I can’t fall asleep till my skin—sweaty, sticky, sizzling with bacteria, random fungal itches, swellings, vague histamine eruptions—has been unified by a bath or shower. I wear a white cotton T-shirt softened by age to tame this commotion and to guard my insanely sensitive nipples against the onslaught of, say, the blanket’s edge.

Mr. X. and I read for a while. I’m reading Derek McCormack’s wondrous Castle Faggot, but after a few paragraphs the words stop making sense. I whisper, “Bona nit, estimat.” Xavi whispers, “Bona nit, malparits,” and we kiss. Why do we whisper? Sometimes we whisper “I love you.” I roll onto my right side, and incredibly Xavi slides closer and drapes an arm over me. Ceding bed territory sets off a small alarm. “Sweet dreams, honey,” he might add, amused to be using the English endearment. Thirty seconds later he snores softly in my ear and a toenail digs into my calf. I am on the edge, he gathers the quilt in such a way that I am half-exposed and if I want more space or more covers there will be a struggle. I find this adorable. Everything explains why we should be together in this bed.

I often think about the dead before sleep—saying goodnight to them? Not think about—more like have the feeling of them. Are they my default setting? Is default consciousness what happens before sleep? My mother and I disliked talking on the phone so we spent most of our weekly calls saying goodbye, but now I mentally pick up the phone to say hello, a gesture. I think of Kathy Acker with a pang of love, a welter of unfinished business. When Xavi holds me, he contains these feelings. Tonight it’s simple—I wish Kathy were alive to be held like this.

To my retroactive disappointment, the journals I keep—I fill about one marble composition book a year—are an undifferentiated, undated jumble of fiction drafts, semifictionalized self-reflections, actual diary entries, to-do lists, lesson plans, notes for articles I’m writing, and strange doodles often in the form of heavily inked trapezoidal grids. I wish that the notebooks more frequently included scenes like this, in which I simply recorded, without much commentary or elaboration, what I remembered right after a conversation with my younger sister sometime in 2011, when she would have been thirteen and I twenty-five. Too often when I write personally I simply record states of mind, which have been frustratingly static and melodramatic over the years and often seem to be stylized in a way that I find unconvincing, even to myself. This page presents a clearer picture of what life was like at the time—quizzing my sister about her religious beliefs, asking her about TV shows and who Bruno Mars was. I was encouraging her to be open-minded about religion, even as a devout nonbeliever myself, probably out of some quasiparental instinct. She described an idiosyncratic cosmography: no to God, yes to guardian angels. Apparently she wanted to be a doctor at the time. (She ended up going to art school, a family tradition.) I was living in New York, home for the weekend, visiting my parents in New Jersey. The next decade took me to Montana, Virginia, and Boston before I circled back to Brooklyn just in time for the pandemic. I saw my sister in Philadelphia recently. She was driving the car, and we talked about what was on her mind now. Gay bars, the Supreme Court. I did not ask about angels.

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work and the story collection Cool for America.

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Amazon has released the first full-length trailer for its upcoming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s set in Middle-earth thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. 

The new trailer promises to live up to the epic fantasy descriptor, with end-of-the-world stakes, a huge and beautiful world to explore, and an ensemble cast, including a young Galadriel and Elrond. Galadriel has seen an apocalyptic vision of death and destruction set to shatter the peace currently reigning over Middle-earth, and she is unconvinced by Elrond’s attempts to reassure her. As usual, though, there is also a group of hobbits, the Harfoots, that seem poised to take center stage.

The trailer shows glimpses of Elven and Dwarven realms, the home of the Harfoots, and more. We also see what appears to be Two Trees of Valinor.

The eight-part series will premiere September 2nd on Amazon Prime.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

“This report was birthed in trauma.” It’s a striking and heartbreaking opening statement for the groundbreaking 2022 Urban Library Trauma Study Report, released in late June at the 2022 American Library Association Annual Conference. While the beginnings of the study were rooted in library trauma before the COVID-19 pandemic, the initial grant application was written as the virus hit New York and days before many city libraries were closed. The two year long study was delayed and redesigned due to the pandemic, allowing researchers to capture some sense of the difficult working conditions urban library workers experienced pre-pandemic but possibly more importantly the increasing demands and disruptions because of the pandemic, resulting in extensive trauma, stress, and burnout for urban library workers.

