Welcome to your weekly round-up of all the bookish news worth talking about.

As a bonus for All Access members, here are a bunch of interesting links we didn’t quite get to.

It’s Sapphic September! It’s always a good time to read sapphic books, in my opinion, but this is a great excuse to recommend some of my favourites. If you want my full reviews on these and hundreds of others, you can check out the Lesbrary, especially the recommendations list. I’ve been reviewing sapphic books there for over a decade.

There are plenty of sapphic graphic novels I’ve read and loved over the years, but here are my top five at this exact moment. They range from heartwarming love stories to a horror graphic novel about cannibalism and capitalism, but they’re all books that have stuck with me. I’d love to hear about your favourites in the comments!

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The fight against book bans in schools, public libraries, and elsewhere across the map is ongoing, and the tireless work of keeping books accessible and on shelves has been heaped on the shoulders of many who recognize the negative impact these bans have on communities. Librarian Amanda Jones is one such individual who took a stand against book banning in her Louisiana parish. Read on for an excerpt from her story about how one decision to speak up against bans during a library board meeting changed her life and encouraged others to do the same.

Early in the summer of 2022, I had spoken to several friends of mine who worked at our public library. There was rumor afoot that a library board member had been making comments about LGBTQIA+ books and was questioning the purchase of certain books. These librarians all had an impending sense of doom that there would be a move to censor books with LGBTQIA+ characters.

Here’s this week’s library news to have on your radar. We’ve got a long list of censorship updates, a rundown of the recent controversy surrounding NaNoWriMo, and more.

Libraries & Librarians

News Updates

Nearly two dozen Philadelphia libraries have closed this summer due to A/C issues.

More than 180 UK public libraries have closed or been handed to volunteers since 2016.

NPR looks at how some states are trying to fight the rising costs of eBooks for libraries.

Cool Library Updates

This Las Vegas librarian is using R&B to bring kids into the library.

Following this week’s disastrous finale of The Bachelorette, I’ve had it up to here. At some point, this show used to kind of (sort of maybe) be about falling in love. But that premise seems all but abandoned in favor of being able to boast the most dramatic season ever. The problem with promising that every season? At some point, it stops being about human emotions, and it starts feeling exploitative. It’s seriously getting to the point where I’m considering abandoning the franchise all together.

Fiction about reality TV shows allows us to experience the drama of other people’s lives without real people’s emotions actually being involved. And books like this one end up being kind of wish fulfillment, too. Because when a season ends as disastrously as Jenn Tran’s season just ended, don’t we all just wish Jenn had ditched all these garbage men and ran off with one of the female contestants from the previous season?

The following five letters were written by the poet Seamus Heaney, all in the spring of 1995. The Paris Review’s interview with Heaney, referenced in his letter to Henri Cole, is available here; two of his poems appeared in the magazine in 1979.

To Ted Hughes

March 14, 1995

There is enormous pleasure to be had in maintaining at least two, if not several, parallel lives. Of course, there are the pleasures of concealment and control, but the true indulgence is in occupying the vast reaches of interior space, populated by all the aspects of yourself that don’t end up in any social circle, any relationship, any reputation, and so don’t really get expressed at all; a big, sumptuous, light-filled nothing, the real you. You find it especially at the age of, say, twenty-five, on an airplane between two major cities, one in which you live and the other in which your girlfriend lives, the latter being where she carries on flings she takes little trouble to conceal, and the former being where you’ve discovered the cover afforded by being mistreated and have decided to carry on a fling of your own. Up there, between clouds, the contradictions don’t really clash, they just float beside one another. It’s useful to float along with them, becoming comfortable with the illogic and the fabrication, particularly when, for example, you are seated beside your new fling at a dinner party, trying not to let on.

“Are you having an affair with ——?” Someone had put the question to me the day before the party, and the word affair had rung so hollow that when I answered in the negative it didn’t even feel like a lie. I was mostly struck by the use of the word itself, which gave the whole thing a certain sophistication. But still, I chafed. “Why are you asking?” “I wouldn’t care if you were.” “Why would you?” “I said I wouldn’t.” In those days, I would snap at questions or laugh them off. How badly I must have wanted to be found out.

