It’s hard to believe it’s the last month of the year! This year has both moved incredibly slowly and flown by. December tends to be a bit of a hard month for me with so many holidays and get-togethers to plan and the weather turning colder. Now that I have a kindergartner, December also means an increase in illness. The last few months have already been an endless parade of viruses. Kindergarten germs are no joke! Thankfully, we’ve had many books at home to read while we recover from illness, including several review copies from this list of December children’s book releases.

December is also full of winter holidays, and these nine December children’s books would all make wonderful holiday gifts. Several December picture books center intergenerational experiences about sharing knowledge and traditions, whether it’s a family recipe or how to crochet. Others in all categories explore complicated friendships, and two follow legendary Black women Shirley Chisholm and Toni Morrison. December tends to be the slowest publishing month of the year, so I have fewer books on this list of December children’s books than on my previous monthly new release children’s roundups. However, they’re still excellent reads that I hope many children’s book readers will check out.

I watched the 1979 film Saint Jack on Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, Freevee. Because the commercials often lurched on midsentence, I concluded that Freevee doesn’t pay people to insert the breaks between scenes. The deduction was sound, but being human, i.e., desperate for meaning, I nevertheless read intention into the placement of some of the ads. At the end of the movie, for example, when the main character must choose between collaborating with an occupying power or forgoing a fat check, Freevee broke to a spot for a skin serum by Vichy Laboratories. Unfortunately, the synergy didn’t last. The next commercial featured the socially conscious rapper Common, of the too-resonant baritone, shilling T-Mobile from a barber chair—a rich text, to be sure, but one without much relevance to Saint Jack, which is set in Singapore in the late sixties.

Based on Paul Theroux’s novel of the same name, the film is the director Peter Bogdanovich’s Vietnam movie as well as his Casablanca, a wartime melodrama about a raffish American trying to make a buck on the periphery of the conflict. A lot happens to Jack Flowers—he falls in love, finds a kindred spirit (platonic), fulfills his dream of running a brothel, runs afoul of local gangsters, goes into business with the U.S. military, witnesses the death of a friend, and gets roped in to a smear operation by the CIA—but the film’s tone and pacing belie its density of event. Saint Jack is laid-back, even chill. Applied to heavy material, this attitude usually produces a comedy, but Saint Jack, while full of funny moments, achieves something serious: the sublime.

Retrospectives of Bogdanovich’s career tend to describe it as his “loosest” film, a departure to the now for the director, whose interest in the visual style and genre tropes of Hollywood’s studio era, as opposed to those of the French New Wave, had distinguished him from his New Hollywood contemporaries. Shot on location by the minimalist cinematographer Robert Muller, with Cassavetes’s regular Ben Gazzara as Jack Flowers, and local non-actors , including prostitutes and madams, filling out the supporting cast, Saint Jack definitely looks like a gritty seventies flick. It brings to mind the Golden Era in other ways, however. Besides the shadow of Casablanca, there’s the film’s breezy script. Snappy dialogue could have upset Saint Jack’s lo-fi equilibrium, but fortunately we’re in Gazzara’s capable hands. As our weary yet amiable hero, a stoic drinker who takes all vicissitudes in stride, he gets the lion’s share of the script’s great lines—the trick is that he delivers these naturally, never “making a meal,” as film people say. He rarely gives the sense that Flowers is inventing a joke or a bon mot on the fly; usually, Jack seems to be repeating himself (it’s all the more to Gazzara’s credit that Jack never actually does). On the one hand, this chestnut effect is satisfying because it’s realistic: for Jack, clever patter isn’t an end in itself but a tool, like his warm smile or his impeccable manners, that he deploys to make bread. On the other, Jack is a wise man. He repeats himself because that’s what gurus do.

Saint Jack is not an ironic title. Flowers, improbably, is full of grace. When the gangsters arrive to shut down his bordello, he offers himself up at the front door to give his employees time to escape. The gangsters tattoo obscenities on his arms and deposit him in a ditch. Back at the brothel, which is now destroyed, he has a drink and a laugh and then goes straight to a tattoo parlor to get his new ink covered up. The tattooist asks him what he wants. Jack scans the room’s posters for two seconds before asking the man to garland his arms. What’s remarkable about Jack isn’t that he accepts his fate but that he accepts it immediately, without pitying himself or weighing his options. I was reminded of wu wei, the Taoist ideal of effortless action, which is something like a flow state that encompasses all one’s activity and not merely a discrete task like writing a movie review or playing a tennis match. Jack’s wu wei gets thrown into dramatic relief in the final act, when, for the first time, he agonizes over a decision.

In an interview in the Review‘s new Fall issue, the playwright Lynn Nottage describes the way one of her classes at Yale would open: with a trip to the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. “Most academics and practitioners weren’t acknowledging the different forms of theater happening all over New York City, and how those forms were in conversation with the way we as playwrights make our work,” she tells Christina Anderson. Her class also visited vogue balls, megachurches, trials, and wrestling matches. “What I’ve witnessed is that, by the end of the course, all the students, even if they began as very naturalistic, structurally conservative writers, are making work that is more playful, inventive, and open,” she says. We asked Nottage to provide us with a syllabus of sorts—and she sent a reading list of plays that can also teach us to look at drama and narrative structure from a similarly wide range of vantage points.

