My introduction to the prestigious 2023 reading rundown explored adoption and adaptation to reading more often on the iPad. In 2025 I continued reading via the Kindle app on iPad but solely when reading in languages other than English. Downloading “foreign” novels to ye olde iPad saves on international shipping costs, I suppose, but, more so, tapping a word to see the translation is tops, so incredibly efficient, helpful, and absolutely modern. Looking back on the year known as 2025 it’s been a good one reading-wise, although my so-called “reading” has been sensorily extended, in a modern way, to include way more listening than in the past. I started listening to audiobooks all the time after noticing that Spotify had really expanded what’s available on there. You get 15 “free” hours with a premium account, plus you can get an extra 15 hours/month for something like $9. I no longer have a commute to dedicate to reading, so my reading was limited to bedtime on weekdays, with occasional extended porch sessions summertime evenings and weekends. I rarely walk and read anymore, although I hope to reinitiate the regimen in the spring. But I do drive all around the winding wooded hills of Delco (western suburb of Philadelphia), run pre-dawn, walk at lunch through the woods, lift weights a few times a week at the gym, fold laundry for a while once or twice a week, mow the lawn every other week in the summer, and now I can fill some of this time with auricular reading — apparently your brain is activated the same way when you listen to audiobooks as when you read print books but the visual aspect of appreciating the texture and slant of language is obviously lost.
Looking back on the books I read/listened to this year, some titles really stand out. I posted about Knausgaard’s The School of Night in late August, easily den beste boken I read on iPad in Norwegian in 2025 — and one of the better novels I’ve read in the modern era. The “best” audiobook I listened to this year was easily Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad, with each chapter read by a different reader, including Jonathan Franzen, Fred Armisen, Jeff Tweedy, and so many others. Suicide by Édouard Levé was easily le meilleur livre I read on iPad in French and also among the best of the year of course. But the best good old-fashioned American novel I read this year was definitely Body and Soul by Frank Conroy, who died twenty years ago this year.
(Note: links embedded in the images below mostly google the books for you although some links go to the publisher’s site or the audiobook on Spotify. Also note: the image above was generated by an artificial intelligence machine per the prompt: “create an image based on the likely reader of the following text,” with the following text being the text that follows below. Also please note: the reader rendered in the image above does not resemble the author of the post, although the image is a fairly accurate depiction of his spirit when underslept and/or freaked/frazzled.)
Body and Soul by Frank Conroy
Through its first half everything’s going right for Claude, breaking his way, like a comedy in that he’s starting low and rising up, a variation on the “rags to riches” story of a child whose musical talent opens doors usually closed for someone of his class.
Loved the evocation of old NYC, Third Avenue when the El still ran there, and how the author’s early NYC childhood may have fed some of the descriptions. A bildungsroman/künstlerroman, I loved generally the sense of the artist coming into his own, the descriptions of young Claude’s initial intoxication with music and awareness of his talent, his obsession with the keyboard, his commitment to practice and play, the technical passages I could follow just well enough.
Listened to the Mozart Double Piano Concerto and Beethoven piano concertos to get a sense of pieces Claude performs — and the sweet comforting resolutions in the Mozart synched with the successions of Claude’s good fortune. Loved the little fugues of appreciation for qualities of light, reflections of sun on water etc, the reveries that Claude’s wife thought kind of weird but that seemed essential to what made him artistic, contrasted with the senseless jabbering of his wife’s parents (loved Weisfeld’s little rant about non-artists who will never be able to properly understand who artists are and what they do).
The first solid proper ~450-page American novel I’ve read in a while, totally committed to dramatization, characterization, setting, rising drama — its body technically sound and animated with such soul.
Through the first half I was concerned that a wrenching-back was inevitable, no way Claude could make it through an entire literary novel without experiencing a massive karmic crackdown, the spirit of Mozart would inevitably be marred by Schoenberg (the bits about twelve-tone compositions seemed meta/self-critical in a way I’m sure was intended) — and sure enough the complicating crackdowns arrived more or less on cue, although not in such a way that it turned what’s essentially structured as a comedy into a tragedy.
Felt for much of it like a perfect novel but then toward the end it seemed to excessively succumb to the expectations of its form. Felt a little over-resolved, with all loose ends attended to, including semi-surprisingly the provenance of Claude’s musical patrimony, in the final 50 pages or so. (Great scene on stage playing Honeysuckle Rose at a jazz club in London.) It ended in a sort of tidy bow, minor characters peeking back from behind the curtain for one last cameo in a way that semi-strained credulity.
If I’d asked the author about this he probably would’ve said he felt like the form demanded it — he’s not interested in twelve-tone music, after all, although toward the end there’s a semi-dissonant section from the perspective of Claude’s biological father that unexpectedly breaks the well-established POV. (There may be a similar scene early on with Weisfeld and one of Claude’s piano teachers talking about Claude but I didn’t go back to investigate and it didn’t jump out at me as much.)
At one point I could have asked the author about the ending or anything in the novel, and now I wish could somehow relay the gist of this impression to him and get a response. I read the first two or three pages in the summer before I attended a fiction writing workshop led by the author, the last complete semester he taught before his death during the second semester of my first year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where Frank was the director from 1987 to 2005), now more than twenty years ago. I should have continued but didn’t want to be influenced by it (idiotically) and also at the time balked at anything with a child protagonist (Claude grows up fairly quickly in this). Maybe I just wasn’t ready for it in 2004, too interested in Bernhard and lit in translation etc, needed to wait a couple decades before I’d appreciate how well Frank’s only novel fulfills its conventional form and conveys so much of a sense of life lived.
