Albanian folk tale reimagined as a medieval police thriller. A habitual reread, something about this story that haunts me: the serious inspector trying not to give in to capital R Romantic notions of bonds & love & promises. Ghost story, detective story, national pride & family bonds. The “bessa,” a promise that can overcome death. What do you dare believe? Translated from French translated from Albanian, but solid. 1986, tr. 1988

A little sad to say that I loved hearing him TALK about this book so much more than I loved reading it. His strongest voice may be 1st person confessional, as in the poetry & in Briefly Gorgeous? This experiment in 3rd person “traditional“ novel structure feels a little clunky. Mostly, I‘m jealous of his NYU students & would love to take his class. 2025

5 “They could be statues for what it means to wait for a boy to crush himself into manhood.”

Bookclub book. Well-paced, split timeline. A bit breezy-cheesy for WWII story? 2019
373 “War breaks us down to nothing more than our most selfish will to survive—but when we rise above that instinct, miracles can still happen.[…] And now, at last & in this small way, I am grateful for the opportunity to help you in return. This, my friend, is how we find the best of humanity during times when the worst of humanity may seem to have the upper hand.”

Loved this short story collection. Unsettling, many unanswered questions, repetition in theme & variations. Untrustworthy friendships, circus performers, funerals, spooky homecomings. Solid translation. Beautiful non sequiturs, imitating leaps of thought. 2006, trans 2024

85 “Having experienced war at the age of nine and been forced to flee to a new land, her mother had a habit of assessing a room by estimating how many people could sleep there.”

Impressive insistence, but I‘m afraid I don‘t quite get the message. Memoirish essays on language & selfhood (NOT translation). 2024

21 “Oh, how many times in this interminable lifetime have I scarred over my love for you only to remember the trees.”

29 “The ferryman is never the hero. He is always heartless. If your family cannot pay, you cannot pass. Reviled by both sides, his only purpose […] is to change people from one side to the other.”

Need & desire in an unlikely, fragile friendship. Reluctant trust, identity, vulnerability, recovery in two outsiders finding each other. Rather gentle for Han Kang. Trans. 2019

13 “Her songs slid the bolt from across my heart and my craving stepped out into that dark, run-down alley to look me straight in the eye.”
28 “The majority of people live out their lives with much the same color and form, but some change their bodies several times over.”

^^hustler‘s relief after a score. Pulp fiction / existentialist mashup, kinda Kerouac. Vulnerable tough guy selling “love.”

61 “they begin to speak in sharp high voices that have no love, no despair, only a kind of miserable wisdom that prevents them from doing reckless things.”
63 “the sea released me from all thought and feeling, the way alcohol releases other people.”
121 “The man returned with his dog, a boxer. Both of them look like cheats.”

Polish novella set in 1950s Tel Aviv. Two con men bum around Israeli beach resorts, fleecing rich widows & divorcees. Jacob seduces his marks in an almost offhanded way, directionless and depressed. Dark but breezy humor, pratfalls, bratty kid. Then—boom—long passage on war atrocities witnessed in Warsaw, revealing what these grifters are escaping. Memorable tone, desperation, beach breezes soothing trauma. Cover design all wrong. 1965, tr. 2014.

Approaches to grief: 1) screaming at trees, 2) leaving voicemails for the dead. Slim volume, sparse and deadpan. Solid trans. from the Dutch by Jozef van der Voort. 2020

9 “One guy I spoke to suggested I get some therapy. What kind? I asked. I didn‘t dare tell him I‘d already tried just about everything and my last therapist and I had both given up in the end.”

11 “I had no time at all for a lot of things that happened all the time.”

^^93 most alive when trembling with dread

19 “circumventing my dead wife‘s closet”

89 “coffee, strong coffee, I‘d begun to believe, was a conduit to the divine”

90 “if one does this, meaning studies or contemplates Madness and Civilization while also listening to Stravinsky‘s The Rite of Spring, it‘s the equivalent of losing a limb or getting executed, but in a good way”

^^this final “I don‘t know who I am” after pages and pages of blabbedy blah blah is heartbreaking. The caregiver, the failed scholar, the widower, searching to redefine identity. Also love the contrast between the father‘s and son‘s obsessions: Great Books versus EDM.

