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The Best Books of 2024 (So Far)

I am linking to this short list not because it is definitive or right, but because holy moses it is April. With the year a quarter gone, it makes sense to take stock of the year in books. Wandering Stars, included here, does seem to have an early case as the book of the year, but there is a long way to go (James is hot on its heels and closing). That said, it has been somewhat of a quiet year in books, but the first few months are always so. April is hot and the summer is always jammed.

After Allstora’s Messy Launch, The Lavender Rhino is Coming

Allstora’s launch, messaging, and response was a mess. The spirit didn’t seem to match the actions of the LGBTQ+-focused online store, at least at first. A more indie-spirited indie effort named The Lavender Rhino will open online April 6th, with aspirations for a brick and mortar store in the future. A word advice for this multi-colored pachyderm: get your story right about Ingram right now.

Horror Sales are Up 50%

There have been breakout hits, new imprints, and generally a mainstreamification of horror books over the last few years. And the sales numbers are following suit. This piece in The Guardian suggests that an evolution of horror towards issues confronting women has helped some horror titles in the social media world (caveat: no sales numbers for these titles are cited). I have a more general theory: kids who grew up in the 80s and after reading Stephen King in the library are now in their 50s and younger: prime ages to be writers and readers now. These folks are doing other things with horror, but it took several decades for their early exposure to manifest in their reading and writing habits.

In May of 2005, discontent with my job as a photo editor at a women’s magazine, I accepted an offer from a friend who did Bruce Weber’s casting to interview for a photo assistant position with him. At the time, Weber was doing the photography for Abercrombie & Fitch, working in tandem with the CEO, Mike Jeffries, to resurrect the brand. The photographs, in tonally rich black-and-white or vivid color, showed cheerful, cartoonishly chiseled, (mostly) white people frolicking, washing dogs, and generally playing grab-ass. They hearkened back to the scrubbed cleanliness of the fifties (with a sprinkle of Leni Riefenstahl); everybody looked like they had gotten a haircut the morning of the shoot. My friend described the photo assistants as a group of young men who traveled the world with Weber, making big money. On breaks, they’d show off for the models by playing shirtless football on the beach or jumping off cliffs into narrow pools of water. This seemed better than sitting at my desk arranging catering or reassuring Missy Elliott’s team that the mansion where we were going to photograph her did in fact have air-conditioning.

The day of my interview, I put on a gray sweater, a striped oxford, and A.P.C. New Standards. I wanted to look tidy, but not too uptight. As requested by the first assistant, I brought a CD of my pictures to demonstrate my photography skills. The office was open plan, with a large round table in the middle and twenty or so people milling about. Weber, a bandanna-ed Santa Claus type, shuffled around chatting with his employees, trailed by a pack of identical golden retrievers. I sat down with Weber’s first assistant, whom I’ll call Sean. Sean told me he had been photographed by Bruce (we kept talking about “Bruce” as if he were imaginary, even though he was standing a few feet away) when he was a NCAA wrestler. He had close-cropped blond hair, and the lingering musculature of a former athlete (I later came across Weber’s pictures of him and his teammates in the locker room, showering cheerfully). The job, as Sean described it, was to hand Weber an unceasing flow of Pentax 6×7 medium-format cameras that had been preloaded with film, focused and set to the proper exposure so he could photograph continuously without technical fuss.

We clicked through the CD of my photographs and he complimented my use of color. While we talked, I looked around the office at the other assistants, a variety pack of hunks. Among them were an Ashton Kutcher type, a Patrick Bateman type, and the all-American boy interviewing me. Wrapping up the interview, he told me that they needed to take a Polaroid because Bruce “needed to be able to put a face to the name.” I stood up and posed for the Polaroid, made with a vintage land camera. I knew this moment was to be my undoing. I am under six feet and, according to my sister’s 23andMe, our family is 99.3 percent Ashkenazi Jew. This type seemed absent from the roster. I suspected I was not there to fill that void. We shook hands, and I got in the elevator and left.  After a few calls over the next few weeks, things tapered off and I never heard from them again. Sometimes I wonder if they saved those Polaroids, and if it would be possible for me to get mine back.

