What Makes a Good Book Club Question?

What Makes a Good Book Club Question?

I’ve written about my book club for Book Riot before. It’s been one of my favorite things for almost ten years. How our book clubs works, generally, is that each member takes a turn choosing a book. Everyone reads it, and then we meet once a month to discuss that pick. When you choose the book, you lead the discussion. That means, yes, if you choose the book, you ask the questions. 

At my book club, each meeting begins with the discussion leader sharing why they chose the book and what they thought about it. Maybe they chose the book because it’s a buzzy new book that they’re excited about or maybe it’s a classic that they have been meaning to read for years. Their initial thoughts are usually just a quick summary — they thought it was exciting, they thought it was boring, it was a slow start but got better — and then they, popcorn-style, ask someone else in the group for their initial thoughts. This primes the pump for the rest of the conversation, and often the book club discussion goes fairly smoothly from there. But, if it doesn’t, then the person who chose the book is in charge of keeping the conversation going. 

This has led to varying degrees of panic over the past ten years — less now than then, but still sometimes now. But after more than 100 book club meetings, I’ve learned a few things about what makes a good book club question. 

A good book club question invites your book club to get talking. My book club’s first question is sort of a no-judgment zone. The point is just to start talking. The first few quiet moments of book club can feel a bit like staring at a blank page that needs to be filled, so your goal with your first question is just to break that silence. A good book club question is concerned about character. Even the most plot-driven story is driven by people on the page making decisions and going about their days. So what do you think about the characters in your book? But don’t just ask if they were likable. Were they believable? Do their decisions make sense? Would you do the same in their situation? A good book club question is an investigation. Authors love to leave clues in their work, little allusions to work that inspires them. Is there an epigraph in the beginning of the book? What book (or movie or play or song) is it from? What might that have to do with the book you hold in your hands? Do the characters listen to a particular song? Is it a real song or invented for the book, like “Never Let Me Go” was invented for the book of the same name? A good book club question directs the conversation outwards. Does this book have something to say about the larger world? If it’s an old book, does it still feel relevant, or do the ideals of the characters seem dated? If it’s a new book, does it talk about the world in an interesting way, or does it seem to beat a dead horse? A good book club question might be the result of — or inspire — a Google search. When you read the book, did you come across any questions that drove you to a web search? Maybe you’re curious about the bookstore the characters visited. Is it real? Is it based on a real store? Or maybe you want to know where the author is from, and how that influenced the book. Ask your book club members what they think! A good book club question imagines what might have been different. My book club recently read a book where the first quarter of the book was about a conversation in a graveyard. Would the conversation have been different if it had taken place in a barn? Or in a restaurant? What if it was a different genre? Sometimes imagining something different about a book shows you what is essential about the book. A good book club question might come from a reading guide — or it might not. These days, many books have a URL on the back flap or maybe on a back cover that invites you to download reading guide questions. (If not, you can Google “BOOK TITLE + discussion questions” and usually come up with something.) These can be a great starting point, and there was a point in my life when I was committed to printing these guides out or saving them in my notes app so I knew I would always have a question handy. They’re useful, especially when they provide some background to the book, but I wouldn’t rely on them. Going down the list of questions often feels like you’re going through a school assignment. A good book club question gets various — and sometimes conflicting! — answers. The most boring book club conversations I’ve ever been a part of were the meetings where everyone liked the book. When you just sit in a circle and agree with each other, there’s just not much to go on. The most fun, on the other hand, were when we had a 50/50 split of people who loved the book and people who absolutely hated it. The fun of book club is in learning about your book club members through their opinions of the book. The best book clubs are the ones where I leave with a head full of different ideas about the book than I had when I walked in. A good book club question inspires respectful and kind conversation. The fastest way to kill a conversation is to make someone feel silly or stupid for their opinion or because they misremembered a plot point. Book club arguments are a delight, but everyone has to understand that the stakes at book club are low: you don’t need to agree, and you don’t have to convert someone to liking the exact same things about a novel that you do.