In the Acknowledgments, he thanks Marilynne Robinson for liking Claude’s mother Emma, which made me fantasize about that conversation and the notes she gave him. It’s definitely probably not a Marilynne novel, with way too many (fairly well done) scenes of amorous intimacy and music-related mysticism.
Overall, one of the best novels I’ve read involving music, one that brought back memories of the author airing similar observations about writing fiction instead of playing music. (Also appreciated the appearance of words he’d used in workshop that I’d learned from him, like “redounded” and “frisson.”) He said in his introductory lecture that there was something technical about writing fiction that could be analyzed and discussed but also something mysterious about it (he’d said this spinning his fingers through the air above his head), and the novel wonderfully dramatizes the interplay between theory/practice and something more like inspiration from within or beyond.
Would make a good series on Netflix or HBO.
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad
Probably the most enjoyable audiobook I’ve ever listened to — worth it alone for Franzen reading the chapter about Mission of Burma or Fred Armisen reading about The Butthole Surfers. But every chapter, even for bands I’ve never really liked much (Black Flag, Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Mudhoney, Fugazi), completely activated my imagination as I listened, transporting me from wherever I was while listening in my current middle-age suburban existence (driving to and from Costco listening to the chapter on The Replacements, working out listening to the chapter on the Minutemen, doing a ton of dishes after our dishwasher broke listening to the chapter about Minor Threat, mowing the lawn listening to the chapter on Sonic Youth, waiting for daughter to get off bus from summer school listening to the chapter on Dinosaur Jr, sitting pool-side as wife and daughter float around in the water listening to the chapter on Mission of Burma).
As the father of a unique young daughter, it was comforting to hear how isolated and weird all these kids were before they started their bands, how immersed they were in music, and how that isolation and immersion ultimately paid off. The Minutemen chapter is probably the most inspiring or interesting and affecting with the death of D. Boone, but all the chapters are memorable.
Particularly enjoyed the last chapter on Beat Happening, the only band covered I’d never listened to/knew nothing about. And also throughout but particularly in the Mudhoney chapter it’s exciting when it’s all about the early Seattle grunge scene and there’s the first mention of the “grease monkey”-looking singer guitarist with the piercing eyes and his super-tall bassist . . . Really just a wonderfully executed collection of relatively contemporary adventure stories.
Loved also that Greg Ginn, the founder of SST Records, had seen the Dead seventy-something times.
Suicide by Édouard Levé
Read about a page a day for two months in the original, accompanied by the imperfect but helpful Kindle translation function. After putting down Madame Bovary after a 150 pages, reading contemporary French jumped off the page, particularly when relaying the riveting tragic opening scene. The rest can’t maintain that charge of course but the language takes over — even reading in another language only studied for a few years it was easy to appreciate how each word was weighted and selected, the sentences sculpted, balanced, controlled, but not clipped or spare. I often highlighted insightful, perfectly worded lines. Really an extraordinary book, urgent, filled with life, so many memorable images. The bit about intimidating those two road ragers on his motorcycle, walking forever through a city, playing drums in a band, the suggestion overall of this character who at times I wondered if he even actually existed, if this were all fiction, autobiographical, a sort of suicide note in itself (the author killed himself immediately after submitting it apparently). I need to read more (anything) about the circumstances behind it. The stream of two-word lines at the end is fantastic for a language learner BTW.
El Rey Medusa by Brecht Evens, Rubén Lardín (translator)
Masterwork first installment of a series about a young artist boy (“puer universalis” per his father — “universal boy”) and his eccentric father who dresses all in yellow (father-son dynamic reminded me of Curious George and his yellow-hatted friend), including a face mask of some sort, who’s slowly and ambiguously revealed either to have schizophrenia or — because POV is the child’s — to actually be fighting for the Alliance against the Directors or Leaders (“Dirigentes”) or Skulls. In the Spanish translation I read, that last term for the bad guys is spelled “Skouls,” which seems like a blend of “Skull” and “Skoal,” which makes sense since the ending (not really a spoiler) dissolves into a series of toasts to eccentric souls doomed by their attempt to save the world in their own weird way.
Satisfies as a dramatization of the wobbly intersection between art, genius, eccentricity, and madness — from the pre-psychologic intuitive innocence of child-like drawings to the exaggeratedly elaborate psycho-dramatic schemes of someone over the verge of a psychiatric split — but that’s just the content, the narrative, the novel aspect of this graphic entertainment.
Visually, as with everything Evens produces, it excels — it’s stunning, super-saturated, detailed, perfectly paced so there’s rhythmic expectation of variation in approach, full-page illustrations, half-page, broken-up quick little sketches with more dialogue than most pages, black-and-white pages, elaborate spreads, everything other than conventional comic-book panels. And the variation creates emotional effects or cues, particularly at the edgiest endangered moments.
Not yet published in English by the North American (Montreal-based) publisher Drawn & Quarterly (not sure if they plan to put it out), after eyeing it for months since it was a little more than twice as expensive as most new graphic novels, I humbly submitted my request to wife-type person (WTP) when she asked what I wanted for Father’s Day. I sent links to both the original French edition and a somewhat less expensive Spanish edition, and WTP bought both (hey thanks again, WTP!), but since the French edition arrived shrink-wrapped I decided to read the Spanish one and let the French one sit either until my French improves or the copy ten- or twenty-tuples in value and I decide to sell it.
