2025 Reading Log

This year, the ninety or so books that I read have been divided into five categories: Fiction & Literature Studies, Poetry & Poetics, Art & Art Matters, Detectives & Spies & Mysteries, and Non-Fiction.

Fiction & Literature Studies

Kaveh Akbar. Martyr! Penguin, 2024. I slowly began to despise the quote from the NY Times which is plastered in all caps across the front cover that “Martyr! is nothing short of miraculous.” I have to admit that I struggled throughout much of Martyr! It was very hard for me to be too invested in a college-age screw-up, wanna-be writer who was drunk or stoned a fair amount of the novel and had no respect for himself. Cyrus, an Iranian-American and orphan, struggling to find any value in his own life, thinks he might want to write something that would honor his parents before he kills himself. (His mother had been one of the passengers on board the Iranian commercial airplane mistakenly shot down by the USS Vincennes on July 3, 1988.) But mostly he fails to make progress and spends time flagellating himself, making himself and his boyfriend miserable. Eventually, he reads about an Iranian-American artist who is dying of cancer and who is performing a Marina Abramović-like performance at the Brooklyn Museum called “Death-Speak,” in which she sits at a table in a gallery and simply talks to any museum visitor who wishes to speak to her. Cyrus manages to converse with her several days in a row, which becomes revelatory for him. The final fifty-some-odd pages, after the performance artist’s death, are terrific (except for a very unnecessary Coda), as are sporadic bits and pieces of Martyr! But by the end, I was very grateful to be rid of Cyrus. I would love to see Akbar write about a different set of characters.

Oana Aristide. Under the Blue. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2022. This is a double-track pandemic novel, written before the Covid pandemic, but mildly altered, according to the author, when reality caught up with her fiction in 2020. In the main track, two professional woman and a male artist flee London and a global pandemic for a rural British cottage. But as they begin to suspect that most of the when world’s population has likely died, they worry that Europe’s nuclear reactors will soon overheat. So they begin the painstaking drive to Africa, through abandoned cities, barricaded towns, and endless obstacles. Africa, they presume, will be the safest location for them from the radiation they expect to begin descending any day. In the second track, two scientists at a location in the Arctic Circle are secretly feeding computers with AI to try to make them as intelligent as humans. Before long, one of the computers is lecturing the scientists on ethics and other failures of civilization. The premise is so promising, and the big ideas that Aristide raises are nicely handled, but the ending just didn’t click for me.

Claire-Louise Bennett. Checkout 19. London: Jonathan Cape, 2021. For more than 200 pages, this much-hyped novel was very disappointing and unoriginal. Checkout 19 is about the narrator’s development from a young girl into a student into a young women, while she discovers that writing is the key that unlocks her imagination. She revels in her ability to pull characters and stories out of thin air, but the stories that she tells I found uninspiring, such as a long one about Tarquin Superbus, his housekeeper Rosalia, and a Doctor who “swans off” to Vienna and returns with “gourmet gobstoppers” (much of which is lifted from Elias Canetti’s novel Auto-da-Fe). The long lists of the books that she reads will warm a book lover’s heart. But only when the narrator discovers her affinity for the British writer Ann Quin and has her own deeply disturbing life event, when there are less than fifty pages to go, did Bennett’s book become complex enough to be intriguing. On the plus side, every page of the book emanates with a powerful feminist example.

André Breton. Nadja. New York Review of Books, 2025. The first new translation into English since 1960 of Breton’s famous 1928 Surrealist novel comes from prolific French translator and writer Mark Polizzotti, who admits he is not a poet, like the translator of the Grove Press 1960 edition. Polizzotti says that he has “labored” to make Nadja “more comprehensible” to the English reader, fixing “a surprising number of mistranslations and misreadings” that he found in Howard’s version. (Howard died in 2022.) What is new in the NYRB volume, in Polizzotti’s Introduction, is updated biographical information on the woman who Breton called Nadja, based upon research that has only come to light in recent years. Polizzotti also appends a helpful series of Notes, to assist the English reader who might miss many of the French references in Breton’s text.

Michel Butor. Mobile: A Study for the Representation of the United States. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Butor’s inimitable book has sat on my bookshelf for a decade or two. I have dipped into it, but never traversed it from cover to cover before. This feels like the 20th century echo to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835-1840); it’s a prescient, foreigner’s take on America in the 1960s, American history, and America’s problems (still). Mobile (there’s a pun on the adjective and the American cities named Mobile) is a totally unclassifiable book in which Butor riffs on America, using the country’s many cities as an endless series of jumping off points. The book (which is dedicated to the memory of Jackson Pollock, by the way) is sometimes structured around states, then around city names, but then all hell breaks loose. For every city, Butor will jump to a city of the same name elsewhere in the U.S. From Florence, Colorado to Florence, Arizona. From Lebanon, New Jersey, to the Lebanons of three more states. As Butor passes through these areas (figuratively, that is) he reveals bits of local history and quotes some of the local tourist propaganda. He also reports of the status of the Negro situation and segregation, and tells us something about the history of the Native American tribes that once resided there (whenever appropriate). He quotes from the Salem witch trials and other selected moments from American history. He names the local rivers and one of the ice cream flavors at the local Howard Johnson restaurant (they used to be everywhere). He reports on whatever else he thinks we need to know. Fifty-one years later, we still need to hear all this stuff from a Frenchman.

Teju Cole. Pharmakon. Mack, 2024. One could get tangled up in the weeds forever trying to understand what pharmakon meant to Plato or Jacques Derrida, so I won’t go there. Teju Cole’s book primarily consists of his brilliant color photographs, interspersed with very (and I mean very) brief texts (only one exceeds a page). In so many ways, his photographs are about vision—how we look, what we don’t see, what fakes our eyes out, what we see when we look closer. The photographs are in color, but they mostly tend towards a monochrome range—all creams or all blues, and so on. All but one or two are outdoors and none show people. The texts are very short, ominous fictions that take place in unknown locations. There are no beginnings or endings. Even the situations taking place seem unclear. It’s tempting to label them Kafkaesque, with a touch of Twilight Zone.

Don DeLillo. Libra. Library. Penguin, 1988. DeLillo has been writing about the American outlier for much of his career, the loners, kooks, paranoids, and geniuses that seem to thrive in our death-cult nation. Lee Harvey Oswald, born under the sign of Libra, is perhaps the epitome of these loners—aggrieved, paranoid, cocky, ambitious, susceptible. DeLillo’s alternative history of the Kennedy assassination is also a novel about language, about the acronyms, cryptograms, and lingo of the CIA; the language of revolution, Communism, Marxism, and Trotsky; the brutal language of the Marine brig; the language of US government propaganda abroad; Lee learning Russian and his Russian wife learning English. “After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation.” They can just go buy a rifle and shoot somebody famous.

Don DeLillo. Mao II. Penguin, 1991. Once again, DeLillo centers a novel around a persnickety recluse, this time a famous writer who has been working on his latest novel for years, and is holed up with Scott, his secretary/archivist, and Karen, a one-time Moonie, who is the lover of both men. Bill, the writer, becomes involved in a plan to free a poet who has been kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists in Beirut. The other key character is Brita, a photographer aiming to make portraits of as many writers as she can. As always, DeLillo raises many topics of interest, but perhaps the overarching one is whether art (the novel or photography or the work of Andy Warhol, for example) can overcome mankind’s need to listen to a Messiah’s promise of unity and security. “We will all be a single family soon,” Karen says. “Because the day is coming. Because the total vision is being seen.” Regardless whether its the Rev. Sun Myung Moon or the leader of a terrorist organization, that voice is compelling.

Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff. Your Name Here. Dalkey Archive Press, 2025. Why, oh, why did I spend any time reading this? Yes, it’s a giant, baggy, novel-like thing about trying and failing to jointly write and publish novel, which is conceptually OK. But it’s full of bad and boring writing. I just didn’t care about anything I read on perhaps 75% of the book’s pages. For the first time in years, I want the hours back after finishing a novel.

Mathias Énard. The Deserters. New Directions, 2025. On September 10, 2001, Irina is helping organize a small event to honor the legacy of her father, a very prominent mathematician and Buchenwald survivor. The event, the attendees, and the events of 9/11 the following day, combine to surface revelations about the past of both her parents, who lived apart much of their adult lives, on opposite side of the Berlin Wall. Énard reveals the engrossing story of Irina, her parents Maja and Paul, and their intellectual circle in carefully managed stages. He intercuts this story with an unrelated one of a man who has deserted from his army, desperately trying to reach the safety of the border. Along the way he brings along a woman he encounters who has fled her village where she was nearly killed for apparently consorting with the enemy. These two deserters intensely distrust each other, but neither can bring themselves to kill the other one. No location or national identifiers are used (though the book jacket says it takes place in “the Mediterranean wilderness”), and the time period could be within the past half century. Énard knows how to write a compelling, propulsive novel. I’m going to assume the many references to complex mathematics are knowledgeable (which would be impressive in itself). The juxtaposition of a group of people dedicated to esoteric intellectual pursuits and two people fighting nature and each other just to survive, is jarring. Each strand seems to cleanse the palate for the other. Translated from the 2020 French original by Charlotte Mandell.

Mathias Énard. Tell Them Of Battles, Kings & Elephants. Fitzcarraldo, 2018. In 1506, Michelangelo is given a chance to go to Constantinople by the Sultan to design a bridge to cross the Golden Horn and connect Europe with Asia. Entranced with the design challenge, the riches offered, and the opportunity to show up Leonardo da Vinci, whose design had been rejected, he accepts. The basics of the story are true, but Énard imagines the emotional, political, and cultural issues that he faced while working there. Énard writes relatively simple sentences, which are full of local terms, historically accurate nouns, and foreign words. They show off his erudition and make for an almost photo-realist type of description. There is a subplot of a transvestite who tries to seduce Michelangelo throughout his stay, but cannot break through his cold shell. Translated by Charlotte Mandell from the 2010 French original.

Tan Twan Eng. The Gift of Rain. Myrmidon Books, 2008. After enjoying Eng’s The House of Doors (#22 below), which was about Somerset Maugham and Sun Yat Sen and the origins of his revolution against the Chinese Emperor, I got sucked into The Gift of Rain. The pull of these books is the sense of authenticity of the first person voice and the surrounding environment of compelling historic events occurring in a distant place, the Penang Peninsula of Malaya, a place I knew nothing about. Eng is an excellent writer of seductive historic novels. While overlong, this one had a great plot that spans the Second World War and the years just before it, and involves a young man, his family, and their varied responses to the Japanese invasion and brutal occupation of Penang. I enjoyed this as a fine bit of escapism and an immersive history lesson.

Tan Twan Eng. The House of Doors. Bloomsbury, 2023. In 1921, Somerset Maugham and his secretary/lover Gerald visited a couple in the Straits Settlement of Penang. Looking for a topic for his next book, Maugham realized that both the man and the wife had been involved in affairs. The book focuses on the woman’s affair with someone very close to Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the Chinese revolutionary. It’s a patient, beautifully observed book that made me realize how little I knew about this era of Chinese history. Maugham’s book of six short stories The Casuarina Tree contains a story related to Eng’s novel.

Jenny Erpenbeck. Things that Disappear. New Directions, 2025. While I enjoyed this wisp of a book (barely 70 pages) of “interlinked miniature prose pieces,” all on the subject of disappearance, it’s annoying that this is marketed by the publisher as “an exciting new collection,” when, in fact, it was published in German in 2009. As usual, Erpenbeck traverses from disappearances that are small (single socks and her favorite Berlin bakery delicacy, Splitterbrötchen) to those that are considerably much larger (the Berlin Wall and the Warsaw Ghetto) to the disappearance known as death. But the key take-away seems to be this: “Whenever a thing disappears from everyday life, much more has disappeared than the thing itself—the way of thinking that goes with it has disappeared, and the way of feeling, the sense of what’s appropriate and what’s not, what you can afford and what’s beyond your means.” Translated from the German original by Kurt Beals.

Percival Everett. Grand Canyon, Inc. NY: Gagosian, 2021. Part of Gagosian Gallery’s Picture Book series, which pairs writers with artists from the gallery’s stable of artists. Everett’s farcical story (it’s only about 60 pages long) is about you super rich twat named “Rhino” Tanner who is able to buy the Grand Canyon from a failing U.S. National Parks Service, and set up his own outsized food service, tourist train, and Ferris wheel there. Rhino got his nickname by taking super-rich clients up in hot air balloons in Africa, where they could more easily hunt down the trophies they wanted for their walls at home. Everett was paired with the artist Richard Prince, who made a dead-pan photograph of Monument Valley, which is about 30 miles from the Grand Canyon.

Richard Flanagan. Question 7. NY: Knopf, 2024. Two people meet for a second time in a bookstore and kiss—the married and famous H.G. Wells and the as-yet unknown writer Rebecca West. This, according to Flanagan, will lead to Wells writing a book that will provide the inspiration for physicist Leo Szilard to realize that nuclear fission held the secret to creating the controlled chain reaction to create an atomic bomb. And dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ironically, saved Flanagan’s father from certain death in a Japanese slave camp, so that he, Richard, could eventually be born. In this digressive, Sebald-like memoir/essay, Flanagan delves into family memories, the tragic devastation that British colonists brought upon the original Tasmanian peoples and their lands, and the history of the atomic bomb. The result is an utterly engaging piece of writing and a terrible indictment of the human race (or at least most of us).

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, 1988. This genius of a book traces the attempts of Black writers to fashion a voice that truly captures the Black experience and Black vernacular, starting with slave narratives through several key novels of the twentieth century: notably, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Essential reading for anyone hoping to understand Black literature.

Michael Gorra. The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. Liveright, 2020. Gorra’s very careful, perhaps overlong book maps the novels of Faulkner to examine in depth his responses to the Civil War, America’s unending racism problem, reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Black life in the South. In Faulkner’s view, the American South came to believe that the defeat in the Civil War bequeathed the South a Lost Cause which one can forever dream of recovering, a two-tiered society that once was a White paradise. The trouble is, despite the fact that he gave some of his characters a powerful vision of historical reality, Faulkner too often agreed with his fellow Whites’ hazy, wishful nostalgia for a different outcome. This is a close reading of the highest order, combined with enough biography and history to make a very wise book about both Faulkner and America. The saddest word? “Was.” What once was (even if imaginary), can once be again.

Rebecca Grandsen. Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group. London: Tangerine Press, 2025. A novella of dystopian beauty, in which a woman named Flo flees an unidentified danger that is killing people and animals. As she heads north through woods and rural landscapes, she encounters animals, odd individuals, and groups of people. Perhaps because the possibility of mass extinction seems so real in the book, the writing focuses on the strange beauty of nature, even when it is threatened and dying. This is a poet’s novel, written with very unusual word choices and a handful of small touches that are designed to slow the reader down and give the narration a sense of another time.