Shortly after my interview, an Abercrombie flagship store opened on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Sixth Street. Aside from the overpowering stench of their cologne Fierce (an “irresistible blend of marine breeze, sandalwood, musk and wood notes”) and the moody lighting, both A&F retail signatures, the Fifth Avenue store was notable for its centerpiece, a mural called The Locker Room. This was painted by the artist Mark Beard, under one of his many aliases, Bruce Sargeant. (The name Bruce is inexplicably historically associated with being gay; for example, when the Incredible Hulk comics were adapted for television, Bruce Banner’s name was considered too fey, and changed to David.) The mural depicts an early-twentieth-century gym class in a style that evokes Thomas Eakins: young men in baggy loincloths or singlets, doing calisthenics and climbing ropes. Like Weber’s flawless crew of assistants, the romantically rendered athletes were perfect manifestations of the hairless-and-wholesome masculinity defined by his work for A&F. Homoerotic, suggestive, but never explicit. You could be spotting your pal as he climbed a rope or playfully pulling your buddy’s underwear down all in good fun! The photos from the store’s opening show the live version: groups of unnamed shirtless guys carrying around the (blond, rosy-cheeked) model Heather Lang, chastely kissing her on the cheek.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Eliot Weinberger’s “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 247.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

First, I doubt it qualifies as a poem. It starts out as a simulacrum of a poem and then turns into an essay—or at least what I consider to be an essay, which is sometimes mistaken for a poem or a prose poem.

Its origin was a letter I received out of the blue from a photographer in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Anne Noble, whose work includes portraits of  dead bees, some done with such devices as electron microscopes and 3D printers. She knew my collaboration with the Maori painter Shane Cotton (the essay “The Ghosts of Birds”) and asked me to write a text for a catalog of her photographs she was preparing.

The one time I met Lauren Oyler in person was in New York in the spring of 2018. I had been closely following her work as a critic and admired her intelligence and fearlessness. That exuberant night, she sat mostly quietly, with a look of anger, through a long evening at a bar, which ended late, outside a pizza restaurant, over greasy slices. She was the girlfriend of a friend of mine, who was the reason I was there. The next day, I learned that after they had gone home, she had dumped him. All of this made a deep impression on me. Not pretending to be having a good time. Some sort of power she embodied, just sitting there stonily. I have a terrible memory, but I remember that night—and her at the center of it—so vividly.

That spring, it seemed like everyone was talking about her hyperarticulate critiques of Roxane Gay, Greta Gerwig, and Zadie Smith. She was unafraid to use the full force of her critical eye to scrutinize even those artists who were mostly widely praised. Several weeks after we met, she wrote a defense of my novel Motherhood in The Baffler, responding to various prominent American female critics who had negatively reviewed the book. I wrote to thank her, and in the years since, we developed a correspondence and a friendship.

Three years ago, she published her first novel, Fake Accounts, about a young woman who flees to Berlin and interrogates her relationships and herself, while a Greek chorus of ex-boyfriends occasionally chimes in with corrections to her self-mythology.Her new book of essays, No Judgment, contains six pieces, all written specifically for the book. She thinks about the history of criticism in the form of star ratings on Goodreads; about gossip and anxiety. I was struck by the pleasure vibrating from these essays; the evident joy she takes, and freedom she feels, in writing and thinking in the essay form. I was eager to ask her certain questions outside the structure of our friendship. She is a critic I admire, with strengths that feel different from my own; in other words, someone to learn from.

INTERVIEWER

Hebe Uhart had a unique way of looking—a power of observation that was streaked with humor, but which above all spoke to her tremendous curiosity. Uhart, a prolific Argentine writer of novels, short stories, and travel logs, died in 2018. “In the last years of her life, Hebe Uhart read as much fiction as nonfiction, but she preferred writing crónicas, she used to say, because she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes Mariana Enríquez in an introduction to a newly translated volume of these crónicas, which will be published in May by Archipelago Books. At the Review, where we published one of Uhart’s short stories posthumously in 2019, we will be publishing a series of these crónicas in the coming months. Read the first in the series here.