The first graphic novel I’ve read in a language other than English — it had never occurred to me to do so before — but I’ll definitely keep it in mind as a possibility since the concentration on the visual helps of course to decipher unfamiliar words (before hitting the apps when stumped). Immediately after finishing I ordered an inexpensive used copy of “The Making Of” (the only major Evens book I haven’t read yet, I think) and will read the second installment of this Jellyfish King series as soon as it’s available.
The Making Of by Brecht Evens, Michele Hutchison/Laura Watkinson (Translators)
Awash in characteristic active saturated watercolors, varied approaches conveying narrative significance, emotion, movement, creating as the pages turn an experience that assumes a sort of cinematic rhythm, teaching the reader how to read it, with color-coded characters and dialogue. Published in 2011 (2012 translation), this one’s about a comparatively established yet insecure male artist in from the city leading a rag-tag crew of villagers including a few male amateur artists as well as a team of boy scouts and other helper-types hanging around to conceive of and create an open-air installation for a biennial arts exhibition.
The opening pages are intentionally disorientating, I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but about a tenth of the way through it began to cohere — mirroring creative processes — once the primary artist dude decides they’ll erect an enormous papier-machie garden gnome, first constructing the scaffolding, then skinning it with paper, then painting it black, then painting it in its final colors. At its best when the camaraderie of their collaborative efforts is in full gear, everyone pitching in, starring in their role, no matter how minor. There’s also a psychotic side character who just paints swirls and refuses to collaborate who serves as a sort of foil, one step beyond the border between art and madness. And there’s some downtime recreation with booze and a barely legal photographer babe (she’s almost 18). Ultimately, the whole thing ends in a whoosh of dramatic pages, reminiscent of the Bartlebooth section of Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual.
It’s up there with all his other work, if not quite as refined as his more recent stuff, which makes sense since this was published when the author/artist was about 25. The last Brecht Evens graphic novel available in English translation I hadn’t yet read. A favorite graphic novelist. Up there with Ware.
James by Percival Everett
Came to this with expectations lowered by big prizes and universal praise — and came away saying aloud “wow, more or less perfect” after I finished, reading most of it in two solid cold and dreary Presidents’ Day weekend sittings. It’s formally conventional, accessible, vivid, fast-moving but not spare, a real page-turner etc, all to serve to the reading public a powerful important meaningful moving reminder of slavery and the ignominious persistence of bigotry. (Here’s a quotation that jumped out as speaking to the present: “Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away da truths dat scares ’em.”)
The apotheosis of what I know of Everett’s work (five novels, all read last summer), perfectly dramatized, an adventure replete with racial, historical, linguistic, intertextual resonances. So clear, so conventionally well-structured (linear, first person, short chapters, strong desire/intention consistently thwarted/endangered, a series of obstacles overcome only to reveal another obstacle/endangerment), the conventions used to excavate and animate/activate the well- yet under-known character and true horror off-screen in Twain’s original’s time and place setting. No LOLs for me exactly but I read with a smile so often, not at an expression or turn of phrase so much as something along the lines of a radiance of greatness, the language conveying an inner glow, an aura, a stance, a pace and depth and heft, interspersed with moments of moral complexity, audacity, and invention (the snake-bitten conversation with Voltaire, the dream and drowning talks with John Locke).
In some of the Everett novels I’ve read he somewhat mars a perfectly strong straightforward story with a minor postmodern formal contrivance, as though to make a play for critical acceptance or to complicate and introduce a “more literary” texture in what’s essentially cinematic-style conventional storytelling (Everett is an LA writer, after all). This doesn’t do that — the inventive ingenious linguistic thing’s embedded in the storytelling, something as meaningful and telling as it is humorous.
Also, although the BPM is elevated and the pages fly by, the pace of the prose is not as accelerated and thereby cartoonish as in The Trees, a novel I thought Everett had written the way Monk wrote “My Pafology” in Erasure, to profiteer off an atrocity exhibition, to serve up a sped-up satirical cartoon to con white prize purveyors and readers into revealing essentially racist taste. This one also isn’t that, not at all, thanks to its intertextual conversation with Twain, generous characterization and humanity, evocation of time and place, the Mississippi functioning almost like the Mediterranean for Odysseus on a there-and-back-again quest to make it to freedom in the north and buy his nine-year-old daughter and wife.
An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays by Jon Fosse, May Brit-Akerholot (Translator), Kåre Conradi (Narrator)
I snidely presented my review of Fosse’s A Shining as a chatGPT prompt to generate text similar to the novella I’d just read, which had seemed formulaic and like something AI will have no trouble producing in a few years. The review wasn’t particularly respectful and so it has a lot of likes on Goodreads, and now I sort of regret it, although I won’t change it because I feel like, after listening to these brief essays on writing and reading and becoming a writer, I was onto something.
In many ways, these short essays function as a prompt he entered into his own AI (artistic intelligence) and ambition before spending the past 25 years or so executing it, like he laid out more or less exactly the sort of work he’d subsequently produce. Listening to these essays I repeatedly flashed to impressions I’d had of my experience reading him, scenes or images or approaches in his novels. Really striking and kind of amazing — it’s like, here’s the blueprint for one very Norwegian man’s Nobel Prize-winning literary production.
