The Paris Review's Blog, page 622

Gloriously, Preposterously Impractical, and Other News

George E. Ohr’s pottery workshop in Biloxi, Mississippi, 1901.

In 1849, not long before he died, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a book called Eureka, the goal of which was nothing less than to outline the origins of the universe. “It’s like a nineteenth-century version of the many manuscripts I have received over the decades from brilliant but deranged autodidacts … Imagine what you might get if you toss Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Newton’s Principia in a blender along with scoops of gothic rhetoric and romantic philosophy.” Did Poe unwittingly anticipate modern cosmology? Well, no—but his book is still fun to read.
On writing and bravery, or the lack thereof: “Although I acknowledge it can be scary to set down what you think and feel, I’m not sure brave is the operative description … This is my problem with brave and other words like it: They do not engage but rather insist. They are singular, anti-conversational, self-congratulatory even; they pre-digest our experience, before we get a chance to have it for ourselves.”
“Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.”
How did pottery become art? A new exhibition in Boston tells the story of American ceramics: “Sometimes art is defined by uselessness. An object that remains functional never quite gains the aura that is normally associated with the highest creations of the imagination … For a century and more, many ambitious ceramicists have labored to lift the status of their craft. In the process, they have left behind any notion of utility, creating objects that, while they may nod to their antecedents in the cup, the jug or the storage jar, are gloriously (and often preposterously) impractical.”
Joe Franklin, who “presided over one of the most compellingly low-rent shows in television history,” died last weekend at eighty-eight. He left behind an office overflowing with memorabilia and historic clutter, “mounds formed by stacks of old reels of silent films, publicity photos and press copies of books. There were playbills from the Booth Theater from the 1920s and a VHS tape of the comedian Sarah Silverman … somewhere in there was Bing Crosby’s hat, along with a lipstick-smeared drinking glass Marilyn Monroe sipped from on the show. Also somewhere was the tie clip that Ronald Reagan gave Mr. Franklin.”

Shying

Hermann von Kaulbach, Die Schuchterne, 1909.

One of the great sacrifices of adulthood is giving up shyness. Even if it’s been a defining characteristic since childhood, a constant companion through early life, at a certain point it is a luxury we cannot afford. So far as the world is concerned, we are all outgoing, delighted to be here, happy to see you. We can’t run away when we get to the door.

There are moments that change our lives. Sometimes big, conscious decisions, other times a word, a missed train, the last five minutes of a party. I can only remember one such, consciously. It was reading a quote by Penelope Keith: “Shyness is just egoism out of its depth.” 

Introversion is real, of course. For many people, shyness—or its cousin, social anxiety—feels like anything but a luxury, and renders a host of situations challenging. What’s more, it feels less like egotism than a total subjugation of self. I’ll admit it: I still feel a clutch of panic before walking into a room of people, and I remember fondly hiding behind a book, finding a corner, hearing my mother tell people I was shy. But for some reason, the unequivocal harshness of that quote was what I needed. Okay, I thought, it's you or other people. No one is looking at you; to think they are is the worst form of solipsism. Taking the option away was what I needed. 

Because the problem is, when you are a grown-up—especially if you look halfway normal and have at least a few friends and aren’t visibly weeping or shaking—people don’t look at you sitting by yourself and think, She’s shy. They will, perhaps, attribute to you all the power you give them. In short, they will merely think you aloof. And this does not become less true as life goes on, even if yours is what Jane Austen termed “a mind which had seldom known a pause in its alarms or embarrassments.”

“Everyone’s shy,” my dad used to tell me, when I didn’t want to go to a birthday party or meet dinner guests before going to bed. “We just don't give into it.” At the time I thought this was silly; after all, the world looked to be full of people going about the business of socializing with none of the agony I felt. It seemed like one of those myths about adulthood, like that you lose your taste for sweets.