The study and report were executed in a partnership between the New York Library Association, Urban Librarians Unite, and St John’s University. On the Urban Librarians Unite website, they introduce the report writing, “Almost every library worker has a story about one event at work that left them shaken. Sometimes it’s an abusive patron, sometimes it’s workplace bullying, and sometimes it’s that haunting feeling left behind when a patron needed more help than you could provide. The Urban Library Trauma Study looked to take these anecdotal stories, quantify them and build a pathway to practical solutions for the issue and move the library industry towards a culture of community care.”

The study included four stages including a comprehensive review of current literature on the topic, a survey of urban library workers, a series of virtual focus groups, and lastly a two-day forum of urban library workers to go over the research and create plans for the future.

Key Takeaways from the Urban Library Trauma Study

The survey was distributed between August 7, 2021 and September 29, 2021. The survey received 568 responses, of which 435 were from urban public staff. Responses from rural, suburban, academic, school and special library responses were filtered out to focus the scope of the study but the report does mention that library workers at all kind of libraries are dealing with many of the same issues raised in this report.

Lifestyle & Self Development

Cooking

General Nonfiction & Memoir

Whether you’re in public schools or libraries or aren’t but support your local public institutions, one thing you can do right now to prepare for the fall and its inevitable wave of “parental rights” discourse and book challenges is get ahead of the misinformation. By openly addressing what has been happening over the last year and setting the record straight, you become the transparent organization that these groups are desperately demanding (even when they then are mad when it happens exactly as they demanded).

Build a guide to the current climate on your website, your social media, and affiliated groups to challenge the narrative being pushed by Moms For Liberty, No Left Turn, and others. Be upfront about the claims being made against libraries and schools in a broad way, then focus it on your local institutions.

Here’s a stellar example.

The Forest Hills Public Schools (Michigan) has been subject to a local group’s demands to things like “removing CRT” from the curriculum and “focusing on fundamentals.” They’ve been especially intent on highlighting the so-called Critical Race Theory being taught in the schools, beginning their quest for information via FOIAs last spring. The school board meetings have also become a space for right-wing political rallies.

A Political Action Committee in Forest Hills — developed and run by parents in the district — has stepped forward to right these claims through their group SupportFHPS. Included on their website is a thorough guide to all of the claims being made about education right now, both nationally and locally, with links to credible sources about why such claims are wrong and why they’re being made. It is a handy, easy to use guide that is accessible and understandable to people who are not staying on top of all of this news — which is impossible! — and it is a vital tool for passing along and ensuring that everyone has the same correct information at hand. What makes this guide especially good is that it’s usable to people inside the community specifically, as well as broadly applicable to those outside it.

If you’re a millennial on Twitter, or at least if you follow millennials on Twitter, you’ve likely come across the “We need an American Girl doll who…” meme. It’s a hilarious trend that combines one of the most sought-after toys of the ’90s with hyper-specific situations, and book lovers are not immune from getting called out by it. Because we can’t resist catching the latest social media wave, we’ve collected the best bookish American Girl doll tweets for your reading pleasure.

Since their introduction in 1986, American Girl dolls have highlighted a variety of different points in history and unique experiences. Fans could even create a doll to look like themselves and buy matching outfits! But leave it to Twitter and Instagram to find the gaps in American Girl doll representation.

Wow, meme one and I’m already feeling attacked!

For those of us who grew up obsessed with books, taking trips to the library every chance we got and memorizing the check-out limit, books have always been our safe spaces. They’re where we go when we have too much to do, or we’re going through something, or just need to escape for a while. I’ve spent many an hour with my head tilted sideways, reading every title on the shelves of the library or hunched on the floor, flipping through a book before buying it at my favorite bookstore. Libraries, bookstores, they’re my favorite places in the world!

With all of that time spent in the quiet of a library or lost in the shelves on a darkening afternoon, I realize just how quickly that setting can turn sinister. A scream in the silence, eyes peering from the other side of the spines. The quiet is only comforting until you want — no, need — someone around to help you.

And some authors have tapped into that fear, turning the places we love so dearly into an accomplice to a crime. Have used the darkness and the silence and the wandering as a way to heighten tension rather than relieve it. If you want to read about the ways a bookstore or library — and not the books inside — can scare you, here are eight novels to get you started.