It’s also one of the best books I’ve consumed (listened to on Spotify but will read in print as soon as the paperback from Dalkey Archive arrives) about writing, reading, and becoming a writer. Also about Bernhard, Beckett, Joyce, Ibsen, writing in Nynorsk (New Norwegian), teaching writing, style, Wittgenstein’s isolated cabin in Norway, the darkness, the deep fjords, mysticism, anagogic reading (a real highpoint — about a fourth, mystical/spiritual-type interpretation beyond the literal, allegorical, and moral senses), Harold Bloom and the sublime, literary quality, old houses, eg. Highly recommended. Substantially elevates my estimation of his work.
Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai, John Batki (Translation)
Enjoyable, mostly single-paragraph essayistic novella focused on the movement/activities of Melville, Lowry, and Lebbeus Woods in lower Manhattan, revealing itself ultimately as the work of an unreliable cracked-up narrator. Loved its incorporation of the AT&T Long Lines Building (33 Thomas Street) downtown as the narrator’s white whale of an enormous walled-off library. File under novels about “de-ranged” librarians/lovers of books. Thought it was pretty iffy/wobbly and wasn’t sure it was worth it maybe 10 to 15 pages into it but it took off as it started talking about buildings in the process of collapsing into themselves on page 20 and mostly maintained a high level through to the end. Probably the most accessible and engaging Krasznahorkai novel/la I’ve read. Love these snazzy “storybook” editions too.
Brev (et Forsøk) by Tomas Espedal
Downloaded this from a Norwegian ebook site and read it very slowly, a page or two a day for two months, highlighting half the page to activate the English translation, but reading it first without help and then looking at the English when I hit a word I didn’t know. Now on my third year of studying the language, I understood about 80% of it, the text fairly simple and often repetitive, the same series of words often returning. I’m not sure why this earlier book hasn’t been translated and published with his others by Seagull. It’s as good as the others, the same clarity and intensity, the same sort of introspection and quick jumps in perspective, as in private writing (letters, diaries). The book’s title in translation would be Letter (Biography, Diary, Letter), or at least that’s the title of the book I downloaded, although the file is only titled Brev (et forsok) — Letter (an attempt).
This one has some of the most vibrant, direct, physical writing about being a young boxer, often drunk, fighting in the ring or fighting on the streets, learning to fight with his father, also some sexy bits, all very well done, evocative, suggestive, poetic but not lyrical or elusive. Again, the language is very intelligible, often presented with line breaks like poetry as in his other books but it doesn’t read like poetry, more like notes to oneself, thoughts written down as they come without apparent concern for arrangement, although they also feel artfully arranged, natural, organic, pure, all those sorts of words. About death, as well, and writing, and relationships, and toward the end there’s an unexpected amusing Jon Fosse cameo. Ultimately, excellent reading for someone learning the language, and also something worth making its way to English one day.
Other Men’s Daughters by Richard Stern
Read this — and Stern by Bruce Jay Friedman — thanks to Avner Landes and Adam Levin on one of Beyond the Zero’s end-of-year extravaganza episodes. Someone else on the podcast, Sara Lippman, objected to the title, rightfully so, since OMD is pretty awful but also kinda misleading, derived not from a random Shakespeare quotation as I first thought but from an old saying I’ve never heard (“treat other men’s daughters as you would your own”), plus silent films from 1918 and 1923 also shared the title, which overemphasizes the novel’s engine, the relationship between the central character, the 40-year-old doctor/Harvard professor Dr. Merriweather, and his 20-year-old patient Cynthia Ryder.
It’s an old story, a simple story, but the story relayed isn’t so much about the relationship as the rupture of Merriweather’s family. So-called Divorce Novels published recently have gotten some attention, and this is a 1973 version, dated maybe by moral, emotional, psychological, and linguistic complexity now out of favor, replaced by straightforward rage and righteousness (not that I’ve read the recent related novels).
What’s striking about this, more than anything content-related, is the pitch of the language, the pervasive sense of intelligence, the generous description/sensory activation, the balance in the phrases and their flow, the perspective that’s mostly close third but opens up to access thoughts and feelings of others here and there, and the POV deepens at times into poetic fragmentary phrases when Merriweather feels his life falling apart as well. The language generally is accessible, maybe like a blend of Updike and Roth, occasionally gratuitous in description (like Updike) or insight/interrogation (like Roth), and feels overall propelled by an informed/wise author who, as the protagonist would say, can be deemed “first rate.” The Cambridge setting and the characterization of everyone who gets some air time in this are so well-elaborated. There’s a vividness to the prose and its people, a way of introducing and emphasizing a representative image, that seems like plain good writing. Feels real, too, in its specificity, its details, its ranginess (loved the chapters in Old City Philadelphia and France).
To return to the content, there’s the expectation that Cynthia will run off with someone her own age or throw herself into the Charles but the tragedy of it is the ensuing hatred between mother and father, husband and wife, that ensues when the family, with four children including an older daughter at Oberlin, breaks up. So it earns points for undermining expectations somewhat.
Really nicely evokes the era, the early ’70s (this was published in 1973), the free-spirited sexual and political revolutions associated with the late-’60s filtering through the spirit of the times, visible on the peripheries of the novel’s central focus, which is steadier, more stoic, conservative, well-educated, civil, decent, termed in the novel “New England” for short.
Iif you can look past the title and aren’t too skeeved by the pages about the relationship featuring a 20-year age difference, this one is really worth it for the language, the evocation of an era, and the dissolution of a family in divorce.
And here’s a well-done, thorough review by Christian Lorentzen.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, Sophie Roberts (Reader), Sophie Hughes (Translator)
Thought it was perfect through the first half, the first 3/5ths, the way it perfectly walked the line between criticism and complicity before Anna and Tom leave Berlin for Lisbon and Sicily. The ending felt just about exactly perfect, the last line perfect, the update to Perec’s Things seemed perfect.
