Death is not always physical. Sometimes it comes in the form of self-destructive female desire that caves to abuse, accepting it as a prized possession. Female desire sometimes refuses to live in the orderly house of kindness and logic. Instead, harm feels familiar and there is therefore safety in abuse, self-inflicted or otherwise. Women have centuries of trauma to thank for that. Being exploited is the price Vanessa and Nolan’s unnamed narrator have to pay to be able to afford a brief trip away from being alone. Twisting a man’s abusive behavior into a romantic act is the only way forward, or so these women have convinced themselves to believe. 

In Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa, 15-year-old Vanessa’s first love is her teacher, a 42-year-old Jacob. Jacob cleverly exploits her hormonal teenage mind and her deepest desire for admiration. He breaches all boundaries and starts touching her inappropriately in class, much to Vanessa’s pleasure. He quotes Nabokov and starts calling her “My Dark Vanessa.” He gifts her Lolita, which Vanessa becomes obsessed with to a point when she confuses her own memories with those of Lo and Humbert.

The novel opens as an adult Vanessa tries to recount her ‘affair’ — if we can call it that — with Jacob. Vanessa still hasn’t admitted to herself that she has been sexually abused by Jacob. Instead, she remains fixated on him. Since her teenage years, she has been full of longing and desire for this monstrous man who repeatedly raped her in the past and is now seeking her support to defend him against allegations of sexual harassment. Vanessa says, “I wasn’t abused, not like that.” She strongly believes that she wasn’t “raped raped.” She adds, “All I can think of is the lovely warm feeling I’d get when he stroked my hair.”

Vanessa is a classic victim who protects her abuser as the truth will break her. She is mad at the world that vilifies Jacob and still delusionally thinks that he was in love with her. One loves as one knows how, and for Vanessa, loving her abuser is a way of loving herself. She has a dull job and so much of her potential has been wasted because of her obsession with Jacob. Yet she has her sights set on Jacob as if he is the prize that will finally stabilize her life. Losing her desire for Jacob will mean losing a pivotal part of herself, something she has built her personality around. Vanessa’s constant denials of her own victimhood and her stark refusal to stop loving it signify the ambivalences inherent in abuser-abused relationships. 

Megan Nolan’s Acts Of Desperation is a tour de force chronicling the many paradoxes of female desire. The narrator is in her early 20s and in love with a man named Ciaran who is cold, casually cruel, and still in love with his ex-girlfriend. The narrator’s love for this man, the toxicity they share, and the way she feels the happiest in a sacrificial role leave the readers feeling claustrophobic and gasping for air. She willfully removes herself from her friends, narrowing her life down to revolve around Ciaran: cooking him effortful meals, the increasingly joyless sex they have, and the bottles of wine she downs when Ciaran isn’t there to monitor her. Though she revels in her victimhood, pushing herself to anorexia, and having periods where she cuts herself, she also longs to be free. Her desire to be debased by Ciaran stands in sharp contrast to her desire to evolve into an independent woman.

When I was a teenager, one of my favorite authors was Kate Morton, who I once remember saying in an interview, “Write the book you want to read.” She was later the subject of a school project that I did in which I included this quote of hers, but now I can’t seem to find any source to back up her saying that. But it doesn’t really matter, considering there are a wealth of authors and creatives who have been credited with some version of that quote — a fact which I had no idea of as a teen.

The best known and most accredited form of the “write the book you want to read” saying comes from Toni Morrison. In 1981, she spoke at the annual meeting of the Ohio Arts Council, where she was reported as stating, “Writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading. If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” A simple Google search will tell you not only that the internet loves this quote, but that there’s no shortage of writers and authors who have said something along the same lines, making it virtually impossible to credit the sentiment of the quote to only one person.

In 1951, for example, crime novelist Mickey Spillane responded to a question of why he continued to write material that some readers, including his father, found distasteful: “I write the kind of stuff I’d like to read but can’t find. If I didn’t like it I wouldn’t write it.” C.S. Lewis, beloved author of The Chronicles of Narnia, was quoted in a biography as saying, “I wrote the books I should have liked to read if I could have got them. That’s always been my reason for writing. People won’t write the books I want, so I have to do it myself.” Additionally, in 1955, Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien shared that Lewis had passed on that very wisdom and quoted him as proclaiming, “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves; but it is very laborious.”