Peter Handke. A Moment of True Feeling. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977. Gregor Keuschnig, an Austrian living in Paris with his wife and young daughter, wakes up one morning having dreamt that he has murdered someone. Like his literary predecessor, Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, who awakens as an insect, Keuschnig is instantly alienated from the world he used to know. He struggles with his relationship to language, with how he is defined, and how others perceive him. After an agonizing day, his sight of three random objects makes him think of Kant’s statement that “What names cannot accomplish as CONCEPTS, they do as IDEAS,” and he becomes transformed. However, he still acts erratically, losing his wife and child, yet feeling freed. Taut, complex, nicely paced. A brief novella translated from the 1975 German original by Ralph Manheim.

Peter Handke. Short Letter, Long Farewell. NY: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1974. The first novel after The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, this continues Handke’s obsession with alienation and language. After a breakup of his marriage, the narrator makes a trip across America, only to find he is being trailed by his estranged wife. In addition to exploring his own alienation, the narrator closely observes America at the time, which makes the novel a time capsule of bygone days, but also makes it feel dated. Perhaps it’s just the era, but Handke’s narrator has views about non-Europeans that would be very offensive today. Translated from the 1972 German original by Ralph Manheim.

Peter Handke. Slow Homecoming. NY: New York Review of Books. Sebald’s references to this title in Silent Catastrophes (below) piqued my curiosity. It’s actually the combination of three very short novellas published separately between 1979 and 1981, which Handke saw as a single piece, even though each is quite distinct from the others. The Long Way Around is a story of a geologist doing research in an Inuit village before making his way back across America toward his home in Europe. In The Lesson of Mont Saint-Victoire, the first person narrator reveals himself as the author of the previous story and as someone who needs to find his art again, using Cezanne as a guide. And in Child Story, perhaps a different narrator altogether raises a child, negotiates a difficult marriage, and moves between European countries, always seeking the right situation for the child and himself. In each part of the the trilogy, the narrator writes as if holding his subjects at a strange distance. Even the first person narrators often speak of themselves in the third person. Handke is rare among major authors in seeking an inner peace and happiness and not, for the most part, focusing on society’s negative issues.

Peter Handke. The Left-Handed Woman. This is scarcely long enough to be a short story, yet Handke calls it a novel. A woman (known only as “the woman”) decides one day that her husband should move out and leave her alone with her young son. Nothing has seemingly predicated this decision, yet he obliges. The comfortable fringe of a German city provides the eerie setting for this minimalist novel in which very little happens, but everything feels tinged with importance. She struggles with her loneliness, friends try ineffectively to help her, her husband tries to bully his way back into her life, but all to no avail. She is determined to become whoever she really is. Translated from the 1976 German original by Ralph Mannheim.

Robert Harris. Precipice. Harper, 2024. After watching and enjoying the film Conclave, based on the novel by Robert Harris, I thought I would try one of his novels. Precipice is based on the affair between England’s Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith (1908-1916) and Venetia Stanley and the actual love letters that he wrote to her (over 500 of which have been found and preserved). As World War I began to unfold, Asquith confided to Stanley confidential political and military information and routinely enclosed in his letters actual documents and telegrams he had received. Harris invents Stanley’s replies (which Asquith burned) and a Scotland Yard detective tasked with tracking down the source of some leaked documents (Asquith). A well-written, if overlong story about the fading days of British aristocracy, the blundering Cabinet decisions that led to the disastrous campaign in the Gallipoli peninsula of Turkey in 1915 where there were over 125,000 British casualties, and Asquith’s foolish behavior (which could have been viewed as criminal had anyone known at the time).

Samantha Harvey. Orbital. Grove Press, 2023. A novel about six astronauts orbiting the earth on an aging space station. Harvey’s observational writing on the ever-changing views of the Earth, the Moon, and the cosmos are breath-takingly beautiful. In this sense, perhaps 80% of the book feels like non-fiction and this writing alone was probably sufficient to win her the 2024 Booker Prize. But I have to say that the six character studies of the astronauts and their interactions on the cramped space station barely amount to Novel Writing 101. No challenges (other than the death of the mother of one astronaut), no deep conversations, no confrontations. Nothing that the six representative humans did could compete with any paragraph of her writing about the universe outside the pressurized windows of their fragile station.

Samantha Harvey. The Western Wind. NY: Grove Press, 2018. The Western Wind takes place across four days in an isolated English village at the end of the fifteenth century. One of the richest men in the village has gone missing, possibly drowned in the river, and the citizenry is very concerned. If he committed suicide, his lands would revert to the state and the future of Oakham as an independent village would be in doubt. John Reve, the village priest and the book’s narrator, has assigned himself the task of calming everyone and getting to the bottom of matters. The structural twist in The Western Wind is that we read the four days in reverse order. This is a far cry from Harvey’s 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, about six astronauts’ day in a space station, but I think it’s a better book.

Shirley Hazzard. The Bay at Noon. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970. Hazzard’s second novel is the story of three couples, but it is also a portrait of Naples, Italy, where she lived for many years. The writing in The Bay is richer, more complex, much more dazzling than that of The Evening of the Holiday. A great short novel.

Shirley Hazzard. The Evening of the Holiday. 1966. In Hazzard’s first, short novel, Sophie, a British woman with Italian heritage, returns to Italy for a summer vacation and meets Tancredi, a man whose wife had recently left him, taking the children with her. Neither is particularly taken by the other at first, but circumstances bring them together and something gels. They fall in love. Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, Sophie feels she must end the affair and return home. Has she just thrown away her great chance at love or is this an important step of independence? I feel that Hazzard leaves us guessing. This is not the quirky, literary tour-de-force that The Transit of Venus is—it’s short, has only three main characters, and feels pretty light—but it points to where Hazzard’s writing will go in the future.

Shirley Hazzard. The Transit of Venus. NY: Viking, 1980. Essentially the story of two sisters, Caroline and Grace, and their husbands, lovers, and admirers across several decades. A novel of minutely observed details and emotions from one of the great stylists of the second half of the 20th century. Vividly imagined and utterly original.

Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Hurston’s novel of Janine and her three lovers/husbands and their life in 1930s Jim Crow Florida is justifiably praised as a brilliant novel. The writing splits between first-person and third, between Hurston’s version of Black speech and more straightforward prose, between the perspectives of women and men, and between Black and white worlds. One point of the novel is to demonstrate that, if you are forced to continually flip between two worlds, the place to thrive is in between. There’s at least one sentence on every page that can drop you dead with admiration. Her lengthy description of folks fleeing a hurricane as it rushes across the Everglades is simply astonishing.

Claire Keegan. Small Things Like These. NY: Grove Press, 2021. After watching the beautifully filmed movie with Cillian Murphy, I had to read the book. It’s a two- or three-hour read, 116 pages. Keegan writes very simple-looking, but subtle prose that feels very clean and moral. This means that she can turn the mood of the novel sharply with only a single word or two, and this is partly what gives the book it’s great sense of power and purpose. Nevertheless, the novel, as enjoyable as it is to read, is really a touch overwrought, almost schmaltzy towards the end, in a way that the film isn’t. In the book Furlong has to “think” his thoughts, while the film relies more on his eyes and his body and on sounds to tell us what is happening in his head. The film has terrific sound effects—screeching metallic scrapings, noisy motors, howling wind, and so on—that set you a bit on edge. I also think the film comes down harder on the Catholic church than the book does. Nevertheless, I guess this is destined to be on the list of classic Christmas novels.