Listened to it, read by an English woman who sounded like she was trying to sound like AI, who handled the German place names with relish. Loved the subtle inclusion early on, in a long list of standard personal effects in the apartment, of “herpes cream” — LOL’d at it, and I LOL’d at a few other perfect lines and cracks in the veneer, suggestions of more to the story. Glad I had read, earlier this year, Latronico’s essay on gentrification in Milan (see below) and flattening superficial sameness spreading through the gentrifying parts of cities worldwide, which serves as a prompt for his generation of this generationally defining novel, something of a masterpiece too in terms of the essayistic novel, novels that show via telling.
Click the dislike button on reviews that say there’s no story or plot (what is plot but characters encountering a series of obstacles, like rising rental prices, friends moving away, losing interest in where they live, aging, the creeping feeling of meaninglessness and awareness of the significance of luck in their lives?) — it’s a simple love story, a rise and fall and rise again of a relationship, a coming-of-age story, a kunstlerroman with the young artists being stable professional freelance graphic designer “digital nomads” instead of unhinged musicians or painters. And there’s the more advanced interpretation that considers the narrator of the novel, questions who’s telling this story, and what is up with the narrator anyway? And does the voice smoothly and tastefully presenting and arranging this narrative scroll of curated superficialities derive from the author or is it distinct?
Those were the sort of things I was interested in as I listened, driving back and forth between our old city place and our current suburban home 15 miles to the west, the perfect novel really to listen to while petting, preparing, and photographing (for eventual future online listings) your empty, cleaned, rehabilitated hip urban real-estate asset before new tenants move in.
Had been saving to read in Italian but an American friend who lives in Italy and reads Italian fluently said this one was difficult for him thanks to all the specialized interior design and cuisine-related vocabulary, so I went with the audiobook via Spotify, the recording not quite as long as a recent Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast episode I listened to about the song Blues for Allah.
The anti-climax of the last third (not including the ending) away from Berlin, my engagement lapsed a little unlike through the rest of it when I was right there with every word (loved the integration of news reports, the growing interest in the migrant crisis before that section, and how that precipitated a change in their perception of the city).
Will maybe read the author’s memoir about living in Berlin, the other side of the novel, La chiave di Berlino, at some point semi-soon.
La rivoluzione è in pausa by Vincenzo Latronico
Engaging short essay (40 ebook pages) focused on the gentrification of a neighborhood in Milan, how it reflects the flattening/same-ification in cities throughout the world over the past 20 years, an era corresponding with the initial experience of aging/seeing the world change for Millennials (the author’s generation). Smoothly balances the personal and the socio-political/theoretical, tying it together with the technological (trying to use Google Street View’s archive to document the change and see the past, how Amazon has made it easy to get whatever wherever [eg, Italian-language ebooks in the Philadelphia area]). The old pizzeria with the red plastic tables is now a cafe decked out in reclaimed wood, offering vegan cheese and organic wine, eliciting conflicted feelings in the author who misses the unique character that’s been lost but prefers vegan cheese and organic wine. If you’ve lived in a city for the past 20 years or so you can relate. I’ll resist the temptation to improvise an extended essay about how South Philadelphia has changed since I moved there in 2006, my $495/month mouse-infested 450-square-foot studio recently converted into a standalone swanky apartment worth ~$250K, although a lot of the new bars/restaurants on East Passyunk, eg, emerged from otherwise abandoned storefronts, more like urban renewal than straight-up gentrification. My first attempt to read anything in Italian, this seemed like a good choice to establish a solid standard for the language — Latronico’s sentences have balance and flow, and relay a matter-of-fact (not showy or posture-y) accessible and insightful intelligence. Will read more of his stuff in the original soon.
All Fours by Miranda July (read by the author)
Figured the author is about my age. Searched her name and – lo! – it was her birthday the day I started listening to the audiobook via Spotify, read by the author, accelerated slightly at 1.4x speed, the day after Valentine’s Day. The night before, as a special Valentine’s Day present to my special spouse-type person, I agreed to watch the most recent installment in the Bridget Jones series. And with that movie in mind, at first as I listened to this I thought it was the literary equivalent. Older woman, younger man, semi-implausible, oft cringe-y — something I would have probably put down after 50 or 75 pages if the story were silently streaming to my eyes instead of effortlessly proceeding into my ears. But also, early on, she won me over with humor, with Family Guy-like ideation cut-aways, like a bit about how after working all day on some art project in the garage when she reentered family reality she felt like Buzz Aldrin returning from orbit being expected to immediately unload the dishwasher. One of four or five legit LOLs but I made other sounds as I listened: OH DUDE or NO or C’MON or GROSS or something along those lines, myself the embodiment of shocked bourgeois (“epatered” not by surrealistic imagery but running one’s hand through another’s urine stream).
The day I finished listening I looked at a hardcover in a bookstore to see how long it was: nearly 300 pages. My estimate was 578 pages. It felt like it could’ve been much shorter but its perceived length, its return to its system of established time, space, and thought (dis)locations, ultimately started to seem thorough, not at all spare, fully filled with the stuff of life.