And it doesn’t stop there. After White Oleander became a bestseller when it was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, Janet Finch said in 1999, “As a writer, I’m always trying to create the book I want to read, but can’t find anywhere. Mine happens to be for anyone with a strong stomach.” In 2002, as part of “Writers on Writing” series in The New York Times, Ann Patchett stated, “Sometimes if there’s a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.”

The list goes on. Anne Lamott’s most famous saying is, “I write books I’d love to come upon.” Madeleine L’Engle shared a similar philosophy concerning children’s literature: “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” Beverly Cleary is most often quoted as having said, “If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.” And I’m sure any number of your own favorite authors have said something to the same effect, as writing the book you want to read appears to be one of the most valuable pieces of advice one writer can give to another.

I first encountered Gail Scott’s sentences in Calamities, a book of glorious short essays by Renee Gladman, one of Scott’s closest readers. “These were the shortest sentences I’d ever seen,” Gladman writes, “yet they were not the kind of sentences that allowed you to rest when you reached the end of them. They pointed always to the one up ahead … They pushed you off a balcony; they caused fissures in your reading mind.” When I finally read Scott, it was two novels back to back: Heroine, a young lesbian’s feverish account of living in a Montreal boarding house in the early eighties, and My Paris, the precisely calibrated diaries of an often depressed Quebecois woman living in Paris. It was easy to see how you might want to live in Scott’s sentences forever, or, as Gladman did, transcribe them from memory onto your living room wall. I read them again and again for the pleasure of pure description; for the unnamed women who move through them without warning, wearing loose black pants, an olive-green jumpsuit, silk socks, and irrepressible perfume; for Scott’s impressions of Quebecois political-left consciousness in the second half of the twentieth century. “Heroine is more a work of reading than of writing,” Eileen Myles wrote in the book’s introduction, which was also published by the Review in 2019. It’s the deceptive work of accumulation, too, that drives both these novels—in the kind of ravenous prose that seems to revise itself as it’s already in motion. From My Paris: “The marvellous is to be had. I thinking at 5:30a. Looking out window. Pale blue sky beyond anarchy of chimney pots. You just have to pierce the smugness of the surface.”

—Oriana Ullman, intern

“History repeats itself.” This repetition, the relentless circularity of time, is the subject of Time Shelter, the latest novel by the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel. It follows an unnamed Bulgarian narrator as he finds himself drawn into the creation of a Zurich-based “clinic of the past” for Alzheimer’s patients, dreamed up by Gaustine, a philosopher prone to uttering enigmatic sentences like, “No one has yet invented a gas mask and bomb shelter against time.” The clinic is neatly divided into floors, each of which is dedicated to a decade of the patients’ lives—but these floors eventually begin to spill over into one another. Mayhem ensues. Soon, nonpatients want in, too, and politics enters the scene. Referendums are held: Should Europe be returned to its past? Strewn with aphoristic meditations on the history, fiction, the nature of time, and the construct of Europe, this is a novel that feels both prescient and like a dream. Or like a moment of déjà vu: At the book’s end, is it 1914 in Sarajevo, a time and place that decided the course of modernity as we know it—or is it a reenactment of that assassination, happening in 2024? At what point does that which is reenacted merge with that which is real? As Gospodinov illustrates, it’s pointless to bet against the past. The house always wins.

One night, my stand-up comic brother, David, and I were sitting on my couch, talking about the joke that concludes Woody Allen’s 1977 film, Annie Hall. We’d watched the movie together dozens of times growing up, and we’d always assumed that we interpreted the ending—about how people get into relationships because we “need the eggs”—the same way. That night, we discovered we did not, and even after much talking, we found we couldn’t agree on the joke’s meaning. In the weeks that followed, I longed to restage and expand our conversation, and hopefully to answer some of the questions it had raised, so I invited a few other people into the discussion: Zohar Atkins, a rabbi and poet; Nathan Goldman, a literary critic and editor; and Noreen Khawaja, a professor of religion who has written a book on existentialism. Could we, together, get to the bottom of this profound and amazing joke?

DAVID HETI

The joke came up one night when Sheila and I were talking.

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

“Spring like a gun to the head,” Dorothea Lasky writes in a poem in our latest issue, “Green how I want you.” It’s been a strange, uncertain season, and now that the weather is turning and the cherry trees are beginning to blossom, we’re revisiting some works that evoke the cruelest month: an interview with the Italian poet Antonella Anedda; a story by Ira Sadoff that makes romancing a florist sound wistful yet thrilling; Elizabeth Brewster Thomas’s poem in which “beneath your feet a thousand spores of ice / blossom in darkness”; and a collaboration between Ben Lerner and the photographer Thomas Demand, featuring a profusion of paper flowers. (And if you pick up a copy of our Spring issue, you’ll also find collages by the late artist Birdie Lusch, who pasted newspaper clippings onto Hallmark catalogues to make her glorious bouquets.)