Hopefully, this list gave you some great ideas for how to keep the conversation rolling at your book club! If you want great book club discussion questions that can work for any book, check out this list!

Want some rules to keep your book club running? Here’s what my book club does. Here are some great picks for your book club to read this fall!

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How TikTok Gave Colleen Hoover and her Novels a Resurgence

How TikTok Gave Colleen Hoover and her Novels a Resurgence

With a backlist of over a dozen novels and novellas, Colleen Hoover isn’t a new author. Since publishing her first novel in 2012, the romance writer has earned the loving nickname of CoHo and has worked to cultivate a huge following of devoted fans. She started a Facebook group in 2016 called Colleen Hoover’s CoHorts that is still active today with over 130,000 members gushing about her work. Other groups have sprung up dedicated to talking about her individual novels, like this one for Verity with over 30,000 members. Hoover is the 2nd most followed author on Goodreads.

Since TikTok’s emergence into the literary scene, she’s been dubbed the “Queen of BookTok,” accumulating over 800,000 followers and hundreds of videos under the hashtag #colleenhoover. According to Hoover’s publisher Atria, her most popular books on TikTok have spent a combined 151 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Novels like It Ends with Us published in 2016 were back on the list in 2022 with staying power. What about Hoover and her books has resonated so much with TikTok?

Her TikTok Content

It doesn’t take long to see why Hoover is so engaging on her TikTok. Videos with her mom and family and the realities of authorhood give viewers a glimpse into who she really is. She posts updates about her books of course, glimpses of a new manuscript, and announcements about release dates along with duets with readers sobbing at the end of her emotional rollercoaster books. But she also posts videos of her “hot mess” life, posting even when her mic cuts out or when she forgets her mouse and keyboard on a writing getaway eighty miles from home. 

@colleenhoover

2,000 & done. Obviously taking up singing next. #booktok

♬ original sound – Colleen Hoover
@colleenhoover

#duet with @kierralewis75 Dont think ive ever laughed at a series of videos this hard, thank you, Kierra.

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Women Gone Feral: Werewolves and Other Angry Creatures

Women Gone Feral: Werewolves and Other Angry Creatures

As someone with chronic depression and anxiety, wild mood swings are just a normal part of my life. Sometimes, I’m bursting with frenetic energy, barely hanging on for dear life as I do All The Things. Other times, I’m flattened by chronic fatigue, barely able to function.

But a new emotion has been building up inside me these past few years, coating my insides with acid and leading me to isolate myself from others: rage.

The source?

Manifold.

There’s the growing resentment that comes with being a woman who engages in a huge amount of emotional labor, who makes sure things are running smoothly before she attends to her own career and mental health. There’s the fear and frustration that come from seeing entire communities controlled and silenced and erased via fascism, the fall of Roe v. Wade, the varied legislation attempts that seem born out of cruelty more than anything else. There’s the growing impatience that comes with seeing seemingly rational people radicalized, seeing them embrace individualism over collectivism.

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10 New Nonfiction Books Out in September to Add to Your TBR

10 New Nonfiction Books Out in September to Add to Your TBR

I always get excited for September — even though I’m long past back-to-school days, September feels like a new start, and it’s the time when I’m ready to learn a ton of new things. I’ve got my shiny new school supplies ready, and now I’m looking forward to diving into books that will teach me new things and take me new places. Fortunately, September is also an excellent month for brand-new books to gobble up to do just that! 

From memoirs of all kinds to true crime to graphic nonfiction, there’s something for everyone in this month’s batch of new releases — I also have my eye on a paperback release, Thicker than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis by Erica Cirino, which comes out September 22. This month’s nonfiction new releases also take place all across the world, so they’re perfect for learning about new places and a bit of armchair traveling. 