Back then—all of us in grad school—we met weekly for dinner. It began as a way of observing Shabbat as my roommate rediscovered his Judaism, or rediscovered himself in relation to Judaism, or else rediscovered everything, concluding that within the world as it existed there was no way to disentangle himself from his religion. I am not Jewish but Catholic, by then more or less totally lapsed, and while spending most of my time around this brilliant, intense religious seeker certainly shunted me along toward my own reckoning with faith, what these dinners really inspired in me was a taste for dinners. But then, maybe there was something irrepressibly if obliquely religious about even this. Around a ruined table, confessions can be offered or extracted at will, friendships forged and sundered, and the truth, or what you believe to be the truth, can be loudly declared only to be shrugged off the next morning as drunken enthusiasm. You can fake it, and have it count, or you can mean it, and have it not count.

The Friday gatherings soon swelled to two-part binges: the first, small group who came early to eat matzo soup and drink blessed wine; the second, smoke-filled blowouts with whoever happened to drop by, filling our large apartment and terrorizing our anonymous neighbors with late-night shouting, nearly everyone disastrously drunk by the end. The first group would remain secretly intact throughout the second half of the party even if we dispersed physically among the larger party, silently faithful to the privacy we had shared before everyone else had arrived. I prided myself on always remembering to turn on a lamp when I went to bed, so that my roommate could read on Sabbath morning as I slept off the hangovers to which he seemed miraculously immune.

Anne Serre’s “That Summer,” which appears in the new Summer issue of  The Paris Review, opens with an anticlimactic claim: “That summer we had decided we were past caring.” But the story that follows is packed with drama. Over the course of three pages, it chronicles interactions among four characters in a family—two of whom are institutionalized. There are two deaths. Serre’s narrator’s reflections on her family dynamics, charged and nuanced, are the main attraction. They bring to light entire dimensions of experience; when life has such a finely wrought interior, death is literally the afterthought. 

“That Summer” previously appeared in French, in Au cœur d’un été tout en or, a collection of stories of similar brevity. That was not Serre’s first book of short-shorts, though her books available in English are made up of longer texts. They include three short novels—The Governesses, The Beginners, and A Leopard-Skin Hat—and The Fool and Other Moral Tales, a collection of novellas. All are translated by Mark Hutchinson, who is a longtime friend. Her untranslated works include Voyage avec Vila-Matas, which riffs on an experience of reading Serre’s Spanish contemporary, going so far as to feature a fictionalized version of Enrique Vila-Matas, and Grande tiqueté, written in a combination of French and a language Serre invented for the purpose. In her latest novel, Notre si chère vieille dame auteur, an elderly authoress whose death is imminent directs the process of assembling the manuscript that she has, already, left behind.

This interview was conducted primarily over email. A WhatsApp call was thwarted by “enormous storms” in the Auvergne region where, for two months out of the year, Serre lives, in a house that was also her grandparents’. As in Paris, she lives alone, something she has wanted since her adolescence. Asked if she would field a personal question, the author was encouraging. “Literature is personal,” she said.

—Jacqueline Feldman

For millions of people in the Americas, our Indigenous heritage is something tinged with mystery. We look into a mirror and believe we see the Mayan, the Aztec, or the Apache in our faces. The hint of a high cheekbone; the very loud and obvious statement of our cinnamon or copper skin. We sense a native great-great-grandparent in our squat or long torsos, in the shape of our eyes, in our gait, and in the emotions and the spirits that drift over us at times of joy and loss. But the particulars of our Indigeneity, the weighty and grounded facts of it, have been erased from our history.

In my Guatemalan-immigrant childhood, the great Mayan jungle city of Tikal was a symbol of the civilization in our blood. Despite the humility of our present in seventies Los Angeles—my mother was a store cashier, my father a parking-lot valet—we were once an empire. My father suggested that a personal, familial greatness was there in our Mayan heritage, waiting to reawaken. I could not trace who my Mayan forebears were, exactly. But I knew the Maya were in me because I was a guatemalteco; or, in the hyphenated ethnic nomenclature of the time, a “Guatemalan-American.” Only now do I realize how deeply fraught the idea of being “Guatemalan” truly is. “Guatemala” is a way of glossing over the cultural collisions and the racial violence that produced a country centered in the mountain jungles and river valleys where Mayan peoples ruled themselves until Europeans came.