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

INTERVIEW
The Art of Poetry No. 109
Antonella Anedda

You’re on that old kick again, rereading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage to refresh and resplendorize the senses, but why not go back to the source? It’s never wrong to read Dyer’s Thomas Bernhard (and, after all, your Bernhard). It’s never bad to sit at Good Karma Café, in Philadelphia, at a little metal table out front, with Bernhard’s novella Walking, reading 

I ask myself, says Oehler, how can so much helplessness and so much misfortune and so much misery be possible? That nature can create so much misfortune and so much palpable horror. That nature can be so ruthless toward its most helpless and pitiable creatures. This limitless capacity for suffering, says Oehler. This limitless capricious will to procreate and then to survive misfortune. 

while a person pulls up with a carriage and introduces to the air a baby, a little baby who was born three days ago, and stands there holding this: “Lily.” She explains as much—the three-day thing—and announces the name to inquirers (the nonreaders …). Three days old only! Why is this little baby taking the air so soon? Why promenade now? This merciless tenderness might permeate the whole atmosphere now, while you read “My whole life long, I have refused to make a child, said Karrer, Oehler says, to add a new human being over and above the person that I am, I who am sitting in the most horrible imaginable prison and whom science ruthlessly labels as human,” and laugh at combinations, at the café. 

—Caren Beilin
You can read Sheila Heti’s interview with Caren Beilin on the Daily here. 

“Dad did not care about food,” the daughter of the Soviet dissident writer Sergei Dovlatov once told me, vehemently, upon my suggestion that I might cook from her father’s work. I knew what she meant, but I also knew that Dovlatov’s books were full of the everyday food that was still current in Moscow when I first arrived there to live in the nineties, a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Dovlatov’s characters pause during phone conversations to scream that someone not forget to buy the instant coffee (the only coffee available—I grew to like it). They drink—continuously—wine, vodka, beer. They offer each other bowls of borscht or “spear a slippery marinated mushroom” while talking, or order a sandwich, a salad, or a “chopped-meat cutlet” at a café. In one memorable scene near the end of The Compromise, an autobiographical novel about Dovlatov’s time working as a correspondent for the newspaper Soviet Estonia in the seventies, a full spread of delicacies for Communist Party elite comes out: expensive cold cuts, caviar, tuna, and a piped marshmallow dessert called zefir.

Like everyone I know who has personal ties to the region, I watched with profound sadness and stress as Russia invaded Ukraine. I thought again of Dovlatov. Within Russia, he is among the most prestigious of the Soviet anti-regime writers, and is a household name. Born in 1941 to Armenian and Jewish parents, he grew up in Leningrad and worked primarily as a journalist. By the seventies, he was publishing fiction abroad, and circulating it by hand in photocopied format, as samizdat, in the USSR. This work drew government reprisals that left him unemployable, and he was forced to emigrate in 1979. His stories featured a depressed and often drunk narrator named Dovlatov and focused on the despair, hypocrisy, and absurdity of life—particularly life in the publishing industry and the arts—under a totalitarian government. I was working as a journalist during my time in Moscow, and everyone I met told me that I had to read him, specifically recommending The Compromise. Each chapter begins with a fulsome snippet of a fictional newspaper article written in the propagandistic style of Soviet newspapers, and is followed by the tragicomic story that unravels the propaganda. At the time, it was thrilling to believe that the forces of censorship had been defeated, and that Dovlatov and those like him had won. 

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

“I styled myself to look like no one else,” Jamaica Kincaid tells Darryl Pinckney in an Art of Fiction interview that appears in our new issue. “And I also knew I didn’t want to write like anyone else.” Tonight, at our first Spring Revel since 2019, we will present Kincaid with our lifetime achievement award, the Hadada, while Chetna Maroo will accept the Plimpton Prize for Fiction. To celebrate, we’re revisiting work by some of the recent prizewinners we were unable to honor in person: Jonathan Escoffery, who was awarded the Plimpton in 2020; Leigh Newman, recipient of that year’s Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura”; and N. Scott Momaday, who accepted the Hadada last year. (And if you missed the story we unlocked last month by Eloghosa Osunde, winner of the 2021 Plimpton Prize, you can always make it right by subscribing.) We’re also including a 1987 portfolio of drawings by the chair of this year’s Revel, Ed Ruscha.

