Another month, another fistful of great reads. But before we look back on recent books we couldn’t put down—one even passed the rigorous Subway Test—a quick look forward to April, National Poetry Month, in which one might gather their rosebuds by cavorting in vast fields of verse. A few contemporary suggestions: Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, The Tradition by Jericho Brown, (both winners of the Pulitzer Prize), or Ocean Vuong’s bestselling 2022 collection Time is a Mother. One might also make some preorders—a treat for future you! The coming month has a happy onslaught in store: South Korean poet Kim Haengsook’s Human Time: Selected Poems (Moon Country), Ursula K. Le Guin’s collected poetry, or Henri Cole’s Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022. Or if you’d like to sprinkle in some prose, turn to the intimate, evocative memoirs coming from poets Eileen Myles, Matthew Zapruder, and Maggie Smith. As always, happy reading.
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“Commitment” by Mona Simpson
In the early twentieth century, the psychologist Alfred Adler developed the Birth Order theory—an answer, he posited, to the question of why children within the same family can grow up with such different personalities. Adler may not be referenced in Mona Simpson’s excellent seventh novel (instead the Quaker psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride, whose theories on mental asylum design became a blueprint for hospitals throughout America, proves core to the book), but in some ways Commitment brings Adler’s theory into vivid, individual literary life. The book is an absorbing, moving portrait of a Los Angeles family—single mother Diane and her three children, Walter, Lina, and Donnie—as they navigate financial troubles, addiction and, centrally, mental illness. Simpson ping pongs between perspectives, beginning with eldest son Walter as he and Diane drive north to UC Berkeley, where he’s starting his freshman year in the wake of peak Bay Area hippiedom, next mixing in ambitious middle daughter Lina’s perspective and, late in the book, that of the sweet but troubled youngest son Donnie. Because Diane suffers a psychological breakdown shortly after dropping Walter off, the book’s structure mirrors Diane’s relationships with her children; Walter, who gets the most of the novel’s airtime, is out of the house by the time the most debilitating aspects of her illness descend, having benefited from his mother’s relative health for the longest, while Lina and Donnie, with whom we spend progressively less time, are younger and in closer proximity to Diane as she becomes increasingly unwell and, eventually, institutionalized. As Simpson follows the kids into adulthood, where their lives and careers split and intersect, the reverberations of their childhoods ripple forward, too. At one point Donnie, having just come through a bad patch, starts laughing “There was no punchline, really”: just the pain and joy and strangeness of being a person in a family. (Knopf, March 2023)
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“On Writing and Failure” by Stephen Marche
“They tell you to develop calluses,” writes Stephen Marche in On Writing and Failure: Or, On The Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer. “It’s not enough. You have to relish the rejection. Rejection is the evidence of your hustle. Rejection is the sign that you are throwing yourself against the door.” The book is a tight 80 pages put out by the Canadian publisher Biblioasis in their Field Notes series, other books of which explore such topics as class, risk, and browsing. I want to buy up a big lot of Marche’s contribution and hand them out to anyone struggling to write—a population of friends one acquires, as if by magnetic force, when one also struggles to write—because, somehow, with its mordant humor and underlying message of accepting defeat, I’ve found it more motivating and heartening than a thousand cheery Instagram posts. Marche offers a vigorous cavalcade of aphorisms (“Persistence is the siege you lay on fortune”; “Without struggle there is the struggle of no struggle. They call it writer’s block”) and advice (“Be scrupulous in your envy”). He also proffers up the misfortunes of literary titans: the banishment of Ovid, Dostoevsky’s mock execution, the tribulations of eighth century poets Li Bai and Du Fu. “Fitzgerald thought of himself as a failure, even though, by that time, he had published This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, Flappers and Philosophers, and The Tales of the Jazz Age, several of which were bestsellers. Hemingway was utterly convinced of his success even though his entire published output at that juncture consisted of 470 copies of two volumes totaling eighty-eight pages.” And yet, of the connective power of writing, “These ephemeral connections are the substance of victory, to belong to a constellation of meanings, to alleviate a specific, miniscule cosmic loneliness,” he writes. “It seems like such a small satisfaction to expend your life on. It isn’t.” (Biblioasis, 2023)
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“The Paris Review Interviews, IV”
In the age of the internet, the interview is a much-bandied form, from online Q&As, to quick-to-publish podcasts. The Paris Review interview is a beast of its own, often conducted over a span of months or years, and edited in collaboration with the subject. The first Art of Fiction appeared in the first issue, Spring 1953 (E.M. Forster) and since then the Review’s interviewers have conducted hundreds, many of which have been collected into brilliant, varied compendiums of big thoughts and writerly temperaments. “They don’t just entertain you,” Salman Rushdie writes in his forward to this edition, which puts Philip Roth beside Maya Angelou and Paul Auster alongside Haruki Murakami, “they make you think, and they even make you rethink what you know.” In this volume a reader will find: Marianne Moore on first reading Ezra Pound; Roth on “premature feminist rage” (worth noting: of the sixteen writers in this collection, a scant three are women); Jack Kerouac’s wife, Stella, trying to throw the interviewer out of her house, and also Kerouac utilizing the magnificent expression “Up your ass with Mobil gas!”; John Ashbery talking about what Auden thought of him; Marilynne Robinson on creating Housekeeping’s Ruthie and Sylvie’ and so much more. (Picador, 2009)
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Lightning Round
Recommendations from the staff of Vanity Fair
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“Remote Control” by Nnedi Okorafor
Friends and I have taken to discussing what makes the perfect commute read. We can agree that typically novellas—flexible-spined, slim to fit into the office-bound tote with little obstruction, riveting enough to pull your gaze away from a phone or blankly staring at the passing cityscape—is the platonic ideal for an early Manhattan routed train. And for the last few days Nnedi Okorafor's Remote Control has been that companion.