And now, as a grown-up, I find I don't much care for chocolate or ice cream, and I go places I don’t want to, and there is a strange power in that, too. I don’t want people to take that Keith quote to heart the way I did; I would hope you are kind to yourself. If you need ballast of that kind, look not for abuse but commiseration. Here is what Stevie Smith wrote:

Into the dark night
Resignedly I go,
I am not so afraid of the dark night
As the friends I do not know,
I do not fear the night above
As I fear the friends below.

And here is Shy Guy: 

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily’s correspondent.

Fast Asleep and Wide Awake

But shouldn’t that be the other way around?

A. Rötting, In the Morning, 1840.

Like Thomas Wyatt, who can’t quite let go, I can’t quite let go of that Wyatt poem about what she hath deserved. He says in it that love was not just a dream: “It was no dream, I lay broad waking.” The last two words are an obvious yet pleasantly unfamiliar double-synonym for wide awake.

But what’s so wide about it?

To see the link between alertness and vast side-to-side extent—and why we’re also said to be speedy asleep—the place to start is with awake. The “a-” is a weakened form of the preposition on or in, by the same verbal laziness that turned one into the article an, and then before consonants into a, pronounced “uh.” To go on board or on shore, to be in bed or on a slant, is to be aboard, ashore, abed, aslant, not to mention astern, abreast, ahead (originally nautical as well), afoot, aloof (on the luff side, to windward, steering clear), far afield, run aground. We don’t think of them as contractions of preposition + noun anymore, but many of our location and direction words have this form: afar, amid, atop, athwart, askew, awry, gone astray, and less obviously across, away, apart, around, aside, taken aback.

The same thing happened to time phrases. There’s a-nights and a-days, surviving in nowadays; in five dollars a day or twice a week, it looks like the “in” has been dropped from twice in a week, but actually it’s the article that disappeared. And sometimes these forms preserve old etymologies: aloft (“in the air”—German Luft), among (“in the crowd”—German Menge). Bonus points if you can spot the prepositional phrases in akin, anew, amiss, anon, aghast, agog.

Finally, “a-” meant in as in “in a state of” (asleep, awake, alive) or “in life”—the f and v wavered, which is why we have the word lives. The second part of the “a-” word was always a noun, even where it seems not to be, such as in afloat or adrift (“in a drift,” “on float”: float was originally a noun for the state of floating, like a fleet). Since all these nouns also look like verbs, though, the pattern was falsely extended to any verb, which is why we can now be atremble, aquiver, aflutter, awash, abloom, ablaze, aflame, aglow.

Wake, too, was a noun, meaning “awakeness”—Wyatt uses the noun waking. (He didn’t lay broadly waking up: he lay awake, in awakeness, just as “every waking hour” does not mean every hour that wakes up.) Add a verb of motion to the “a-” noun forms with “-ing” and you get go a-begging, set the bells a-ringing, a-hunting we will go. Thoreau called Time “the stream I go a-fishing in” and mentions going a-strawberrying and a-huckleberrying in the woods, but he was just about the last person who could get away with it: the construction is too olde fashion’d now. (A-tweeting we will go? A-refinancing?)

The question remains: Why “wide” awake? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, wide awake is a relatively recent term, defined as “awake with the eyes wide open; fully awake,” and going back only to Shelley in 1818. That must be wrong. Wyatt’s “broad waking” has Shelley beat by three centuries. Wide also meant “extensive, inclusive, or broad in scope”—“wide fame” is in Milton—so wide awake means “deeply, fully in the waking state,” nothing to do with eyes open wide. The dictionary lists nothing under broad waking, but broad daylight, equally nonspatial, goes back to the fourteenth century, and far and wide, in the sense “affecting many things,” goes back to Beowulf. The lovely term far nights, with its obsolete genitive, meaning “late in the night,” goes back to Wyatt’s time, and far days even farther.