Disability Pride Month is in full swing, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with all of the wonderful books by disabled authors that are making their way around the internet. I love when people discover disability literature and realize the incredible range of books out there. From romance to poetry to memoir, disabled authors write it all. For some folks, I know this year is their first foray into disability literature, and I appreciate the effort to learn new things and expand one’s understanding of the world. 

While I love seeing nondisabled people pick up books by disabled authors, I’ve noticed that when able-bodied folks review disability literature, they often say things like, “I can’t relate to this” or “the writing is just too clunky.” But disability literature is, at its core, for and by disabled people. These books entirely center disabled folks and our experiences. But when able-bodied people review disability literature, they often write their reviews through an abled lens, which skews their understanding of the book.

Let’s look at the medium of the text itself. To create a print book, many of the writers used accommodations because the very method of communicating in a book format is inaccessible to them. Working on a computer, formulating ideas into written language, or looking at a page aren’t actions that every disabled person can do. So to even communicate, some disabled people have to adapt to get anywhere close to the able-bodied norm. 

For example, I write by not looking at a screen or by using voice-to-text, and that changes the rhythm and flow of my writing. Using accommodations to write will change the prose and structure of essays. It is literally impossible for some of us to reach the literary standard based on able-bodied folks’ abilities. So if you assume disabled people will write like able-bodied people, you may be disappointed.

If you apply the expectations and assumptions of an abled lived experience, disabled literature may not work for you. I often see nondisabled people say they can’t relate to disabled people’s stories, that our lives are too “different” from their own. Or some able-bodied people say that they feel they didn’t learn enough from disability literature to make it worth reading.

This week, we bring you reviews from two of our issue no. 240 contributors. If you enjoy these, why not read recommendations from four more of our Summer issue poets?

I was watching the sunset on the Greek island of Hydra with my best friend when I suddenly said, “I think I hate Henry Miller.” I’d just raced through The Colossus of Maroussi and then Tropic of Cancer. So, as my friend and I perched on rough stones by the sea, I forced her to listen to my least favorite passages from Tropic of Cancer. Miller brags about his penis—“a bone in my prick six inches long”! He catalogs what seems like “every cunt I grab hold of.” At a bar, he ejaculates on a stranger’s dress. (She’s “sore as hell.”) In 1934, when Tropic was published, this ecstatic obscenity could have been appealing; in 2022, reading it reminds me of being trapped in the bathroom queue at a party next to a coked-up man with a PhD and a browser tab permanently open to PornHub. The book feels, in Miller’s words, like “a thick tide of semen flooding the gutters.”

“I think I hate Henry Miller.” I think. Why did I qualify? Well, there is Tropic’s bravura opening. And despite the ethnographic gaze that saturates The Colossus of Maroussi, certain episodes of hilarity delighted me: the saga of Miller’s diarrhea during his visit to Crete, for example, in which he shits his pants, then shits at “the bottom of a moat near a dead horse swarming with bottle flies” and embarks on an oft-frustrated quest for “soggy rice with a little lemon juice in it” to quiet his bowels, all while touring ruins and being plied with victuals that are decidedly disquieting to his bowels. There are also passages of arresting beauty, where the writing has the feeling not of mania but of deep dreaming. Miller’s first approach to the island of Poros can only be quoted in full; it is perfect. 

Does the moment redeem the mass of it? Can I recommend The Colossus of Maroussi for the sake of one gemlike isle? The question engenders other questions: what, if anything, redeems a work of literature? Is the language of redemption even appropriate? What about the language of possession? Yours, mine. Give, take. In college, listening to people debate that problematic, shifting thing called “the canon,” I privately thought that the books included in it are far weirder than either its defenders or detractors usually admit. I’ve rarely felt that what I read “excludes” me: no matter who wrote it or when, it is mine for the taking, or leaving. I cling to that feeling even now—even when I read “while it’s all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.” 

“Today I’m REALLY worried about death. I almost started crying. However, my new calligraphy kit is AWSOME.”

“My dollys are so fun to play with. They bend and move and pose. : )

P.S. the police think that Peterson might be guilty because there was blood all over the scene of the crime and a used condom (EW!) and a bloody soda can with hair on it.”