Men of Maize is Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mayan masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses, a deep dive into the forces that made and kept the Maya a subservient caste, and the perpetual resistance that kept Guatemala’s many Mayan cultures alive and resilient. Like most people born in Guatemala, Asturias more than likely had some Indigenous ancestors, even though his father, a judge, was among the minority of Guatemalans who could trace their Spanish heritage to the seventeenth century. When the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (later the subject of Asturias’s novel Mr. President) sent the future author’s father and family into an internal exile in the Mayan‑centric world of provincial Alta Verapaz, the young Miguel Ángel fell deep into the great well of Indigenous culture for the first time.

In the 1920s, Asturias left for Paris to study. Soon he would become a member of a generation of Latin American thinkers influenced by the Eurocentric aesthetics and worldviews of the time: modernism, surrealism, socialism. In his own artistic practice, these ideas would fuse with the Indigenous spirituality and consciousness of the Americas. The life stories and the mythology of common Mayan and “mixed” folk of Guatemala would appear in his work, and influence it, again and again. In Men of Maize, he rejected the superficiality and sentimentality to be found in so many works about Indigenous cultures written by outsiders. The Mayan families in the novel are not hapless, helpless victims living out one tragedy after another in the face of the relentless march of modernity. Instead, in a frenzy of surreal stories and images, their ghosts and folktales and visions take over the narrative. Darkness comes streaming out of an anthill. A postman transforms into a coyote. Fire sweeps across the corn‑covered landscape, both as a tool of ruthless capitalism and as an agent of peasant retribution. In this fashion, Asturias reimagined the birth of Guatemala as a mad, disorderly event that unleashed countless personal and familial passions: betrayal, mourning, love, loyalty, and revenge.

A form of life that keeps itself in relation to a poetic practice, however that might be, is always in the studio, always in its studio.

Its—but in what way do that place and practice belong to it? Isn’t the opposite true—that this form of life is at the mercy of its studio?

***

In the mess of papers and books, open or piled upon one another, in the disordered scene of brushes and paints, canvases leaning against the wall, the studio preserves the rough drafts of creation; it records the traces of the arduous process leading from potentiality to act, from the hand that writes to the written page, from the palette to the painting. The studio is the image of potentiality—of the writer’s potentiality to write, of the painter’s or sculptor’s potentiality to paint or sculpt. Attempting to describe one’s own studio thus means attempting to describe the modes and forms of one’s own potentiality—a task that is, at least on first glance, impossible.

Earlier this year, the visionary poetry critic Helen Vendler died at the age of ninety. After her death, the writer and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas—author of  The Shadow of the Object, Cracking Up, and Meaning and Melancholia, among many others—collected a correspondence between himself and Vendler that unfolded over email during the last two years of her life, which began as Vendler was clearing out her office at Harvard in 2022. These emails, which have been selected and edited by the Review (with spelling and punctuation left unchanged), touch on the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry; the experience of aging in all its forms; and the growth of a friendship, and understanding, between Bollas and Vendler. 

January 22, 2022

Dear Christopher Bollas,

There was an air of subdued anticipation at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine as we waited for Philippe Petit to take the stage. A clarinetist roved through the church improvising variations on Gershwin in spurts, making it hard to tell if the event, which was being held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers, had begun. Eventually, the lights dimmed and we were told to turn off our phones, as even a single lit screen in the audience might cause Petit to fall from his tightrope. Music started, but so quietly that it seemed like it was being played from a phone, while a candlelit procession made its way down the nave. Large boards were set up, on which footage of the Twin Towers being constructed was projected. A group of child dancers imitated Petit’s walk along the ground, and were followed by a professional whistler. After we were shuffled through this sequence that felt like a performed version of ADHD, Petit finally appeared and began walking, first meekly, then quickly, to Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” wearing a white jacket laced with gold.

The original Twin Towers walk took place on the morning of August 7, 1974, after Petit and a group of conspirators broke into the World Trade Center while it was still partially under construction, and used a bow and arrow to span a tightrope between the towers. Petit walked, ran, lay down, and knelt on the wire, a quarter of a mile in the air, as the city looked on from below. It had taken more than eight months of meticulous planning to carry out the performance, including creating a mock-up of the distance between the Towers on a field in France, studying their engineering, and using various disguises and fake IDs to gain access to them. These heist-like aspects (it is referred to as “the coup”) have made it ripe material for movies including Man on Wire and The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit and featuring CGI Twin Towers.