And it feels absolutely real throughout — when she revealed the cover on IG she said the novel is “close to the bone,” suggesting it’s close to real life, with author/narrator overlap, but it doesn’t quite seem like so-called autofiction, in part because it’s about something in particular — the narrator’s crackup, losing her shit under the cover of art, or in service of an artistic sensibility, which is all fine and cool etc when you’re single and twenty-seven but in your forties, married, with a child, with lunch-packing and drop-off responsibilities, it comes off kinda eye-roll repellant? Which is maybe in part the point?
And they live in such rarefied territory, in a $1.8 million home, blowing a $20K windfall on gloriously redecorating a motel room, creating an aestheticized padded cell from which to deconstruct her family. Interesting about perimenopause — and consistently committed to its bit, to seeing the novel through, attending to its issues not half-assing it, although this somewhat undermined the sense of reality in the last chapters when loose ends with Erkanda and Davey were tied up, conforming to expectations of conventional narrative despite otherwise comfortable with other ways of content (both meanings intended).
To a degree, for someone essentially my age, the emphasis on sex seemed icky, immature, almost adolescent, as though she doesn’t realize that after Davey and after Kris some other new big love will surely come along. The sex scenes too were a little much, not oblique or suggestive or lyrical or “poetic” — that is, nothing like Salter or Updike, surely intentionally.
But generally I respected and “enjoyed it” for its thorough depiction of a crack-up, despite the narrator’s crazy-pants approach to middle-age parent life. It elicited strong emotions. I yelled out while driving, streaming it from phone to car stereo. And that too is something I admired — it infected me with feelings, mostly reactionary, replusionary, in a way that made me look upon myself and consider myself lucky not to feel the need to lavishly and lasciviously redecorate the motel rooms of my life.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (read by various readers)
Author is super-talented, the language unfurling non-stop, the intelligence obvious, the concerns absolutely modern.
Single lingering impression is I don’t think there’s a single description of weather, of trees, of rain, of ice, of snow, of a human gesture or trait that’s not knowingly typecast (“a thing” indicative of a type of person).
Listened to the audiobook on Spotify and I imagine I would have been impatient with it more than I was if I’d been reading. I skipped ahead at 15-second intervals through the final 12 minutes of BDSM instructions, which made me think there’s something about these stories — their persistence, their thoroughness, their extreme fluency in 21st century internet lingo, their overt application of intelligence, their identity-political/interpersonal rational calculation — that made them seem rendered rather than written. There’s nothing expressive or romantic or uncontrolled or loose or intuitive-seeming about these stories. They’re alive not so much with the stuff of life as the ick of the internet.
That’s not necessarily a critique.
The readers of the audiobook BTW are fantastic, particularly the dude bro who narrates “Our Dope Future.”
Reminded me of some of Franzen’s recent novels (Purity, mostly) in which everyone’s just so icky. After listening for a while I’d turn it off, relieved to return to the life I’m living “IRL” — the tasks, responsibilities, half-recognized fluctuations of energy levels and feelings, concerns about unsettled weather/wind gusts causing limbs to fall, the knife slipping off the avocado skin and slicing my finger while making guacamole after listening to this while shopping and driving to the store. That is, like Twitter of yore, this one’s concerns feel limited to their medium, caught in the text, and generally nauseating and exaggerated and not really what it feels like to be alive both online and off, despite obvious displays of narrative and linguistic talent.
A line Frank Conroy had famously said about a friend’s story came to mind — “it lacks the milk of human kindness.” Even the kind characters like Justin come off as types instead of people. There’s talk of dealing with people as who they are instead of as representatives of identities but I didn’t really sense that any of the characters really achieve real personhood, in part because they’re trapped in a sort of authorial intelligence limited to the complexities of limitless cringe found online. And I think that’s in part the point. IRL personhood is nearly impossible for these characters and this impossibility causes IRL suffering.
The author, again, seems super-smart, knowing/immersed, fluent and talented and ambitious, with a dark sense of humor, and I’m glad to have listened to this — and I’ll definitely consider his future books and may even read (or at least listen to) his first novel fairly soon.
Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo
Enjoyed this enough to write a review for the estimable Orange County Review of Books. Here’s a brief, lightly edited, AI summary of it: this review examines a novel the reviewer discovered through recommendations citing Thomas Bernhard influences. The reviewer, a former South Philadelphia resident familiar with Bernhard’s work, notes the book’s stylistic nods to European literature in translation while observing it’s not quite as “Bernhardian” as expected—lacking the relentless, repetitive, paragraph-long rants characteristic of Bernhard’s prose. The novel follows a thirty-five-year-old narrator who lives in South Philadelphia attending a New Year’s Eve party hosted by a philosophy professor. The reviewer appreciates the elevated prose style, especially when focused on contemporary concerns like social media and self-improvement culture, while noting potentially intentional slightly inaccurate Philadelphia geography details that seem “fake real.” Despite philosophical reference that seems to feel intentionally empty, the reviewer finds the novel succeeds as genuine artistry—its affected elements combining to create something authentically elevated, earning what he calls a “real-real” literary experience through committed artifice.
Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America by Jesse Jarnow
Totally enjoyable, remarkably well done, illuminating, generous, linear yet effortlessly revolving/evolving mandalic quilt-type unique mind-expanding relatively contemporary work of mostly American ethnopharmamusicology. Of all the Dead- and psychedelic-related books I’ve read and listened to over the past several years, this is easily up there with the best. Love how it centers psychedelics and refocuses the Dead and later Phish in the larger lysergic context of their eras.
