In recent months I have been listening to Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 2 (1945) and trying to describe something, anything, about it. Describe seems too weak a word when there exist long formal analyses of the piece: nevertheless, analysis seems easy, and description much more difficult.

It might be a vocabulary and grammar and syntax issue: I’m not sure we have any of those for music like this. Mervyn Cooke says of the first movement: “The overall effect … is highly unusual.” This is the reassuring resignation of a music writer.

***

Roland Barthes: “Music, by natural bent, is that which at once receives an adjective.”

In the months in which death swooped down on my father, circling on some days, and on others, its talons gripping the bars of the hospital bed where he lay dwindling, I found myself caught, as if on a Möbius tarmac strip, driving between Manhattan, where I live, New Haven, where I was teaching, and Long Island, where my father was dying. His death had been precipitated by a fall, but for years he had been kept alive by a series of red blood cell infusions; these had stopped working, and at almost ninety, one by one his faculties, until then intact, had one by one begun to fail. I had loved my father, but our relationship had not been an easy one, and his dying did not mitigate those complications nor make things easier between us. He was not a man who approved of my many casual arrangements and rearrangements or who participated in the give-and-take of ordinary life. He without fail believed he was right, but he also believed in portents and he was afraid of the dark. When I was a child his father died of the same blood disease that would kill him fifty years later, and early on the morning of that first death a flock of mourning doves alighted on the terraced lawn behind our house. Come and see, my father said. I was twelve, in my nightgown. A decade later, after my grandmother died, my father refused for the next ten years to sit in a darkened movie theater.

That fall, the autumn that turned into the winter of my father’s death, was for me more than usually fraught. A love affair had ended, or hadn’t—all that remained to be seen—but it meant that, as we were not speaking, he did not know that my father was dying, and I did not break our silence to tell him. A beloved dog, belonging to my middle daughter, a beautiful white Pyrenees, had developed epilepsy, which had resulted in seizures; during one seizure, the dog had badly broken her leg running into a tree; the decision was to put her down; my daughter, too, had a broken heart. I had an allergic reaction to my COVID booster, which resulted in a virulent raised rash all over my torso. And so on. Every Tuesday I drove eighty miles to New Haven from my house in Harlem, up the Saw Mill past Spuyten Duyvil and over to the Merritt Parkway, where the autumn leaves were so beautiful it was like driving up the bloodstream of a unicorn, and then from New Haven the next day one hundred miles to Long Island, over the Whitestone Bridge. My father had gout; he had pneumonia; he had dementia. He recognized me, or not. Afterward, I drove back over the Triborough to New York. The bridges were sutures over the bays and rivers. At the end of these trips I would park the car or put it in a garage a few blocks away from the house, climb up the stoop, go through the crowded little vestibule where steam hung in the air from the radiator, and then sit, still wearing my coat on the little sofa that was pushed against the wall. Sometimes I sat there for a few minutes, but more usually, I sat there for hours.

The sofa is a family relic. When I was first married, we found, in the attic space of a friend’s old chicken coop, the skeleton of a sofa. We were living in a tiny apartment on West End Avenue; the appeal of the forlorn sofa was that it was small. We brought it back in pieces tied to the roof of the car, and a few weeks later I had it re-covered with seven yards of pale silk twill embroidered with a pattern of pale red stripes and pink and yellow flowers: the choice of a person who has not yet had children or cats. A decade later the sofa moved to a larger apartment overlooking Morningside Park. By then I had acquired three children and a second husband, who conceived a deep dislike of the sofa, which he said was a Victorian copy of an early eighteenth-century design. There was a baby on the way. The brocade flowers unraveled. Laundry piled up on the sofa. When we moved to a drafty house down below the park, the sofa, now shreds, as the children liked to pick at the embroidery, was put between the windows at the end of the dining room until, in a frenzy of domestic renovation, it was shoved against the wall by the front door.