“Fast asleep” is easier to make sense of than “wide awake.” The original meaning of fast is “firmly fixed, immobile”—fastened with a fastener, held fast, color-fast, steadfast, a fast friend. As an adverb, fast meant doing something steadily, earnestly, tenaciously. We are firmly asleep far nights, fully awake far days. To “sleep fast” goes back to 1200; today we say “sleep tight.” The meaning “quick” or “speedy” for fast came later, apparently as an offshoot of “running fast,” i.e., “running hard.” Work hard, play hard; sleep fast, run fast. It seems that the thing a person had to do most tenaciously a thousand years ago was run away, and so fast turned into its opposite. To be fast asleep is to be soundly in sleep, sound asleep—hard and fast, safe and sound. “Steady asleep” and “quick awake” may seem to make more sense, but they just don’t sing with the music of English.

 Damion Searls, the Daily’s language columnist, is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch.

Lost Looking

Maia Cruz Palileo, Nochebuena, 2013, oil on canvas, 33" x 48". Image via Cuchifritos Gallery

Maia Cruz Palileo’s show “Lost Looking” is at Cuchifritos Gallery through February 6. Many of her paintings tell the story of her family’s emigration from the Philippines to America, confronting “the disconnect between memories, stories, imagination and experiences.”

“The imagery in my work is rooted in the American Midwest, where I was born and raised,” she told MoMA P.S.1 during a studio visit. “In 1999, my mother suddenly died, completely severing my connection to home, both geographically and psychologically. My naïve sense of wholeness and security was changed forever and I’ve been making work about it ever since.”

You can see more of Palileo’s work at Cuchifritos Gallery’s site. Her show there is curated by Jordan Buschur.

TV Tray, 2013, oil on panel, 16" x 20". Photo: Samantha Wrigglesworth, via Cuchifritos Gallery

 

The Woods, 2013, oil on canvas, 52" x 60". Photo: Samantha Wrigglesworth, via Cuchifritos Gallery

The Golden State’s Golden Age, and Other News

John Van Hamersveld and Victor Moscoso, The Who with Fleetwood Mac Shrine Auditorium poster, 1968. Image via It’s Nice That

From the department of own-horn-tooting: Looking for something to read today? Try The Paris Review. But you didn’t hear it from us: “One thing I’d like to have on my blanketed lap today,” Dwight Garner wrote, “is the new issue of The Paris Review. That journal has found its mojo, in a big way … The new one has among other things a warm and wise interview with the memoirist and essayist Vivian Gornick that’s worth the price of admission alone.”
India’s Jaipur Literary Festival is advertised as the largest free literary festival in the world. “This year it attracted an estimated 80,000. And on the fourth day, with 20,000 packed into the disorderly old palace complex where it is held, and the queues for entry still growing, the police abruptly closed the gates. They feared a stampede was coming. But who were these people? And what were they coming for?”
A new book looks at midcentury graphic design in California, which had a sensibility and influence all its own: “Fuck New York. Fuck Europe. We’ll figure out what art is.”
Whither the ukulele? It began its life as a piece of exotica and then, in the hands of Tiny Tim, descended promptly into kitsch—but some say it’s enjoying a revival. “The ukulele still plays its role as everyman instrument quite convincingly.”
Today in people who are wrong: “Today’s minor arts, I think, include theater, ballet, opera, symphonic music, and literary fiction. These still include small audiences whose members are not also creators, audiences who patronize these arts in part out of an inherited feeling that these are superior to movies or genre fiction … The literary novel, too, may be on its way to losing its minor art status and becoming a pure hobby.”

In Search of Cervantes’s Casket

Juan de Jauregui y Aguilar, Miguel de Cervantes, seventeenth century.

Archeologists in Spain have excavated a casket with Miguel de Cervantes’s initials on it, the Associated Press reported earlier today, which may mean that a long search for the author’s remains is finally over.

When Cervantes died, in 1616, he was buried in the Trinitarias convent in Madrid. This arrangement required a special dispensation: years earlier, when Cervantes was a soldier, his ship had been captured by pirates, and he was held captive for five years. The Trinitarias’s religious order had helped arrange for his safe release, so he asked to be buried there.

