Hello Readers,

A short intro so I can get this out while thinking and writing about, you know, all of that, so you all have something to read that isn’t, you know, about all of that. (Apologies to new subscribers I usually write something about books & reading here. I’ll get back to that next month most likely.) If you want to read what I think about all that, let me know. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I’m going to be doing over the next few years.

Josh

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YESTERDAY

Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr.

I was thrilled to see Ron Currie at the New England trade show this fall. It has been while since his last book The One-Eyed Man and you can get to worrying when a gap has been long enough. To make matters worse, the timing for The One-Eyed Man could not have been worse. It tells the story of a man who, through the trauma of losing his wife, can no longer lie and who, because of the reactions this generates in other people ends up the star of a reality TV show. Isolated from the rest of the world, it’s an exploration about the different types of “truth” and how the ways we define those different types can be a source of power. It’s also about the cynical assumptions of our entertainment industry and a few other things, but it came out in the spring of 2017, during the beginning of the Trump presidency and, frankly, I can’t blame anyone for not picking up a book whose protagonist is an an asshole reality star. It’s the type of shit luck that can derail a career.

But the good news is that he took some time to explore screenwriting and that he’s back with a new book this Spring (that sounds fantastic, that I, Alyce willing, will get to soon). And this is good news, cause the dude who wrote Everything Matters! deserves to keep publishing books.

My standard line for Everything Matters! is this: It might be the most optimistic, life-affirming novel I’ve ever read BUT you need to get to all the way to actual absolute last page before the optimism and affirmation arrive and it is only after Currie puts you through a fucking ringer. But there is a reason for that. I don’t think books always have a “main idea” and I don’t often like books that do, but the main idea of Everything Matters! is “being alive is worth it.” To just say something like that is…boring, saccharine, maybe worse, but tell that in a novel that makes us go through it, with nuance and complexity and without apology and with honesty about the ways life will end and the pain we can feel while we live it, and it becomes one of those truths we can build…well, nearly everything on.

Buy Everything Matters! from Porter Square Books

Buy Everything Matters! from Bookshop.org

TODAY

The Plains by Federico Falco translated by Jennifer Croft

Buy this book now but don’t read it yet. Hold onto it until January or February or for whatever time in your life when it feels like Spring is a fairy tale. The depictions of gardening are so lush with the words of plants and the simple actions of cultivating vegetables that just about every time you pick it up, you’ll get a dose of green.

It’s not about gardening or not really. It’s about remaking your life after someone else decided you no longer had a place in theirs. What’s most interesting about the book to me, from a narrative structure level is that, though the main character is clearly using tending the garden as a mechanism for rediscovering or recreating his self, I don’t think the author is using it as a metaphor or image for re-creation. Gardening isn’t a metaphor for helping to create something new, it is creating something new and even though we eat the plants we grow, we don’t need to always understand the acts of cultivation in terms of what they produce for us. We can understand them as being part of the relationship life has to life.

I don’t know if Falco would go so far as to say a de-anthropizing perspective is the solution to the emotional morass of the narrator, that he needs to free himself from the idea that stories need to be about a person to write again or the idea that he needs to be a protagonist to begin his own healing, or even if I’m reading Falco’s use of gardening as intended, but I don’t think there’s a person on earth who doesn’t need the occasional reminder that humans are just one part of the network of existence on this world and that a whole of lot of the terrible shit we do would stop if we started seeing ourselves as neighbors instead of landlords.

Buy The Plains from Porter Square Books.

Buy The Plains from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

Code Noir: Fictions by Canisia Lubrin with art by Torkwase Dyson

I’m not far enough into Code Noir to know if it will live up to its ambitious structure; using Louis XIV codification of slavery in France through a series of 59 decrees, to tell 59 interlinked short “fictions,” with different tones, different narrative styles, different genres, different timelines, even different timescales, that explore living with and maybe eventually living beyond a world where the full power of the state can be used to support the ownership of one human by another (and the way I’ve been reading I don’t even know if I will be when the book comes out in February!), but I love that ambition itself and find it valuable whatever the ultimate execution may be.

As with Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis and The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor Lavalle Code Noir isn’t redeeming its racist source content, but rather, revealing that there simply are no ways to create about human beings in any media or context that fully erases human potential. They try. They try so hard. They have to try so hard, so much work has to be put into racist thought and racist propaganda because it is so obviously and easily bullshit.

Preorder Code Noir from Porter Square Books

Preorder Code Noir from Bookshop.org

FOREVER

The Village on Horseback by Jesse Ball

The best term I can come up with to describe the incredible body of work that Jesse Ball has produced over the last decade and a half is neo-fable-ist. “Fabulist” would be the more recognizable term, but I do think it is most accurate to understand Ball’s work (novels especially but maybe even Autofiction) as fables; relatively simple, almost allegorical, stories that reveal something profound and complex about the human condition, through the way he tells them and our careful consideration of that way. Are these fables also often weird and fantastic? Yes. Do they sometimes feel more like fairy tales than anything else? Sure, though in many ways, I think the writer Ball most resembles is, rather than any of his contemporaries, George Orwell, who also hid the complex within the simple and also is underappreciated for the way he captured the mundane yet potent emotions of living in unjust societies.

I got A Village on Horseback when I absolutely needed more Jesse Ball. Perhaps after The Curfew or if not then, then definitely by How to Start a Fire & Why, which should have won an Alex Award. A collection of early short stories, poetry, and other things, including a piecer or two that appeared in The Paris Review that probBuy ably kicked off his career, it is the perfect book for someone who just needs more Jesse Ball in their lives. But if you’re new to Jesse Ball, I’d recommend starting with one of his novels. I mean, after The Way Through Doors, The Curfew, Silence Once Begun, or How to Set a Fire and Why, you’ll want everything else anyway.

Buy The Village On Horseback from Porter Square Books 

Buy The Village on Horseback from Bookshop.org