a reading of the New Testament, a presentation of tithes and offerings, a confession of sins, and so on. At select call-and-response moments, the audience is directed to read aloud from the bulletins in our laps. We complete a circuit of knowledge, and maybe something more. Ultimately, the play’s concern with how an authority figure might wield charismatic power over her charges put me in the mind of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Considering Rev. Kat, Beatrice says, “She frightens me … She say[s] what other people don’t want to hear because they don’t want to hear it.” Others, though, fall for her faster than you can say “benediction.”

—Rhoda Feng

Mary Manning’s portfolio for the Winter issue of the Review documents a summer spent in Italy. Their collages are perfect expressions of the special kind of vision you have on vacation, when everything—pizza receipts, sidewalk seating, wildflowers—looks new and exciting, strangely saturated. Manning’s work not only captures but literally incorporates their world in order to rearrange it, ever so gently, at an angle: in Ciao!, there’s a cantaloupe wrapper and a bag from a pharmacy, plus photographs of their friends, of a Nicola De Maria fresco, and of a performance of a Trisha Brown dance. Manning was born in Alton, Illinois in 1972 and lives in New York City. In 2006, they began sharing digital photographs of their everyday life on their blog alongside scans of objects and links to the work of musicians, filmmakers, writers, and other artists they admire. Today, their work appears in print and on gallery walls across North America. The book Manning was preparing last summer, Grace Is Like New Music, a collection of images spanning ten years of their work, will be published by Canada Gallery in February. We talked about looking at images nonlinearly, as well as Italian graphic design, postmodern choreography, and bags (paper and plastic).

INTERVIEWER

Do you take photos differently when you’re on vacation?

MANNING

In our new Winter issue, Belinda McKeon interviewed Colm Tóibín, the author of ten novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of essays and journalism. “In the autumn of 2000,” he told her, “I taught a course at the New School called Relentlessness, and I chose to teach translations of some ancient Greek texts, and Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Ingmar Bergman, Sylvia Plath. The class was very useful because it gave me a bedrock of theory about what this sort of work was doing. … Once you have that certain authority, you can actually write a plainer prose.” We asked Tóibín for his syllabus from that class, along with a short introduction, as the first in a new series we are launching called Syllabi.

I am interested in texts that are pure voice or deal with difficult experience using a tone that does not offer relief or stop for comfort. Sometimes, the power in the text comes from powerlessness, whether personal or political. Sometimes, death is close or danger beckons or violence is threatened or enacted. Sometimes, there is a sense of real personal risk in the text’s revelations. Sometimes, there is little left to lose. All the time, the tone is incantatory or staccato or filled with melancholy recognitions.

Euripides, Medea

Sophocles, Electra