If you enjoy these free short stories and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

POETRY
Concession
N. Scott Momaday

You should read Old Filth, someone said to me about ten years ago. I couldn’t for the life of me, in true Gardam fashion, remember who that friend was until just now—it was the writer Nancy Lemann—but I can think of the people—dear friends—to whom I went on to recommend it myself. I adored the book, stunned I had not heard of Jane Gardam before, and immediately read the next two books of the trilogy: The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends. I then taught Old Filth in a seminar so that I could spend more time with Gardam and study more closely how she creates her magic. She improves, as great writers do, upon rereading. And then reading again.

I found out more about her life. She published her first book at forty-three, and was a mother of three children. In the next thirty years she published twenty-five books: many collections of short stories and many books for children. She was seventy-six when her masterwork Old Filth was published and eighty-five when Last Friends came out. She says that she wrote to survive, working in a green room overlooking her garden, since during this time both her daughter and husband died, her husband having suffered with dementia for several years.

She says that when she first started writing—the morning after she’d dropped her youngest son at his first day of school—she was not interested in what was fashionable or what was publishable. She just wanted to write. She believes that there are no minor characters. Everyone’s as interesting as everyone else.

Gardam’s style combines wit, romance, brevity, and enchantment. As the best artists do, she offers hard truths in a pleasurable way. There is no overindulgence. Sensuous details are side by side with a sharp intelligence. She is the master of the quick brushstroke, painting a room, a city, the feeling of an era, or simply a complex-at-one-glance character. Philosophical musings merge into social commentary, but you notice no intrusion because you are mesmerized by the story. The story is everything. An omniscient voice plays alongside a character’s point of view; there is lightness in tragedy and depth in comedy. A description of Betty Feathers, from the trilogy, could very well apply to Gardam:

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Students in Williamson County, Tennessee, have experienced near non-stop changes to the books and resources available to them this school year. Thanks to Moms for Liberty’s relentless campaigns locally, books continue to be challenged and removed throughout the district.

This week, the district took even more draconian censorship measures. In response to a couple of complaints from parents about books available in the digital library app Epic!, the district removed access to the app for review. Epic! is used at elementary schools throughout the US and provides over 40,000 age-appropriate titles to readers.

Williamson County schools serve 42,000 households. A small number of complaints from right-wing affiliated individuals removed an entire library of material for the school to “review.”

The book that launched the removal of an entire app, disrupting lesson plans and making an entire collection of materials inaccessible to an entire district? An ABC of Equality. This 52-page book offers an alphabet with terms such as B for Belief, G for Gender, and N for No and it’s meant for 4-8 year olds.

Emily West shares a breakdown of the history of Williamson County censorship, and within those comments are responses from a “parent’s rights” group upset that some of the alphabet choices include L for LGBTQ, S for Sex, and T for Transgender. P for Privilege is also, apparently, worthy of removing an entire library collection from students, teachers, and parents so the district can review. The local Moms for Liberty group has shared their thoughts on Twitter in this thread from the advocacy group Williamson Strong.

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The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni by Nikki Giovanni for $1.99

It’s National Library Week, and as is tradition, the American Library Association (ALA) highlighted the top ten books challenged in the U.S. over the last year. The list, which includes the reasons for those book challenges, shows what has been clear for over a decade: books with queer characters, characters of color, or book written by queer or authors of color are most challenged.

In addition to rolling out the official list, ALA also launched a new landing page called Unite Against Book Bans. This “national initiative to empower readers everywhere to stand together in the fight against censorship” offers some of the statistics collected by the organization’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

But what’s missing on this new website is any call to action. There are no steps or tools anyone can take to combat censorship in their own community. Instead, visitors are invited to sign up for a mailing list for updates from United Against Book Bans. What those updates might be remains a mystery. It is hard to “raise your voice” by signing up for news updates without any indication of what those news updates might be, and it’s certainly not a tool for speaking up — no letters go to legislators in defense of the freedom to read.

More troubling, though, is that the only other action available on the website is the donate. Donations look like they will go toward the campaign against book challenges, but in fact go to ALA’s 21st Century Fund: a fund without restrictions that can be used for anything within the organization’s purview. Will it go to creating educational resources for fighting book bans? Maybe. It could also go toward creating graphics used to market the sale of banned books swag from their store or toward scholarships that are unrelated to book challenges. None of these are bad, per se, but it’s deceptive to the average “reader” who is begging for some kind of direction to take.