I listened to the audiobook via Spotify but actually acquired this in print a few years ago and skipped around but then sort of figured my time could be better spent than learning about those Johnny Appleseeds who helped psychedelics become a mind-manifesting invasive weed thrown to the wind, the true blue honest-to-Dark Star entheogenic sacred/profane culture that it’s become since it escaped the lab back in Palo Alto in the early ’60s. At first I skimmed the book for bits on the Dead and Phish, honestly, but then put it down in favor of fancy Euro lit in translation, as is my wont, all along and ever since loving the author’s Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, my #1 priority download whenever it streams down the tubes into my phone in the morning.
Jesse Jarnow graduated from the same college I did, a college known for its progressive politics, music conservatory, indie-rockers, and hippies (the line about how there were “still a lot of Deadheads and granola munchers” attracted me, along with its five-star academics, in the Peterson’s Guide to Colleges I browsed when considering colleges in high school). And unknown to most for its winter term project (a month-long self-directed January immersion in whatever you want to do as long as it’s conceived as a sort of project) as well as its Ex-Co, or Experimental College, actually accredited classes taught by students usually about things like, for example, the history of psychedelic America, and this book felt to me like it easily could’ve started as Jarnow’s winter term project before morphing into an Ex-Co class.
I’m very familiar with the author, in part because Obies recognize Obies out in the wild, but more so because I’ve listened to him speak for however many hours it takes to listen to every episode of his official GD podcast, the greatest ongoing ethnomusicological project I know of. Jesse reads the audiobook version and it’s like a special season of the Deadcast, with some welcome overlap of stories he’d resurfaced there, but for the most part it’s just a damn fine impressive work of popular accessible scholarship, especially how it presents for example how hip economics slowly becomes hippie capitalism, how the shambling experimental trial-and-error organic processes of the Dead enterprise are elaborated by Phish and later codified and preconceived/perfected as business models — so well done, so well handled. Not to mention how he introduces and returns to the primary players, some really well-known like Kesey, Bear, Garcia, Terrence McKenna, John Perry Barlow, Keith Haring (surprisingly), and other familiar entities like Dick Latvala, or Nancy (the writer of two favorite early Phish songs, from whence the wacky lyrical wordplay derives, a sort of crazy playful rhythmic sensory code they replicated in their own early originals), Bread & Puppet, or even more so the random manufacturers of note of the sacramental stuff, and especially (and unexpectedly) early NYC graffiti artists like Chad (LSD OM), early disco, various communes in northern California and remote Vermont, the formation of Burning Man, early raves, post-Garcia music festivals . . . oh! and not to mention the early internet, all those early San Fran-area computer dudes were heads too of course, Steve Jobs you’ve heard of but also the first guy who ever posted a status update to the internet for example.
The author also does a great job every once in a while noting, often humorously, that most of these “heads” are white and comparatively well-off dudes, essentially the demo turned on en masse in the late ’80s as the Dead had a top 10 hit for the first time, also around the time I was a prep-school stoner, in my mid-to-late teens reading The Doors of Perception, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Storming Heaven (which Jarnow mentions at one point), just scratching the surface of this stuff before heading in other directions in college and after it.
Cool to see how it was a phenomenon that had been growing and changing and surging and being tamped down by the feds and then resurging to an extreme around the time a high school band called the Blues Band (soon to change its name to Blues Traveler) was playing in my friend’s basement and we were all trading Dead tapes and hitting as many Dead, JGB, and a little later Phish shows as possible, doing what one does there. Interesting how Jesse keeps returning to stats on high school seniors and LSD use to chart the rise and fall and rise and fall of it all — essentially it seems like there’s always a 20% of high school seniors who are at least interested in psychedelics, and a fraction of these interested kids are the seekers, the ones who often find the Dead, create their own thing, and/or “find the others” like them, per Timothy Leary’s instructions.
Also excellent on the formation of Wetlands in NYC where so many of those HORDE-type bands played (I somehow never went there, feeling like I had missed its prime, being in high school and then in college in Ohio in the late ’80s through 1994) and the Psychedelic Solution, on W. 8th, where I went once or twice on my first unaccompanied-by-mother trips into the city, probably circa ’90.
So grateful/thankful etc that Jesse’s energies now seem mostly funneled into the Deadcast but I also look forward to his next extended work of scholarship, and I will definitely look into his earlier book on Yo La Tengo and indie rock.
Just Kids by Patti Smith
I’ve never really known much about Patti Smith, have never been able to get into her music despite trying a few times, and so I just didn’t really think I’d love this as much as I did. It really won me over pretty early, maybe when her family moved to the Germantown section of Philly and then to South Jersey and I recognized those places as the source of her accent. Should be required reading for anyone who moves to NYC with artistic ambitions. Loved how she slept in doorways and Central Park and lived the way she did for the first few years. Exposure to the city was her college and MFA. Generally reads like a WWI memoir (All Quiet on the Western Front, Storms of Steel) or a Holocaust novel in which luck plays such a part in the narrator’s survival.
Just totally engaging, how she met Mapplethorpe, how they became an interdependent duo devoted to art, their early days essentially living like hippies, seeing The Doors early on — moving to The Chelsea Hotel was really their first major stroke of luck, experience in that community at that time, with all the celebrity encounters (Jimi, Janis, Ginsberg). Loved it for the fact alone that it may interest some young reader to pick up Gregory Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death, let alone Rimbaud. The whole bit with how she met Sam Shepherd was wonderfully done — such a funny scene when it’s revealed who Slim, the wild down-homey handsome drummer for the Holy Modal Rounders, really is and how he can afford to buy her lobster at Max’s Kansas City. Only in New York.