Caleb Klaces. Mr. Outside. London: prototype, 2025. The unnamed narrator arrives at the home of his father, Thomas, to help him move into a care home at the end of the weekend. But Thomas, a poet and a one-time priest who was fired for posing for photographs naked in his own church, is nowhere to be found. His mind is failing and his son finds his father’s house to be an utter disaster. Eventually, Thomas is found and father and son spend a weekend together grappling with memories, discoveries, fears, regrets, and love. Klaces’ writing is appropriately disorienting and acutely observant. Included are a dozen or so small photographs (snapshots, really), that are too small and poorly reproduced to be clearly seen. But perhaps that’s the point.

Benjamin Labatut. The Maniac. Labatut’s book looks at the lives of three obsessed men and the consequences of their manias: utter madness for them and ruin for those around them. Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who became depressed when science and technology turned evil in his mind; the prodigy John von Neumann, who changed the world through his work on computers, AI, and other fields; and the men behind the AI program AlphaGo, which laid waste to the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol. AlphaGo, a self-reproducing machine, is a forerunner of today’s AI programs, which Labatut thinks will evolve dangerously beyond our control. Like his book When We Cease to Understand the World, this is his warning to the world that we might already be beyond the point of no-return. Labatut, who is obsessed himself, overstates his case.

Andrew Lanyon. Bifurcated Thought: Reflections on Invented Thinking—Diagrams as Gesticulated Ink. St. Ives: self-published, 2013. Lanyon’s exercise in “inventive thinking” involves several characters brought back from previous books in order to roam his imaginary Rowley Hall, which, in this book, has been “expanding and contracting.” There’s a maid, made of curving rope, who ascends and then descends (in Duchampian mode) a set of stairs made of film, and so on. The story morphs endlessly like some kind of Rube Goldberg contraption. The story is illustrated (or interrupted) by photographs and artwork by Lanyon. Lanyon is one of a kind.

Andrew Lanyon. Compartments in the Heart of Rowley Hall. St. Ives: self-published, 2021. The fictional “paper” published is by Vera Rowley of Rowley Hall, the historic home and site of many of Lanyon’s bits of farce. Vera’s paper hopes to distinguish between “photographs” and “snapshots,” using as examples some of the worst and funniest amateur photographs one might ever see. The paper was, needless to say, rejected by the English Psychoanalytical Society. Published in an edition of 100 copies.

Andrew Lanyon. Pinpoint of the Yard Investigates the Cultural Crime of the Century in Saint Ives. St. Ives: self-published, 2022. In this small humorously illustrated book, a detective from Scotland Yard (one presumes) arrives. The crime? Apparently, at a recent exhibition, a seascape had been shown upside down, and ever since the artists of St. Ives have been making their art upside down. “The result was yet another new art form.” The criminal was never discovered. Two photographs are included to demonstrate the difference between Order and Chaos for the benefit of the reader. Published in an edition of 75 copies.

Andrew Lanyon. The Daughters of Radon. St. Ives: (self-published), 2011. In this follow-up title to Von Ribbentrop in St. Ives, Lanyon uses the radioactive gas radon “and his three daughters” to explore the creative community of St. Ives in an entirely new way, using the imagination. This is tongue-in-cheek seriousness of the highest order.

Andrew Lanyon. Von Ribbentrop in St. Ives: Art and War in the Last Resort. St. Ives: (self-published), 2010. When war broke out between Germany and England in 1939, it turned out that the German Minister of Foreign Affairs von Ribbentrop had recently been in the area of St. Ives looking for a home. This led to speculation that Germany might be particularly interested in invading this area. The multi-faceted artist Andrew Lanyon uses this as the backdrop for a fanciful story about how St. Ives (where he lives) reacts during the war. Scattered throughout his loopy, but almost truthful story, are historical photographs and artworks by himself and other residents of the area from that time, including Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson.

Javier Marías. Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. The great Spaniard’s excellent final novel is narrated by Nevinson, a Spaniard who has retired after serving more than two decades as a spy for England. But, in classic spy novel form, he is brought back for one last job, to ferret out which of three women living in a provincial Spanish city is the mastermind fundraiser behind a number of atrocious terrorist attacks. While on assignment in the aforesaid city, Nevinson realizes that he might be over the hill and have no more taste for the game, so to speak. Marías uses much of the novel as a platform for pondering all sorts of topics, including trust, justice versus vengeance, loyalty, responsibility, democracy, terrorists, and state terrorism. He also writes more freely and at length than in any of his other novels about ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist organization. It’s a thinking-person’s spy novel, translated from the 2021 Spanish original by Margaret Jull Costa. It includes one photograph of the bloody aftermath of a terrorist bombing.

Javier Marias. While the Women Are Sleeping. New Directions, 2010. I found this half-read in my Kindle and now I know why I stopped reading this some time ago. I didn’t enjoy a single one of these stories. The plots were generally too obvious and sometimes involved things that were definitely not Marias material, like ghosts. His work needs time to develop, and short stories don’t allow him the necessary space. The very fact that Marias had to append an Author’s Note at the beginning to provide “some explanation” for a few of these stories was probably a hint. Translated from the 1990 German original by Margaret Jull Costa.

Toni Morrison. Tar Baby. Knopf, 1981. Morrison’s update of the Black folktale of the tar baby is a modern fable of human blindness, of the ways in which our stubborn predilections don’t let us see others or as they are and don’t let us change when change is required. Valerian and Margaret, two well-off whites have retired to a tiny Caribbean island, where a handful of Black servants keep their estate and lives intact. The primary servants an elderly married couple and their niece Jade, who is an on-again, off-again model in Paris. Enter the tar baby, in the form of a handsome young man who has jumped ship and hidden on the estate until he is discovered one day. As expected, everything begins to unravel from that moment. Jade falls hard for Son, as he is called, and they will eventually run off to America. Son’s appearance also disturbs both of the marriages in the household. There are moments of brilliance and great insights tucked away in what often feels like a fairly conventional but very readable novel.

Haruki Murakami. Kafka on the Shore. NY: Random House, 2005. “The world is a metaphor, Kafka Tamura,” one character tells him. Indeed, everything seems to be a metaphor here, but it’s not always clear what for. In Murakami’s clockwork universe, where everything meshes to perfection, cats and crows talk and there are flutes made of the souls of murdered cats. The plot is too complicated to describe. Suffice it to say that the destinies of a number of people are all headed in the same direction, and each much fulfill a certain role so that another may complete his or her journey. (Murakami could probably write terrific video games.) Why did I read this? Several years ago, the Japanese clothing store Uniqlo sold some super-looking t-shirts based on Murakami’s novels. I bought the one for Kafka on the Shore because it looked so cool. But, of course, someone asked me what the book was about and I had to admit I hadn’t read it. So now I’m prepared if someone asks me the same question again.

Simon Okotie. The Future of the Novel. Melville House, 2025. (One of their Futures series of books.) Okotie assigns the birth of modernism to the year 1922 and the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, a book which creates a “radically different kind of space.” From there, he eventually wends his way to Timothy Bewes Free Indirect (2022), a book which I am very slowly taking in. Okotie sees the novel continuing to reinvent itself, evolving further into a “burgeoning self-awareness.” “Such self-awareness will make possible an ever-deepening understanding of the mind and the world.”

W.G. Sebald. Silent Catastrophes. NY: Random House, 2025. The first English translation (by Jo Catling) of two books of Sebald’s collected essays that collectively covered two centuries of Austrian literature: Die Beschreibung des Unglücks: Zur österreichischen Literature von Stifter bis Handke and Unheimliche Heimat: Essays zur österreichischen Literatur. I wrote at length about the book here.

