2024 Reading Log

Here are the 100 or so books that I read in 2024, divided into categories: Fiction & Literature Studies, Poetry & Poetics, Art & Art Matters, Detectives & Spies, General Non-Fiction. If you want to see a separate listing of my 18 Notable Books from the year’s reading, look here.

Fiction & Literature Studies

Valerie Babb. A History of the African American Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. A fairly deep overview of the African American novel from its origins in the early 1880s to the mid-2010s. Babb, who taught at the University of Georgia (she’s now at Emory University), looks at a wide variety of novels, at the trends, and at the pressures that Black writers faced in each of seven segments of time (usually about two decades in length). She also discusses several distinct genres: the neo-slave novel, the detective novel, the speculative novel, African American pulp, the Black graphic novel, Black novels made into films, and novels of the diaspora modeled after the African American novel. All in all, there are introductions to substantial discussions of the books of nearly 150 writers.

Thomas Bernhard. The Rest Is Slander. London: Seagull Books, 2022. Five stories from 1968-1971 translated from the original German by Douglas Robertson. This is Bernhard in full fine fettle, with his narrators rattling on and complaining endlessly. For me, the gem of the book is “Ungenach,” a story about a young man who has decided to outright refuse his inheritance of a large estate upon the death of his father. His arguments for this are wonderfully circular and self-negating, while the lawyer he visits gives one of the most confusing and hence most delightful rants that I have read.

Peter Boxall. The Value of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. In this slim book, Boxall tries to trace a new arc for the novel, attempting to discern where it has gone after the “theory wars” and after postmodernism. In chapters on the voice, realism, the body, time, and justice & the law, Boxall briefly examines how the novel has operated over the last half millennium, using just a handful of novels as examples in each chapter.

Willa Cather. Death Comes for the Archbishop. 1927. The episodic manner in which Father, then Archbishop, Jean Marie Latour’s life is told was designed to give the reader plenty of moral and ethical stories about what Cather believed to be the way life should have unfolded when Anglos, Mexicans, and Native Americans met and mingled in the laboratory of nineteenth century Santa Fe and the Southwest. Cather has little affection for the westward plunging Americans who wouldn’t live peaceably with their other neighbors, but at times she also seems to patronize Mexicans and Natives. Cather wanted to create a kind of panoramic mural depicting the richness of the Southwest, so it can feel a bit more like a p.r. piece than a novel. That said, the writing is drop dead gorgeous.

Willa Cather. The Professor’s House. 1925. Cather’s wonderful novel is about a dedicated, successful professor at a Midwestern college. He’s a family man whose life becomes upended when he and his wife build a new house and he finds himself clinging emotionally to the old one. In the middle of this Midwestern college town story is another story about the adventures of the Professor’s best student in New Mexico many years earlier. And it is this story-within-a-story that is the real undoing of the Professor’s comfortable family life (and also the more engaging story, to my mind). I continue to be surprised at how much I like Cather’s writing. A 2024 Notable Book.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Dictee. Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1995. A reprint of the original 1982 edition. Cha wants to attempt so many things at once in this book. Dictee is, among other things, about language, women, Korean history, family, writing, performance, film, Roman gods and goddesses, St. Therese of Lisieux, and Joan of Arc. The book’s various photographs and other images play complex roles. Every few pages the text shifts gears, changes voice, launches into new topics or looks again at previous ones. It’s a deeply personal book in which Cha invokes the past in order to understand herself.

Carys Davies. Clear. NY: Scribner’s, 2024. In Davies’ novel, it is the 1840s and the Scottish Clearances are still going on. A dirt-poor minister who is one of 450 that have just walked out of the Church of Scotland, in order to create the so-called Disruption Assembly, needs an income for himself and his wife. For a fee, he agrees to go to a remote island and be the messenger for the eviction for the island’s sole resident, an aging farmer who, it turns out, is one of the last speakers of a dying Scottish dialect, and the two can barely communicate. But upon his arrival he takes a terrible fall and, instead, finds himself under the care of the man he has been sent to evict. Brief at 185 pages, Davies’ novel is richly evocative and a great pleasure to read. I don’t want to spoil the plot but the outcome seems an anachronistically neat and very 21st century dénouement. A 2024 Notable Book.

Don DeLillo. Point Omega. NY: Scribner, 2010. A documentary filmmaker watches Douglas Gordon’s film installation 24 Hour Psycho, in which Hitchcock’s movie is slowed down to 24 hours, then he accompanies another man to a remote spot in the Southwestern desert to contemplate the night sky and the unchanging horizon. DeLillo’s novels always give me much to think about, but this one didn’t add up to anything larger than the sum of its parts. The dust jacket says this is about “a lingering human mystery,” and that about says it all. But his writing on the slow motion Psycho is pretty terrific.

Stephen Downes. Mural. Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2024. A psychopath, who has been locked away in some kind of “secure facility,” has been tasked by his psychiatrist of writing down whatever comes to his mind. The result is this fascinating, meandering written and visual tour through the various obsessions of the man we only know as D. Over the course of his life, D. had become totally obsessed with the renowned sexologist Havelock Ellis and the Australian artist Napier Waller. Downes includes many photographs, some reproducing Waller’s various artworks.

Rikki Ducornet. The Plotinus. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2023. A brief dystopian novel about a man imprisoned by a robot called the Plotinus (after the Greek philosopher). During his imprisonment, he thinks about big things like Beauty and freedom, and he also thinks about small things like food, Fred’s Grocery, and the hornet that comes to visit him. The Plotinus is really a paean to the stunning power of the human imagination, which can put together something like this which defies every categorization. Interspersed amongst the text are cyanotype images of trees and nature by Michael Eastman (the book is also printed in cyan type).

Danielle Dutton. Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2024. Dutton’s book contains essays about art and some short stories, which are usually inspired by artworks, so I have cross-listed it in two categories here. I had mixed responses to her short pieces of fiction, which aren’t really stories. None of them came up to the level of writing that I loved in her novel Sprawl.

Percival Everett. Cutting Lisa. NY: Ticknor & Fields, 1986. In Everett’s third novel, he continues to probe the male psyche, which seems to be an inherently unstable thing. In this case, a retired obstetrician who has just lost his wife, goes to live with his son’s family for the summer. Two events cause him to flip. He has a fling with a woman half his age, but learns it is over when he accidentally spies her making love with another man. Then he finds out that his son’s wife Lisa is pregnant not from his son, but from his son’s best friend. One day, the retired obstetrician decides to take matters into his own hands. The title says it all.

Percival Everett. James. NY: Doubleday, 2024. With James, Everett has hit the big time and moved up from Graywolf Press, which has published him for years. That’s what happens when 1) you have a title on last year’s Booker Prize short list, 2) your novel Erasure is made into the hit movie American Fiction, and 3) your current novel is a rewriting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the slave Jim. James is terrific. It’s smart-ass, compulsively readable, and takes Mark Twain for a real ride. The last pages have a few nice surprises in store. Everett is fearless.

Robert Hampson. Joseph Conrad. London: Reaktion Books, 2020. Critical Lives series. A very nice overview of Conrad’s life and major works. I’m hoping to find time to read some Conrad this coming year. I am impressed with this series.