In the 1990s, a tremendous wave of book challenges and bans were under way across the country. Focus on the Family and associated arms of that organization coordinated broad censorship, and in response the ALA offered robust, freely available information to readers about not only the challenges, but where they were coming from and what library workers could do to stand up for themselves and their organizations.

The squeal that I released when I heard that Deanna Raybourn — who writes one of my favorite historical mysteries series (so funny + grump and sunshine pairing!) — was writing a crime book about assassins, could be heard on the moon. I was so excited that the day I was able to get my greedy little hands on an advanced copy I dropped everything and read it. Now you know the danger of consuming a thing you’re so excited about has a higher chance of being disappointing the higher your anticipation is. And mine was high. But I never had any doubts that Raybourn was going to kill this book, because she’s just so funny. I am not only super excited to reveal the cover but to also say that the book met all my expectations and is fun, smart, hilarious, has girl gang vibes (assassin team), and a great dose of revenge.

Check out the awesome cover below by Colleen Reinhart, a synopsis beyond my “omg I loved this to pieces everyone read it” excitement, and read an excerpt introducing you to Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie on their first assignment.

Killers of a Certain Age is a witty, action-packed thriller about four elite assassins — Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie — who also happen to be middle-aged women. After forty years on the job, the ladies are jet-setting on a retirement cruise…until they realize that, this time, they are the targets. But while older women often feel invisible, sometimes that’s their secret weapon. Watch as Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie go on their first assignment (you won’t be able to put the book down!), learn how they got recruited, the organization they work for, and why now they’re the ones on the hit list! These women didn’t spend 40 years training and killing to just sit back; they’re going to come up with a plan and fight back, menopause and backaches and all, they are not going down easy.

Deanna Raybourn is the author of the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Lady Julia Grey series as well as the USA Today bestselling and Edgar Award–nominated Veronica Speedwell mysteries and several standalone works. Her novels blends mystery, history, romance, and have been nominated for myriad awards, including the illustrious Edgar Award.

Visit her online at www.deannaraybourn.com, and on Twitter at @deannaraybourn.

Music can be used to convey just about any thought, theme, message, or emotion you can possibly imagine. For some reason, most people choose to sing about love, which is fine, I guess. But then there are the musicians who decide to write about superheroes instead, which I can personally really appreciate.

I appreciate it so much, in fact, that I decided to outline some of the most common tropes that superhero-themed songs (as opposed to superhero theme songs, which is what we’ll talk about first) fall into. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list, but rather a brief introduction to the topic based on my personal observations.

Like with many superhero-related things, this topic is pretty homogeneous: most of the artists and the heroes they choose to sing about are white men. I didn’t take a survey of every superhero-related song ever recorded (though I did ask my fellow Rioters for suggestions, some of which made it into this post), so I don’t know for sure if this is due to my musical tastes or if it’s a general trend. In any case, let’s put our headphones on and hit the Play button on this whirlwind tour of superhero music references!

Themes

While modern cartoons seem to eschew theme songs, older shows inevitably needed a fast, punchy anthem to get viewers excited. A lot of these are instrumentals (Justice League Unlimited is still the gold standard, and I will fight you on this), but others have lyrics about the greatness of the character you are about to witness, including Spectacular Spider-Man and Teen Titans.

Movies occasionally get a good superhero theme in there, like Queen’s “Flash” (from Flash Gordon) and Vanilla Ice’s “Ninja Rap” (from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II), which is somehow not the worst song I have ever heard.

When I was a kid, I thought my grandma was old. She wore clothes I associated with older ladies and she made cinnamon sugar toast for us when we went over there. She used mothballs! When my grandfather died, it turned out she didn’t know how to pump gas or write a check. And she was in her early 70s! That’s not even old! Why did I think she was old?

Is it just that the times were different and nobody was out there writing think pieces about how moms and grandmothers needed to flaunt their sexuality? Is it because I’m getting closer to my grandmother in age, and when I was a wee, tween, and teen I just lumped “older” into one category? Or is this due to advances in healthcare and quality of living? I mean, my father-in-law is 72 and he’s perfectly capable of climbing a mountain if he wanted to (he doesn’t want to). But then again he’s about 40% robot at this point, having had so many joint replacements.

I might not find the answers I want to those questions, but one thing I do know is that reading keeps the brain young in many ways. Research is still being conducted, but early signs show that reading could even help prevent or reduce the severity of various forms of dementia, which is of particular interest to me because I have the APOE e4 gene, which increases my chance of developing Alzheimer’s.