There are many more books coming out over the month of September, but here are 10 nonfiction new releases I am particularly excited to check out, and I think you should be too! The publication dates are listed after each title to make it easier to add to your never-ending TBR pile.

Hysterical by Elissa Bassist (September 13)

Elissa Bassist writes about her own experience, over the course of two years, seeing more than 20 medical professionals — none of whom could figure out what was ailing her. She had pain no one could find the source for and was told she was being dramatic, or that it couldn’t hurt that bad, or that it was probably just cramps. Like millions of women, her illness was downplayed until she began to believe it was all in her head. Her memoir is her own account of this journey and her rise to reclaim her own voice and be able to speak about her feelings rather than quash them down.

They Called Me a Lioness by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri (September 6)

Ahed Tamimi is a Palestinian activist participating in nonviolent demonstrations and protests at a young age in Nabi Saleh, her home village, one of the centers of conflict against Israeli occupation. In 2017, when she was only 16, Ahed was seen around the world when she was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier who refused to leave her yard, and she was arrested for the offense. Ahed tells her story of fighting back, of growing up visiting her father — who was also a resistance fighter — in prison, and of her own time spent in jail.

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19 of the Best Award-Winning Mystery Novels + 1 True Crime

19 of the Best Award-Winning Mystery Novels + 1 True Crime

Regardless of how much weight you subscribe to awards — they are, after all, from humans subjectively picking their favorite — award lists can still be a great place to find your next read from. There are so many awards that it’s definitely like standing in the cereal aisle, inside another cereal aisle. It’s hard to know or hear about all of the awards and then there’s the most recent awards and all the previous years and an immediate feeling of “Where do I even start?”

Since I love and read so many crime books (mystery, thriller, suspense, true crime — and everything related!) I decided to take a look at the many annual mystery awards to pick out the ones that are my favorites. So now you have the subjective judgment of the judges, and me! Basically we’ll pretend they’ve been judged twice so double murdery seal of approval for must-read best award winning mystery novels!

I checked out all the info I could find on about 16 different annual awards for mystery novels and picked out the ones that I was like “Yup, yup, great book, all the awards!” Below you’ll find a range of mystery books, and one true crime, with the year and award they were honored with (While I listed one award for each many of them are multiple award winners!). But first you may want to whisper some sweet encouragement to your TBR list because it’s about to get heavy with these 20 great reads.

The Honjin Murders (Detective Kosuke Kindaichi #1) by Seishi Yokomizo, Louise Heal Kawai (Translator)

1947 Mystery Writers of Japan Award

If you like reading classics, locked-room murder mysteries, and detective fiction you’ve hit the trifecta with this novel. Set in the village of Okamura in 1937 a bloody sword is found in the snow after a scream on the night of a wedding. You’ll follow amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi as he investigates while also getting to play detective as all the clues are presented to you, the reader.

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12 Must-Read September Children’s Book Releases

12 Must-Read September Children’s Book Releases

It’s September! September feels like one of those weird in-between months, not quite summer, but not quite fall either. At least, not here in Tennessee. While October is full of pumpkins and Halloween prep, and August is full of pools and playgrounds right before school starts, September is just sort of there. But while the month may feel a bit nebulous, September children’s book releases are spectacular. I had the hardest time ever narrowing down my selection to 12 books. I could’ve easily made a list of 20. In picture book new releases, some of my favorite authors and illustrators, like Julie Flett, Ryan T. Higgins, and Kate Messner, return with new books. In middle grade new releases, Kwame Alexander returns with possibly his best book yet, and several books explore mental health in really meaningful ways. 

Many authors on this list have tweeted about how their books will not be carried by Barnes & Noble after B&N’s decision to shelve only the top 1-2 bestselling children’s books per publisher. This decision disproportionally affects marginalized authors. I encourage readers to buy locally or buy online from places like bookshop.org. If a local bookstore isn’t carrying a book you want, call and ask them to stock it. 

