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Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes these books are brand new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. This week, let’s talk about a stellar sophomore novel from Lisa Ko.

Earlier this year, several users began to note that the “News” tab on Google was disappearing. It wasn’t one time here or there. It was noticeable enough that several outlets reported on the issue. Indeed, Google’s experiment in disappearing the “news” feature wasn’t a bug. It was a goal.

Since when, Google, does refining a search mean that I would like loads of results that do not include the news I’m looking for? Apparently, to Google, this is the future of search.

There are pages of results from foreign, questionable websites that are nothing but “deals” on book titles. Repeating the search a day later, the results looked similar, with pages of links to individual Barnes & Noble stores and their upcoming events. None of this is news, and indeed, none of this even shows up when you do a general Google search — the news tab specifically has become completely garbagified (or, as Cory Doctorow would note, enshittified).

Welcome to the wonderful world of horror poetry! What’s horror poetry, you ask? Well, it’s more or less what it says on the tin. It’s poems that incorporate elements of horror into them, whether that be a terrifying monster, a psychological scare, or a chilling setting, much in the same way a horror movie or horror novel might. These poems come in all different forms and lengths too, from a Shakespearean sonnet to a pages-long free-verse to anything in between. The Bram Stoker Awards, run by the Horror Awards Association, even have a category for superior achievement in poetry!

Some classic examples include Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” which I’m sure many of us had to read in English class at one level or another. A more recent example is “To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse” by Burlee Vang, a poem about survival and adaptation to a new world. There are many more examples out there for anyone who might like to explore this fun and frightening intersection of horror and poetry.

For anyone wanting to check out a collection or two in this realm, check out these eight horror poetry collections to get you started!

Last weekend was one of my biggest holidays of the year: Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon. It happens biannually, in April and October, and I have been doing it every year since 2012! This time really snuck up on me, though: I thought it was later in the month. Still, I had a low-key readathon — I definitely didn’t stay up all 24 hours — where I managed to make some progress through some 2024 Read Harder Challenge tasks, so I’m counting it as a success.

Today, I have updates on what I’ve been reading and which tasks I’ve checked off lately. I also want to hear from you! What’s the last book you read and the last task you checked off? Let me know in the comments!

I also have some more recommendations from the comments section for Task #8: Read a book in translation from a country you’ve never visited. Let’s get into it!

What’s the last book you read and the last task you checked off? Let’s chat in the comments!

Check out all the previous 2024 Read Harder posts here!

When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly details that go beyond what you see on the television, read about in newspapers, and hear about from tourists.

I know that China’s international reputation is like that of a young upstart from the countryside who has money but lacks culture, education, and knowledge. Of course, in addition to money, this young upstart also has things like despotism and injustice, while lacking democracy and freedom. The result is like a wild man who is loaded with gold bullion but wears shabby clothing, behaves rudely, stinks of bad breath, and never plays by the rules. If an author must write under the oversight of this sort of individual, how should that author evaluate, discuss, and describe him?

To address this question, we will first consider the distinctive conditions faced by contemporary Chinese authors.

I. Light and Shadows Beneath a Half-Open and Half-Closed Window

In our new Spring issue, we published the short story “The Beautiful Salmon” by Joanna Kavenna. It features one of the most disastrous-sounding dinner parties I’ve ever read about in fiction, which is a meaningful distinction; it is also very funny at times and slightly surreal and imbued with a kind of offbeat philosophical bent. “People often talk about learning experiences and, in the days after the salmon-based fiasco, I wondered about this,” the narrator says, at the end of the story. And it’s a good question: What do we learn from an experience like this? Anything at all? “The Beautiful Salmon” made me think of dinner parties I’d attended or hosted—ones that had gone well and ones that had gone quite poorly and ones that had gone just fine, so that they mostly escaped my memory except for the specific dish or the offhand comment that has stuck with me for years. The significance of these moments, when we’re sharing meals with a group of people, often with a certain sense of occasion, have a particular type of comedy and drama that is often hard to distill or decipher. And so I asked some writers we admire to write short essays on dinner parties they remembered, often long after the dishes were removed from the sink.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