*

I encountered Joan Didion’s famous line about why she writes—“entirely to find out what I’m thinking”—many times before I read the essay it comes from, and was reminded once again to never assume you know what anything means out of context. I had always thought the line was about her essays, about writing nonfiction to discover her own beliefs—because of course the act of making an argument clear on the page brings clarity to the writer too. She may have believed that; she may have thought it a truth too obvious to state. In any case, it’s not what she meant. She was talking about why she writes fiction:

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means … Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

These pictures, Didion writes, are “images that shimmer around the edges,” reminiscent of “an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia.” (I know these frightening psychedelic cats, the art of Louis Wain, very well—I saw them as a child, in just such a book, which I found on my parents’ shelves.) Play It As It Lays, she explains, began “with no notion of ‘character’ or ‘plot’ or even ‘incident,’” but with pictures. One was of a woman in a short white dress walking through a casino to make a phone call; this woman became Maria. The Bevatron (a particle accelerator at Berkeley Lab) was one of the pictures in her mind when she began writing A Book of Common Prayer. Fiction, for Didion, was the task of finding “the grammar in the picture,” the corresponding language: “The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement.” This is a much stranger reason to write than to clarify an argument. It makes me think of the scenes that I sometimes see just before I fall asleep. I know I’m still awake—they’re not as immersive as dreams—but they seem to be something that’s happening to me, not something I’m creating. I’m not manning the projector.

To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

In December 1981, I visited my older brother at the University of Michigan. There three men taught me to play three songs on guitar: “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” “Genesis,” and “Suzanne.” The first left me cold. The second, its melodic charms notwithstanding, featured the line “They say I’m harder than … a marble shaft,” leading me to believe, until just now when I finally looked him up, that Jorma Kaukonen was born in Finland and never really learned English. The third rocketed me, on my return to William & Mary, straight to the town record store, where the cashier sold me Songs of Leonard Cohen with a money-back guarantee on the condition that I listen to it ten times before complaining.

There existed milieus where Cohen’s music was inescapable, such as kibbutzim and the GDR. Tidewater, Virginia, was not that milieu. A basic tenet of its all-pervasive racism was that white people couldn’t do music. Black people were denied decent jobs and homes, but there was no question that high school dances would be themed “Always and Forever” and culminate in “Brick House” and “Flashlight.” At college, surrounded by northern suburbanites’ awkward skanking to babyish punk rock, I realized that I had been inadvertently blessed. But it did take me at least ten listens to acclimate to Cohen’s chansonnier velocity and compound meters while his lyrics were sinking their claws into my soul.

I taught myself all the songs on the record and borrowed his novels from the library. An image of sainthood from Beautiful Losers haunted me for decades: to live like a runaway ski. I blame The Favorite Game for the image of a sentient vibrator that drives a couple from their home, as well as a description of getting trapped in a writhing mass of young people at a political rally but failing to orgasm. I suspect they’re also from Beautiful Losers. The Favorite Game is about getting laid a lot in swinging Montreal (autobiographical).

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

The documentary Rocco, which follows the Italian porn actor and director Rocco Siffredi, feels like a hundred perfect short stories. We learn that Rocco carries around a photo of his mother at all times. We watch Rocco and his teenage sons chat in their cavernous and starkly lit climbing gym/weight room in Croatia. We discover that Rocco’s hapless cameraman of many decades, Gabriel, is actually his cousin, a thwarted porn star. During one virtuosic shoot (Rocco Siffredi Anal Threesome with Abella Danger) Gabriel accidentally leaves the lens cap on, which they discover only after shooting the entire scene. There’s a surprising sweetness in Rocco, a man in the twilight of a certain era. “They used to focus on the women’s faces,” he says, sadly. He’s decided to retire. The final scene finds Rocco carrying a giant wooden cross on his back through the hallways of the Kink.com Armory. This tableau is the brainchild of Gabriel. “Because you die for everyone’s sins,” he tells Rocco.

