This week, we bring you reviews from four of our issue no. 240 contributors.

I went to Johannesburg in 2013, I don’t know why I’m telling you about it now. Maybe because lockdown is a kind of segregation, where you see only the people you live with. Dilip picked me up at the airport. Driving into town, he left a car’s length between his Toyota and the car in front. I noticed other vehicles doing the same. We don’t want to be carjacked, he said, they box you in and smash the windshield. The seminar began the next day, and I was at my seat at 9 A.M., jet-lagged and medicated. I nodded off during Indian Writing in English: An Introduction. Later, I vomited in the staff restroom, left the university building, and went toward the center of the city. In the wide shade of an overpass, I walked into a smell of barbecue meat that would stay in my clothes all day. There were people drinking beer, blasting cassettes, selling fruit and cooked food from tarps spread on the ground. In the car Dilip had said apartheid was a thing of the past, but wherever I went I saw people segregated by habit. The days passed so slowly that it felt like a long season, like summer on the equator. I saw people in groups, some kind of shutdown in their eyes. I saw a man kneeling in the middle of a sidewalk. Why we got to go out there? he wailed. Why? I had no answer for him. At the Apartheid Museum, the random ticket generator classified me correctly among the NIE-BLANKES | NON-WHITES, and I entered through the non-white gate. The museum was designed to provoke. Of the exhibitions, documents, photographs, and pieces of film footage I saw there, only the installation Journeys stays with me now, a decade later. In 1886, when gold was discovered in Johannesburg, migrants came to the city from every part of the world. To prevent the mixing of races, segregation was introduced in both the mines and the city. Journeys is a series of life-size figures imprinted on panels and placed along a long, sunlit walkway. These are images of the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that first wave of migrants. By walking among these people of all races, something you have done countless times in the cities of the world, you are part of a subversive tide of art and history, an intermingling, the very thing apartheid was created to prevent.

—Jeet Thayil, author of “Dinner with Rene Ricard”

“In more than one language the words for love and suffering are the same,” observes the narrator of Sigrid Nunez’s debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God. “I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin.” But Nunez herself, whose Art of Fiction interview appears in our new Summer issue, has no interest in effortful seduction. Speaking to the Review’s Lidija Haas in early May, she expressed impatience with writers who want to break their readers’ hearts: “There’s an arrogance to that that has always bothered me. You leave my heart alone!”

Writing that beguiles and devastates often appears to do so casually, with the smallest of phrases or gestures, and those moments were what caught at us as we put this issue together: a little girl, in a debut work of fiction by Harriet Clark, patted down by her grandfather with a tailor’s respectful discretion on their Saturday visits to her mother in prison; a phone call from a former lover, his voice as jarringly familiar as “the feeling of my tongue inside my mouth,” in Robert Glück’s “About Ed”; that gentle “mm-kay” in a poem by Terrance Hayes written in the voice of Bob Ross.

Although the Review has generally resisted the lure of the themed issue—the main criterion for what we publish is that it leave us in some way altered—just occasionally, as if from the unconscious, the hint of a theme emerges. This time, as press day approached, we noticed that several of the pieces we’d chosen conjured the experience of an intense crush—the kind that takes you over with a fierce possessiveness, while its object remains oblivious. The fastidious, measured narrator of Esther Yi’s “Moon,” attending the concert of a K-pop band whose fans she’s always looked down on, finds herself instantly undone. In a portfolio made especially for the Review, the artist Marc Hundley captures the vertiginous sensations of reading alone, falling under the spell of certain lines from our own archives. And, in a short essay, Darryl Pinckney describes the night when he was alone in an upstairs bedroom as a child in Indianapolis and the film Paris Blues “switched on a certain channel of my being.” What channel, exactly? As Rilke would no doubt have written had he seen the movie: Paul Newman must change your life.

“Russian soldiers stayed in our building,” my friend, the poet Lesyk Panaisuk, wrote to me when the Ukrainian city of Bucha was liberated from Russian occupation on March 31. Some months before, as soon as the war ensued, Lesyk had left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian soldiers.

Although the city is now liberated, it is still dangerous to walk around Bucha. Lesyk’s neighbors find mines in the halls of their building, inside their slippers and washing machines. Some neighbors return only to install doors and windows. “In our neighborhood, doors to almost every apartment were broken by Russian soldiers,” Lesyk emails.

“A Ukrainian word / is ambushed: through the broken window of / a letter д other countries watch how a letter і / loses its head,” writes Lesyk in one of his poems. He continues: “how / the roof of a letter м / falls through.”

While I read Lesyk’s emails, miles from Ukraine, my own uncle is missing. As bombs explode in Odesa, I email friends, relatives. No one can find him.

Saturday. July.       7:15 am

Yoga.