September Children’s Book Releases: Picture Books

Magnolia Flower by Zora Neale Hurston, Ibram X. Kendi, & Loveis Wise (September 6; HarperCollins)

Ibram X. Kendi (How to be an Antiracist) adapts one of Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories in this stunning picture book about the transcendent power of love. Magnolia Flower is the child of parents who survived the Trail of Tears and slavery. When she falls in love with a poor, formerly enslaved person, her father forbids their marriage. But Magnolia Flower knows the best way to live is to follow her heart, so she and her lover take a boat between trees and find another place to live where they will be accepted. Decades later, Magnolia and her husband revisit her old home, particularly the three trees where their love first bloomed.

Over and Under the Waves by Kate Messner & Christopher Silas Neal (September 13; Chronicle Books)

I adore this nonfiction series about nature, which I believe now has six books in it. This latest installment depicts the beauty of the sea with a family kayaking over the waves. Beneath the waves, schools of silver fish swim by, leopard sharks prowl, and an octopus blends in with rocks. Above the waves, humpback whales break the surface, kelp floats by, and shorebirds sing. The child and their parents observe it all. The back matter gives more information about the sea life depicted in the illustrations.

Beatrice Likes the Dark by April Genevieve Tucholke & Khoa Le (September 13; Algonquin Young Readers)

This is Algonquin Young Readers’ first foray into picture books, and it is a stunningly beautiful book about sisterhood. Sisters Beatrice and Roo could not be more different. Beatrice loves bats, wearing black, spiders, and especially night. While having picnics at a graveyard in the middle of the night sounds utterly charming to Beatrice, it’s a nightmare for Roo. Roo loves wearing bright colors — like pink! — investigating flowers, picking strawberries, and especially waking up early and enjoying the sun. She’d much rather have a picnic in her treehouse. The sisters often glare at one another. But when Roo has a nightmare, Beatrice shows her how to enjoy the night, and the next day Roo shows Beatrice there are things to appreciate about the day. Despite their differences, they are sisters, and sisters stick together. Khoa Le is one of my favorite children’s book illustrators, and it’s impossible to imagine this picture book illustrated in any other way. It’s perfection from start to finish.

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On Cary Grant, Darryl Pinckney, and Whit Stillman

Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

During the COVID confinement and afterward, I watched around sixty films starring Cary Grant. What a comfort to have him in my mind before I slept. No matter if he is comic or desperate, self-possessed or wounded, romantic or cool, he is ridiculously good-looking and seems never to know this. I love it when he puts his hands on his waist and pushes his hips forward as if about to dive or perform some acrobatic trick. His slim, athletic torso and long arms are always tanned. Sometimes he wears a fine shimmering gold medal around his neck. I love his dark eyes that have not forgotten his youthful suffering. He makes me laugh when he rolls his eyes around with his own special brand of sophisticated nonchalance. Though he isn’t aggressive, he doesn’t seem weak either. I find him buoyantly masculine. I can’t resist watching him. A few days ago, on a flight to Los Angeles, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s hugely entertaining thriller North by Northwest again. Grant was fifty-five when he made this film and long past his box office peak in the screwball comedies that made him famous. In the Hitchcock film he wears a nice-fitting, light gray suit with a gray silk tie and cuff links. The suit gets dirty, sponged off and pressed, then dirty again. Grant’s hair is a little gray, too. I don’t wear ties anymore, but I would wear a tie worn by Cary Grant. North by Northwest appeared in 1959, around the time that he was experimenting with medical LSD and searching for more “peace of mind,” as he called it. I don’t really know what a great actor is, but I think Grant is sensational.

—Henri Cole
Read Henri Cole’s recent essay on James Merrill here.

In a scene midway through Whit Stillman’s Barcelona, which I rewatched this week, the Spanish Marta (played by a not-so-Spanish Mira Sorvino) is explaining to patriotic American naval officer Fred why her friend Montserrat has left his also American cousin, Ted.

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Softball Season

Summer softball. Photograph by Sophie Haigney.