A peculiarity of the house to which we moved is that it is only fifteen feet wide. Sitting on the sofa in my coat, still as a figure hacked from stone, I looked almost directly into a corner formed by the back of another sofa, the curve of the piano, and the dim recess of the fireplace, encased in black slate. A space of no space. Before my father’s fall that summer, I was in Rome, walking almost every afternoon from Monti, near the Colosseum, east through the Porta Pia and then down to the Via delle Quattro Fontane and then to the river. The Italian architect Francesco Borromini, who often built in almost impossible configurations and made the air in those spaces eddy as if awhirl with swallows, was a master of liminal space, of small bivouacs, places to secret the self. Standing across the street and gazing at the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, it is difficult to see the entire facade from the street, jammed in the intersection of four streets. The visitor enters through a green door into a tiny elliptical anteroom that shudders open to the small nave; above, an oval full of light, punctuated by embossed diamonds and hexagons, lifts up the space of the church like a kite held aloft by the sky at the end of a string. Often there are students drawing in the pews, their necks craned upward. Sometimes I would sit there, too. My father was not a handy man, but one of the things he did make for me were kites out of newspaper, and I could imagine those kites swooping above the nave as they had swooped and veered over Riverside Park, the newsprint too far away to read. When I first came to Italy, when I was very young, I lived in Perugia, down one of the streets winding from the piazza, and every night we came to sit by the fountain, where at dusk the starlings spiraled above it like a column of ash and then flitted back down to eat the crumbs of bread we left for them.

X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X is opening at the Metropolitan Opera on November 3. It originally premiered in 1986 at New York City Opera and is the result of a collaboration between three cousins—Anthony Davis, who wrote the music; Christopher Davis, who wrote the story; and Thulani Davis, who wrote the libretto. I spoke with Thulani Davis on the phone about the niche art of writing a libretto, how she transformed Malcolm X’s speech into arias, and the many American stories that might be operas.

INTERVIEWER

How did you first approach writing the libretto for X, back in 1981?

My mom liked to call the color, half-endearingly, “baby-shit brown.” I’m told Subaru manufactured vehicles in that particular color for only one year, 2011. The biggest Outback model—far from cute. I wouldn’t say that I lived out of it, though that’s not too far off. I was in college at the time, and my living situation consisted of sleeping on a three-season porch in Colorado Springs. I bought the car in Boston, the summer before my junior year, and threw a futon mattress in the back. By the time I got to my porch, I kept as many clothes in my room as I did in the back of the car. Wherever I slept, the temperature was always the same inside as out, and most mornings I was drowning in high-altitude sunshine.

It was a dirty car. If I was with friends and we stepped out of a bar and saw a dumpster in the parking lot, someone would say, “Look, it’s the passenger seat of K’s car.” Lots of laughs. Once, driving from Colorado Springs to Moab, Utah, half the rear bumper released itself from the frame. I could see it waving through the back windshield like a shit-brown flag against the canyons and red dust. I kept promising to plastic-weld the bumper back together, but a Frankenstein-like stitch job with black tape did the job well enough. As they say: duct tape will fix anything but a broken heart. My friends took to calling the car “Dirty Gerty,” with a flair for rhyme. Why Gertrude? Who knows.

The beginning of the end for Gerty came at high speed. It’s not as frightening as that might sound. Visiting home after graduation, near Boston, I was doing eighty on Route 2 when the car stalled. I pulled over to the side of the road and got it started again. On a side street, after I came to a complete stop, the engine stalled again. It was an automatic. By the time I got it to a garage, I was basically keeping a hand, twist-ready, on the key in the ignition. Blown transmission, not worth replacing, considering the condition of the car. After three years, close to a hundred thousand miles, and nights spent in at least half of the lower 48 (MA, VT, ME, NH, RI, NY, PA, MD, VA, OH, IL, IN, IA, ID, MI, MN, MO, KS, NE, CO, UT, AZ, NM, CA, OR, WA) and five Canadian provinces (NB, NS, ON, PE, QC), I donated Gerty to charity.