Burhan Sönmez. Lovers of Franz K. Other Press, 2025. This brief novella is set up largely as a police interrogation of a young man accused of attempting to murder Max Brod, for being disloyal to and betraying Frank Kafka by not destroying his manuscripts as Kafka instructed. Occurring during the student riots of the 1960s in Europe, the conversations between the young man, the police Commissioner, the Prosecutor, and the Judge largely focus on the ethics of Brod’s decision. The publisher describes the book as “gripping, thought-provoking” and “a brilliant exploration of the value of books, and the issues of anti-Semitism, immigration, and violence that recur in Kafka’s life and writings,” but I thought that it added nothing to this subject at all. The plot and the arguments felt pretty stilted. Translated from the original Kurdish by Samî Hêzil.

Yoko Tawada. Suggested in the Stars. New Directions, 2024. The disappointing second volume of Tawda’s trilogy loses whatever zany, light-hearted energy that Scattered All Over the Earth possessed. In this novel, the seven original characters, joined by a handful of new ones, converge on Susanoo’s hospital room in Copenhagen, where he is being treated for a sudden inability to speak. Much of the book consists of the many conversations that go on around him, as the initial spirit of camaraderie that marked the group descends into tension, jealousy, and irritation. I thought these conversations were mostly pointless and confusing. While they did begin to give dimension to the rather flat characters, they did so at the expense of Tawada’s interest in language, which was so pervasive in volume one. But then a radio appears. And music. And suddenly everyone is dancing in a circle with perfectly matched steps and all is well again. It is then announced that the group will commence a voyage that is intended to take them in search of the drowned country of Japan. To be continued in the final book of the trilogy next year. Translated from the 2020 Japanese original by Margaret Mitsutani.

Yoko Tawada. Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel. NY: New Directions, 2024. Tawada’s pandemic novel is an homage to her constant inspiration, the poet Paul Celan. Patrik, a student of Celan, worries about the pandemic that threatens his world, dreams of an opera singer, and meets a Tibetan man to converse about Celan and life. It’s a brief, dizzying novella, full of delicious wordplay and continual references to Celan’s life and poetry. While it isn’t necessary to have read any Celan before, it would help. This was my first book by Tawada and I’m already committed to reading more. Translated from the 2020 German original by Susan Bernofsky.

Yoko Tawada. Scattered All Over the Earth. New Directions, 2022. The first volume of an announced trilogy. In a somewhat cartoony version of our world (Japan, for example, has simply disappeared), a half dozen or so seemingly young people from different nationalities and backgrounds find their way to each other by happenstance or fortune and coalesce into a small coterie of individuals bound together, in part, by their love for linguistics. As they move from city to city within Europe, learning new languages quickly and gathering up new members for their tiny clan, they talk and have odd adventures. The book is light on its feet, almost goofy, and feels at times as if it shouldn’t be taken seriously. But the conversations about language are entrancing and have worthy insights buried within. Translated from the 2018 Japanese original by Margaret Mitsutani.

Yoko Tawada. The Emissary. New Directions, 2018. Yoshiro, a novelist who is now 115, is taking care of his great-grandson Mumei in the aftermath of some cataclysmic tragedy that has resulted in Japan once again cutting itself off from the rest of the world. Children can barely sustain themselves; they are weak, their legs aren’t strong, and they have to use wheelchairs to get around. The core of the book is about the close relationship between the two, as Yoshiro reminisces about the old days and Mumei adapts readily to the harsh new realities. Tawada’s love of language is on full display, as is her penchant for depicting characters of great warmth. But in the background there are haunting reminders of the type of dystopian future we might all face some day.

John Trefry. Plats. Inside the Castle, 2015. A stunningly original book of prose fiction. On one hand the book is meticulously platted out (the author is an architect), on the other hand the writing is a bravura performance of language and pure imagination, signifying . . . what exactly? That is the question each reader must answer. Does this shiny object, like a diamond of exactly 936 facets, add up to anything beyond its own obvious beauty? Probably. I wrote more about the book here.

Virginia Woolf. Between the Acts. 1941. A very funny, sometimes mocking short novel that takes place on an evening in August 1939. A pageant is put on by local actors and children on the lawn of a country house. The three-act pageant is written in verse, while the remainder of the action largely drifts among the audience, listening in on snippets of conversations. Liaisons are suggested, marriages are on the rocks, the locals gossip about each other, and homosexuality is hinted at. The book was unfinished at the time of Woolf’s suicide, but it’s full of great lines, terrific observations, and some exquisite descriptions of the English countryside and of night falling over the assembled audience and neighboring herd of cows.

Virginia Woolf. The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf. e-artnow, 2013. I have been very slowly making my way through her essays. So slowly, in fact, that I don’t remember much about some of the earliest pieces. But the writing is so fascinating. This compilation includes some classic pieces, such as “The Modern Essay,” “The Death of the Moth,” “Street Haunting,” “and Henry James.” “Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is simply that it should give us pleasure.” And pleasure she gives us in spades.

Virginia Woolf. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume One, 1915-1919. NY: Harcourt, 1977. I have dipped into this sporadically for about a year. It gets more entertaining as it progresses, as VW’s life becomes more complex, as she and Leonard become more successful. She has nervously published her first two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day, during this period. The diary writing, done, as she claims, in 15-minute snatches whenever she can, is precise and formidable. The people she meets are sized up (or, more often, down) in a phrase or two. She’s opinionated and withholds little in these entries. She writes about the events of the day, politics, the war, gossip, fashion, and, of course, real estate. (The Woolfs leased, bought, and sold several properties in this short time period.) But every once in a while she stops you dead on the page with comments that remind you that, for all her feminist-forward attitudes, she could be deeply suspicious of servants and people of the “lower classes” and she was probably prejudiced against Jews.

Virginia Woolf. Jacob’s Room. 1922. I must have read this 20-30 years ago, but I scarcely remembered large swaths of it now. It’s such a strange book to read in the 21st century. While respecting its ground-breaking role in the history of the novel for its non-linear narration and use of so-called stream-of-consciousness, there is much that is hard to take. Jacob is a largely frivolous, unlikable young man, pompously smoking his pipe, believing he thinks important thoughts, and being patronizing with women (especially prostitutes!). And then there are a few slightly uncomfortable moments dealing with Jews and Jewish stereotypes and Woolf’s adherence to English class structure. There are many flashes of Woolfian brilliance throughout, but it’s hard to shake off the remnants of Edwardian England.

Poetry & Poetics

Nadia Alexis. Beyond the Watershed. CavanKerry Press, 2025. Alexis is a Haitian-American poet and photographer. Some of these are brutally honest poems of her father abusing her mother and men apparently abusing her. Other poems examine family and her Haitian background. The beautifully printed volume contains eight full-page photographs by the author, each showing a blurred woman in a white dress who is in motion in a forest setting.

Steve Barbaro. Plane of Consummate Finitude. Chicago: new_sinews editions, 2024. Barbaro’s poems are sometimes printed in different typefaces (some of which remind me of the crude typefaces of old video games like Pac Man). And every glossy page in the book is actually a unique photocollage. Barbaro describes his book as “a collection of poems backdropped by a series of photomontage refrains.” The poems, the typeface, and the images are all designed to unsettle the reader, to let us know we are in a brave new world. Every once in a while a character named Grafitto shows up, and Barbaro writes several excellent ekphrastic poems about Impressionist paintings, but otherwise he takes us on a wonderfully strange journey as he attempts to understand his mind and our times. “I must believe the / mouthings, these frontmost of an inner’s / musings are any / thing but breath’s far / fetched scenery?” (from Guilt..of..The..grapho-maniac) And: “a mind at low play / pushing up but mostly just against its own boundaries . .” (from the..Lighthouse..verdict..)