As a playwright, I’m interested in what happens when I enter my craft from differing perspectives, as an anthropologist, an athlete, an activist, a con artist, a criminal, a prosecutor, an exhibitionist, an archivist, a visual artist, a musician, a mystic, or a healer. What can we learn about dramatic structure and storytelling from observing the way theater, and performance, occur outside of a traditional theatrical setting? I’ve gravitated toward the following plays for their ability to raise this question, to engage unexpected dramaturgy, and to bend and twist the architecture of narratives to arrive at a piercing truth.

Every Sunday morning would start the same way. Grandma Gayle, after her overnight shift as a nurse’s assistant, would walk into the room catty-corner from hers, knock, and yell, “Grandson!”—though Grandman’s yelling barely registered a decibel. So she would gently nudge my side and remind me that we had to get going. If there was time, bath; if not, shower. I’d make my dash to the kitchen, where Grandma would have prepared the kielbasa sausages fried, eggs fried, and cheddar cheese melted on a bialy or bagel bought from the deli up the street and accompanied by Tropicana Berry Punch in a glass. Church wouldn’t start for four hours, at least. But we started early—my grandma, grandpa, and me getting into the 1994 Plymouth Voyager, normally parked in the back lot of their home, which was wedged between where Brownsville and East New York meet. We traversed every borough to pick up congregants; on Sundays, the Voyager served as the church van.

The bottom half of the Voyager must once have been a pristine teal, but it had faded into an odd mixture of light blues and grays. The top half was covered in homey faux wood paneling. The seating legally accommodated seven but in actuality the church van would fit as many people who did not mind sitting on laps and on the tan carpeted floor, or squeezing into corners. The cassette deck remained unused. As we got going, 1010 WINS would blast through the stereo with a crackle and a burst of static, a narrated mapping for Reverend Gayle, my grandpa, pastor of the church in the Bronx not far from Gun Hill, who would drive this first leg. Plus, a dissonant, semi-melodic mumble of hymns from Grandma, seated in the front passenger seat, as Grandpa—ever the nervous driver—would intermittently and suddenly press his right foot on the brake. Grandpa and I never understood what Grandma was trying to sing, but it always prompted Grandpa, after two minutes, to yell, “Marlene, ’top ya noise!”

This first leg of the ride was relatively smooth because it was short and still within a part of Brooklyn that Grandpa felt comfortable navigating. After fifteen minutes, Grandpa’s duties as church van driver would be passed on to “Uncle Robbie”—Dad’s best friend, my godfather, and Grandpa’s right-hand man—whom we picked up first. Grandpa would shift to the front passenger seat, Uncle Robbie would take the wheel, and Grandma would become my seat partner, which I appreciated because she usually packed candy to freshen my kielbasa breath. And Grandma would nearly cradle me in the front row.

Quickly, Uncle Robbie’s voice would add to the sounds of 1010 WINS, Grandma’s singing, and Grandpa’s audible aggravation: “Ya don’ kno, where ya go, mi headed to Ellis!”—our last stop in Brooklyn before drove more hurriedly to the other four boroughs. Add to the church van sounds the shocks, which were shocked that they ought ever to be used, every passenger feeling every pot hole, speed bump, unexpected slam on the brakes. Once we got to Ellis—another relative, this one related speciously by blood—she’d enter with so much bluster that I’d lose my seat and so would Grandma. Ellis’s first name, Josephine, had been replaced by her title, “Missionary,” which came with no official duties—it was just an honorific to sate her clamor for attention, prestige, and honor in our tiny church. Because more pickups were imminent, I sat on a hump in the back right-hand corner that covered the indent of the right rear wheel, just before we waded through the ever-present traffic on the RFK Bridge going toward the Bronx.

Elizabeth Bishop delighted in the postcard. It suited her poetic subject matter and her way of life—this poet of travel who was more often on the move than at home, “wherever that may be,” as she put it in her poem “Questions of Travel.” She told James Merrill in a postcard written in 1979 that she seldom wrote “anything of any value at the desk or in the room where I was supposed to be doing it—it’s always in someone else’s house, or in a bar, or standing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night.”

Since her death in 1979 and the publication of her selected correspondence, Bishop has become known as one of the great modern-day letter-writers. And yet inevitably something is lost when an editor transcribes a letter to prepare it for print: the quality of the correspondent’s hand (or the model of her typewriter), the paper used, cross-outs and typos, and everything else that fixes the letter in time and space. When it comes to a postcard, or a letter composed on a series of postcards (something Bishop enjoyed doing), we get none of the images, and even more is lost.