Much like “Saint Sebastian‘s Abyss,” realizing in the end that it‘s the relationships that make life full. PAY ATTENTION

92 “one can never have enough coffee in their coffee”

Starts with “Anyway,” already in motion & can‘t stop, won‘t stop, holding back grief. Mania besieged by self-sabotage & distraction, obsessed with Montaigne, with coffee, with finding a “mental Sahara” for focus. Titles without texts. Repeating riffs like house music, longing for Stravinsky. Exhausting, propulsive voice, echoing Sebald or Saunders. Pathetic, hilarious character but when realization finally hits, everything breaks right open. 2024

Self-help books hardly ever need to be book length, a lot of filler here. The lowdown: Prioritize. Rest. Do the hard stuff. Rest. Be yourself. Set achievable goals. Embrace your limits. Focus on one thing at a time. Set time limits for work. Rest. Allow for failure. Celebrate achievements. Pick your battles. Control technology, don‘t let it control you. Find ways to make the mundane fun. Be curious. Act on positive impulses. Do nothing. Rest. 2021

^^ p 90 alienation in urban environment, Madrid‘s “unceasing march towards the total eradication of tenderness.” Activists from 2 extremes trying to build community.

Sweeping rhetoric to justify violence:
138 “in no case was it a question of hate, but a question of order […] a will to protect one‘s own, to get rid of the knots and beasts encircling one‘s own, to tear the fairytale castles out of the sky, to put an end to so many years of misery.”

Operatic, propulsive, passionate tiny volume. Big stakes, big love. Political activists as starcrossed lovers: Romeo & Romeo (are the Capulets the fascists or the Marxists?). Love the tone, intimacy, admiring & mocking these young men caught up in big ideas, looking to change the world & themselves. Well paced, measured voice, big climax. Violence, propaganda. City as character. What do we have in common with the “enemy?” Excellent trans. 2023.

Story went through many iterations over decades: theater play, screenplay, musical, finally a novel. Lead character switched political parties along the way. You can feel the different media in the plotting, lack of interiority. Tries to tread a line between earnestness and farce; wish it were a bit more ridiculous & heightened.

137 “This is what politics is really like […] It wasn‘t about doing good, it was about being less awful.”

And another art… this one feels not at ALL daring until the end, which keeps it real. Good poetry analysis. Restlessness of desire, restlessness of boredom. How daring relates to norms, knowledge, loss of self, understanding of risk. Revelation, confession, shame.
23 “defiance of closure is what constitutes adventurousness”
117 “restlessness sets risk into motion”
138 (on risk and revelation) “Respect or shame, it‘s pretty much your own choice”

I like this series. Semi-successful entry on a tricky theme: how mystery is created in fiction. Examples: Henry James, WG Sebald, Shirley Jackson, James Baldwin, Paul Yoon. The frustration & freedom in mystery. Imagination, capacity for wonder, pursuit of strangeness. Hauntings. Accepting what can‘t be understood.
98 — “the land of Un: uncertainty, unknowing, unfathomability.”
137 — “There‘s an aspect of infinity to mystery—an eternal becoming.”

Talk about regime change. Marie-Antoinette‘s reader describes the last days at Versailles in July 1789. Beautiful depictions of the grounds, confusion of “should we stay or should we go?” Avoids her time in the Conciergerie, final parade through Paris. Atmospheric if incomplete.

172 “Je connaissais l‘ambition des courtisans, je n‘avais pas songé à l‘ambition du peuple…”
234 “Comment cesser d‘un jour a l‘autre de se croire les maîtres du monde?”

Eerie, unnerving, defamiliarizing stories of everyday spaces: neighborhood, workplace, transportation. Strange spaces, noplace places.

45 “He picked up speed, following the sound that would lead him to the kennels. The road would end eventually. If he kept following it to the end, he would reach someplace. He thought it would be good if they were headed toward the kennels.”

Not sure how O. Henry prize editors are prepped, but always a moral, “oh I learned something about being human” element reaching back to Henry himself. Brad Felver story had me bawling, deep KINDNESS that doesn‘t fall into sentimentality. Balancing kindness & pain.