The order obliged, but upon his death, there was a bit of a hiccup: apparently no one thought to mark his grave. If it was marked, it wasn’t marked well—centuries later, no one is really sure where exactly Cervantes was interred. As The New York Times reported last March,

Strangely, either through neglect or oversight, reverence for the dead or the seeming impossibility of unraveling a riddle obscured by the passage of time, no effort has been made over the years to locate Cervantes’s grave site.

Spain should have searched for Cervantes “a long time ago,” said Alfonso de Ceballos-Escalera, a publisher and historian who has researched the writer’s family. “I think that we’ve done less than others to find some of our most famous people because this also corresponds to a Catholic view, which considers that what is important after a burial is the spirit and not the body and the physical remains.”

Soon after that article was published, the search began in earnest, “working with ground-penetrating radar technology.” And earlier today, the Associated Press reported that Cervantes’s remains may have at last been found:

Experts searching for the remains of Miguel de Cervantes said Monday that they found wooden fragments of a casket bearing the initials “M.C.” with bones in and around them in a crypt underneath the chapel of a cloistered convent in Madrid.

Archeologists have yet to verify if the bones are Cervantes’s—they’ll need to consult records of his battle wounds, as well as his portrait and his stories, “in which he relates that shortly before dying he only had six teeth”—but it seems likely that their search is over.

“You cannot write in Spanish without having Cervantes in mind,” the translator Edith Grossman told the Daily in 2011. “There is no question, in my mind, that you couldn’t have Marquez, for example, without him. They are all heirs of that style … Cervantes’s influence blossomed in England … it comes by way of the eighteenth-century novelists like Fielding and Sterne.”

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of The Paris Review.

Cold Comfort

Illustration from Die Gartenlaube, 1876.

“Brrr! It’s cold!” I exclaimed the other day, because it was. 

“Did you just say brrr?” my friend asked.

“I did indeed.”

“People don’t say that; they just write it.”

“That’s not true. Do people say ow? Or ouch? Or achoo?” 

“Yes. But they only write brrr. Or make a general shivering noise. They don’t actually sound it out.”

I maintain that this is nonsense. 

True, I haven’t been able to track down many literary citations. When I tried to find examples, I could only come up with the Beastie Boys song “Brrr Stick ‘Em” and, of course, the part of Bring It On where the cheerleaders chant, “Brrr, it’s cold in here/ There must be some Clovers in the atmosphere.” While it’s in the dictionary, they don’t specify whether it’s spoken, and it’s not included on most lists of onomatopoeias. 

And, yes, just reading words can get someone in trouble. What if it was like the period in second grade where I mispronounced Phoebe, or the several years where I avoided saying chimera out loud? I didn’t want to be like the Brazilian guy in my college dorm who sometimes said “What ho?” at inappropriate moments with a heavy Portuguese accent because he’d read a lot of Wodehouse. 

But the damage is done. Whatever its genesis, it is now associated in my mind with cold; I say it when I’m alone; I said it only this morning when I stepped out into the snow. And language is constantly evolving. If we needed more proof, here’s how it’s defined in the Urban Dictionary: “a word a girl uses when she first gets into the bed sheets.” 

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily’s correspondent.

Letter from New York, 2005

Adventures in tastelessness at The Onion.

Photo: Casey Bisson, via Flickr

I used to be an editor at The Onion. This was in 2004, when most of the original writers were still there—just a handful had gone off to Hollywood. I was hired by my friend Carol Kolb, who’d just been made editor in chief.

Carol is the funniest person I have ever known. One time we went to a German restaurant together, and our server was a cross-dresser. The cross-dresser was the newer kind. He was a man, dressed as a woman, but I think the polite thing is to use the female pronoun. She didn’t wear any makeup, and she didn’t have styled hair. She wore blue jeans and a shirt from the Gap. Her chin-length red hair was lackluster, and looked a little oily. She was about forty years old, and she behaved like a forty-year-old woman—tired, kind, a little weary.