Fredric Jameson. Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. Verso, 2016. This is a short, strange book of three chapters that don’t seem to hang together very well. Jameson doesn’t seem to have a unifying vision of Chandler. His take on Chandler involves the writer’s unique relationship to the city of Los Angeles, his use of physical space, and his special way with similes in his four main Marlowe detective novels. It’s not what I expected from Jameson at all.

Gabriel Josipovici. The Cemetery in Barnes. Manchester: Carcanet, 2018. It’s a simple story of a man and the two women who were his wives. He works as a professional translator with a penchant for sixteenth century French poetry. He is especially a fan of the The Regrets, a collection of sonnets by Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560). Like nearly all of Josipovici’s fictions, this is a novel that reminds us how easy it would be for a life to have gone in many different directions and how one’s memories and one’s imagination are essentially interchangeable. I reread this novel as book number 9 in my Vertigo 15 Books Project, one of the fifteen most memorable titles across fifteen years of my writing Vertigo. My longer review is here.

Gabriel Josipovici. After & Making Mistakes: Two Novels. Manchester: Carcanet, 2009. Two short novels written in Josipovici’s most minimalist style. Both novels consist of little more than dialogue. After concerns a woman who reappears in a man’s life after a fifteen year disappearance. She seems to be threatening him and very slowly the story of their strange past unfolds. Making Mistakes is a modern version of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutti, in which two couples exchange partners and then change back again. The challenge of keeping track of the who, where, and when of what is going on really tends to keep the reader awake.

Gabriel Josipovici. A Winter in Zürau / Partita. Manchester: Carcanet, 2024. In this two-directional book, reading the book in one directions features Josipovici’s attempt to understand what happened to Franz Kafka during the eight month period when he went to live on his sister Ottla’s farm in Zürau, outside Prague. He had just received his prognosis of tuberculosis and wanted to make a clean break (again) with his fiance Felice. While at Zürau, he began writing in two small notebooks some mysterious, brief entries that he called Aphorisms. He told his Executor Max Brod these should be destroyed among many other papers, but Brod disobeyed Kafka. Josipovici is a brilliant interpreter of Kafka and he makes the reader understand what Kafka was grappling with at this moment and what he achieved in these notebooks. Reading the opposite direction is Partita, which is meant to recall a Bach musical work. Josipovici presents us with a semi-comical, fever dream of a short fiction in which a seemingly innocent man named Mike finds himself fleeing across Europe from a series of men who each are convinced he has slept with their wife or girlfriend, only to return home one day as if it had never happened. The two works make a splendid pair.

Benjamin Labutat. When We Cease To Understand the World. NY: New York Review of Books, 2020. Brief, somewhat fictionalized stories from the lives of a handful of twentieth century mathematicians and physicists who helped give birth to quantum physics. The mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, who gave up his field to live like a monk, once said that it would not be too long before “we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant” any more. This is Labutat’s warning to us that we don’t have much time left, if we have any at all. Translated from the 2020 Spanish original by Adrian Nathan West.

Janet Malcolm. Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. NY: Random House, 2007. I choose this book wanting to read more Janet Malcolm, not especially interested in Chekhov. Malcolm writes about Chekhov’s life, stories and plays, as she recounts her pilgrimage through Yeltsin-era Russia to various Chekhovian sites in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yalta. Her take on early post-Soviet Union Russia is amusing and she’s an insightful reader of Chekhov. But, on the whole, it’s not a very entertaining book unless one is a Chekhov fanatic.

Laura Marcus. Virginia Woolf. Devon: Northcote House, 2004 (Second Edition). As I continue my slow traversal of Woolf’s novels, Marcus has been a basic guide for things to look out for in each one.

David Markson. Reader’s Block. Normal IL: Dalkey Archive, 1996. I haven’t read this since just after it was first published, but it still feels fresh and original and one of the most experimental of American novels. The book’s penultimate line could stand as an excellent description for the book itself: “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.” Markson’s narrator, referred to as the Reader, is a writer attempting to finish a novel. But, instead of having writer’s block, he seems to have “reader’s block,” and keeps reading and researching. Reader’s Block is 193 pages of very brief lists, thoughts, names, and sentences. The Reader morosely recalls the countless writers and famous people who have committed suicide or died young. He catalogs the many examples of artistic bad taste and failure he has run across among the world’s writers and artists. (“Henry James was bored by Crime and Punishment.”) He thinks of names for the Protagonist and the characters of his own novel (Mr. Earbrass), and worries about how to handle certain events in it. (“Could the woman who appears at the grave be the woman with one leg?”) All in all, it’s very amusing. I tried to follow up by reading his next book, This Is Not a Novel (2001), but it felt like a poor imitation of Reader’s Block. A 2024 Notable Book.

A.V. Marraccini. We the Parasites. Seattle: Sublunary Editions, 2023. We the Parasites is partly a memoir of Marraccini’s experiences during the Covid pandemic and partly her attempt to establish a trans-Atlantic queer relationship. But it’s mostly about establishing a critical platform for herself, vectoring the things that interest her, while establishing some sort of ideological DNA strand for herself. There’s a fair amount of Genet-like raging and Tracy Emin-like bad girl stuff, but much of this slim volume is spent pondering a few Greek writers, Homer, poets W.H. Auden and Rainer Maria Rilke, and the painter Cy Twombly. Reading Marraccini is highly energizing and thought provoking. Oh, keep a dictionary nearby. My longer piece on this book is here. A 2024 Notable Book.

Brian McHale. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987) has been a key text for me, so I was very curious to see how he updated that book for Cambridge. He addresses the theoretical discussions that have arisen around postmodernism in the intervening years and he writes about many newer books. But he also ponders the question “Is postmodernism dead?” and, if so, what might be following it. At times he is very engaging, but much of the time he is slogging through the requisite synopses of endless works of fiction and how they match with certain aspects of postmodern theory. Still, a very worthwhile book.

Claire Messud. This Strange Eventful History. NY: Norton, 2024. “We’d lived many places and belonged nowhere.” Messud’s novel, based closely on her own family history, takes place in locations across the globe and covers nearly a century in time, yet feels strangely claustrophobic. As pieds-noirs, or Algerians of French descent, the Cassar family left their homeland at the outbreak of World War II and were never able to return. The novel flits from one family member to the next, from one country to another as people move, from one generation to the following. Each family member seems depressed in their own unique way. The novel, however beautifully written, never leaves the confines of the family and so we don’t really see much of the century as it passes by. Each character seems focused mostly on their fears, their regrets, and their sense of guilt. Perhaps the parts that will stay with me are those that depict the blend of love, nostalgia, and utter mental confusion that afflicts various characters as they age and approach death. The book finally feels more open in the few short chapters at the ends which are written in first person by Chloe, the Claire Messud stand-in.

Stephen Mitchelmore. The Opposite Shore. Self-published and downloadable here as an Epub or pdf, 2022. Mitchelmore, one of our premiere writers and deep thinkers about literature, has pulled together twenty posts from his important blog This Space from the years 2015-2021. They cover writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Maurice Blanchot, Gabriel Josipovici, Enrique Vila-Matas, J.M Coetzee, Thomas Bernhard, T.J. Clark, and others. Mitchelmore and T.J. Clark are two writers who continue to push me to keep learning.