Irresolute, no, shivering, I was waiting—lingering—outside the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which I had not yet seen beyond the entrance hall and the large auditorium, in which I’d just attended an event honoring the Swedish writer Lars Gustafsson, who had died a few months before. (The only real names in this story are the names of the dead.) The event, conducted in Polish and Swedish, was unintelligible to me, but my understanding was not a priority: it was one of the few invitations I’d received since moving to Warsaw two months before, and I accepted all of them, catholic in my pursuit of a real life. So far I had only an apartment, a rhythm of groceries and laundry, early mornings at a desk, and daily trips by tram to a cold classroom for language lessons. Technically, we hadn’t yet passed from autumn to winter, but it was as cold as any winter in New York. Lingering there, hoping to catch sight of someone I’d already met, specifically the woman who had invited me, I was wearing a blue wool coat, several years old and oversize in such a way that I looked tubular. But its bright, almost azure hue might draw attention in the swirl of black.

In the middle of this event, a string quartet had performed several songs—études by Chopin, I learned from the program—and I’d realized that for me, and perhaps for no one else in the audience, the music and the words were exactly the same. Both signified nothing except sound. And, still lingering, now concluding that I should probably just walk to the tram stop and give up on the idea of any continuation of the evening, I thought that this, the event, but also my daily life in a country in which I spoke approximately five hundred words of the language, was the closest I’d ever get to actually remembering childhood before language, when people must have talked all the time around me without my comprehending words as words.

Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A theatrical set piece painted by Ragnar Kjartansson leaned against the wall. Out the window: the ocean and Iceland’s barren expanse. “America seems so cluttered, vegetatively,” Carson said. “Trees everywhere, plants all over the place, flowers. Here it’s just empty. There’s lava, there’s the sea. There’s just lines. Empty space.”

Empty space is one of Carson’s creative playgrounds. “Lecture on the History of Skywriting”—the centerpiece of her latest collection, Wrong Norma—is narrated by the sky, or space itself personified. Formally, where other Sappho translators have filled the gaps between the ancient poet’s fragments, Carson’s If Not, Winter marks the negative space with brackets, emphasizing that lines and stanzas have been lost to history. Carson has often explored absence-as-presence: Eros the Bittersweet argues that desire comes from lack, while Nox, an elegy for her late brother, Michael, mourns the final absence of someone who had long been missing from her life.

We were there to talk about Wrong Norma, Carson’s first original work in seven years, which she called “a collection of disparate pieces, not a coherent thing with a throughline or themes or a way you have to read it.” But images, phrases, and ideas recur: bread, blood, pebbles, a fox, lawyers, a heart of darkness, John Cage, the word wrong, and various flavors of wrongness, for example. “I don’t have much to say,” Carson remarked. Yet over a pair of hour-long conversations, we found plenty to talk about.

INTERVIEWER

“Before the problem of the creative artist,” Freud famously declared in an essay on Russian literature, “analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.” Our creative potential—as it is expressed in the most ordinary dream or jokes, or in the extraordinary compositions of great artists—has always been a vital theme in psychoanalysis, but it has also been an elusive one. Freud himself, although he was interested in art and literature, knew he was better at diagnosing sources of suffering than sources of inspiration. People in mental pain, whether from depression, obsession, or panic attacks, may present similar symptoms, but everyone is creative in her own way. Creativity is difficult enough to describe, let alone prescribe.

Born in London in 1900, Marion Milner was part of a group of British psychoanalysts who put creativity at the center of their theory and practice. Her friend and colleague D. W. Winnicott, for instance, considered it the analyst’s role to encourage patients’ capacity for creative and playful living, rather than to interpret the hidden meanings of their psyche. Another member of this group, the extraordinarily learned Masud Khan, insisted on the relevance of literature to any psychological knowledge. What makes Milner distinctive, however, is that she approached her therapeutic project by way of her own creative explorations in literature and visual art. She began her career as a writer and an amateur artist while working a more conventional day job as an industrial and educational psychologist, and she did not train in Freudian psychoanalysis until she was well into midlife. But it was by bringing the perspective of the creative artist to her practice of psychoanalysis (and not the other way around) that she came to offer lasting insight.