I went to the restaurant a lot, and for whatever reason, she never confused me, but Carol, I have to say, was uncomfortable. It was as if she couldn’t decide whether this was just a guy who had accidentally put on his wife’s clothes that morning or she was a woman who had just given up all hope. Carol had trouble ordering—she stumbled over her words and couldn’t meet the server’s eye. I noticed she kept looking nervously at the server’s breasts and hips. It wasn’t too big a deal, and the server handled it like a forty-year-old woman would, not taking it personally and not acknowledging that it was happening. When the server walked away, Carol said, “I am so embarrassed. I was acting like somebody from Spencer, Wisconsin.” She made her eyes glaze over as a hayseed’s would if he met Divine. “I was like this!” she said, “I just couldn’t get it together.”

Another joke of Carol’s was to say, on a crowded subway, “Did you hear about Maria’s new boyfriend?”

I enjoyed this, so I’d always go, “What? Maria’s dating someone?” I’d be pleasantly surprised. “How long’s this been going on?”

Carol would act like someone who has a secret she shouldn’t tell. I’d pressure her to spill. After some back and forth, she’d say, “He fucks her with a gun.”

Whoever was around us would begin to eavesdrop, and then we’d just play out the scene. It changed every time. Sometimes I started to bring up Maria’s new boyfriend, and then it was even better. When I told Carol about the gun one night on a subway, beside a modestly dressed brunette, Carol immediately said, “Was it loaded?”

I said it was, and she said, “Well, was the safety on?”

I’ve been thinking about Carol and those days at The Onion lately because of what happened at Charlie Hebdo. I’ve been remembering a time when The Onion’s advertising team, who just wanted us to be “a little more tasteful, a little more cautious,” tried to bully Carol.

We’d done a few jokes the ad guys didn’t like. The only one that comes to mind immediately was about Weird Al Yankovic writing a parody of “Tears in Heaven.” This joke came out the week his parents died. I don’t have Carol’s ferocious comic instincts, and so I admit, a bit shamefacedly, that I sort of sided with advertising, and a few other cowardly writers did, too. But Carol didn’t back down, and I admired that. She never backed down. Also, in her defense, the ad guys saw—and complained about—the material they didn’t like by sneaking our proofs off the editorial printer, which always just seemed slimy.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the people in the advertising department got very, very worried about what Carol was going to do. In fact, the writers had already had the headline meeting and none of them thought there was anything funny about Katrina. They were just staying away from it. I don’t know if they were right—maybe there was something there, in the government’s bungled handling or something—but they all felt just sad and scared and a little sick about it. Nobody was laughing.

But understandably, the advertising wing was working itself into a lather imagining all the tasteless jokes we were going to try to publish. They had even begun to decide, without consulting us, that this was it, they were taking a stand. This time they would not let Carol decide. “We will go to any lengths to protect the dignity of the citizens of New Orleans,” they more or less declared. The “president” of the company called Carol into his office, sat her down for a serious talk, and let her know that he felt strongly about this. He understood she would want to cover Katrina, but he “knew she would use good taste and good sense,” and that he wouldn’t have to take it any higher or play cards he didn’t want to play, should she choose to test him.

I don’t remember who had the idea. But one of us suggested we mock up a fake front page for our Katrina issue. We’d leave it lying in the editorial printer for one of the advertising people to find. We all got together and brainstormed the most offensive, terrifying, tasteless, wrong headlines we could think of, knowing that those little schemers would be watching the printer.

We turned in maybe fifteen headlines apiece. None of mine made it. We chose five, laid them out, and, to make it more realistic, Carol scribbled some editorial comments in red pen. One headline was so outrageous that it still makes me laugh a decade later. It was written by John Krewson. The art guys illustrated it with a newswire photo of African Americans wading through chest-high water. It evoked America at its worst—it was racist and insensitive and I remember every word, but The Paris Review editors drew the line at gun-fucking.