Translating Bayard’s Peut-on appliquer la littérature à la psychanalyse? from a Spanish copy of ¿Se puede aplicar la literatura al psicoanálisis? One word at a time. Speed limit, 25 mph.

To Cartagena with Jamie this 22-26 September.

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When putting together the book censorship news this week, it felt like each story was trying to one up the next, ranging from the ridiculous to the truly chilling. We’re seeing an increase in lawsuits and legal involvement, from residents suing officials for banning books, to parents suing teachers for reading LGBTQ books in class, to the ACLU planning legal action against a school’s new book challenge policy.

This is why Kelly Jensen and I keep emphasizing that simply reading banned books or buying them isn’t enough: this is a systemic issue, and it needs a systemic solution. We need to organize in order to fight back against this wave of censorship, and that includes paying attention to who is getting elected to school and library boards — if you have the opportunity, running for these positions is one of the most effective ways that you as an individual can fight censorship.

In May, we announced the School Board Project, which is a database in progress that documents every school board and school board election in the country, state by state. It’s a massive project, but we’ve been chipping away it, prioritizing the states that have school board elections coming up. Eventually, we hope to do the same thing for library boards.

As Kelly explained, this is meant to be a resource that you can build on for your own local activism:

The School Board Project allows anyone to download the spreadsheets and add any relevant information that helps them. For example: individuals or groups may find including the names and stances of those running for boards in the sheet to help guide voters and/or as a means of tracking the kind of topics that are producing the most discussion in those districts. It can be useful for those considering a run for school board to collect information about what they need to do to become eligible or how long they have to prepare for a run. The possibilities here are wide open.

Are you one of those people that whenever you go to someone’s house, you say hi to their dog/cat/hamster/any other pet they have before doing anything else? Yeah? Me too. When a dog sneezes, I say bless you. To be honest, animals are literal angels and I am obsessed with them. If you’re like me, you enjoy whenever a cute animal appears in the book you’re currently reading. Animals just make books better, that’s the cold truth. And they will continuously do it every single time. In this next list, I compiled books with pets on the cover, so we can see them front and center!

Some animals have main character energy (MCE), not going to lie. I believe the ones I’m mentioning in this article have a lot of MCE or are beginning to have it. I mean, some of these covers have these cuties before even the protagonists, so you know what? They are clearly the light, the sun, the shining beacon of their own books. Most of the time, whenever I see a pet on the cover, they have a focal part in the story. They either function as matchmakers or helpers for the main human character. Which it’s so fun to see, because they are always chaotic antics happening around them whenever they start getting involved with the plot.

Note: Because we’re mainly talking about book covers, and most of these covers are illustrated, I wanted to include the illustrators and designers who made these beautiful covers. I tried my hardest to find them all, but there are a few that made it impossible for me to do it.

What is a superhero without a supervillain? Not much. Some supervillains, however, are worth a lot more than others. I have therefore decided to spotlight some lesser-known villains. Are they underrated gems or irredeemable losers who deserve to be forgotten? You decide! Today’s subject: the Living Monolith!

The day has finally come. You’ve been told that you are the only one who can stop what is to come. You must fulfill the prophecy and take up the mantle of the chosen one. You are destined to save everyone from the peril that awaits; to put your life on the line and ultimately triumph in the end. Maybe. If things work out that way. The prophecy gets kind of vague. Everyone is counting on you to play your fated role.

You absolutely refuse.

You didn’t ask for this. No one prepared you to be “the one.” Prophecies aren’t even real, and there are a thousand other people more qualified for the peril and great adventure and brushes with death that no doubt await you. You’d much rather stay at home and live a quiet life, please and thank you. No, no, you will not be persuaded from your decision. Find another chosen one.

This list is dedicated to you, who opted out of answering the call of the chosen one. To all of the prophesied and fated chosen ones who took one look at their future responsibilities and took a hard pass.

Not every anti-chosen one on this list was able to fully turn away; after all, some reasons to answer the call are too compelling to ignore (the death and destruction of everything you love is a difficult one to shrug off), but it took a LOT OF CONVINCING to get you to agree, and by god you weren’t going to make it easy on them for upending your entire life when you did not ask for this, but fine, have it your way I guess.

We’re all too familiar with the age-old saying “so many books, so little time.” And so, many of us listen to audiobooks to make time for reading. But time is oh so precious, and we don’t want to end up with a bad audiobook and a terrible listening experience.

So what really separates a great audiobook from something that is so-so? What makes you pick up something, get overjoyed by it, and then recommend it to your friends or colleagues? Is there a standard formula that goes into the production of audiobooks? Is it all subjective? Is it true that audiobook narrators can make or break the story?

I asked professionals who are directly related to the art of audiobook production what they think makes a great audiobook. Being a former audiobook producer and a reviewer for AudioFile Magazine myself — though I’m on an extended hiatus — I am also going to share what I think.