When I used to take walks along Bulnes Street and Santa Fe Avenue, a certain boutique would catch my eye. It always displayed the same series of colors: beige, dusty rose, baby blue—a small array of colors, and always the same ones on rotation, never a red or a yellow. Everything behind the display window was elegant but hidden in shadows; this included the owner, who seemed determined to fulfill her duties despite having so few customers. The owner’s silent manner and desire to pass incognito (as if showing one’s face were distasteful) led me, in one way or another, to this idea: she must have inherited her taste in clothing from her mother, and she was making sure to carry on its legacy. Well done, well done on that display window, but with so few customers, the shop was doomed.

On Corrientes Avenue, at the corner of Salguero, there is another window displaying sweaters paired with little vests (for when it gets chilly). Every week, the owners debut a new line of muted colors: grayish blue, blush, timid yellow. Delicate T-shirts that seem to say: This is the way things are. The garments are always the same shape and length; every week, the owners change the color scheme. It occurs to me that this taste is also inherited, passed down from a time when women dressed to please rather than to offend and when dialogues unfolded like this:

“Go ahead, dear.”

While reading Maradona’s autobiography this past winter, I found that every few pages I would whisper or write in the margins, “I love you, Maradona.” Sadness crept up on me as I turned to the last chapter, and it intensified to heartbreak when I read its first lines: “They say I can’t keep quiet, that I talk about everything, and it’s true. They say I fell out with the Pope. It’s true.” I was devastated to be leaving Maradona’s world and returning to the ordinary one, where nobody ever picks a fight with the Pope. 

I started reading El Diego: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Footballer, ghostwritten by Daniel Arcucci and translated to English by Marcela Mora y Araujo. He said reading it was the most fun he’d had with a book. I came to El Diego with basically no knowledge of Maradona or even of soccer. I would have said I hated soccer actually. I hate the buzzing noise the crowds make on the TV. But from the very first page I found Maradona’s voice so addictive and original that reading El Diego felt like falling in love. 

Maradona’s skirmish with the Pope goes the way of much else in the book. Because of his extraordinary talents and global fame, Maradona is invited to the Vatican with his family. The Pope gives each of them a rosary to say, and he tells Maradona that he has been given a special one. Maradona checks with his mother and discovers that they have the same rosary. He goes back to confront the Pope and is outraged when the Pope pats him on the back and carries on walking. 

“Total lack of respect!” Maradona fumes. “It’s why I’ve got angry with so many people: because they are two-faced, because they say one thing here and then another thing there, because they’d stab you in the back, because they lie. If I were to talk about all the people I’ve fallen out with over the years, I’d need one of those encyclopedias, there would be volumes.” 

A black-and-white photograph, three and a half by five inches, shows a figure in profile—a silhouette in suit and hat, alone on a giant heap of demolished buildings far above the cathedral tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. I found it in a stack of photos stored inside a small envelope with a handwritten label: “NY Downtown, Summer 1971.” The man’s expression is hidden, but his stooped posture and tiny scale against the massive pile make the picture feel lonely. His eyes are fixed on something beyond the frame, but the longer I studied it, the more I could see him staring at the Twin Towers, which, though unfinished, had reached their full height.

The man in the photo is the writer Joseph Mitchell, who was then in his early sixties, or “well past what Dante called the middle of the journey,” as he wrote in his notes. From 1938 to 1964, he published legendary profiles as a staff writer at The New Yorker, mostly portraits of ordinary people in disappearing worlds on the edges of the city. By 1971, he was a stranger to himself. Increasingly he wandered the city by day and at night, surprised by the intensity of his emotion. The beauty of commonplace images—“a sunflower growing in a vacant lot”—had become almost unbearably moving to him, and sometimes he stared for a long time at certain old buildings in the city, trying to understand why he felt so drawn to them.