Yves Bonnefoy. Poetry and Photography. London: Seagull, 2017. I read this shortly after it first came out, but I felt I might be better prepared to understand it this time around. Bonnefoy first talks about poetry, whose role (among other things) is to help people “combat the alienation they undergo.” Then he turns to imagery, to painting, which seem to suggest to us “a complete reality” (something Bonnefoy dislikes). But photography brought with it “chance.” And here, Bonnefoy is partly referencing Mallarmé’s influential 1897 poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance”). Chance, or “insinuation,” is “that tiny element that threatens beliefs and certainties with collapse.” Bonnefoy doesn’t want us caught up in “conceptual thought,” which I take to be those systems that lead our thinking to “congeal” (his word) rather than open up. “Photographs . . . suggest we look elsewhere than on the paths of mimesis for ways to think the human condition and its true needs.” “Nadar [the great 19th century French photographer] was quite right to seek out and respect the gaze in the man or woman he photographed. That gaze, brimming with its unknown element, was enough to remind us of the potential that remains alive in a seemingly dead reality.” But when Bonnefoy shifts to the poetry of Baudelaire, the fiction of Poe, and a very short story by Maupassant, “The Night” (which is included in the book), and how these works reflected the discovery of photography, I confess I became lost. Translated from the 2014 French original by Chris Turner.

Robert Creeley. His Idea. Photographs by Elsa Dorfman. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1973. A small, square book with a tender poem about making love. Perhaps a man thinking about love-making with a woman now far away. The seven photographs by the famous and wonderful Boston photographer Elsa Dorfman show a couple making love. They are equally tender and utterly non-pornographic. The poem is dated 2 March 1973.

Percival Everett. re: f (gesture). Los Angeles: Black Goat, 2006. One never knows what to expect with Everett’s poetry, and here we get three totally different sections, each powerful and innovative in their own way. The section called “Zulus” consists of 25 different poems, one for each letter of the alphabet, except that x and y are combined (“XY is for xylography”). These are somewhat playful poems that occasionally get snarky and touch on race. (“C is for Chandler, Happy / because he is caucasian. / He sings about ‘darkies in the field’”.) The section “Body” consists of nineteen unrhymed octaves, each of which describes a minor interior body part using exacting language. But frequently, Everett hints at the human use for this body part, especially if that usage is sexual. In the final poem “Logic,” Everett seems to be thinking about what goes on when he writes poetry. What separates words from the things they represent? “We do here / what we do / in a host of familiar cases. / Ask about relations, / about the thing named. / Recall the picture of that thing.”

Percival Everett. Trout’s Lie. Pasadena: Red Hen Press, 2015. There’s lots of wordplay, repetition, and playful use of cliches in this volume of Everett’s poetry. In “No Dreams” he uses 24 variations of the word dream in 31 lines. There is no basic mode for Everett’s poetry, but here he frequently reminds us that he’s a bit of a Westerner at heart—trout fishing and hiking and listening to crows.

Sylee Gore. Maximum Summer. Oakland: Nion Editions, 2025. Short prose poems that begin with the birth of the poet’s child. Many of the poems refer to making or looking at photographs, and the roughly square poems are placed on the page like snapshots in an album. “A photograph is a sentence. Without / syntax.” Beautiful writing in a beautiful hardbound edition of 200 copies.

*S*an D. Henry-Smith. Wild Peach. NY: Futurepoem Books, 2020. Although there is anger rustling through these rebellious, energetic poems, so full of alliteration and consonance, they mostly look to nature and to friendship/community to keep the poet’s spirits renewed. The book includes numerous full-page color photographs by Henry-Smith, mostly closeups of nature. Like the poems, their photographs often play with patterns like spider’s webs and ocean spray.

Susan Howe. Articulation of Sound Forms in Time. Windsor VT: Awede, 1987. This 56-page, three-part poem is anthologized in Howe’s book Midnight (1990). Articulation is probably one of the more important examples of the way in which she recuperates history by fragmenting it, turning the language of early America back on itself in order to better reveal the real history, or, perhaps, to prophesy America’s future. The poem is related to a narrative written by the Rev. Hope Atherton, who was part of a group of Americans fighting Native peoples in Massachusetts in May 1676. He wrote that he got lost during a battle and offered to surrender to the enemy, but they refused to take him. Howe uses this to create a poem of mostly unconnected phrases, often without verbs, that can initially puzzle the reader. But this is all part of Howe’s belief in deep reader participation, requiring each reader to pull their sense out of her poem, starting with the way that sounds work in the poem.

Susan Howe. Kidnapped. Tipperary: Coracle Press, 2002. Howe’s slant meditation on 19th century books, Robert Louis Stevenson, her mother, Ireland, acting, Dracula, and assorted other subjects, all packaged in a beautiful small limited edition from Simon Cutts’ Coracle Press. There is also a longish untitled poem at the end of the book. With photographs by the author and her then-husband Peter Hare (several of which are tipped-in) and an actual Irish postage stamp.

Susan Howe. The Nonconformist’s Memorial. NY: New Directions, 1994. A collection of four longish poems, all requiring the utmost reader participation, including some research, and some mental reassembly. Some meditation wouldn’t hurt, either. The most accessible poem is “Melville’s Marginalia,” about the pencil markings that Herman Melville wrote in his books and a possible source for Bartleby the Scrivener.

Susan Howe. Penitential Cries. New Directions, 2025. In the long title poem, the poet admits that it is “hard to make out the numbers” on the watch strapped to “a widow pariah’s thin arm.” The seemingly autobiographical poem is about aging and healthcare and death and includes numerous uncited, tantalizing quotations as the poet thinks about the poets and poetry of the past. The other major poem is “Sterling Park in the Dark,” which consists of fifty pages of what I think of her “woven” poems of partial texts which are apparently photocopied and then arranged on the page in a non-linear manner. Each page (or section) which consists of partial phrases, partial words, and partial letters woven together architectonically, reminds us how suggestive written language can be even when we cannot glimpse the meaning or context of the words on view.

Susan Howe. Poems Found in a Pioneer Museum. Tipperary, Ireland : Coracle, 2009. This scarcely counts as a book, but, hey! It’s a 2-piece box in dark green cloth with the title printed on the top, containing 35 unbound pages (2 dark green card stock and 33 cream card stock with red and dark blue printing). A note inside reads: “I copied these poems, almost verbatim, from typed identification cards placed beside items in display cases at Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Memorial Museum founded in 1901 by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. The artifacts and memorabilia in their collection date from 1847 when Mormon settlers first entered the Valley of the Great Salt Lake until the joining of the railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869.” A typical “poem” is this one: “712: Piece of String cut from underwear of Joseph Smith Jr. when he was martyred.” The work, another fine piece from Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn at Coracle Press, is numbered and signed by the poet.

Ishion Hutchinson. Fugitive Tilts. London: Mack, 2025. Hutchinson is a Jamaican-American poet I admire and follow. This is a book of his collected essays, which range from “travel” pieces to African countries, reminiscences of childhood in Jamaica, commentary on other poets and poems, and a few miscellaneous topics. For me, the writing ranged from meh to deeply engaging, which is probably to be expected from someone who is only forty-one.

Tyehimba Jess. Olio. Seattle: Wave Books, 2016. Jess’s book of poetry, prose, songs, and more, deals, more or less, with the long history of Black music and showmanship, including minstrel shows, “coon” songs, black face, ragtime, and spirituals. It also deals with the dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and others from the early twentieth century and John Berryman’s “Dream Songs,” which include poems about Henry “Box” Brown, a slave who mailed himself to freedom inside a large crate. In essence, Jess is exploring how a distinctive Black voice arose out of slavery, and the severe challenges Blacks have faced, including lynchings, the fire bombing of Black churches, and white folks taking over Black voices and Black faces for their own amusement. It’s a rich, accomplished book that uses several photographs.