So allow me to present to you some of the best books for seniors. Experts agree that the earlier a person gets started preparing their brain for senior-ness, the better off they’ll be, so I’ve got my work cut out for me, too.

Self-Help Books

The thing about aging is that you don’t really need a book to tell you how to do it. All you really have to do is continue to not die and you will age, magically! But there are some great books for seniors on how to age healthfully and happily.

The news of “challenging” books has been sweeping the country lately. It has also been covered across most, if not all, media outlets. The main reasoning behind this has been the idea of “thinking about the children and what’s best for them.”

To that I say, with my loudest voice and every inch of my chest, the following:

If you’re a person who’s actively trying to ban books, you’re probably a not-great parent. At the very least, you’re inattentive as hell.

And I can back that statement up. 

But first, a little background as to how I first became aware of the act of trying to ban books. 

During the pandemic, I took up many, many hobbies. Besides going through the usual baking, gardening, and crafts, I also got back into reading in a big way. Not only that, but because I was post-grad and had free time, I decided to volunteer at my local anarchistic bookstore. I have been very lucky to have this opportunity, as I have very much enjoyed getting to know other members of the collective. I have learned a lot, radicalized my thinking, and gotten to know my community in a new way.

Of course, another bonus is getting lots of cheap and free books. Not to mention all the friends I made along the way!

Introducing Spartacus Books

Spartacus Books is a local collective in my city with a complex history. It is a nonprofit, volunteer-run bookstore that specializes in anarchism and building an activist space in our community. We carry LGBTQ+ studies and lit, Indigenous studies and lit, socialist theory, ecology, poetry, graphic novels, kids books, radical fiction, and more.

Additionally, we have a mini library, sitting areas, a free-to-use computer, and free wifi. We provide a space for local writers to sell their books and zines on consignment and provide our space for local organizing (during non-pandemic times, of course). We also carry naloxone kits, an important service in our neighbourhood.

The History of the Bookstore

Spartacus began in 1973 and is one of the oldest collective-run bookstores in North America. It was started by Roger Perkins, a member of a local university bookstore. The original name was the Spartacus Socialist Education Society. The main mandate of the collective was sharing reading materials that were otherwise hard to get. The store used to share a pool hall with the American Exiles Association.

Kathi Hofer: “Grandma” Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, published last year by Leipzig’s Spector Books, is a nice-looking hardback about the vernacular art environment Tressa Prisbrey built in Santa Susana, California, a former railroad town now incorporated into Simi Valley. The volume was compiled, introduced, and translated into German by Hofer, an Austrian artist who first encountered Prisbrey’s pencil assemblages in an exhibition at the Los Angeles Public Library.

Prisbrey, the daughter of German immigrants, was married at fifteen to a man almost forty years her senior; they had seven children together before she left him and began an itinerant life with her kids in the late twenties. When she finally settled in Santa Susana in 1946, she met her second husband, and together they bought a plot of land, about a third of an acre in size, which they leveled and was where they parked their trailer after removing its wheels. Prisbrey began building the Bottle Village in 1956, at the age of sixty. Looking for a way to improve the property—to “make it pay”—she chose bottles as a building material because there were plenty of them around, and made daily trips to the local dump to collect other materials. She planted cacti everywhere—hundreds of varieties—because they are “independent, prickly, and ask nothing from anybody” and because, she said, “they remind me of myself.” Her sons handled roofing and doors, but otherwise, every structure in the Bottle Village—sixteen houses total—was built by Prisbrey. For years, she gave guided tours for a small admission fee, and children were often preoccupied by Prisbrey’s white cat and her kittens, who had their own Prisbrey house made from the nose of a plane and whom Prisbrey combed with food coloring: pink, green, and yellow animals roamed the place.

She left it, finally, in 1982, at the age of eighty-six, and died in 1988. But the site, though in disrepair, remains and is protected as a historical landmark. Hofer’s book—an elegant intervention and homage—includes texts, color photographs of the Bottle Village, and a facsimile edition of the essay Prisbrey wrote about her creation in 1960, which she published as a pamphlet and gave (or mailed) to anyone who asked. Reading Prisbrey’s charming, conversational descriptions of her village, you get a sense of what it might’ve been like to tour it with her, and how important that social aspect was to the project. “Oh, this is an interesting place to see,” she says, “and you hear such funny things, too.”

—Kathryn Scanlan, author of “Backsiders”