According to AudioFile, the only magazine in the publishing industry that reviews audiobooks rigorously, the following are the criteria to be considered for an Earphones Award or a starred review. When I was actively reviewing, I was not given descriptions of these criteria, and the explanations below are based from my own experience.

There is a video of Prince that I can’t stop watching. It’s just over an hour long, shot in grainy black-and-white. It looks like a surveillance tape. This is Prince in 1982, before 1999, before Purple Rain and Sign “O” the Times, before there were stadiums packed with people demanding something from him. Three months earlier, he opened for the Rolling Stones, wearing thigh-high boots and bikini briefs, and got chased off stage by an audience throwing garbage. Now he’s playing in suburban New Jersey for a crowd of college kids who don’t know how to process what they’re witnessing. It’s one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen. 

The show starts in pulsing darkness, with an a capella gospel track. Above the choir we hear Prince clearly, his always startling baritone rolling up to a keening falsetto. “You’ve got to love your brother if you want to free your soul,” he sings. These are the last religious words that will be sung that night, but they’re a reminder that Prince is an artist who knows, like Madonna and Al Green and Marvin Gaye, that all the sexiest music is at least a little bit about God. Then the drums kick in. Prince’s strobe-lit silhouette flashes out of the darkness. His body looks enormous, which it was not. I’m reminded, strangely, that Prince was born epileptic, and that as a child he informed his mother—correctly, it turned out—that he wasn’t going to have seizures anymore. He’d been cured by an angel, he said. 

It feels like there’s something private about what he’s doing up there, like we’re not supposed to be seeing this, like it’s a sin. The camera can’t contain him. He vanishes a few times, leaving an empty black square. When the camera pulls back, we realize he’s dropped to the floor, seeking an angle of even greater intimacy with his guitar. Over the course of the hour he seems to draw inward, choosing to ignore the teenagers shuffling clumsily around him. At several points, I think, he forgets the audience is there. But then he remembers, looks up, shoots his arms to the ceiling and poses for a beat before retreating again into his body, that place where he spins and jumps and grinds and, unasked, gives freely of himself. 

—Charlie Lee

In the opening scene of the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, first performed in 1897, “orange girls” at a Parisian theater in the 1640s make their way through an audience of soldiers, society ladies, noblemen, and riffraff, selling orangeade, raspberry cordial, syllabub, macarons, lemonade, iced buns, and cream puffs. The handsome soldier Christian de Neuvillette and his friends sample their wares, drink wine, and eat from a buffet. A poet and pastry cook named Ragueneau banter-barters an apple tartlet for a verse. Then the poet and militia captain Cyrano arrives, and in a glorious, idealistic act, spends his year’s salary to get a bad actor kicked off the stage. The orange girls offer the hungry man nourishment, but he eats only a grape and half a macaron, staying to true to a kind of restraint that defines his character. Food, in other words, plays a major role in the play—one that culminates in act 4, when Roxane, the woman both Christian and Cyrano love, arrives at the Arras front in a carriage stuffed with a feast for the starving soldiers: truffled peacock, a haunch of venison, ortolans, copious desserts, ruby-red and topaz-yellow wine.

I’ve seen three versions of Cyrano this year—a 2021 movie starring Peter Dinklage, with an original score by the band the National; a staging of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starring James McAvoy; and the 1987 Steve Martin movie—and in none of them did I pick up on a food theme. Its absence, I thought, must mean something.

The original Cyrano de Bergerac was a period piece, set in 1640 but written in 1897 by a successful Paris playwright who has fallen into obscurity in our time. (I found only a single academic biography on Rostand, though his mustache alone deserves a tome.) The plot is a love triangle. Cyrano loves Roxane, but he believes she cannot return his love because of his huge nose. Roxane has a crush on Christian, because of his pretty face. Christian, tongue-tied and insecure, can’t provide Roxane with the intellectual stimulation she seeks, so he allows Cyrano to write letters to her, signing them as Christian. Roxane falls madly in love—but with which man? It’s a perfect romantic comedy that taps into universal themes. Anyone can identify with the lover’s fear that they cannot be loved due to a fatal flaw, physical or otherwise. But its influence on Parisian society in the late nineteenth century was highly specific.

Jordan Castro’s forthcoming novel The Novelist takes place over the course of one morning in which the protagonist tries to write his first novel. During this time, he sometimes G-chats and emails his friend, Li. Tao Lin’s Leave Society is about someone named Li who is writing a novel documenting his recovery from dominator culture. Castro and Lin have been friends since 2010. This conversation was composed from October 31, 2021 to June 8, 2022 on Google Docs and sometimes on Gmail and G-Chat. That material has been shortened and then reorganized freely to suggest thematic continuities, but also discontinuities, in the time, mood, and medium of the interview.