But what exactly? “What do we miss by not seeing these postcards?” Jonathan Ellis and Susan Rosenbaum ask in the catalogue for the exhibition of Bishop’s postcards they have curated at the Vassar College Library, on view through December 15, 2023. Vassar, which is home to Bishop’s papers, has published print and online catalogues of the exhibition. The print catalogue includes the curators’ richly suggestive introduction, front and back images of the exhibition’s sixty-three items, and appendices.

The answer to the curators’ question is: quite a lot. There is always some dialogue between the front and back of one of Bishop’s postcards. Take the one to Merrill commenting on her restless habits of composition. The front of the card (“the nicest left of my postcards from the Eastman Museum,” she says) is a reproduction of the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion study of a goat. Bishop doesn’t point out the analogy between her unsettled ways and the ambling goat. She knows Merrill will get it.

In 1965, a stone house near New Paltz was slated for auction. A cousin of the owners, a young and broke painter, begged them to let her buy it with her musician partner. She feared the house, which was limping along, would be torn down. Soon after the artists purchased the house, the painter heard a voice in her dreams: Take a chisel to the concrete stucco, and you will find golden stones beneath; use a crowbar to peel up the linoleum flooring, there are chestnut boards below; hammer at the drop ceilings, there are wide beams above. The painter did as she was told, and found what she was promised. The house began to breathe again. The painter lived in, or perhaps with, the house for more than five decades, long after the musician departed. There were other lovers, and a series of cats—some of the cats were reincarnations of the previous cats. She made films in the rooms and worked in a studio on the second floor. She became, in time, famous. Four years ago, she died in the downstairs bedroom.

This is the story, anyway, as told by the painter, who was known to take creative liberties. Carolee Schneemann named herself. “I made it up,” she said of the surname, “I wanted a big masculine German name.” She was born in 1939, if not 1934. Her birth certificate seems to have been altered with one careful pen stroke, closing off the four into a nine. Census records concur. Still, even last winter, at her first retrospective in the U.K., the Barbican’s Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, the museum materials showed not just the factual date, but the later date, the one Schneemann used when she told her life story.

Last December, I saw the house myself. Rachel Churner, the director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation, picked me up at the station and drove me to Rosendale, New York, where Rachel Helm, who caretakes the house, met us. There was snow on the ground, and we stomped what we could off our boots before the Rachels began my tour. Helm pointed first to the exterior stones Schneeman had uncovered, and then, inside along the walls, the horsehair insulation, coming unstuffed like a child’s favorite plush toy.

The house was built, I learned, in the 1750s. One of three on the street, it was constructed when the French Huguenots made a deal with the Lenape. The Huguenots designed these houses with sloped entries to the basements for livestock to enter—the animals’ body heat would rise, helping to warm the rooms above. In the 1820s, the town became the cement capital of North America, and the industry supported the community until the early twentieth century, when Rosendale cement fell out of favor. The town grew quiet. The house expanded upward and sideways, a patchwork of extensions and renovations, and there was a farm on the property—the farm failed. Finally, the young Schneemann, along with pianist and composer James Tenney, purchased the house.

I don’t remember learning to read. There is a story in my family: I am still a small child, my mother carries me in her arms as she stands in line at the bank, the bank teller sees my long golden hair and says, “What a pretty little girl.” I say “I am a boy, Janice,” and Janice screams and faints.

This was in the seventies in Kentucky, the years of The Exorcist and The Omen, the era of demonic children on-screen. Janice, primed by horror movies to see the supernatural in everything, was unable to imagine a less exciting explanation. It was impossible that a child so small could have read her name tag.

It is not lost on me that this myth of learning to read frighteningly early is, at the same time, about my indignant insistence that I am a boy. Nor is its brimstone whiff of my family’s demonic flavor lost on me. When my mother’s brother Charles Edward died, she told me, “He was the devil, John David, and you are just like him.”

***

I immediately found a taxi in front of my hotel, which I thought meant good luck for the venture ahead. The driver smiled. I smiled. I gave him the directions in Spanish, then French, and finally I gave him a slip of paper with an address. He smiled. We drove slowly up and down hilly streets and then into a valley of people selling carpets and kitchenware; a mosque towered above us. We passed a man walking with a live lamb draped over his shoulders. It was my second day in Morocco, and I was not yet used to such biblical scenes.

Ten minutes later, I saw the same spread of carpets and the same array of pots and pans, the same mosque, and I gestured to say, What’s going on? He shrugged and gave me another of his wide smiles. I was not reassured, thinking of stories of kidnapping and worse that supposedly happened in Morocco, stories I had admired written by a man I had admired since I was sixteen and whom I was on the way to meet. But then, finally, I arrived safe and free, ten minutes late and lighter by thirty dollars—with tip.

Paul Bowles was already there, waiting for me on a bench at the American School’s entranceway. He was very thin, slight, in a beige jacket, gray trousers, and a narrow, quiet tie, and was smoking a cigarette in a holder.

“I hope you had a good ride,” he said.