For more than three decades, the story goes, he went to his office at The New Yorker on West Forty-Third Street almost every day, worked behind his closed door, and never submitted another story. But unpublished fragments—notes, drafts, letters, photographs, and found objects—attest to another Mitchell, one who would leave his desk to visit an old cemetery or enter a demolition site, where, he noted, he worked as hard as he ever did. In his published stories, he preserved lives that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, then he gathered objects from their threatened worlds. Mitchell couldn’t find one single way to describe what had changed—he called it “living in the past,” “living with the dead,” “living as in a dream, or, I might as well say it, as in a nightmare”—but he claimed to know the exact moment when he metamorphosed into an obsessed collector.

It was 4 A.M. on the Friday of October 4, 1968. Mitchell woke from uneasy dreams, then got out of bed as quietly as he could, so as not to disturb his wife, Therese, and set out from their 44 West Tenth Street apartment for the Fulton Fish Market, where “the smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness,” as Mitchell wrote in his 1952 profile “Up in the Old Hotel,” always gave him a feeling of well-being. But urban renewal projects had doomed much of Lower Manhattan, and the wrecking ball was destroying whole blocks. (In the previous year, more than sixty acres of buildings were demolished.) The piles of rubble depressed him, so he went to the Paris Café at Meyer’s Hotel, which afforded a good view of the East River. He ordered coffee, found a spot at the bar, and as he observed people cooking fish on the riverbank and box fires built against the blackened posts of the elevated highway, he saw his oldest friend in the city, Joe Cantalupo.

The fictional Pittsfield, Massachusetts, native Mack Bolan first appeared in Don Pendleton’s 1969 novel The Executioner #1: War Against the Mafia. A self-righteous vigilante (“I am not their judge. I am their judgment”), the by-now-lesser-known Bolan was the inspiration for the popular Marvel ­Comics antihero Frank Castle, also called the Punisher, who made his debut in 1974’s The Amazing Spider-Man #129 and who has been played by Dolph Lundgren, Thomas Jane, and Ray Stevenson in three movies and by Jon Bernthal in a recent Netflix television series. (Season one, episode one: Castle is reading Moby-Dick.)

Bolan’s and Castle’s origins are not the same. Castle’s family was murdered by the mob—that’s how the red wheel cranks into motion, that’s his permission to kill. But Bolan’s story is different. His father gets in debt to the mob, gets sick, and falls behind on loan payments. His sister, Cindy, starts turning tricks for the mob to help pay off her father’s debt. When Bolan’s little brother finds her out, he tells their father. Their father shoots his son, Bolan’s brother, wounding him, then kills his wife and daughter, Bolan’s mother and sister, before killing himself. War Against the Mafia begins with Bolan turning away from the fact that it was his own father, not the mob, who murdered his family.

Given that Bolan was from Pittsfield, where Herman Melville lived from 1850 until 1863, and given that Castle in 2008’s Punisher: War Zone snarls in a church, “I’d like to get my hands on God,” and given that “War Against the Father” could be another name for the satanic Captain Ahab’s pursuit of Moby-Dick as a murderous revolt against God the Father, it was no surprise to me that these overlapping references filled my head as I drove toward Pittsfield through blinding sleet. “You Are At 1724 Feet Highest Elevation on I-90 East of South Dakota,” said a brown sign near Becket, Massachusetts. Hence my elevated thoughts.

I have been to that even more elevated spot on I-90 in South Dakota. The year was 2016. I saw the sun rise as I drove through the Fort Pierre National Grassland on US 83. Then I turned east on I-90 at Vivian, ate breakfast in Presho, and drove through Kennebec and Lyman and Reliance and Oacoma (1,729 feet above sea level, five feet higher than the roadside sign in Becket) and Chamberlain and Pukwana and Kimball and White Lake and Plankinton and Mount Vernon and Betts and Mitchell and Alexandria and Hartford on my way to Sioux Falls, where I stopped at Bob’s Cafe for a dynamite two-piece fried chicken plate with beans and slaw.