Yoko Ogawa. The Memory Police. Vintage, 2019. Ogawa’s dystopian novel is something of a cross between George Orwell’s 1984 and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. On a strange island, things routinely disappear from memory—at first simple, innocent objects, but eventually, ominously, things like books. A small number of people are genetically disposed to continue remembering the things that disappear from the lives of everyone else and it is the role of the Memory Police to track these people down and make sure they disappear also. A young writer discovers that her editor has been marked for disappearance and, with the help of an old man, she conceals the editor in a hidden room in her house. As the Memory Police tighten their vise on the people of the island, the editor attempts to help the writer and the old man understand the value of retaining memories by showing them objects that have previously disappeared and have been forgotten. Meanwhile, the writer is slowly writing a very curious novel about a young woman who has lost her voice and is being held hostage in a tower by a typing instructor. The Memory Police is written rather plainly, which seems to enhance the feeling of impending doom. It’s occasionally jarring, sometimes tender. I actually think the novel embedded within the novel is more disturbing. Translated from the 1994 Japanese original by Stephen Snyder. A 2024 Notable Book.

David Peace. 1974. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999. The opening salvo in Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, his powerful set of novels about masculinity and violence in Yorkshire. This volume is narrated by young Edward Dunsford, a junior crime reporter for the Yorkshire Post.

David Peace. 1977. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000. Part two of his quartet of crime novels that take place in West Yorkshire around the time that the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher era begins. In this volume, we first see the Yorkshire Ripper. This volume is co-narrated by Jack Whitehead, a senior reporter for the Yorkshire Post and Bob Fraser, a cop with a conscience, who is aiding the reporters in their attempt to probe corruption within police ranks.

David Peace. 1980. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001. Part three of Peace’s quartet is narrated by Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter of the Greater Manchester police force who has been brought in from neighboring Bradford to review the progress of the Yorkshire Ripper investigations, because, not surprisingly, the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police Department has failed to make any material progress for six years.

David Peace. 1983. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2002. Significant portions of 1983 are written as flashbacks, allowing the reader to relive some scenes that occurred earlier, but which are now seen from different perspectives, through the eyes of different characters. In this way, we finally grasp the larger implications that were invisible in the earlier encounter. The book’s co-narrators are John Piggott, a lawyer, and Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson (known as The Owl for his eyeglasses) of the Greater Manchester police force, who has helped orchestrate the major police cover-up which has been one of the key stories of the Quartet.

David Peace. Munichs. London: Faber, 2024. In February 1958, a plane carrying the Manchester United soccer team, some of its coaching staff, and several journalists crashed on take-off at the Munich airport and broke in two, killing more than twenty of its passengers. The team lost almost half its players. Peace follows numerous individuals and families as they try to recover from the tragedy and we watch the team attempt to rebuild and get to the finals of the FA Cup later that spring. The novel is often quite gripping, but I am sure it would be much more so if I had any familiarity with the large cast of characters. Peace tends to refer to characters by their first name, so half the time I didn’t fully understand who was who. “Munichs,” Peace explains, was a term of abuse yelled at Manchester United by their rivals. He would like it to be a “badge of pride” instead.

Ricardo Piglia. The Way Out. Brooklyn: Restless Books, 2020. In Piglia’s final novel, he uses his own alter ego Emilio Renzi as the narrator. Renzi is a visiting English professor from Argentina at a university in New Jersey whose colleague and occasional lover dies under mysterious circumstances. Restless and uncertain of his own future, he feels compelled to investigate and eventually pursues the possibility that her death might have been linked to the serial killer Thomas Munk, who is styled after the Unibomber Ted Kaczynski. Ultimately, Renzi interviews Munk in prison just before his trial in California. Haunted with conspiracy theories and some dated stereotypes of various California characters, The Way Out is not Piglia’s finest hour but is nevertheless a compelling read.

Marcel Proust. Finding Time Again. Penguin, 2003. It has taken a monumental, multi-year undertaking for me to read and now finish all seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The parts of this volume which describe the parties that Marcel attends were often a great struggle to get through. But Proust’s writing is so rich, if only one can stay awake. It was particularly fascinating to see the impact of World War I on this volume. As the book ends and Marcel begins to reminisce about the past—especially about his childhood in the first volume—it was wonderful to recollect the early days in Combray. Translated from the French original by Ian Patterson.

Ann Quin & Larry Goodell. Between Ann & Larry: Letters 1965–1973. Placitas, NM: Duende Press, 2023. The letters between the British novelist Ann Quin and American poet Larry Goodell were a powerful reminder of how the Love Generation slowly spiraled into the Anti-War generation and what those years were really like: no money, endless drugs, cars that broke down frequently, relationships that broke up frequently, trying to heal the planet one small garden at a time, trying to find a job while having long hair, etc. Larry and Lenore Goodell lived dirt poor in Placitas, New Mexico, and became close friends with Quin when she stayed there several times. Their correspondence as she moved around the U.S., Mexico, and in various locations in England, is full of gossip about the local clan of writers (including Robert Creeley), their own struggles as writers, Quin’s psychiatric problems, and much more.

Lisa Robertson. The Baudelaire Fractal. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2020. This is the Canadian poet’s first “novel,” in which her narrator reminisces about her experiences developing as a poet. How, why, and when did she become the type of writer that she is now? Most of the narrator’s remembrances take place in Paris, across several decades, as she absorbs the poetry of Baudelaire, the art of nineteenth century France, the writings of the new feminists, and contemporary avant-garde fashion (Limi Feu, Ann Demeulemeester, etc.). Robertson is highly attuned to emotions and physical sensations, and she has forged a distinctive style which is most obvious when her writing becomes nearly as abstract and loose as a jazz improvisation or when she riffs on an idea or a piece of clothing.

Cristina Rivera Garza. New and Selected Stories. St. Louis: Dorothy, a Publishing Project, 2022. An anonymous envelope is left at the door of a man’s hotel room. “Run away. Get out of this place. Soon you won’t be able to escape.” Regardless of what happens in any of the two dozen stories in this collection, the background music is uniformly ominous. Rivera Garza writes in crisp, short sentences, so that whenever her stories take even a slight turn it feels like a body blow. Several of these are so astonishingly polished and compact that it seems like a single word couldn’t be changed. A 2024 Notable Book.

Christine Schutt. Florida. NY: Harvest, 2004. For me, the what (Alice’s unhappy life and her dysfunctional family) takes second place to the how (the manner in which Christine Schutt rearranges English prose to tell Alice’s story. Much of the emotional and psychic effect in the novel is the result of her fractured sentences and her reordered grammar, which makes even the simplest sentence read fresh and alien. Nothing much happens. Alice mostly reflects on her mother, who drinks, goes in and out of rehab, moves to warmer climates, swaps men frequently, and leaves Alice to a kindly, rich Aunt and Uncle. “Mother was sick and somewhere quiet, ‘a little bit of Florida’.” Alice never knew her father. And she hates but desperately wants to love her mother, which leaves her completely unmoored as she grows up and starts to make her own mistakes.

W.G. Sebald. Austerlitz. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001. I hadn’t reread one of Sebald’s novels in several years, so I chose Austerlitz, the one I had read only once or twice before, probably around the time it was first published. It was shocking how different the basic shape of the novel was from my memory of reading it twenty years ago. For example, I had thought that the story of his Wales upbringing was much shorter and much less interesting. But this time around I found that part much longer and stronger than I had remembered. Austerlitz is such a rich novel, full of sharply drawn scenes that generate ideas in multiple directions. Translated from the German original by Anthea Bell.