LIN

It’s December 19, 2021. Yesterday, I opened the galley of The Novelist and looked for something to quote in my tweet of a photo of it. I flipped around a little and saw and chose this: “I opened Gmail. Li had emailed me again. ‘Fuck off,’ the email said, simply.” I wonder what readers of that tweet—who know my novel’s main character is named Li—thought about that quote. In the context of your novel, the “Fuck off” is playful, causing the first-person narrator of your novel to grin. What’s your narrator’s name?

CASTRO

I did confide in a diary from the time I was nine or ten. I remember one diary well from this era—red plaid vinyl, with a strap and a fancy lock. The key was lost and the strap had to be cut. I gushed into spiral, lined notebooks in my twenties. Rereading any of these created massive disappointment, so I destroyed them—I am not sad to say. I feel anger toward them, about them. That little girl or the woman understood little or was unable say what she meant to say, and this is one reason I labor on with my fiction. Most of these daily jottings for stories in progress will remain forever lost or hidden, but this sketch work represents, for me, a purer form of diary. Here is one page from this morning.

Diane Williams is the author of ten books of fiction. She has a new collection of stories forthcoming from Soho Press next year. She is the founder and editor of NOON.

Maybe you know this, if you’re Catholic or hang around in churches: in paintings of Saint Lucy, she’s usually holding a pair of eyes. In most cases they’re on a plate, like some sort of local delicacy she’s about to serve up to a tourist. These are her old eyes, the ones she plucked out when a man wanted to marry her, because she wanted to marry only God. She looks down at them with her new eyes, the ones God gave her to say thanks. The version I like best is Francesco del Cossa’s, from 1473. In it, Lucy’s eyes hang drooping from a delicate stem, a horrible blooming flower. She pinches them gingerly, pinkie out like the queen. To me they look like the corsage I vaguely remember wearing at prom; later, who knows, she might put them in the man’s lapel, a consolation prize.

I have been drawn to this painting for nearly a decade, though my feelings toward it, toward Lucy and her two sets of eyes, have changed over the years. The first feeling was a slightly delusional but sharp sense of envy. I was seventeen or eighteen, seeing the painting for the first time in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and for as long as I could remember I’d wanted what Lucy had: to pluck out my eyes and get new ones. I believe this is the sort of fantasy often held by people with certain ailments, a childish notion that makes no sense but is still somehow grippingly tantalizing—like how the chronically congested dream of one triumphant nose-blow that clears them out for good, or those with bad backs imagine some kindly giant pulling them apart until every vertebrae gives a magical crack and their pain is banished at last.

I wanted new eyes because for almost as long as I could remember I had gotten frequent migraines, which were, I believed, caused by light. I won’t pretend that this is particularly remarkable or interesting to anyone but myself. (A memory: A doctor listens blankly as I describe the particular contours of my pain, how my head feels like a balloon and all I need is the prick of a needle. A small part of me hopes he will be fascinated, be spurred to action, and recommend a lobotomy on the spot. Instead he says, “Well, some people get migraines, yes,” and sends me home with a large co-pay.) But I will say this: the pain and ritual of these migraines, and the many futile measures I have taken daily to avoid them and consequently to avoid light, have been since childhood the unfailing constant of my life. I’ve worn sunglasses every day, sometimes inside. An unexpected flash is all it takes. The sun’s sudden gleam off an ocean wave, headlights passing on a dark country road; these are the things that have left me crumpled in bed, a damp towel over my face, writhing. It begins with a spell of blindness, my world tunneling down to black. The pain comes soon after. In old family vacation photos my face is always hidden. There we are on the beach in Maine: my brother and sister, my mom and dad, their faces shining, smiling, thrown open to the brilliant light of the world—and me, under a hood and a headscarf and Maui Jim wraparounds, some sort of NASCAR babushka.

***

In 1999, I traveled around Europe with a friend from college, going from hostel to sofa to hostel, sharing a bath towel, both of us with $350 Eurorail passes in our pockets. These passes would cover seven cities in twenty days. Correction: eight cities. Who could forget the eighth city?

I have no recollection of how it happened, but we boarded the wrong overnight train leaving Barcelona. We thought we were bound for Nice but woke up in Geneva. To be fair, there were no signifiers of our error in the dark. No, say, alps. When the train arrived, I checked the time and assumed it had simply run late. It had not run late.

My friend and I proceeded to get in a massive fight in the Geneva train station. I suspect it had something to do with who should speak to the ticket agent and my confidence in my bad French over her bad French. At some point, I stormed out of the station. What was my intent? For this to be the story of how I moved to Geneva? Probably. At that age, there is a kind of marriage between the logical act and the dramatic act. They consciously uncouple as you get older.

I have no idea why we didn’t just stay in Geneva, a city worth seeing, for a night, but we didn’t. Maybe we were punishing each other. Maybe we were too anxious to stay. This was before we had any money or way to get money and certainly before smart phones.