52 “Our job is to make furniture that you hardly notice.”

60 “Do you ever feel,” he asked, “like your life is really just a preparation for another life that you‘ll never quite have?”

Collection somehow feels totally original & highly derivative. Creepy throughout, w/ dark humor recognized in final meta story. Domestic life interrupted. Loss of childhood, threat of violence, mourning, denial. Raphaël is better known as a pop star, sometimes metaphors=too much, but wow well-crafted, memorable stories. “L‘effet de couronne” (chauffeur one) got me. 2021

190 “tu es un éternal touriste dans la souffrance des autres, n‘est-ce pas?”

There‘s something stingy and mean in this collection, characters putting up barriers in self-preservation mode. But a few lovely ones: tender tourist in Hyderabad, urban tent housing vs. luxury safari tents, sentimental AI in Mall of America, Paul Yoon‘s mini-epic “Valley of the Moon,” Lori Ostlund‘s bubble family in “Just Another Family.” Preferred 2023 collection edited by Min Jin Lee. 2024

^^p57 translation as metaphor for life: perpetual failure, misunderstanding, hope.

P58 “Traduire, c‘est d‘un même geste faire le deuil d‘une langue première, et le pari d‘en ériger une autre sur ses cendres.”

P76 “Tous les hommes, dit-on, ont droit à un deuxième chance dans la vie. […] La deuxième chance de la vie peut être mieux que la première. Elle peut aussi être pire.”

P196 “C‘est la réticence qui crée la méfiance.”

African refugees (“i ragazzi”) arrive by boat in rural Sicily. Multiple viewpoints—social workers, church volunteers, angry residents, artists, politicians, refugees. Huge cast presented in numerous narrative forms (diary, newspaper, odd mini playscript). Overly dramatic at times, but compelling story of finding a new home, bridging cultural divides, violence, moral choices. So many typos! C‘mon, copy editor. 2022

198 Qui doit s‘adapter à qui?

Love this. Bumblers into heroes arc, beautiful prose, beautifully paced. Set in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War, but laced with Irish jargon and a stripped-down setting of quarries & markets for a sense of timelessness near the “wine-dark” sea. Brutality & art. Preservation of culture. Entertaining the enemy. Funny & sentimental. Crazy premise (stage Medea with actors now prisoners of war) becomes a beautiful meditation on art & freedom. 2024

Light & lovely coming-of-age story, Tomoko lives a year w/ wealthy extended family. Girlhood, crushes, friendship, fantasy. Strong trans. Stephen Snyder 2024
81 “If you wanted to describe Mina in a few words, you might say she was an asthmatic girl who loved books & rode a pygmy hippopotamus. But if you wanted to distinguish her from everyone else in the world, you‘d say that she was a girl who could strike a match more beautifully than anyone.”

^^Miller tells his daughter to work with what you‘ve got, whether that‘s generational wealth or a pretty face. Go spin that reality TV gold!

P188 “You‘re supposed to bear witness, not enjoy it,” says Bernice “It‘s not supposed to be entertainment.”

200 “Tragedy isn‘t capital,” says Gretel. “It doesn‘t buy you anything. It doesn‘t automatically make you a better person. And it certainly doesn‘t make people fall in love with you.”

Exploitation of women‘s trauma stories, cultural obsession with true crime. When does witnessing become gawking? Reality TV, tabloids, social media. Meta in that novel also sensationalizes stories. Fairy tale heroines (Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard‘s wife, Gretel, Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin‘s spinner) join a trauma group. Language and characters clip along, addictive reading if sometimes gruesome. Fairytale aspect cartoonish on tough subject? 2022

Anxiety, menace, secrets. Stories with their own unpredictable logic, weird & wonderful. Uneven collection, but wow are the good ones good. Beautiful defamiliarization of ordinary actions. Attempts at connection, mindless work, masculinity, anxious parents, colluding colleagues, surreal conversations, abandoned theme parks. 2024

18 “The three of us were converging into a singularity. And that was impossible – the building couldn‘t sustain it.”