The novella follows the young "Adopted Daughter of Death" Fatima, renamed Sankofa, as she cuts a winding path from shea tree orchards through to the Robocity and beyond of a near-future Ghana. The journey isn't without goal as she searches for a seed in a box which may offer some answer to the question of the way she is: imbued with an ability akin to wielding death, just below her skin. Which leads to equal parts reverence and fear from all who cross her path. Episodic and butting the usual expectations of a hero's journey, another of Okorafor's additions to the Africanfuturist library is as much a masterclass in the subtleties of world-building as it is the tender portrait of a girl rendered alien, home become unfamiliar, and the attempt at a future despite such despairs. (Tor, 2021) —Arimeta Diop, Editorial Assistant
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“Some New Kind of Kick” by Kid Congo Powers
I've been an avid consumer of punk rock nonfiction ever since dusting off my town library's copies of England's Dreaming and Lipstick Traces as a teenager in mid-90s suburbia. It was several years later when I acquired one of my most treasured entrants in the canon, 2001's We Got the Neutron Bomb, the West Coast answer to Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's New York-centric punk oral history Please Kill Me. Co-authored by Los Angeles scene-maker Brendan Mullen and music journalist Marc Spitz (sadly both deceased), Neutron Bomb is a dramatis personae of the brilliant weirdos who pioneered punk's late-70s L.A. explosion. (The Germs, X, The Screamers, The Go-Go's, etc.) Among these myriad influential misfits were teenage power-buddies Kid Congo Powers and Pleasant Gehman, whose unrelated but complementary memoirs, both published in 2022, I recently devoured with all the starstruck adoration of my younger self. Powers—best known for his work with The Gun Club, The Cramps, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds—imbues his epic coming-of-age story with a narrative tension that ping pongs between on-and-off drug abuse (eventually fully off) and a complicated musical partnership with legendary Gun Glub maestro Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Gehman—an early punk 'zinester turned successful girl-band frontwoman and globe-trotting burlesque maven—braids her trailblazing punk rock backstory, Rock 'n Roll Witch, with a lifelong interest in spiritualism and the occult. But reader beware: after finishing these memoirs—at turns dark, comedic, and dishy, with occasional tugs at the heartstrings—you will only wish you were anywhere near as cool as the people who wrote them. (Hachette, 2022) —Joe Pompeo, Senior Media Correspondent
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“Y/N” by Esther Yi
At a K-pop fan event held in honor of a beloved idol, one character in Esther Yi's Y/N wonders: "We were incredibly lucky ... to be alive at the same time as the boys during this epochal moment in history. Christianity and capitalism—might he and other fans come together to form a movement to rival even these?" It's an utterly serious question that Yi explores in this savage story about a young woman's rapturous descent into our modern-day religion of celebrity worship, fanfiction, and ubiquitous parasociality. The girls who get it, get it. (Astra House, March 2023) —Delia Cai, Senior Correspondent, Vanities
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“Heartburn” by Nora Ephron
Last fall, in the midst of a public custody battle and as rumors ran rampant about her personal life, Olivia Wilde turned to Nora Ephron’s debut novel, Heartburn, published forty years ago this month. Wilde posted to her Instagram story a single page from the book detailing how to make the now infamous vinaigrette. But before the recipe, and just sentences before the end of the novel, comes a bittersweet thesis from Ephron: “Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.” The story, which is semi-autobiographical, finds our narrator, cookbook writer Rachel Samstat, at a nightmarish crossroads: she is seven months pregnant and her husband is having an affair (with a woman he loves!). Ephron, the authority on romantic comedy, of course expertly finds the humor in her pain without sugarcoating her suffering, or downplaying her resilience, in only the way a woman who has lived this could. (Vintage reissue, 1996) —Daniela Tijerina, Executive Assistant to the Editor
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