Because it was a limited model-color run, I don’t see too many Gertys out on the roads. I saw one this morning. In my chest, I felt that familiar flip, my foot pressing the pedal to the floor, climbing something steep, looking over at a friend, Max or Rowan, Fiona or Hollis, with a sea of cans and coffee mugs at their feet.

In an interview in our Fall issue, Robert Glück told Lucy Ives, “I think about the workshops I ran at Small Press Traffic in the seventies and eighties, how reading became a part of writing. We were reading our lives and living our fictions.” We asked Glück—whose free community workshops spearheaded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco—for a syllabus from one of his former classes. This one is from a course called The Displaced Person.

Here is my catalog description: This M.F.A.-level course in fiction explores—through readings, writing assignments, and critical essays—the many ways in which alienation defines the self, from Lacan’s mirror stage, where the self comes to be organized around an image outside of the body, to the various kinds of exile we experience by virtue of class, age, race, and sexuality, as well as the hatred of the other, the discontents of language, and the economies of pleasure that society seems to be founded on.

I assigned class presentations, creative responses based on my prompts, and brief critical responses—two observations supported by examples. Discrete observations allow students to express and get past initial resistance.

My class anthology was more of an environment than a set syllabus. I also taught books—Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik. I had a session on the Gnostics and imported Bruce Boone to talk about them.

Some of the readings:

I wrote this lecture in August 2023 and delivered it at Columbia University at the end of September. Nine days later, on October 7, the military wing of Hamas, the organization in power in the Gaza Strip, launched a surprise attack by air, sea, and land on the Israeli military stations along the partition fence, a nearby rave, and several kibbutzim. Around 1,400 Israelis were killed and more than 200 were taken hostage.

Since then, the Israeli war machine has roared into action. As of this writing, more than 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed so far, almost 3,000 of them children (the average age of inhabitants of the Gaza Strip is eighteen). More than 1,600 are trapped under the rubble. Entire families have been wiped out. The bombing has not stopped. On October 13, Israel ordered the inhabitants of the north part of the Gaza Strip—nearly 1.1 million people—to evacuate. The photographs of those who did leave chillingly recalled the photographs of the refugees of 1948, when Zionist militias drove more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. This event is known in Arabic as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” and is considered by many to be ongoing. The Israelis proceeded to bomb this safe route, killing many of those who were attempting to flee to safety. Israelis continue to bomb the north and are now also bombing the south. The Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Raz Segal has called these events “a textbook case of genocide.”

Clearly, the numbers I cite in this lecture have rapidly become out of date: according to Al Jazeera, the number of Palestinian political prisoners has doubled since September, to ten thousand. I drew my initial statistics from reports by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza. Raji Sourani, the director of the center and Gaza’s leading human rights lawyer, is said to be alive, but his house was bombed earlier this week. It is difficult to get clear information, as Israel has cut off all electricity in Gaza as well as access to water, food, and fuel. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has not published an updated report in over two weeks. The figure I cite of $158 billion given by the United States to Israel, largely in military aid, also requires updating: the Biden administration has just pledged to send Israel an additional $14.3 billion in military support.

Two questions come to me as I think about this lecture now: the first is about turning points, which is how I begin. I claim below that we can only identify turning points in retrospect. I do think we can at present agree with relative certainty, given the speed and violence with which the cogs are rotating, that we are in one now; what we do not know is in which direction they are turning.

Each summer, when they couldn’t stand the city anymore, when the heat was unbearable, and they had a brief reprieve, they drove for three days to the middle of the country to stay at a log cabin on a lake that her grandfather had built now a century ago and where she had spent summers during her childhood. Her father, her children’s grandfather, and his sister, her aunt, would drive up the eight hours from Chicago and spend a week with them so that they could be around her two small children.