I took over the Paris Review softball team this year because the former captain, Lauren Kane, left the magazine for a big job at The New York Review of Books just before I was hired, and someone noted during my first week that I might be a good replacement because I “like sports” (i.e., I sometimes watch Premier League soccer on weekend mornings). I am not, strictly speaking, an athlete, and had never played a full game of softball; still, wanting to be amenable, I agreed and found myself on the phone intermittently all spring with the New York City Parks Department, trying to get our field permits nailed down. At one point I was arguing with someone about the timing of sunset on a specific day in July.

The list of things I didn’t know about softball when the season began in May is long and comical. Among them: Not every field has bases—if you don’t bring them, you might need to use your shoes as second and third. Turf can be very slippery and you should expect bloody knees and have a first aid kit on hand. The play is often at second, and even more often at first. Pitching badly is sometimes actually preferable to pitching well. You can run through first base but not the other ones. You have to shift over in the field when a lefty is batting. You should not attempt to catch with your bare hands, even if it seems like the ball is coming at you very slowly. Right field is actually kind of a chill place to be, except when it isn’t. It all comes down to the quality of your ringers—and sending people shamelessly pleading emails to get them to show up to your games.

When I arrived to play our first game, against Vanity Fair, I didn’t even know how many outfielders a team required. It was a bleak beginning of the season, pre–Memorial Day; there were only seven of us, most of whom had never played and the rest of whom hadn’t practiced. I had expected  a few people hitting around jovially in the summer twilight, and instead we arrived to face a team of guys who were saying things like, “My favorite spring ritual is dusting off my cleats!” One of them got really mad at me over the way I was standing at first base. (I was standing wrong.) We lost 27–1. I was surprisingly demoralized by the experience and wasn’t relishing the concept of forking my summer evenings over to what seemed like the perfectly miserable pastime of taking the subway up to Central Park to get crushed. All in all it seemed like it was going to end up being a raw deal, being softball captain—the kind of thing I would try to foist on someone else next summer. In our second game, we lost 11–3 to The Drift.

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Seven, Seven, Seven: A Week in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Edouard Godard & Vilmorin-Andrieux & Cie, Les plantes potagères, 1904. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

DAY ONE

I sit at the long blond pine table I use for a desk. Nothing happens. Maybe I can make something happen.

A few years ago there was a popular self-help book called How To Make Sh*t Happen, never mind that peristalsis is involuntary. I eat some mango slices and a green apple and a banana. I drink twelve ounces of whole milk with a scoop of whey protein. I find a leftover fried artichoke in the fridge, wrapped in aluminum foil.

I listen to Michael Gielen conducting Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, but it’s not loud enough.

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Goethe’s Advice for Young Writers

“Here lived Peter Eckermann, Goethe’s Friend, in the Year 1854” (plaque honoring Eckermann in Ilmenau). Photo by Michael Sander, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Johann Peter Eckermann was born in 1792. In 1823 he sent Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a collection of his essays about the writer’s works, and he became Goethe’s literary assistant till the latter’s death in 1832. The following is an entry from Eckermann’s diary that recounts one of their early meetings.

Thursday, September 18, 1823

Yesterday morning, before Goethe left for Weimar, I was fortu­nate enough to spend an hour with him again. What he had to say was most remarkable, quite invaluable for me, and food for thought to last a lifetime. All Germany’s young poets should hear this—it could be very helpful.

He began by asking me whether I had written any poems this summer. I said that I had written a few, but on the whole had not felt in the right frame of mind for poetry. To which he replied:

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Like Disaster

Nature × Humanity: Oxman Architects at SFMOMA. Photograph by Matthew Millman.