Sylvia Jones. Television Fathers. Chicago: Meekling Press, 2024. Jones’ first book has some strong poems and some that strive for simplicity that are too one-dimensional. But that is what what happens when a poet takes big risks, as Jones does. In one poem sequence “Bamboozled,” apparently referencing the Spike Lee film of 2000, each of Jones’ six poems faces one of David Levinthal’s photographs from his “Blackface” series, which depict household objects featuring Black stereotypes.

Stéphane Mallarmé. A Roll of the Dice. Seattle: Wave Books, 2024. At first, this seminal poem seems really opaque, hard to unravel, difficult to admire. But with a bit of help and lots of patience, it’s possible to make headway and begin to admire what Mallarmé has pulled off. This is a poem one has to see spatially above all. Translated from the French 1897 original by Robert Bononno, with photographs by Jeff Clark. The Wave Books bi-lingual edition is a terrific choice for a contemporary version of this poem.

Lauren Russell. Descent. Saxtons River, VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020. In 2013, Russell discovered in an archive the 200+ page diary of the slave holder who was her great-grandfather. Her great-grandmother was one of his slaves. This led to further research and this book, which, through prose, poetry, and imagery, explores the known and imagined past of her ancestors. The images include historic documents and texts and photographs.

Richard Siken. I Do Know Some Things. Copper Canyon Press, 2025. The prose poems in Siken’s powerful third book emerge as he recovers from a powerful stroke that wiped his brain clean and put him in the hospital and then a wheelchair for an extended period of time. He had to regain language, memory, and whatever physical capabilities he could. Siken’s singular voice is fearless and funny as he takes on his family, the medical profession, and the world in his attempt to become his true self once again.

Marta Werner & Jen Bervin. Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings. NY: New Directions, 2013. I have come to this exceptional book very later, I am afraid. It’s a wonder of scholarship, publishing, and poetry. The book is dedicated to the fragments of poetry that Emily Dickinson wrote on scraps of envelopes which were found in her archive. It reproduces every one (both sides!) in full scale color photography, with accompanying transcriptions of Dickinson’s writings. Several incisive, poetic essays round out this stunning oversize book. These are gorgeous somethings!

Art & Art Matters

R. Howard Bloch. A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry. NY: Random House, 2006. With the announcement that the Bayeux Tapestry is about to be exhibited at the British Museum for nearly one year, I got this down off the shelf and reread this thorough account of the Tapestry and the Norman Conquest of England. Bloch explains everything that was known in 2006 about the physical materiality of the Tapestry, the probable time of its sewing, and its history until the present. He discusses the role that it has played in the developing of French and English nationalism since 1066. And he provides a general history of what preceded the Norman invasion, of the Battle of Hastings, and of the immense consequences of the Norman victory.

T.J. Clark. Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come. Thames & Hudson, 2018. Clark is perhaps my favorite art writer. I admire his prose, which manages to be original, articulate, and yet almost conversational. Heaven on Earth includes essays on paintings by Giotto, Bruegel, Poussin, Veronese, and Picasso. Not all deal with the heavenly, or even the spiritual, but all are excellent.

Maria & Modernism. Phoenix: The Heard Museum, 2024. I have known the black pottery of Maria Martinez of New Mexico’s San Ildefonso Pueblo since the late 1970s, and I was fortunate that our 2024 trip to Phoenix happened to coincide with this exhibition at the fabulous Heard Museum, which is dedicated to the art of America’s “Indigenous Creativity.” Martinez (1887-1980) was a creative genius who also did much to open the wider public’s eyes to the art of indigenous artists and to advance their ability to profit from their efforts by ignoring the old networks, like the Fred Harvey Company, which had taken so much of the profits. The well-illustrated catalog includes some excellent essays which demonstrate Maria’s visionary ability to remake and expand the market for indigenous ceramicists and then be a creative inspiration for generations to come. She must have been a remarkable woman. It’s amazing to think of her and her husband Julien first demonstrating their work at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904!

Alex Nyerges. American, Born Hungary: Kertesz, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy. Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2024. A major exhibition catalog for a traveling exhibition devoted to the extraordinary contributions and legacy of Hungarian photographers who emigrated to America, primarily by the 1960s. The large volume includes a lengthy, well-research essay by Nyerges, the Museum’s Director, many illustrations, and extra materials that turn the book into a useful research tool. The exhibition opens for its final showing on September 26, 2025 at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY.

Clive Scott & Nick Warr. Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials. With some exceptions, which are stated in a short section concerning what is and isn’t included in this volume, the editors have chosen every work that the evidence suggested was made by or selected by Sebald from his collection for use in one of his published books of prose or poetry, whether or not the image was actually published. Seven essays and a timeline of Sebald’s life (all nicely illustrated) precede more than 300 pages of photographs, arranged chronologically by publication date of his books. Included are full negative strips, contact sheets, and enlarged images. For example, eighty-eight pages of images are provided for The Rings of Saturn. It’s a stunning achievement, and an immense gift to any Sebald scholar.

Sebastian Smee. Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism. NY: Norton, 2024. Smee synthesizes a vast amount of material about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the ensuing Paris Commune, and a number of the Impressionist painters into a very readable history that focuses in on painting in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s (more or less). Smee argues—and he’s not the first person to do so—that Impressionism grew directly out of the tragic years of 1870-72, when France lost a war that it started with Prussia, and then had to fight a protracted civil war in the streets of Paris with several hundred thousand of its own citizens dying as a result. The new paintings of the Impressionists “offered respite not only from the traumas of recent events and the scars still marking Paris itself but more generally from the stress and insecurity of living at the beginning of the modern age.” His main subjects are Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas.

Detectives & Spies & Mysteries

Jo Callaghan. In the Blink of an Eye. NY: Random House, 2024. I couldn’t resist the scenario, though I should have. A more-than-skeptical Warwickshire police detective agrees to head up an experimental program in which she will be assisted by an AI aide so that she could make sure the program utterly fails. The AIDE (artificial intelligence detective entity) assigned to her can become a hologram (of a handsome black male) on command, and it is sure it is much more intelligent than humans. Naturally, the two debate throughout the book over every conceivable low-level AI issue. For example, the two continually bicker as to whether or not humans have such a thing as “instinct” or a “gut belief.” The AI debate is mostly held at the most basic and stereotypical levels possible. As a police procedural concerning several missing teenage boys, the first half of the book wasn’t bad. But when the main character’s son becomes the next missing teenager, procedure went out the window. In the end, the AIDE and the detective make up and the experiment is extended. I’m not likely to.

Paul French. Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China. NY: Penguin, 2012. A footnote in the biography of American journalist Edgar Snow about an unsolved murder in pre-war Peking set writer Paul French off on a research trail that led to this fascinating book. Teenaged Pamela Werner, the daughter of a British diplomat, was brutally murdered and her body mutilated just outside the British legation in 1937. Despite the determination and influence of her father, E.T.C. Werner, the investigation stalled, hampered by multiple bad actors, including the British diplomatic corps, who wanted the entire episode buried. Then came the War and the Japanese, and after that, Mao and the Communists. Using his own resources, Pamela’s father continued to search for the answer to her murder until he died. Incredibly, French located Werner’s files on the murder buried in the British National Archives, which allowed him to start tracking down sources on his own. The story is pretty remarkable and is very well told. If there is a downside, it is the dozens of characters to keep track of. However, I learned a fair amount of Chinese history from French’s book. He lived in China for years and has written multiple books on the country.