We left the page on the printer for a few hours before it disappeared. Then there was a long, icy silence from advertising. Stony glares. The phone call came. Carol went over to the president’s office. He held up the page. At this point, I would have broken. Any ordinary human would, I think, have broken. Carol said, outraged, “How did you get that?”

Amie Barrodale is soon to publish her first short story collection, You Are Having a Good Time.

There’s a Convention for Everyone, and Other News

H.H. Backer’s Total Pet Expo. Photo: Yvette Marie Dostatni, via Slate

On the rise of the medical humanities: Can poetry’s therapeutic effects earn it a place on the doctor’s bookshelf? “Poetry can tell us about human experience, but it does this in its own language and not the more straightforward language of prose. It works by suggestion, but this doesn’t mean that it cannot console, teach, amuse, enlighten, mimic, disconcert and so much more. It can capture—or cause us to reconstruct—experiences and feelings that we might otherwise not be conscious of … Poetry’s use of language is at the furthest extreme from the self-help book, which is often dogmatic, insistent, reductive, bullying even.”
How to cheer yourself up when you’re feeling misunderstood: read scathing early reviews of canonical novels, such as this one, by H. L. Mencken, for a certain 1925 classic: “Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby, is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that … This story is obviously unimportant … What ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story—that Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people.”
Yvette Marie Dostatni’s new series of photographs documents the rise of the convention in America: the obsessive subcultures, the hotel conference rooms, the sprawling trade shows. “That's just the culture of the United States: People are looking for places they can fit in for two to three days, a pass to get out of their daily lives. They’re looking for people who are like them.”
Is there any hope of preserving or archiving the Internet? “The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable … In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes … but a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked.”
Among a certain kind of “creative” Silicon Valley set, the word maker has taken on a grating ubiquity—you’re not truly innovating if you’re not making something. Does this mean that, say, teaching is not a fundamentally creative pursuit? “I am not a maker. In a framing and value system is about creating artifacts, specifically ones you can sell, I am a less valuable human. As an educator, the work I do is superficially the same, year on year … To characterize what I do as ‘making’ is to mistake the methods—courses, workshops, editorials—for the effects. Or, worse, if you say that I ‘make’ other people, you are diminishing their agency and role in sense-making, as if their learning is something I do to them.”

Staff Picks: Country Life, City Life, Future Life

From the cover of The Edge Becomes the Center.

When we ran Sylvain Bourmeau’s interview with Michel Houellebecq earlier this month, a number of readers tweeted their distaste for Houellebecq’s new novel, as described by Bourmeau and by Houellebecq himself. They may want to think again. To American eyes (at least, to mine), Soumission is not a xenophobic screed, nor is it a dire prediction that Muslims will take over France. In the book, Muslims certainly do take over France and impose a form of Sharia. They also impose economic policies based on the theories of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and appoint a minister of education with links to the Belgian far right. This is, in other words, a fairy tale premise, played deadpan; Houellebecq uses it to make fun of, and to vent his scorn upon, the firmly secular France of today. Whether it is tactful (or prudent) to invent a Muslim Brotherhood party led by Chestertonians is a fair question, but Houellebecq has never been celebrated for his tact or, thank heavens, for his good sense. —Lorin Stein

Before I picked up DW Gibson’s The Edge Becomes the Center, I would’ve told you it was impossible to write a significant book about gentrification, as fraught and ubiquitous as it is. But Gibson’s oral history, out in May, is a generous, vigorous, and enlightening look at class and space in New York; it ought to be required reading for the next generation of transplants. In the stories of tenants, buyers, landlords, architects, real estate agents, contractors, and politicians, Gibson has found vibrant humanity in a subject that is, paradoxically, lacking in it. If it seems obvious that gentrification is about people, then why has a book like this been so long in coming? The Edge Becomes the Center raises critical questions about what we expect from our cities and how groups become communities. Mainly, though, it’s a joy to read, its chorus of voices a reminder of oral history’s power. Anyone who cares about the shape and gestalt of life in New York—and anyone who believes in cities as centers of culture—will come away moved. —Dan Piepenbring