Anna Seghers. Crossing: A Love Story. Dialogos, 2016. Seghers was an East German writer who spent the Hitler years in exile in Mexico City. Crossing takes place aboard a Polish freighter carrying a few passengers from Brazil to a port near Hamburg. A German passenger buttonholes the book’s narrator and tells him the multi-year tale of his love for a Brazilian woman, a story which takes several startling turns as the days aboard ship pass by. While the narrator mostly acts as the receiver of the German’s tale, he also adds his own opinions to the strange, but strangely engrossing story and observes the other guests on the ship. Translated from the 1971 German original by Douglas Irving.

Christina Sharpe. In the Wake: On Blackness and Writing. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Sharpe’s book ranges from the personal to the news of our time to the scholarly, as she thinks deeply about what it is to live in the “wake” of slavery. In the Wake is powerful, angry, grateful, and generous. Sharpe examines Black history from slave ships to police shootings and pays particularly close attention to the ways in which Black poets, photographers, and artists have responded. A 2024 Notable Book.

Bennett Sims. Other Minds and Other Stories. Two Dollar Radio, 2023. I normally don’t take to short stories, preferring longer engagement. But Sims’ new book is close to brilliant. A number of the stories deal with the classical world and ancient Rome (Sims spent some time at the American Academy in Rome), but he’s tapping into a very contemporary zeitgeist in all the stories, most obviously in the ones that feature modern technology like GPS and cellphones running slightly amuck. The writing is precise, but never fussy, and he uses a vocabulary that will exercise many readers (as he did this one). I may never forget his story “Pecking Order,” in which a novice backyard farmer tries to kill one of his chickens with a very dull set of hedge clippers. It’s a story that should outrage PETA and Temple Grandin. The young locavore can’t help but think of what’s going through the chicken’s mind as he assaults it, which only makes him step up the attack with his poorly selected weapon. There are several photographs scattered throughout the stories.

Solution Opportunities: For Iain Sinclair at 80. Hackney: Privately published, 2023. Nearly 200 writers, poets, filmmakers, booksellers, and other friends of Iain Sinclair each wrote a page for his eightieth birthday. Somehow, master of ceremonies Gareth Evans invited me to join this group, perhaps the one person in the volume who had never met Sinclair. Sinclair seems like one of those larger-than-life characters, who has created a huge community of creative people and alternative thinkers in East London and beyond through his gregarious friendship, his staggering amount of writing, and his collaborations with artists of all kinds. Limited edition: 200 numbered copies, signed by Sinclair for contributors, and 400 numbered and signed copies to be sold by the London Review Bookshop.

Bradley Stephens. Victor Hugo. London: Reakton Books, 2019. One of their Critical Lives series, this brief biography (220 pages) was just what I needed as an introduction to an author who has always fascinated me but seemed daunting. Well-written, concise, and made me want to read Hugo.

David Wheatley. Stretto. London: CB Editions, 2022. This book alternately charmed and frustrated me. The book is strangely called a novel, while it’s 101 individual entries of nearly identical length—one and a half pages—each seeming like a one-off entry that reflects a passing thought or an event in Wheatley’s daily life. Wheatley is a poet and critic, and most of these read to me more like prose poems. Oddly, Wheatley never likes to inform the reader where anything happens, not even the country in which he lives and works. One can guess (Scotland), but the deliberate absence of almost all place names in pieces that are often about places makes the book feel like it’s for insiders who know these locales by their descriptions. Stretto is a musical term, and whenever Wheatley writes about music he shines.

Justin Torres. Blackouts. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023. A strange and sometimes wondrous novel that largely concerns a conversation between Juan, a young, gay Puerto Rican, and Nene, an elderly gay man who is dying. The setting is a mysterious care facility or lodging in the desert called The Palace. The two tell each other stories, with Nene acting somewhat as Juan’s mentor in life. The stories are about gay life and gay history, many of which focus on the oppression and marginalization of gays (and of Latinos). One primary (true) story that Nene tells is that of Jan Gay, a largely unknown woman who conducted some of the earliest methodical interviews with hundreds of lesbian women. Blackouts is full of photographs, illustrations, and pages from books about “sex variants” with most of the words blacked out and the remaining words forming a prose poem. The book is very conversational, in that it skips around frequently from topic to topic, leaving some conversations unfinished.

Virginia Woolf. The Waves. 1931. After failing several times to get past the notoriously uninviting beginning of The Waves, I finally persevered. What an astonishing piece of writing! In some ways, it feels like a totally abstract novel. Six friends take turns talking in an elevated, dramatic style about their lives as they grow up from young school children to somewhat elderly adults. A seventh friend, who dies in an accident as a young adult, never speaks. In between these soliloquies, are segments describing a shoreline, the sky, the sun, and the breaking waves. The segments advance throughout the novel from sunrise to sunset. Essentially, the book is about life, and the six characters each take a stab at talking about what is important to them. Woolf’s writing is utterly lush. I kept rereading sections and single sentences just a caress them with my brain. A 2024 Notable Book.

Poetry & Poetics

Dionne Brand. Inventory. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006. In Brand’s book-length poem, the poet (or the “she” that speaks directly to the reader), is trying to come to terms with the fact that most of the world is living life naively, believing “the science-fiction tales of democracy,” ignoring the fact that “we mean each other / harm”, and look away from the hundreds that are killed daily in wars around the world. “Happiness is not the point really.” This poet’s job is to keep inventory of those that are killed. “I have nothing soothing to tell you, / that’s not my job, / my job is to revise and revise this bristling list, / hourly.” Inventory is emotionally powerful and full of wonderful linguistic gymnastics that expand meanings. Her innovative, beautiful language seems like a natural counter to the grim message it conveys.

Don Mee Choi. Mirror Nation. Seattle: Wave Books, 2024. Mirror Nation is the concluding volume of Choi’s trilogy of autobiographical books that use poetry and prose in both English and Korean, a somewhat adventurous use of type fonts, photographs, and other types of imagery. Written while she was living in Berlin (once itself a divided city, just as Korea is a divided nation), this volume largely focuses on the Gwangju Massacre of May 1980, when hundreds, if not thousands of students and others were murdered by Korean soldiers after the newly-installed military South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan implemented martial law, with the full backing of the U.S. government. I wrote a longer review here. A 2024 Notable Book.

Tyree Daye. a little bump in the earth. Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2024. Daye turns Youngsville NC, the town where he grew up, into a “Ritual House” through a series of poems that celebrate his family, past and present, and Black knowledge and traditions. This hill, this “little bump on the earth,” that he imagines, is a safe place, a Black community without clocks, without violence or worry. Daye uses photographs of people and family documents and census records to create a small “museum” of his family’s history.

Tyree Daye. Cardinal. Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2020. Poems about people, family, the South, and Youngsville NC (where Daye grew up), with six color photographs of people, presumably by the author, plus a cover photograph of a terrific sculpture by Alison Saar. Daye makes frequent references to the Green Book, to travel, and the freedom of flight (hence the title), along with the dangers that Blacks face as they often travel. The photographs often leave only the people (or the single person) in focus, eliminating most of the background.