The Paris Review’s Writers at Work interview series has been a hallmark of the magazine since its founding in 1953. These interviews, often conducted over months and sometimes even years, aim to provide insight into how each subject came to be the writer they are, and how the work gets done, and can serve as a kind of defining moment—crystallizing a version of the writer’s legacy in print. Of course, after their interviews appear in our pages, many writers just keep going, and their lives undergo further twists and turns. Sometimes, too, there are gaps and omissions in the original interviews that can become clear as time goes on. This is part of why we’re launching a new series of web interviews called Writers at Work, Revisited. The first will be an interview by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain with Louise Erdrich, who was originally interviewed for the magazine in 2010.

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Americans have most often viewed Indians through an anthropological lens; the desire to understand us through difference overtakes all else and creates a permanent distance between the seer and the seen. It is the oldest story in America, and over time has exerted such pressure on Indians that we’ve become explainers nonpareil in every facet of our lives—our fiction being no exception. Once you see it you cannot unsee it; the sheer amount of explaining directed at non-Native readers that takes place in Native writing is remarkable. The best of us, though, continue to do what good writers in this country have always done: produce fiction that is more in conversation with the aesthetic lineage of English literature than any particular audience or political question. From the start Louise Erdrich’s writing has had this quality, and her large body of work is a lodestar for the Native writers who have come after her, showing us how to write past America’s ideas and expectations about Indians into places both more tribally specific, and more human. Her work acts as the primary bridge between the writers of the Native American Renaissance—N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko—and the explosion of Native writing currently taking place. Her characters, regardless of their culture or history, remind us of that great paradox of humanity, that we are all profoundly different, and very much the same. Perhaps most importantly her work reminds us that good fiction is made up of good sentences.

I had expected, because of her lack of public presence, to meet a writer who was something of a recluse. When I finally made it to Minneapolis, however, I found her to be open, self-effacing, funny, generous, and troublingly up-to-date on the politics of the moment—in both America and Indian country. She was also familiar to me in that way Indians are regardless of what tribe or geography they come from. She spends most days, when she is not traveling to various parts of the Midwest for familial and ceremonial reasons, working in her bookstore, Birchbark Books, one of the finest independent bookstores in the country. The store is the only one of its kind: owned and curated by a major Native writer, run by Native employees, where you can find a copy of Anna Karenina a few feet from abalone shells and sweetgrass. Louise was gracious enough to take time from her usual day of working in the back office to talk with me in the basement of the store.

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

It’s Friday. The sun is out. Baseball is back. March Madness has begun. And I’ve got a case of the wiggles. Let’s keep it lighter today.

Worth a Thousand Words

T, the New York Times’s style magazine, does all kinds of cool shit (oh, to have the budget of a traditional media outlet!), and it’s always a treat when they go bookish. This week, artist Marcus Jahmal offers an illustrated guide to the new books of the season. It’s fun and interesting, and it’s not your usual “here’s a picture that sums up the themes of the book” approach. For reasons that go unexplained, Jahmal instead decided to open each novel to page 76 and capture the action from a selected quote. My kingdom for a companion interview with the artist about how and why he shaped the project this way. 

Your Daily Dose of Inspiration 

Five years ago when he began classes at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Ajibola Tolase was sure he’d never realize his dream of being a poet. Tolase, originally from Ibadan, Nigeria, struggled through school and then struggled to find work. After a long string of failures, he took a flyer and applied to poetry programs at two U.S. schools. It was a smart gamble. His debut collection, 2,000 Blacks, will be published in the fall, and he was just awarded the prestigious Cave Canem Prize, putting him in the company of numerous Pulitzer- and National Book Award-winners and two U.S. Poet Laureates. May his efforts succeed!

The Book is Not Always Better

For my money, Nicholas Sparks should retire from writing books and set up a James Patteson-esque idea factory for romantic tearjerkers. Dude came out of the gate with The Notebook, and that story still has legs! The new Broadway musical adaptation opened last week, and it sounds like a smash. Sparks’s flavor of romance—though he claims he writes “love stories,” not “romance novels” (he’s wrong)—has never been my jam, but hear me out. Ryan Gosling’s live “I’m Just Ken” at the Oscars was stellar, and if the producers want to talk him into taking a spin on Broadway, I will certainly be open to giving them my dollars. They have to be thinking about this, right?!