If you went to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco this spring you could see a big small thing, a model that imagines what Manhattan will look like in 400 years. Actually Man-Nahāta is not one model but four, which hang in a square. Starting at the bottom left and walking clockwise you see a version of the city every hundred years, beginning in 2100. Emergence, the first in the series, is a grid of streets and skyscrapers, except for where an organic glassy form appears in Central Park, black and yellow and blue lit from below, awful. In Growth (set in 2200) the form expands in concentric and overlapping spirograph shapes, an almost periwinkle blue at the edges, rippling amber toward the center, where it calcifies into hills. By Decay (2300) it flows back, leaving edges of buildings made soft, eroded into shapes like melted candles. In Rebirth (2400) the built environment is overgrown, peaks and valleys where a city used to be, made of white chalky photopolymers and fiberglass.

Man-Nahāta was commissioned by the director Francis Ford Coppola, who hired the architect Neri Oxman and the OXMAN group to create studies for Megalopolis, an epic set in a future New York City that starts production this year. Made for a movie that does not yet exist, the model has its own narrative, based in part on the projected mean global sea level and surface temperature rise in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Most people walked around it the wrong way, or maybe not wrong but counterclockwise, changing the story. The glassy form recedes, buildings sharpen, streets reappear. You could circle the model again and again, speeding up or slowing down time, repeating the disaster or undoing it. Susan Stewart writes in On Longing that the miniature, “linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination. It marks the pure body, the organic body of the machine and its repetition of a death that is thereby not a death.”

***

Film has always tangled with architecture and invention. Brian R. Jacobson writes about this history in Studios Before the System. In 1888, Eadweard Muybridge took his pictures of horses in motion to the New Jersey laboratory of Thomas Edison. Soon after, Edison filed a patent for the kinetoscope, an early moving picture machine. William K. L. Dickson and William Heise made the first film for the Edison Manufacturing Company in 1892. Around this time Edison was bought out of General Electric and started the Edison Portland Cement Company. He made designs for concrete homes that could be built with a single pour, which Edison described as “the most wonderful advance in science and invention the world has ever known, or hoped for.” The houses would be affordable, fireproof, and made on site. There is a photograph of the inventor next to a two-story prototype with a covered porch and balcony, windows evenly spaced, and decorative molding. Edison wears a dark suit, his tie askew and his left hand in his front pocket. Man and his little house.

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Our Favorite Sentences

Sentence diagram of the sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Craig Butz, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

From Stoner by John Williams:

And so he had his love affair.

And:

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

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Cooking with Nora Ephron

Photograph by Erica MacLean.

I am a baker of pies and a believer in pleasures, but also the kind of killjoy who can’t take a rom-com in the spirit it’s intended. Hence my fraught relationship with Heartburn by Nora Ephron. I remember—from 1983, the year the book was published—it being marketed as a “hilarious” comedy about a woman cooking her way out of a broken heart at the end of a marriage. Heartburn was a cultural sensation in the suburbs of my youth, such that I recall my mother cackling over the film adaptation and criticizing Meryl Streep’s looks—not pretty enough! The story was said to be inspired by Ephrons divorce from Carl Bernstein and has always been considered a delicious revenge plot by a spurned woman upon a cheating man.

Ephron had a dazzling career as a trailblazer for women in journalism, and she wrote many of the greatest movies of all time, including When Harry Met Sally. She was a master, so my cavils over Heartburn‘s myths about romance will be brief: I don’t think a woman who stays in a bad relationship is just a starry-eyed believer in true love, as the heroine, Rachel Samstat, is presented to be. Nor do I think that men are just dogs—which is the book’s explanation for her husband, Mark Feldman’s, behavior—or that the happiest ending is finding a new relationship. But Ephron, in Heartburn, wasn’t looking to soul-search—this was her revenge novel. At one point, Rachel, who is a food columnist, admits to her therapist that she tells stories about her life in order to “control” the narrative. Ephron, writing Heartburn, was controlling the narrative of her divorce while showing off her wit, and she did it wonderfully. The one-liners never cease, as when Rachel says that Mark celebrates the political dysfunction of Washington, D.C., because if the city worked, “something might actually be accomplished and then we’d really be in bad shape” and adds, “This is a very clever way of being cynical, but never mind.”