There are a number of reasons to love Pitchfork’s new interview with Björk: the unabashed feeling with which she discusses her new album; the way she describes trying to unite (sometimes unsuccessfully) motherhood, family, and work; and the glimpse into her extraordinary mind. It’s most important, though, for the candor with which she admits to finding it difficult to be a working woman, that despite her fame and success and obvious talent, she has felt the need to have her ideas annexed by men in order to have them heard. After at least a decade of seeing her own creative efforts passed off in the press as belonging to men, she exhorted herself to speak out: “You’re a coward if you don’t stand up. Not for you, but for women. Say something.” Her experiences—for instance, that “everything a guy says once, you have to say five times”—are now a refrain among women. (How did we cope before we’d coined mansplaining?) But the elephant turd on the carpet, as Rebecca Solnit once called it, should be pointed out at every opportunity. —Nicole Rudick

I first heard about Ben Metcalf’s Against the Country from The Paris Review’s Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan. Set in poor, rural Virginia, Against the Country is narrated by an unnamed farm boy who was “worked like a jackass for the worst part of my childhood, and offered up to climate and predator and vice, and introduced to solitude, braced against hope, and dangled before the Lord our God, and schooled in the subtle truths and blatant lies of a half life in the American countryside.” The narrator’s father wants to flee town for a simpler life, so the family moves from suburban Indiana to Goochland, Virginia, where the narrator spends his later days ruminating over the evil they found in the country soil. Against the Country doesn’t preach against rural America’s perceived moral superiority—it holds it up, allowing readers to examine its farcical nature. Hilarious and dark, like most of Metcalf’s writing, the novel and its thick, rambling sentences had control of me from beginning to end. —Jeffery Gleaves

“Words … aren’t the same as the things themselves,” Herta Müller says in her interview with The Paris Review. “There’s never a perfect match.” I’d never read any of Müller’s books, but her concept of language led me to The Appointment, her 1997 novel, which takes place in Romania during Ceauşescu’s regime. Riding the tram to her interrogation, the narrator, a young factory worker, reflects on the terrors that she, her friends, and her family have been subjected to by the state. Müller draws from personal experience—she was persecuted by the Secutariat of Romania in the seventies—and her prose, like the movement of the tram, is steady and unswaying. Müller has a way with figurative language: eyes that “flashed like greased bullets,” cheeks “like frozen crusts of bread,” fingernails that “looked like ten roasted pumpkin seeds.” Her metaphors are unusual, but there is an underlying force to them. “Every object is steeped with meaning,” she explains in her interview, “but the meanings change with the experience of the viewer.” —Cassie Davies          

Early reviewers of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, out in May, describe the slim volume as a hybrid of Nelson’s two previous books—the lyrical and heartbreaking Bluets and the Sontag-esque The Art of Cruelty. In The Argonauts, Nelson turns her wit and haunting prose to her most intimate subject to date: her family. In chronicling her relationship with the gender-fluid artist Harry Dodge, Nelson explores the language of sexuality, gender, and erotics, blending memoir with a study of semantics, gender politics, and queer parenting, pulling in sources from Wittgenstein to Winnicott. The Argonauts finds Nelson at her most vulnerable, arguing for a radical rethinking of the terms in which we express love. —Catherine Carberry

How did this happen? Creston Lea’s debut collection, Wild Punch, flew entirely under the radar, and now a small band of readers keeps a terrible, beautiful secret. Well, be clean, conscience! I’m sharing. If you wish there were more Breece Pancakes or Pinckney Benedicts in the world, then Lea is your man. If you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, let Wild Punch be your entry into a brand of rural fiction that illuminates certain facets of American experience in a kind yet unflinching light. Understated and perceptive, the stories in this indispensable volume will stay with you like your own memories. —Emilia Murphy