Percival Everett. Sonnets for a Missing Key, And Some Others. Pasadena: Red Hen, 2024. This is the sixth book of poetry from novelist Percival Everett and it may be his strongest. The first twenty-three poems are sonnets, the remainder (about the same number), are not. The structured sonnets seemed to me much more powerful and full of reverberations than the free form poems. As one would expect from Everett, there is plenty of wordplay, which gives each poem multiple, tempting ways to be read. Every poem is named after a musical key. While there aren’t any overriding subjects, the poems feel deeply personal, pensive, and possibly about family. They take you to mental spaces you might not otherwise find on your own. A 2024 Notable Book.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths. The Requited Distance. Riverdale-on-Hudson: The Sheep Meadow Press, 2011. A book of poems that mostly reflect on Icarus, his fateful flight, and his relationship with his father Daedalus. But Griffiths rarely strays far from the sensuous body, the pull of human desires, and the role that language plays.

Jindřich Heisler & Jindřich Štyrský. On the Needles of These Days. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2024. Translated from the original Czech by Jed Slast. Visual artist Jindřich Štyrský’s photographs from the 1930s are combined with an extended prose poem by fellow Surrealist Jindřich Heisler. On the Needles of These Days was originally published clandestinely in Nazi-occupied Prague in 1941 as a samizdat edition of very few copies by Edice Surrealismu. It was then officially published in December 1945 by Fr. Borovy in Prague. This beautiful, new hardcover edition is limited to 700 copies. The book’s layout is based on Karel Teige’s original design. Štyrský’s haunting, elegant photos show store windows, mannequins, graffiti, signs, and such, and reminded me somewhat of Eugene Atget’s earlier photographs of Paris. There’s an emptiness and stillness to them that perhaps suggests the suspension of time that might happen during wartime. Heisler’s text has a Surrealist edge, but also speaks to the subject matter in the photographs. The poem only obliquely suggests that Czechoslovakia, where Heisler and Štyrský are living when this book is first published, had been under German occupation for about two years.

Harmony Holiday. A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom. Minneapolis: Birds, 2019. Poems by Holiday and “interior art provided by Harmony Holiday.” In this case, Uncle Tom is the “defensive, huddled, hyper-masculinity that the West invented and bestowed upon many black male archetypes.” Holiday rings in a New Orleans-style funeral for such a male. Most of the numerous images within the book are oddly cut details removed from larger photographs.

Harmony Holiday. Hollywood Forever. Albany: Fence Books, 2017. Harmony Holiday is involved in jazz, dance, poetry, and other creative forms, and this amalgam of talents shows in Hollywood Forever. Her texts—prose and poetry, some original and some quoted or loosely massaged from other texts—are typeset over an assortment of images, journalism articles, magazine covers, and advertisements, all focusing on either Black culture or overt racism (“Help Save the Youth of America. Don’t Buy Negro Records!”). It’s a smart, angry, cacophonous book about the stupidity of racism.

W. Scott Howard. Archive and Artifact: Susan Howe’s Factual Telepathy. Northfield, MA: Talisman House, 2019. Howard investigates deeply—and I mean deeply— the often un- and under-explored primary materials that Susan Howe has used in her poetry, notably the early history of New England, its captivity narratives, and King Philip’s War (1675-8). Except for a fascinating interview with Howe, Archive and Artifact registers very, very high on the academic scale. But for anyone obsessed with Howe, this is eye-opening reading. I need to read everything by her again.

Susan Howe. The Midnight. NY: New Directions, 2003. New Directions let Howe basically turn this into an artist’s book. There is none of the usual publisher’s information, copyright statement, etc.—just a title page and her text, which is filled with photographs. Partly poetry, party prose poem, The Midnight‘s main subject is the poet’s mother, an Irish-born writer and actress, though plenty of other people make an appearance, including Yeats, Lady Macbeth, Emily Dickinson and Lewis Carroll, to name a few. Not my favorite book of Howe’s.

Susan Howe. Singularities. Wesleyan University Press, 1990. Singularities is one of Howe’s more challenging books of reader participation poetry, in which the reader has to do some heavy lifting to locate their own sense of meaning within Howe’s general parameters. “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time” was a previously published chapbook that deals with King Philip’s War, the Reverend Hope Atherton, and the Battle of Great Falls, which resulted in Atherton becoming lost in the Massachusetts forest. “Thorow” deals with Henry David Thoreau (marginally), the Adirondacks, place, naming, and a host of other issues. And “Scattering As Behaviour Toward Risk” seems to be at least partly about reading: “More imagined it. . . while the Narrative wanders.”

Susan Howe. Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. NY: New Directions, /Christine Burgin, 2014. This is Howe’s love letter to archives, with great reproductions of archival pieces from Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Noah Webster, Gertrude Stein, and others. Each image is accompanied by poetic commentary by Howe that can be personal, historic, or theoretical in nature—or all three. The book’s title alone can be unpacked endlessly, like a magician’s suitcase. This is a wondrous book that anyone even vaguely interested in literature or archives or research should own. A 2024 Notable Book.

Frank O’Hara. Lunch Poems. SF: City Lights, 1964. I was really surprised and delighted to see that Lunch Poems was still available or newly re-available (?) in its original Pocket Poets Series format sixty years on. A first edition that originally went for $1.25 can now sell for $1,500. But the latest edition is only $8.95. City Lights doesn’t give any clues as to how many editions there have been since 1964. Today, it’s hard for me to read Lunch Poems and try to re-imagine how fresh and spontaneous these might have seemed in 1964. It seemed to me that only a handful had stood the test of time—”The Day Lady Died” being the prime example. Sometimes O’Hara is just trying too hard, as in “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday,” where one of the worst lines is “Is it the fig-newton / playing the horn?” Cancel that image, please.

Johny Pitts and Roger Robinson. Home Is Not a Place. William Collins, 2022. Color and b&w photographs by Pitts and poems by Robinson. The pair decided to examine Black life in Britain by exploring the country’s “often overlooked coast,” beginning at Tilbury, where Pocahontas is buried and the Empire Windrush docked in 1948, bringing a new wave of British citizens who were immigrating from the British West Indies. The poems evoke the fear of everyday Black life (including the Grenfell tower fire) and the possibilities for Black Joy. In two brief essays, the pair explain the working philosophy behind their book”Leaving London with a B-Side Aesthetic” and “Towards a Black Psychogeography.”

Kimberly Reyes. Vanishing Point. Oakland: Omnidawn, 2023. Reyes’ poems often start out at ordinary events—a memory of childhood, the beauty parlor, thinking about an artist—but then she delves deeply into the key moment or the hidden undercurrent, the racist action or the quiet history lesson that became the focus of her attention. These are quiet poems, and at times the typeface accordingly fades to lighter shades of gray, threatening to vanish off the page. But the quiet only seems to elevate the pitch of the voice in the reader’s head. Reyes’ book includes several reproductions of artworks and a page from the 1920 census documenting her mother. More significantly, this is the first time I have encountered QR codes in a poetry volume. They send the reader to several beautiful films on YouTube created to accompany Reyes’ reading several of her poems.