The previous summer, in the week before her father and her aunt arrived, she was able to relax into the lassitude that overtook her from being there, and possibly as the result of the long series of days in the car, with two children to monitor and soothe and attempt to entertain. That summer, after having just finished a period of work, she spent most of the time on the bed in the newer room that the four of them stayed in. She would sit, on the old gray-green sheets, the dog curled up next to her, watching the two children and their father through the window, making notes in her notebook. She sat there amidst the green light of the lake and the surrounding green and sketched out the familiar geometry of the trees surrounding the lake, the fallen trunk the ducks often slept on. She attempted to sketch in pen the white pine tree directly outside her window, the surging upwards of the boughs, like a series of prickly mustaches.

The mother showed the drawings to her oldest in the morning, who became jealous of her notebooks scattered across the bed and demanded her own small notebook, which they later purchased in town, one for both of the small children. She wondered, then and now, if they would remember the sound of their mother’s pen, her illegible scratching that probably looked to them like the branches on a tree.

On their daily morning walk, they picked raspberries by the road, the littlest in wet overalls. Never in these woods growing up had she seen raspberries. She wondered whether it had something to do with the heat and heavy rains of the past years.

There’s a theory I like that suggests why the nineteenth century is so rich in ghost stories and hauntings. Carbon monoxide poisoning from gas lamps.

Street lighting and indoor lighting burned coal gas, which is sooty and noxious. It gives off methane and carbon monoxide. Outdoors, the flickering flames of the gas lamps pumped carbon monoxide into the air—air that was often trapped low down in the narrow streets and cramped courtyards of industrial cities and towns. Indoors, windows closed against the chilly weather prevented fresh oxygen from reaching those sitting up late by lamplight.

Low-level carbon monoxide poisoning produces symptoms of choking, dizziness, paranoia, including feelings of dread, and hallucinations. Where better to hallucinate than in the already dark and shadowy streets of Victorian London? Or in the muffled and stifling interiors of New England?

Ghosts abounded—but were they real?

In July 2024 — nine years ago — We Need Diverse Books was founded. The nonprofit dedicated to addressing the lack of diversity in publishing emerged in response to yet another major book event showcasing a slate of white authors as their stars…plus Grumpy Cat. The movement to call out the whiteness of the industry was not new, but that year, it hit a fever pitch.

Malinda Lo tracked queer YA books published starting in 2011, continuing in 2012, 2013, and pulling together a great chart documenting change in this category between 2003 and 2013. Lo also tracked diversity in the YA bestsellers, as seen in Publishers Weekly in 2012, as well as diversity within the Young Adult Library Services Association’s annual Best Fiction for Young Adults list. Her number crunching on The New York Times Best Seller List in YA for 2013 made clear how few authors of color and characters of color were being given the budgets to succeed, if they were being published in any representative manner by the industry at all.

The act of reading comes with many benefits for readers. Reading increases brain activity, according to one 2013 study, improves skills associated with “building, navigating, and maintaining social relationships,” increases a reader’s vocabulary, and can even lower blood pressure and heart rate after reading for only 30 minutes. It’s pretty established that reading is good for you. But it’s not exactly the coolest hobby around. In a world of daredevil hobbies, sports enthusiasts, and concert-goers, staying in on a Friday with a book isn’t the most exciting tale to tell to your coworkers come Monday morning. To non-readers, reading can seem downright boring.

But reading is so cool! With the assistance of celebrities spotted with books out in the wild, TikTok’s push to get reading into the mainstream again, and the rebellion of reading certain books, it’s the coolest it has ever been. However, certain books are maybe ever so slightly cooler to be seen reading. While it’s super cool to own what you like without feeling the shame of other people’s opinions, those a little more conscious of the wandering eye of strangers might lean toward books that have a cooler sense about them.

Whether it’s because of their cover, because TikTok loves it, or your favorite celebrity has sung its praises, here are ten cool lit fit books to pick up as we head into cool girl fall.