—Emma Cline, author of “Pleasant Glen” 

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is about a lot of things: the last ever screening at Taipei’s Fu-Ho Grand Movie Palace; a ticket-taker who wants to gift half of a steamed bun to the projectionist; a young man cruising the theater for sex; and that lonely, amorphous feeling of THE END—not so much death as the cinematic mood of loss. When I heard about Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which was directed by Tsai Ming-liang and released in 2003, I could neither see it in a movie theater nor stream it anywhere. At the time, my brother was quarantining in a high-rise apartment building in Santiago, Chile. He found an illegal copy of it on the internet and sent it to me. I liked the criminality of this exchange. No character in Goodbye, Dragon Inn breaks the law, but it feels like there’s a crime going on. Part of this is due to the rain and the shadows and the grimy brokenness of the Fu-Ho Grand, but it’s mostly because Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a stripped down melodrama of longing. The ticket-taker is the film’s star. At one point, she goes behind the movie screen. The light hits her face. We seem to know nothing about her, but that’s not true. We know how, in the light of the screen, despite the forces that would stop her, she hopes and dreams. In this way, we know her exactly.

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To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

On “Tower of Song” (1988), Leonard Cohen’s weary croak cracks the joke: “I was born like this / I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” He can’t quite sustain his own melody, but some of us remain enchanted—and not merely by his self-effacement. The irony, we suspect, involves us, too. Choicelessness is one of his great themes: we don’t choose our blessings or our deficits, and we don’t choose our material conditions. Fine. But Leonard Cohen takes it further: maybe we can’t even control the impulse to defy our deficits, to work against the grain of what we’ve been given. We feel sentenced to sing even without a golden voice—by our own unruly desires, or by “twenty-seven angels from the great beyond.” The metaphorical cause matters less than the effect: “They tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song.”

Leonard Cohen came to music late, at least compared to his countercultural contemporaries. Bob Dylan was twenty-one when he released his first album; Leonard Cohen was thirty-three. He struggled to adapt his literary strategies to the new form. Even before his baritone stiffened with age, there was something workmanlike in his sensuous, spiritual, serious songs—not just in his delivery, but in his compositional structure, his preference for the heavy-handed end rhyme. Park / dark. Alone / stone. Pinned / sin. Soon / moon. He never made much use of slant rhyme, syncopation, or any of the sinuous tricks of great vocalists from the blues tradition. The second verse of “Tonight Will Be Fine” (1969) seems to describe the monastic simplicity of his compositions: “I choose the rooms that I live in with care / The windows are small and the walls almost bare / There’s only one bed and there’s only one prayer / I listen all night for your step on the stair.” For me, Leonard Cohen’s voice is that step on the stair—stumbling through the song’s tidy rooms, making the floorboards groan. His flatfooted rhythm makes wisdom’s weight hit harder.

I sometimes think of Leonard Cohen seated like a stone on Mount Baldy, where he became an actual monk in 1994 and where he lived for five years. I know a guy who studied at the same monastery. He would try to catch the singer stirring during morning meditation—even just breathing—but his stillness seemed absolute. This discipline frightens me, though it must have been hard-won. I like his songs because they let us overhear the rage and desire rattling discipline’s wooden frame: “I’m interested in things that contribute to my survival,” Cohen told David Remnick. He liked the Beatles just fine, but he needed Ray Charles. And I need Leonard Cohen—not the Zen master, but “this laborer called a writer” (his words) arduously working through a voice too plain for his own poetry. He keeps me company in the difficult silence between my own sentences. “I can hear him coughing all night long, / a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song.” We’re both still straining—sweetly—for the music.

About six months after our daughter was born, my husband calmly set the idea on the table, like a decorative gun. I said I’d think about it.

I couldn’t pretend to be that surprised by the proposition, or ignorant of my part in engendering it. I was too tired. I was too busy. The baby the baby the baby. I had a deadline. I was reading. I was watching The Sopranos (again). I was depressed. I just wanted a nap, needed a nap, ached for a hot throbbing nap. This might, I figured, be “real” marriage, harder deeper marriage, marriage opening its cute mouth all the way and showing the mess that was back there.

Accidental iPhone video of forty minutes in the kitchen one night, a view of the cutting board and the wallpaper: You can hear a baby and the banging of something metal and you can hear our two adult bodies rustling around the space, running water, sliding a knife into the knife holder, dragging a chair across the wood floor, opening and closing the fridge―a sound like a breath and then nothing. We speak in short, muffled bursts, loving to her, not unloving to each other.

Maybe, I thought, the libido of a certain kind of woman is an animal that lives a little and then crawls into a cave and lies there panting for a few decades until, with a final ragged pant, it expires. Could it expire so early? Or perhaps it was taking a breather postpartum—understandable, surely, given how a six-and-a half-pound human body had been slither-pulled out of the place I get fucked, or one of the places.