Martha Ronk. Vertigo. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2007. In Ronk’s mysterious poems, which often seem vaguely incomplete or unfinished, the important element usually seems to be just offstage, leaving the reader slightly unsure of what exactly is going on. Hence the book’s title. These are not poems that end by landing in an explosion of clarity. Many of these poems refer to or are about photographs or works of art or other books, and, without using ekphrasis, Ronk instead enters the spirit of the other artwork. Some of the poem’s titles in this book are taken from the sentences of W.G. Sebald.

Asiya Wadud. Crosslight for Youngbird. NY: Nightboat Books, 2018. Wadud’s first book of poetry aches for the fragility of life, which brings forth immense sadness, but permits such joy. The poems and prose poems are of people swimming and refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, the transient beauty of light and water, the stillbirth of a child, the migration of birds and people. Her use of language is stunningly rich, fertile, and stimulating. The small volume includes several photographs by Wadud of beaches and waves.

Asiya Wadud. Mandible Wishbone Solvent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. Wadud’s most recent book of poems is rich in intimations, wordplay, imagery that seems to lie just beyond one’s ability to imagine. The book is about connections, often between things or words that shouldn’t seem to flow into each other. “Lateral logic.” This feels like the verbal edging toward the non-verbal, as if poetry could become dance. She includes a few of her own eerie color photographs of hands or body parts or cloths. A sentence from the final page just about describes this book: “It is ardent, incandescent.” A 2024 Notable Book.

Asiya Wadud. No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. NY: Nightboat Books, 2021. Wadud’s poetics begin in a place beyond everyday logic, as she strives for something more physical, performative, visceral, more like choreography. Plants, bees, and birds abound. She nods to Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, and the artist Torkwase Dyson, and includes a few of her own b&w photographs of hands and torsos. The reader must lose himself, give himself over to something not completely clear, and trust the poet.

Asiya Wadud and Okwui Okpokwasili. day pulls down the sky. a filament in gold leaf. NY: Belladonna & Danspace, 2019. Poems by Wadud in response to song lyrics by Okpokwasili, a multidisciplinary artist. The project was commission by New York City’s Belladonna Collaborative and Danspace. Wadud’s ethereal poems deal with the body (naturally), the idea of the body as an isthmus and a connector (especially with nature), Fibonacci, and the poet commanding us to see and naming things.

Art & Art Matters

Jakuta Alikavazovic. Like a Sky Inside. Oakland: Fern Books, 2024. The French writer Jakuta Alikavazovic managed to convinced the authorities of Paris’ Louvre Museum to let her stay overnight unattended among the collection. Hoping the museum will not subject her to the usual security measures, she carries something illegal inside her bag, something she will not reveal to us. While partly an opportunity to observe and think deeply about art, much of Like a Sky Inside is a recapitulation of her relationship with her father, a Serb who fled Yugoslavia to come to the Paris that he had loved from afar. When she was a child, he would take her to the Louvre and he would always ask her how she might plan the theft of the “Mona Lisa.” Like many children, Alikavazovic eventually rebelled against her loving father in every way possible, until she finally realized that she was very much in his mold. In the end, we never find out what she hid in her bag except that it was something she planted in the Louvre in honor of her father. Translated from the 2021 French original by Daniel Levin Becker. A 2024 Notable Book.

Leslie Anne Anderson & Ethelene Whitmire, eds. Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the 20th Century. Seattle: National Nordic Museum, 2024. Since the 1930s, African American artists in every medium have found Scandinavia—especially Denmark—a welcoming haven from the daily racism of America, and an alternative to Paris. This exhibition traced the lives and works of a number of African American visual artists and musicians who made their way, and often their home, in Scandinavian countries.

Martin Bailey. Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence. London: Frances Lincoln, 2016. Bailey has done some remarkable research that has uncovered details about the fifteen-month period that Van Gogh spent in Arles in 1888-1889. His narrative of that time covers the people he met and befriended, the troubles he got into, the brief time that Gauguin came to live with him, and the work he accomplished in Provence. The book has many excellent reproductions of Van Gogh’s paintings, along with works by his contemporaries, and photographs and documents attesting to his time in Provence. Bailey’s book makes an important contribution to Van Gogh studies, but his writing can also be enjoyed by a general reader. A 2024 Notable Book.

Helen Cammock. I Will Keep My Soul. NY: Siglio, 2023. This book was “occasioned by” the exhibition of the same title, curated by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought for the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. The book and the exhibition celebrate New Orleans and were the result of the artist’s residency at the Amistad Research Center there, and much of it focuses on her research in the Center’s Elizabeth Catlett Archive, especially the documentary material relating to Catlett’s commission to make a sculpture of Louis Armstrong for the Algiers section of the city. This is almost an artist’s book, with poetry, photographs, and collages of historical material by Cammock, a British artist; a story by Kristina Kay Robinson; two essays; and an excerpt of an interview.

Danielle Dutton. Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2024. Dutton’s thing, if you will, is ekphrasis, the art of writing about visual objects, especially, in her case, writing about art. Her terrific novel Sprawl was inspired by the still life photography of Laura Letinsky. Dutton’s new book is an amalgam of short pieces of fiction (usually inspired by artworks), essays, and a list of quotations taken from other writers on the subject of dresses. The longest essay (and the best piece in the book to my mind), “A Picture Held Us Captive,” has been previously published but by a fairly obscure art press. It’s a fine essay on writers and ekphrasis, in which she also talks about how she used Letinsky’s work to advance her own writing in Sprawl. I had mixed responses to her fiction (which really aren’t stories). None of them came up to the level of writing that I loved in Sprawl.

Ann Goldthwaite: Modern Woman. Greenville (SC) County Museum of Art, 2021. An exhibition catalogue for the Alabama artist (1869-1944) who spent the early years of the 20th century in Paris, then settled in New York City and was included in the famous 1913 Armory Show. This finely produced book contains an excellent essay by Lisa N. Peters and many color plates that show Goldthwaite to be a worthy early American Impressionist, whose work reflects both her Suffragist efforts and her many trips back to the South to paint the people and scenes she saw there.

William Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris. Accounts and Drawings from Underground: East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, 1906. Revised Edition with Additional Drawings and Text. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2021. The South African artist William Kentridge found an extraordinary object in a rare bookstore—the 1906 account book for one of South Africa’s important gold mines. He had it photographed, then he disbound it and began to make drawings on its large graph pages with their century-old penmanship. Morris, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, provides a captivating essay on the history of gold mining in South Africa, an interpretation of the colonial and capitalist politics that can be elucidated from the “cash book,” and a fascinating excavation of the philology of the language of mining. Kentridge is an exceptional artist and his many versions of the South African landscape drawn across the pages of strange historic document is an almost operatic response.Richard Osman. The Man Who Died Twice. Penguin, 2021. I found this second installment in the Thursday Murder Club series over the top and baggy. Osman seems so intent on entertaining that little else matters. I won’t even try to summarize the plot, it’s ridiculous. A 2024 Notable Book.

Rosalind Krauss, ed. William Kentridge. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2017. A collection of essays about and by Kentridge about his art-making practices, along with several interviews with him. Kentridge participates in so many art media—drawing, print-making, film, theater and opera set design—and this volume provides a good entry point.