Ephron describes linguine alla cecca as a “hot pasta with a cold tomato and basil sauce” that’s “so light and delicate that it’s almost like eating a salad.” Photograph by Erica MacLean.

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Watch Loudon Wainwright III Perform Live at the Paris Review Offices

On the evening of August 9, the staff of The Paris Review welcomed a special guest: Loudon Wainwright III, who came with guitar and banjo in hand, ready to perform on a makeshift stage in front of our bookshelves and plants. (We rearranged the furniture a bit before he arrived, and ordered pizza.) Wainwright played both classics and songs from his new album, Lifetime Achievement, accompanied on occasion by his longtime friend and collaborator Joe Henry. His rendition of “New Paint,” first released in 1972, was especially striking. You can watch it in full here, along with a performance of the Lifetime Achievement highlight “How Old Is 75?

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Against August

There is something off about August. This part of the summer season brings about an atmospheric unease. The long light stops feeling languorous and starts to seem like it’s just a way of putting off the night. There is no position of the earth in relation to the sun that comes as a relief. Insomnia arrives in August; bedsheets become heavy under humidity. No good habits are possible in August, much less good decisions. All I do is think about my outfits and my commute, constantly trying to choose between my sweatiness and my vanity. People are not themselves. I go see the party girls and find them wistful. I meet up with the melancholics and find them wanting to stay out all night.

In August I cannot think, so I cannot work. This is not not-working in a restful or decadent way. This is not-working as certain doom. And I can’t not-work in peace either: if I leave in July I consider myself traveling but if I leave in August I am just leaving. The best I can hope for, in the absence of a purpose like business or pleasure, is an escape. Maybe a light excursion. In any case I am rarely in the place I can reasonably call my home in August, and instead stay in other people’s basements, in their living rooms, on their couches. I sleep on what was once a little brother’s bunk bed and wash my hair in his parents’ shower. I walk down the stairs and see their children’s fingerprint smudges on the banister. I stay in hotel rooms by myself and think: What a waste. (I am convinced that hotel rooms are designed for sex, even though I am not particularly into the quality they have—sealed, hermetic, identical. Hotels are to sex what time zones are to jet lag, I think. A change of interiors out of proportion with the body.)

I am against August. When I try to explain this position, some people instinctively want to argue. These people seem to love the beach beyond all reason, to have never suffered a yellowed pit stain on a favorite white T-shirt in their life, and to eagerly welcome all thirty-one days of August as though they are a reward for a year well-lived rather than a final trial before the beginning of another. These are people who vacation with peace of mind. To them, I say: Go away. To the people who agree with me, I say: Go on. 

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Saturday Is the Rose of the Week

Clarice Lispector. Photo courtesy of Paulo Gurgel Valente.

In 1967, the Jornal do Brasil asked Clarice Lispector to write a Saturday newspaper column on any topic she wished. For nearly seven years she wrote weekly, covering a wide range of topics—humans and animals, bad dinner parties, the daily activities of her two sons—but the subject matter was often besides the point. These genre-defying missives are defined by a lyricism and strangeness that readers of her fiction will recognize, though they are a thing apart in their brevity and interiority. Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which collects these columns and others Lispector wrote throughout her career, will be published in English by New Directions this September. As Lispector’s son Paulo Gurgel Valente has written, “Enjoy the columns, I know of nothing quite like them.” Today, the Review is publishing a selection of these crônicas, the final installment in a series.

March 13, 1971

Animals (I)

Sometimes a shiver runs through me when I come into physical contact with animals, or even at the mere sight of them. I seem to have a certain fear and horror of those living beings that, though not human, share our instincts, although theirs are freer and less biddable. An animal never substitutes one thing for another, never sublimates as we are forced to do. And it moves, this living thing! It moves independently, by virtue of that nameless thing that is Life.

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