Milner’s earliest writings stem from her feeling, as she put it in her first book, that she was—despite her cultured life, promising career, and many friends—“shut away from whatever might be real in living.” She responded by way of an “experiment” in finding a “way by which each person could find out for himself what he was like, not by reading what other people thought he ought to be, but directly, as directly as knowing the sky is blue and how an apple tastes, not needing anyone to tell him.”

Since 1926, Milner had been writing diaries in which she recorded her impressions of life in ways that seem ordinary enough. She would, for example, note seeing “a little boy in a sailor suit dancing and skipping by himself on his way to look at the sea lions,” or reflect, “I realized how untrustworthy I am in personal relationships … always agreeing with the person present.” But in the thirties Milner turned her diaries, as a sort of raw material, into her first books, which were published as essayistic reflections about her diaries: A Life of One’s Own (1934) and An Experiment in Leisure (1937). In them she invented something new and a genre of her own: a diary about a diary, or what the critic Hugh Haughton has called a “meta-diary.” Contemporaries like W. H. Auden responded with enthusiasm.

The Review was thrilled this year to honor Tobias Wolff with the Hadada Award, our annual prize for lifetime achievement in literature. At this year’s Spring Revel on April 2, Wolff spoke to a gathering of writers, artists, and friends. We are pleased to publish his remarks here.

When Lady Astor was breathing her last, a large group of family and friends gathered around the bed to see her off. Just before she departed this life, she snapped awake and looked around and said, “Is this my birthday, or am I dying?”

Well, don’t tell me.

The scene here bears some resemblances to hers. I look out and see my dear wife, Catherine, and my oldest and best friends, and others who’ve come into our life in later years, even as I still vividly recall the laughing, never-to-be-forgotten faces of two beloved friends who left our company too soon, George Crile and Edward McIlvain. I have been lucky, blessed, really, in family and friendship, and in too many other ways to describe here.

Anyone can lay a funerary GIF at one of the 238 million virtual tombstones at findagrave.com. A rose JPEG accompanied by the words “im sorry the world did not treat you well” is laid on Kafka’s grave page amidst various uploaded photos of tombstones; “Your statue was unveiled in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol today,” reads a post for Willa Cather. Someone leaves an update on Federico Fellini’s page that tonight they “will watch La Strada in your memory.” Many of these messages seem to have come after a pilgrimage to a physical site. They read like confirmations of an encounter: as though their writers, unsatisfied with what they’d found in the material realm, had taken to virtual channels to yoke a final closeness with the dead.

The playwright and actor William Gillette’s online grave is littered with notes from recent visitors to his house museum, updating him on his property: “Interesting man, a shame he did not have children to enjoy the castle and train ride,” or “when i vist [sic] i always notice something … deer in your yard, the fawn was nursing from its mother.” Another: “Went to your home today… You would be proud that it is in impeccable order.”

Gillette Castle lies up a coily road in East Haddam, Connecticut. I visit on the first hot day of May. An elaborate stone pathway leads me from the parking lot to a gray, cobbly estate that overlooks the Connecticut River. A rabbit passes the entrance sign and disappears into the forest.

I live nearby, and have developed a chronic wandering habit in my final semester at divinity school. The more direct and pursuant my inquiries of God have become, the greater my conflictual desire to roam has grown. Perhaps my proclivity to wander is a symptom of my frustration with the jigsaw splodge of academia, or of my desire for a single, quiet path of pilgrimage. It has become increasingly apparent to me that one of the key tenets of the spiritual life was imitation: of Christ, of the saints. And so, rather serendipitously, I show up to this castle made by a man whose life was defined so completely by imitation.

Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they?—the rejection plot spoils everything upfront: they won’t. There the story stalls; but, strangely, continues. Even with no hope of requital, desire can persist, even intensify, with no guarantee of ending. The lack of happening is the tragedy.

Rejection isn’t the same as heartbreak, which entails a past acceptance. A rejection implies that you don’t even warrant a try. From the reject’s perspective, the reciprocity of heartbreak looks pretty appealing. And if you’re going to suffer, it may as well be exciting. Who would choose the flat desolation of rejection over rough-and-tumble drama, especially if they end the same way? The cliché—tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all—is comforting to the heartbroken, but damning to the rejected. No matter how unpleasant or unequal, a breakup is at least something you share with someone else. Rejection makes only one reject. “Unrequited love does not die,” writes Elle Newmark in The Book of Unholy Mischief, “it’s only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before.” A story that begins with closure can never end.

The basic plot of rejection is simple. First comes the yearning, where “by the successive inventions of his desires, his regrets, his disappointments, and his projects, the lover constructs an entire novel around a woman he does not know,” as Proust writes. Eventually you make a proposition and are declined. You may try again, but only the same happens—nothing.

What science has to say about rejection is mostly what everyone already knows: it’s real and it hurts. In an fMRI study researcher Naomi Eisenberger demonstrated that being rejected lights up the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that deals with physical pain, with a corresponding release of dopamine and cortisol. The social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Dawn Dhavale’s study “Two Sides of Romantic Rejection,” typical of much writing in their field, spells out common sense to a point of absurd rigor (they note that “it is better to be intelligent and beautiful than stupid and ugly”). They define romantic rejection as a situation in which “a person refuses the romantic advances of another, ignores / avoids or is repulsed by someone who is romantically interested in them, or unilaterally ends an existing relationship.” The measure of rejection is the “discrepancy between desired and perceived relational evaluation,” which is “the degree to which a person regards his or her relationship with another individual as valuable, important, or close”—in other words, you want your relationship to matter to the other person more than it does. Certain categories of people are more likely to be rejected: those considered “dangerous, having little to offer, as exploitative, or rejecting of us.” And the leading cause of rejection, they argue, is hypergamy: desiring people more desirable than oneself.

I am prepared. I have had my will drawn and notarized. I’ve given away old books from my library that I will never read again. I’ve gotten rid of porno magazines and cock rings, things that would be difficult or compromising for my beloved to discard. Mother has all my baby pictures I stole. I have paid for my cremation. I carry a pocket full of change to give to panhandlers. My elementary catechism has returned; those who help the lowliest …

Marcus says he just doesn’t understand me sometimes, says he has dreams for us, a home we will build together, but it seems to him I’m giving parts of my life away. I sit quietly at the deli booth, staring at my unfinished sandwich. It is rare now for me to be hungry; the bones in my face have become more distinct. It is when I don’t respond that he gets annoyed, but I can’t help it. I don’t want to change his feelings or argue the probabilities. I don’t believe I have long; my blood has turned against me, there is no one here to heal me. The sunlight from the window pours heavily onto his face, rugged and aged. Myself, I have to stay away from the sun; my face discolors from all the medications I take.

Marcus has become quiet, maybe brooding. I hear a knock on the window next to me. It is a tall man, very dark and in a ragged black suit. He points with a dirty finger at the tray that holds my half-eaten sandwich, then brings his fingers to his mouth. I nod my head. Marcus hates when I do stuff like that, and he barks, “Why’d you do that? Why can’t you just save it for later?”

The man comes to our table, pulls the tray closer to him, unwraps the sandwich from the paper. Marcus leans back far away. The man is intimidating, his form towers over us. I want to tell him to take it away, but he just stands there and eats. Finally, Marcus says, “There’s an empty table over there!” The man gives thanks and then asks for the rest of my drink, which I refuse because I know it would piss Marcus off since he bought lunch. Marcus and I are silent for the rest of his lunch break.