Andrea Marcolongo. Moving the Moon: A Night at the Acropolis Museum. NY: Europa Editions, 2024. Another from the wonderful French series Ma nuit au musée from the publisher Stock. Marcolongo, an Italian philhellene who lives in Paris, spends the night in the Acropolis Museum, reading William St. Clair’s Lord Elgin and the Marbles, about both the taking/theft of the portions of the Parthenon and the sad tale of the remainder of Lord Elgin’s life. She rages at the British refusal to return the marbles to Greece, and she wishes that all museum labels were mandated to truthfully tell the manner in which objects were obtained. It’s a wonderful, eye-opening short read, as each of these volumes has been so far. Translated from the Italian original by Will Schutt.

Leïla Slimani. The Scent of Flowers at Night. Coronet, 2023. Slimani’s slim book is part of the French series Ma nuit au musée from the publisher Stock. Slimani was invited to spend the night in Venice’s Pinault Collection, which is in the original Bourse de Commerce, “restored and transformed” by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. At first, Slimani was sorry she had agreed to do this. “The first rule when you are trying to write a novel is to say no. No.” But as the night wore on, she began thinking about her childhood, her adolescence, her own quest as an artist and as a woman. She thinks about her dual existence, born in Morocco, but now a French citizen. She thinks about her father; “everything here brings me back to him.” For Slimani, a night at the museum is a night locked up. She barely interacts with the art before she is awakened by a janitor and she escapes to have a coffee and a cigarette.

John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd & Celeste-Marie Bernier. Picturing Frederick Douglass. NY: W.W. Norton, 2015. A terrific resource, reproducing every known photograph of Douglass, the most photographed American of the nineteenth century, along with several of Douglass’ orations about photography. Includes a nice essay by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as an Afterword.

Enrique Vila-Matas. Insistence As a Fine Art. London: Hanuman Editions, 2024. Almost a miniature book, measuring about 4 by 2 3/4 inches and 96 pages, Insistence as a Fine Art ostensibly represents the thinking that went into the preparation for a lecture that Vila-Matas was asked to give at the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Museum in Málaga. Asked to choose one painting from their collection, he selected Julio Romero de Torres’ The Fortune Teller, 1922, one of a number of paintings the artist did along similar themes. This led Vila-Matas to think about artists like himself, whose many books seem to be but “a single book,” and Cezanne, who painted Mont Saint-Victoire over and over again. He decides that this form of obstinacy is an insistence on “getting it right.”

Stephan Wolohojian and Ashley E. Dunn. Manet/Degas. NY Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023. Unable to see this exhibition in person, I did the next best thing by hinting to my wife that the catalog would be a good Christmas present. It worked. The oversize catalog is a fair alternative to seeing the exhibition. The essays are excellent and the plates are too. I have actually seen a fair number of these works before in person, maybe 30-40, including some of the best ones. But it would have been amazing to see them all at once—albeit, in the company of hundreds of other people blocking one’s view. This is a book to keep nearby. There are scores of paintings that will reward poring over without hurrying. A 2024 Notable Book.

Detectives & Spies

Stella Blomkvist. Murder at the Residence. Corylus Books, 2023. It’s 2008 and Stella Blomkvist is a hip, sarcastic lawyer watching the Icelandic government sink the country’s economy into the toilet. A financier is found murdered after a reception at the President’s residence, and the police have found a scared young man they claim did the deed. But Stella is convinced otherwise and must go to great lengths and risk personal danger to prove it. Mostly entertaining. A cynical view of Iceland I didn’t expect. Translated from the 2012 Icelandic original by Quentin Bates.

Javier Cercas. Even the Darkest Night. NY: Knopf, 2022. Melchor, the son of a prostitute and once the employee of a drug cartel, decides to become a policeman after a prison term and after his mother is murdered. In Barcelona, he becomes a hero after stopping an Islamist attack. But, afraid he might be the target of a reprisal, he is sent to a tiny rural police force until things cool down. One night, a very elderly couple are brutally tortured (and I mean brutally) and murdered. The police have suspicions, but nothing can be proven and the case withers away. Years pass. Melchor, whose bible for life is Dumas’ Les Misérables, marries the town librarian and has a child, but cannot get the murder of the old couple out of his mind. Did I say he has anger issues? Despite a clear prohibition to do so, Melchor reopens the case on his own and violence ensues. If these skeletal plot details don’t put you off, this is page-turner is probably for you. Cercas is a well-known, important Spanish novelist and a compelling writer. Translated by Anne McLean.

Len Deighton. Berlin Game. 1983. As a teenager, I read Len Deighton, Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household, Ian Fleming, and undoubtedly other authors of thrilling international Cold War spy stories. What kid didn’t? I wanted to be a suave, international playboy when I grew up. Berlin Game is, surprisingly, mostly conversation, and only the final chapters take place in any sort of jeopardy, in East Berlin. The back cover sets off all the appropriate alarm bells. “Brahms Four wants out,” it warns. Out of East Berlin. He’s tired of serving as London’s most valuable agent and wants to go home. At the same time, it’s become clear there is a traitor in the highest ranks of the London office. Bernard Samson has to handle both threats. The manufacturing industry talks about just-in-time delivery of parts and supplies. Deighton’s crisp writing provides just-in-time delivery of only the knowledge the reader needs to know that moment and nothing else. The future is always teased but hidden.

Elsa Drucaroff. Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case. Corylus Books, 2024. Rodolfo Walsh was an Argentinian writer and journalist who wrote about the murder of his daughter by the military dictatorship, just months before he himself was also killed. In this mystery novel, Drucaroff imagines Walsh investigating his own daughter’s murder while he secretly serves as the head of intelligence for an organization that coordinated resistance against the government. A very interesting twist on the murder mystery. Translated from the 2010 Spanish original by Slava Faybysh.

Tana French. The Searcher. NY: Penguin, 2020. French’s novel about a retired Chicago cop who buys a broken down farmhouse in rural Ireland and tries to stay low key, but can’t help but take pity on a local thirteen-year old whose older brother has disappeared under mysterious circumstances makes for a mostly satisfying read. But no Chicago cop would talk the way Cal Hooper talks (even if he does have Southern roots), which made him a weirdly awkward main character for me at times. Still, French writes and plots well that she makes most mysteries seem two dimensional in comparison.

Tess Gerritsen. The Spy Coast. Seattle: Thomas & Mercer, 2023. Perhaps a bit le Carré lite, but nevertheless a well-written and wonderfully escapist book about a small group of retired CIA spies living in a village in Maine faced with a crisis when one of their old cases comes violently back to haunt them. The story branches off to Italy, Malta, and Thailand.

Mick Herron. Down Cemetery Road. Soho Crime. 2009. The very first book by Mick Herron (of Slow Horse fame). A rambling, somewhat overwritten novel about a woman whose life is totally (and I mean totally) uprooted when she takes an interest when one of her neighbor’s house is blown up by a bomb, killing two people, but the four-year old girl who survived disappears from the hospital. She tries to locate the little girl and many people die before the book ends, including her husband.

Mick Herron. Joe Country. NY: Soho Press, 2019. This is the sixth in the Slow Horses series, and I’ve only read the first volume before this one. But this showed up on my local library’s $2 book sale shelf and I couldn’t resist buying and then immediately reading. The mystery writer Val McDermid is quoted on the front cover as saying that “Mick Herron is the John le Carré of his generation,” which says more about the new generation than Mick Herron. The only real similarity is that both write about spies. Herron is cynical, but I would argue in a different way. And his books are much more violent than le Carré’s. Joe Country, or spy country, probably like all of the Slow Horses series, is mostly dialogue, much of which is maximally cynical or sarcastic. There is a great deal of British lingo, which makes the book fun and the plot sometimes hard to grasp. But it all adds up to compulsive reading, in large part because Herron writes with incredible street smarts.