Emma Newman. After Atlas. ROC, 2016. Book II of the Planetfall trilogy. Sometime in the future, Carlos Moreno, a Senor Detective for the Noropean Ministry of Justice, is tasked with investigating the mysterious suicide of an internationally famous cult leader, a cult he once belonged to as a child and ran away from. He and his personal virtual assistant, Tia, form one of the best detective duos that I have read in a while. For three-quarters of the book, these futuristic detectives operate in a bureaucratic world divided into America and Noropean halves, digging into the suicide, which looks more and more mysterious at every turn. In the final quarter, Moreno must shed Tia and re-enter the cult to apparently solve the crime. At this point, the detective work mostly grinds to a halt and it becomes obvious that not having read the first part of this trilogy (Planetfall) is a liability. In the end, the solutions are given to Moreno and he is immediately swept away into the circumstances that, I guess, will led into the final volume of the trilogy. For me, who was reading this as a policier, the ending was a disappointment. Probably not so for a sci-fi reader.

Non-Fiction

Giorgio Agamben. Self-Portrait in the Studio. London: Seagull, 2024. I have been curious about Agamben lately, and this seemed like a soft introduction. It’s basically an intellectual memoir in which Agamben reflects on the people, books, and studios that have been influential on his thinking and growth. The book is filled with photographs of his studios and desks, snapshots of him and his friends, images of book jackets and postcards and all types of memorabilia. Agamben invokes a nostalgia for post-war Rome and pre-tourist Capri and the Left Bank. The list of friends and influences is long, but includes (among those I recognize) Elsa Morante, Italo Calvino, and Walter Benjamin. This is one of those books that will spawn the reading of other books before too long. Translated from the 2017 Italian original by Kevin Attell.

Phil Baker. London. London: Reaktion Books, 2021. One of Reaktion Books’ Cityscopes series. Despite having to treat the history of the city from 1000 BC to the present with necessary brevity, Phil Baker’s London is surprisingly not superficial. He’s an excellent, knowledgeable writer (he has written about Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs, among others). I wish I’d read this before my last trip to London! He packs a ton of history in 280 heavily illustrated pages. Much of Baker’s focus is on the city’s culture—its writers, the arts, fashion, etc. Highly recommended overview. I might try one of the other cities in this series.

Ann Fessler. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. Penguin, 2007. As an adopted child who was recently connected by a DNA test with the half-brother and half-sister from our biological father (who passed about almost 20 years ago), I became much more curious about the experience my biological mother went likely through. I know that she was a high school senior who became pregnant around the time my father signed up for a multi-year tour with the merchant marine and disappeared. I was left at one of the many religious children’s homes that existed in the 1950s and 1960s to take children from unwed mothers and adopt them out to “acceptable” couples. Fessler’s book is a scathing expose of the way that most unwed pregnant mothers were treated during that era, as well as an eye-opening look into the shame, guilt, and unrepairable loss that these young women were left with. The book left me wishing I had been able to meet my own biological mother, who died in the 1990s.

Thomas Jefferson. The Jefferson Bible. With an Introduction by Percival Everett. Brooklyn: Akashic Books, 2004. This little nothing (87 pp.) is really a Percival Everett product. In 1819, Jefferson had the temerity to edit the Four Gospels the way he felt they should be read. Everett writes a nicely snarky Introduction, which includes an “interview” between himself and Thomas Jefferson (who mistakes him for an uppity slave). Everett asks Jefferson about his thoughts on race, slavery, and miscegenation, and the answers, not surprisingly, are unbecoming of the author of the Declaration of Independence and an American President. This is followed by “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extracted Textually from the Gospels, Compiled by Thomas Jefferson,” a reprint of Jefferson’s original text.

Martha A. Sandweiss. The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West. Princeton University Press, 2025. Sandweiss uses a single photograph by Alexander Gardner, the great photographer of the Civil War and the West, to tell a series of sharply detailed stories about the people in the picture. The photograph was made in the spring of 1868 at Fort Laramie as members of a U.S. Peace Commission met with the leaders of multiple tribes, while thousands of their followers camped nearby. Six men, including Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, stood in a line on the prairie, with an unnamed Native girl in the middle, facing the camera. Sandweiss writes deeply researched min-biographies of several of the men, and she miraculously managed to discover the identity of the girl in the middle and tell a fuller story of her larger family. The result is a book that shoves aside the myths of the West and of American history and exposes us to stories of individual, military, and national violence, reminds us of the national shame our government has bestowed upon the tribes that lived here first, and shows how photographs, used correctly, can better aid historical research. A phenomenally fascinating book.

Nicholas Shakespeare. Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France. Harper, 2014. Shakespeare, the biographer of Bruce Chatwin, discovered a box of documents that revealed bits and pieces of the hidden life of his aunt, who spent the war years in Nazi-controlled Paris under mysterious circumstances. As an Englishwoman married to a French Jew, she could have been sent to a labor camp or worse. She was even interviewed by the Nazis and released, possibly at the order of someone higher up. Shakespeare decides to investigate, which leads him into a multi-year search for her friends, witnesses, and documents. The result is an amazing, still incomplete, but nevertheless overlong biography of his aunt’s marriages, affairs, and adventures. The large sections involving life in Paris under the Nazis are fascinating.

Maggie Taft. The Chieftan and the Chair: The Rise of Danish Design in Postwar America. The University of Chicago Press, 2023. This one of several books acquired during the Press’s annual 70% off sale, for which I am annually grateful, even though it means my bookshelves are even more stuffed. We have a good number of vintage Danish Modern pieces of furniture in our house, so I was very curious to read Taft’s history of the way in which what we in America know as Danish Modern came into being in Denmark and then was marketed here in America. This inevitably led to a large number of American furniture companies making “Danish Modern” furniture. “The Chieftan” is a chair by Finn Juhl and “The Chair” refers to Hans Wegner’s Round Chair, two iconic, but very different approaches to design.

Stanley Tucci. What I Ate in One Year, And Related Thoughts. NY: Gallery Books, 2024. This was a Christmas present to me because I have been a great fan of his television program Searching for Italy. On one level, it’s a breezy and fun read. Tucci is very funny,with a wry, barely smiling sense of humor that I like. Still, this is a celebrity book and that means that it 1) comes with the guilty please of peeking into how the other half lives, while 2) realizing that Tucci has bought into the other half big time. He gushes over movie stars, goes literally ga-ga over the 1,000 acre ultra chi-chi estate of film director Guy Ritchie (Madonna’s ex), and has to have everything exactly perfect. One minute you’re admiring him for his dedication to family and food, the next minute your head is spinning as he dines with the elites for the nth time at Riva. He’s involved in so many activities that he has a branding agent to keep them all straight. Well, the book was mostly fun.

Lily Tuck. Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. Harper Perennial, 2024. For reasons I can’t explain, the Italian writer Elsa Morante has long intrigued me. I think it is the combination of having had to hide from the Fascists in the mountains in absolute poverty during World War II, followed by a life among the glittering cafe society of post-war Rome that made her life sound worth reading. Not to mention being married to Alberto Moravia for many years. Tuck, an excellent novelist, grew up in Rome knowing some of the same set of people, so she is well situated to write an insider’s kind of biography of Morante, who is most famous for her book History: A Novel. Surprisingly, this is apparently the first biographer of her in any language. It’s fascinating, and includes a serious look at each of Morante’s novels.