***

Three weeks before the performance, Petit held a reception in anticipation of the event on the eightieth floor of 3 World Trade Center. I exited the elevator into a space with perhaps the most impressive view of New York I’d ever seen. Under the influence of the height and temperature change (it was a hundred degrees outside that day), the vista was so impressive that it was almost addictive; it was hard to pull myself away from the windows, as though the space were designed to keep me there, like the interior of a casino.

Recently, I found myself at the Tate Modern in London, accompanied by my youngest daughter, to see Music of the Mind, a retrospective of the work of Yoko Ono: her drawings, postcards, films, and musical scores. Accompanied is perhaps too easy a word. When told my daughter I wanted to go, she said, “Really?” “Yes,” I said. “Really.”  

A myth about Yoko Ono is that she came from nowhere and became a destroyer of worlds. The truth is otherwise. Yoko Ono—now ninety-one—was born in 1933, in Tokyo. Her father was a successful banker and a gifted classical pianist; her mother an art collector and philanthropist. Ono attended a progressive nursery school where the emphasis was on music: the children were taught perfect pitch and encouraged to listen to everyday sounds and translate them into musical notes. In 1943, she and her brother were evacuated to the countryside. Basic provisions were scarce. For hours, they lay on their backs looking at the sky. They said to each other: “Imagine good things to eat. Imagine the war is over.” She returned to Tokyo in 1945. She was president of her high school drama club; in a photo taken at the time, her hair is bobbed and she is wearing what looks like a cashmere sweater set. At Gakushuin University, she was the first female student to major in philosophy. Her family relocated to Scarsdale, in Westchester County; she enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied music. After three years, she dropped out and moved to New York, supporting herself by teaching traditional crafts at the Japan Society. In 1960, she rents a loft downtown, at 112 Chambers Street, and begins to host musical performances.

Word gets around. John Cage plays. Marcel Duchamp is in the audience. Peggy Guggenheim drops by. Ono is twenty-six, twenty-seven years old—a member of a loose band of international artists who operate under the name Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik. She rejects the term performance art; instead her works are often a series of instructions, by which the viewer can construct or imagine or catalog their own perceptions: art as collaboration. At the Tate, a series of postcards was tacked to the wall, printed with multiple-choice statements such as these:

1) I like to draw circles.
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Hello from Denali! The weather is cold and the mountains are gorgeous. But I’m going to briefly dive back into the library world for you lovely folks, so here we go.

Libraries & Librarians

News Updates

The Digital Public Library of America and the Independent Publishers Group have teamed up to offer libraries an ebook ownership option.

York County Libraries (PA) may have to reduce operating hours next year as a result of budgetary constraints and inflation.

Cool Library Updates

Indianapolis’ first library for Black residents reopens through a school librarian’s leadership.

How Iowa libraries serve communities in the digital age.

Here are the posts that, for whatever reason, got the most activity this week:

The Best Books About the ’80s and ’90s

Those times are long gone, as my eight-year-old loves to remind me, and so if you’re like me, and want some nostalgic reads or an escape from *waves hands* all of this, grab your favorite snack—bonus points if it’s something that was also around in the ’80s or ’90s (does anyone else remember the candy Bonkers?? SO good, right?)—and let’s take a look at some of the best books about the ’80s and ’90s.

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

The order is shuffled a bit from last week, but to add a more variety, I’ve included the top five most read books on Goodreads last week in three countries around the world. This time: Denmark, Malaysia, and Portugal. Denmark’s and Portugal’s most read titles this week are both not (yet?) available in English.

The Biggest Book Club Books Coming Out This Fall

There’s a natural breeze and I can smell people cooking soup. And listen, I am all for leaving this hell of a summer behind us. Turns out the book world is, too. As various fall reading lists have been popping up, I’ve selected a few books that I think will be on everyone’s TBRs this fall.

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION at 30

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the theatrical release of The Shawshank Redemption,here is our Book Nerd Movie Club episode about the novella and film. A classic.