^^ 361 “Let‘s stop here. All truth has vanished.”

365 “Chunhui was about to ask Jumbo something else, but before they could happen, they vanished. Only their voices were left behind in the vast outer space, faint.
Goodbye, little lady.
Goodbye to you too, elephant.”

Playful, sensual, sometimes childlike, sometimes cunning, sometimes cruel.

Talking elephants. Whale-shaped cinema. Coffee. Twins. Daisy fleabane. The Red Brick Queen. Determination, loyalty, cruelty, devotion. A magical-realist saga. One-eyed bee woman. Shamans. Geumbok & Chunhui. Beautiful translation. Love the old-fashioned direct address to reader. 2023

137 “But first, another interesting event awaits us.”

353 “Dear reader, the story continues.”

353 “the lonelier she got, the more perfect her bricks became.”

Emerging from stuckness, Gia calls on dancer & outsider artist Marta Becket in Death Valley. Long-dead Marta appears. Faith, mystery, quest, solitude. Searching & surface, never quite hits a nerve. 2024

9 “This was the kind of woman I thought I would be. Alone and powerful with creation.”

100 “I was surrounded by emptiness, and didn‘t wish to fill it.”

111 “My pursuits had always revolved around representations of life instead of life itself.”

County Donegal, 1994, just before Irish referendum allowing divorce. Women‘s friendships, women pushing against marriages, loving their children extravagantly. Scandal & dread, bits of humor. Irish “Big Little Lies”? 2024

186 “The boy was depressed […] Half the country was depressed, including herself.”

306 “The only thing that seemed to offer her comfort was the lesson she had taken from Colette–that acceptance was not the same as resignation”

^^ 167, the word for the moment before

61 “Well, for a start, being a great reader, he would probably have complained about the fashion beloved by the worst kind of contemporary novelists for inflicting catastrophic and prolonged memory loss on their characters—very likely he would have called it a cheap plot device to complicate an already complicated series of events.” 😂

Language, culture clash, colonization. Companionship. 1840s Scotland. Minister reluctantly takes on evicting the last inhabitant of a Shetland Island. Taut, haunting, quiet. Rushed but satisfying end. 2024

42 “Into her mind a picture came of this vast emptying-out—a long, gray, and never-ending procession of tiny figures snaking their way like a river through the country.”

181 “How was it, she thought, we never see the big things coming?”

Mystery, anxiety, celebrity, adoration, myth, nature, “death of the author.” Translators have arrived & writer is missing. Followers freak w/out a source text. Clever, petty, silly, meta. 2024

5 “We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word.”

43 “all we really wanted was the novel. We wanted to possess it, to stake our claim to it, to make it our own before anyone else even knew of its existence.”

Hallucinatory fishing trip in rural Argentina. Male friendship, trauma, guilt, myth, grief, belonging and other, violence. Cinematic imagery: fire, huge stingray, dance dissolved to fighting. Dreams of the Drowner. Sparse, intense translation by Annie McDermott. 2024

47 “It wasn‘t a ray. It was that ray.”

79 “Every morning, since the girls died, he wakes up convinced he‘s going to hear that Siomara‘s set herself on fire. He‘s sure she‘ll do it.”

Grief, life lostness, Gen Z what-the-hell-do-I-do-now? Drinking. Vomiting. Dead skin, self harm. Male Fleabag? Nested stories, sometimes too “look what I found in my writing journal.” Ghost gardener. Quirky, memorable voice. 2024

49 “I put on a T-shirt with an anthropomorphized broccoli on it. The broccoli was wearing sunglasses and doing finger guns and below him it said BRO in big black letters.”

“I had the feeling that I was being watched.”

Cold War nonfiction companion to podcast about 1962 tunnel dug beneath the Berlin Wall, which allowed 29 people to cross from East to West Berlin. US broadcaster NBC filmed a documentary & financed the dig. Spies, students, families split in two, digging under Stasi soldiers‘ feet. Checkpoint Charlie. The leak. 2021

277 “When you talk to people who lived behind the Wall, it‘s these personal betrayals that seem to have caused the deepest hurt.”