Simon Mason. A Killing in November. London: Quercus, 2022. DI Ryan Wilkins and DI Ray Wilkins make an unlikely and, at first, an inharmonious team of detectives in the Oxford, England Police Department. Ryan is one-time trailer trash, with a chip on his shoulder, and trying to get over the death of his wife (and the mother of his toddler) from a drug overdose. Ray is black, an Oxford grad, well-married, and anxious to please and advance. Together, they are investigating the death of a young woman found in the office of an Oxford college Provost. At times, I was very skeptical, especially when Ryan breaks so many police rules it would seem he would never be left on the force. But in the end, it’s a compelling read. The dead woman isn’t identified until two-thirds into the book and the surprise killer isn’t unmasked until nearly the end. I’m rooting for Ryan and Ray. And the name similarities? That opens up multiple avenues for confusion—both amusing and helpful to the plot.

Richard Osman. The Thursday Murder Club. NY: Penguin, 2020. I bought this on the recommendations of people I respect. I quit it after less than a hundred pages. Then I picked it back up again after seeing more recommendations from people I respect. It turns out they were right. This is entertaining and, as a work of “detective” fiction, it’s not bad. The detectives are a group of senior citizens living in a retirement village in rural England. There is a police detective, but she’s not as effective as the senior citizens. They do some serious detective work and the murderer is a complete surprise, so in that sense the book is a success. I’ve already bought book two in the series. Why not?

Satu Rämö. The Clues in the Fjord. London: Zaffre: 2024. Rämö, a Finnish woman who has lived in Iceland for decades and has married in Icelandic man, is now writing a series of police procedurals based on a female Icelandic police detective and a male Finnish “exchange” detective. They work out of a small village on the sparsely populated west coast. While this opening volume doesn’t break any new ground, Rämö does a great job introducing readers to Iceland and giving us interesting characters. This came very close to being a comfortable page-turner (much needed this week). Translated from the 2022 Finnish original by Kristian London.

General Non-Fiction

Jonathan Clements. An Armchair Traveller’s History of Tokyo. London: The Armchair Traveller, 2018. As I prepare to go to Tokyo in April, this popped up on my horizon. Clements gives an entertaining, brief history of Tokyo that makes sense to anyone who has already seen the city in person. Refreshingly, rather than being a neutral observer, he tells his history the way he sees it, openly blaming whoever he feels is at fault for whatever economic bubble or architectural monstrosity he is commenting on. I won’t see Tokyo the same this time around.

Geroges Didi-Huberman. Bark. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Didi-Huberman, in his inimitable manner, visits the concentration camp Auschitz-Birkenau before the daily tourists arrive, to take stock of his reactions as he wanders the site, to take photographs, and to explore memory, language, and the four photographs that were sneaked out of the camp which showed the gas chambers in action. This small volume demonstrates how a deeply personal account can accomplish things no academic tome cannot. Translated from the 2011 French original by Samuel E. Martin.

Jeremy Eichler. Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War. NY: Knopf, 2023. Eichler, originally a music critic, but now a professor of music history, writes an accessible set of linked histories of a number of compositions that were focused on the Second World War, most notably: Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Dmitri Shostakovitch’s Symphony No. 13, Babi Yar, and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Woven throughout his historical writing, Eichler are important discussions of the moral and ethical issues of making art about the holocaust and of creating memorials to human tragedy. Throughout, Eichler draws upon writers like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and W.G. Sebald, and, like Sebald, he uses photographs very effectively. Whether or not you care about music, this is an invaluable book to read and ponder. Unfortunately, in our lifetime, the sometimes deeply controversial subject of artists responding directly to tragic events is pretty much a daily occurrence. A 2024 Notable Book.

Esther Kinsky. Seeing Further. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024. About twenty years ago, Esther Kinsky bought an abandoned, broken-down cinema in a small village in the Alföld Plain in Hungary, near the Serbian and Romanian borders. It was clearly a hopeless enterprise from the beginning, done out of an abiding love for films and no small amount of nostalgia. With the help of its former projectionist and a few other locals, she gets the cinema back to working order and manages to keep it running for a few delirious months. In the end, after failing to attract even a handful of customers on the best of nights, she sold the building to a man with his own wild dreams (which never came to fruition). In Seeing Further, Kinsky uses her stunningly beautiful prose to capture the landscapes of the Eastern Hungarian plains, the daily lives of her poor peasant friends and neighbors in the village where she lived, and city life whenever she travels to Budapest. But the heart of the book is about her love for the cinema—for sitting in a crowded theater, for the act of watching a movie projected from a celluloid strip of film, and, as the title informs us, for the love of seeing and observing. A 2024 Notable Book.

Stephane Kirkland. Paris Reborn: Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest To Build a Modern City. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2013. I mostly wanted to read about the transformation (destruction) of the old Gothic Ile de la Cite, but Kirkland’s book was a good refresher about the Second Empire. It was a bit shocking (in light of contemporary American politics) to read how easily, after the February Revolution of 1848 and living under full democracy, the French populace accepted the reversion to Emperor Napoleon III in 1851. Over the course of nearly three decades, Haussmann and the Emperor remade Paris into the modern, livable city that it is now. To accomplish this, they used a totally top-down process that encouraged corruption, uprooted hundreds of thousands of residents from their homes, and nearly sent France into bankruptcy. But the obvious question is: was there another way to achieve the modern Paris that we love? It’s hard to imagine one.

Greil Marcus. What Nails It. Yale University Press, 2024. This short book comes from his turn delivering a recent annual Windham-Campbell lecture at Yale University. Marcus, a cultural critic whose focus is often on music, talks about why he writes. The lecture is in three sections. One focuses on finally learning, as an adult, how his father perished in World War II when Greil was only six months old. One deals with what he learned from reading the film criticism of Pauline Kael. And the final section deals with his encounter with a certain painting by Titian, which changed his attitude about “high” versus “low” art.

Cristina Rivera Garza. Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice. NY: Hogarth, 2023. This is a memoir and a haunting portrait of the Mexican writer’s younger sister, who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 1990. Rivera Garza, a MacArthur Award winner, weaves together her own memories, interviews with their parents, notes and letters left behind by her sister, recollections offered by her sister’s friends, and newspaper stories and legal records to tell the story of the night of her sister’s death and the failed police search for the suspect. She brings in recent research on femicide and why men kill the women they love (or once loved). All in all, it’s a draining, beautiful book. The copyright page bears this statement: “This work, while originally written in English, is based on and shares themes with ‘El invencible verano de Liliana’ by Cristina Rivera Garza” originally published in Spain in 2021.

Joshua Segun-Logan. Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers. London: CB Editions, 2024. A truly slim (54 pp.) book of short ruminations, diary-like entries, quotations about death, reproductions of paintings by Edward Hopper, and drawings, and photographs by the author—all of which come out of the most fearful moments of the pandemic. Another sweet title from CB Editions, but I was not nearly as moved by Segun-Lean’s melange as those who wrote the blurbs.