Essay collection. “My ideal is the cocktail-party chat: getting across a profound idea in a brisk and amusing way to an interested friend by stripping it down to its essence.” But it just feels awfully breezy and self-satisfied, floating through quantum mechanics, group theory, fractals, statistical regression, eugenics (!) as cocktail chatter. Popular science but too neatly packaged? Fave: Riemann Zeta conjecture and laughter. 2018

No big revelations here, feels patchworky. Capitalism & wage labor. Productivity, time management, task-oriented vs. schedule-oriented work, efficiency, nature, planetary time. Leisure, rest. Fungible time. Divisible time. Time & attention. The self-timers & the timed. Biggest question: is reading this a good use of time? 2023

66 “If you don‘t know what‘s coming down the line, preparing for the future becomes an infinite task.”

Stunted roadtrip. Room 321. July did the mannish manic pixie trick for so long, what happens when pixie chick ages & makes bank? Quirk dims & sours, resentment sets in. Annoying & awesome in equal parts, now hunger has a wistful, bitter tinge. Motherhood & selfhood. 2024

P47 “She was doing that thing that women do; begging for what you want by not asking for it.”

P173 “So much of what I had thought of as femininity was really just youth.”

Anthology. Not so much nature in these nature poems, but maybe that‘s the point. Faves: Patricia Smith‘s “To Little Black Girls, Risking Flower,” Hanif Abdurraqib‘s “There Are More Ways to Show Devotion” spider rebuilding, Jericho Brown‘s “Aerial View” giraffe. 2024

P 20 Diane Seuss
There is something in suburban rabbits /
that has evolved toward wickedness

P29 José Olivarez
i say to myself when the what wheres all up in the how now – trees!

Pulpy, funny, bawdy, thick w/ machismo, but a feminist core. After witnessing a brutal rape at gunpoint, Indonesian teen Ajo becomes impotent, hardening him against ubiquitous violence against women, feeding his desire to fight men. Rabelais in Jakarta. Scene flash-forwards and back. Cartoon violence w/ 💜. Semi-truck lane battle thrill. Punchy trans. Annie Tucker 2017

29 “one thing was clear: chili peppers would not make your d*ck stand up.”

Yikes. Dread-filled slide into autocratic regime in Ireland. Language often overripe, nature metaphors heavy. What to tell the children when norms are upended? Even Winston & Julia got a picnic break, but not the Stacks. Worse to worser. Booker prize winner. 2023

40 “the man has been trained for the rules of the game but the game has been changed so what now is the man?”

103 “history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave”

“Women‘s work,” domesticity, FOOD, gourmands, self-care and self-deprivation. Winding set-up, translation feels clunky. Japanese culture. Friendship, community, seeking help. Satiation and soothing. 2024

171 “Refusing to look after yourself because there‘s nobody around to care about you is a form of violence towards somebody.”

179 “A gourmand was ultimately a seeker of the truth.”

187 “Humans just need rice, don‘t they? Basically.”

Pain & trembling, killers & sieves. Ragged sketches of stories that survive on energy alone. Underdeveloped. Trans. 2023 by Sarah Moses.

91 “People are capable of anything to dissipate the monotony of their lives.”

103 “She had the eyes of a filthy, infertile, solitary cat.”

113 “A circle. This is what Adah wants to be. She‘s not interested in holding abstract ideas in her head. She wants to be a circle.”

Collection from 2001-21. Feels like the best of what poetry can be: personal memories & the everyday mixing with the mythical, the historical, the mystic. Truly “mojo songs” with their own distinct music. Evocative, attentive & unafraid. I feel like I‘ve been someplace. Pulitzer indeed. 2021

24 He believes to harmonize is
to reach, to ascend, to query
ego & hold a note

119 Sweetheart, was I talking war in my sleep again? Come closer.

Poet Laureate of Brooklyn. More lyric essays than poems. Writing on mothering and justice, on love facing violence. Heritage & identity. Sometimes felt too prosey, direct, not enough space for language to weave magic. 2019

37 “By raising a boy, do I understand what it means to live as a black boy? How do I speak of his existence without appropriating his existence? I return to the language of mothers.”