Just generally interesting how they’re confident in their underlying artistic abilities well before they’ve even actually created anything of merit, how that drives their ambition, which drives their efforts and experiments, all of which lead to photography and music, unexpectedly for both. But also this is of course worth it as a document of what the city had been like, an elegy not only for the author’s great friend, the other half of her bonded pair, but also an elegy for the seedy, grungy, affordable, eccentric, experimental, inspiring, artistic NYC that now seems like the playground of the international rich, the bait and tackle shop where Mapplethrope bought flies and beads for the jewlery he made now surely replaced by a Duane Reade or Citibank.
The ending seemed a little rushed and the poems at the end didn’t exactly engage me but overall this was fantastic listening, evoked and animated a world now passed, and I enjoyed nearly every minute I spent immersed in it. Also enjoyed M Train.
Krautrocksampler: One Head’s Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik by Julian Cope
I’ve been familiar for 25 to 30 years with 85% of the recordings mentioned herein, so it was a lower-case thrill to read descriptions of Can, Faust, Neu, Popul Vuh, all the major “west” German favorites, and for me lesser-liked entities like Kraftwerk, Ash Ra Tempel, Tangerine Dream. But it was a THRILL when reading descriptions of recordings I’d never heard of, let alone heard, like Witthauser & Westerupp, Cosmic Jokers, Sergius Golowin (Lord Krishna von Goloka), Peter Hammill (Nadir’s Big Chance), Tony Conrad (Outside the Dream Syndicate), Walter Wegmuller (Tarot).
The writing style, the language, was fun too — semi-overblown loose rock gonzo journalism doing its best to make sense of all this cosmic outre output. Very much from the perspective of someone who was there (in the UK) at the time listening to this stuff as it came out, forming impressions mediated at most by John Peel and NME and random record stores. Often humorous: comparing Amon Duul I commune dwellers on bongos and maracas to a band of orcs, describing Can as The Meters playing avant-garde rock. Informative too: I’d never heard the bit about how Jaki Liebezeit (Can drummer) was confronted by a freak while playing free jazz who instructed Jaki to play monotonously, immediately changing Jaki’s approach. Also a good point about how Can could’ve released recordings that eventually came out on Delay ’68 but wanted to come out and make a clear statement with Monster Movie. Knew next to nothing about the musicians in Neu and Faust.
First heard about the existence of the book maybe in the late ’90s, maybe in a piece about Sean O’Hagan of The High Llamas, how he was reading this and wouldn’t stop talking about it. (For some reason when I half-remember this I see, without a doubt, the escalator at the Quakerbridge Mall in Princeton-ish area NJ, as though I were told this anecdote while there or read it while sitting in that area, but no idea why?) Never encountered a copy in the wild and didn’t think about it until a few days ago when I searched for it online and saw that copies were available, sure, if you had a few hundred dollars to spare. So I bookmarked a PDF online and read it with total pleasure this Independence Day weekend on my iPad, which is a recommended way to read it, not because it’s infinitely cheaper than acquiring a print edition but because you can flip from browser to popular music app and save everything mentioned that you don’t know.
Like the Yacht Rock sitcom on YouTube, would love to see a ridiculous dramatic sit-com animated series about all these groups, considering the cross-over among so many of the musicians. The only detraction I’d say is Cope’s less than total reverence for Can’s Future Days and Gottsching’s Inventions for Electric Guitar. Also the brief reviews at the end of the albums I wasn’t all that familiar with was like listening to someone tell you their dreams — or, more so, worth skimming for now, and worth returning to once the source material’s consumed and integrated.
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer, Philip Franklin (Narrator)
Makes you feel much better about whatever’s going on in your life. Well, at least I’m not up on Everest in a storm, supplementary oxygen gone, missing a glove, face caked in ice, visibility zero. Love the names in this, the repetitions almost musical when it gets into full-on survival logistics mode. The fog of war. Audiobook reader is more than sufficient and has fun with all the accents.
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Note: I know the authors of the books below from grad school or the internet
Only Son by Kevin Moffett
Perfect example of the fractured ADHD-era novel (plentiful short sections separated by space breaks throughout, easily integrating checking of phone at regular intervals), focused on the experience and echoes of grief, fathers and sons, mothers and sons, its setting in time and place from sea to shining sea (early ’80s humid Florida shambles to edge of contemporary California desert), as well as a quixotic sort of quest up the west coast. Sometimes like literary stand-up comedy, the laughs less out loud than silent and sad (SSLs), a couple hundred flash fictions arranged to assume the form of a novel that feels real and novel in its movements, its spirit, its artful autofictional swerve. Short but the RPM isn’t unnecessarily accelerated (not really something to be read in a single sitting). The beat seems set to savor, the AMB (ambiguity) set so fiction blooms and opens like poetry without ever seeming fancy like that. A really solid read, subtly about class, more obviously about aging, and suggestive of what it means to be a man (sans “manliness”).
The Summer Layoff by Matt Bucher
Like the author’s 2023 “debut,” The Belan Deck, this one is once again openly, joyfully, reverentially derivative of David Markson, with original, welcome variations in texture, including a distant relative’s diary entries from 1911, a few pages of a work-related screenplay, a page or so of Brainardian “I remember”s, something almost like a gripping short story involving an encounter with a drifter (former MBA-certified Dell employee who’s dropped out) and his dog while out hiking/wandering/getting lost along some winding creek running through remote Hill Country territory.
Unlike The Belan Deck, which was mostly about working in the San Francisco tech world, this one’s about not-working, no longer enduring the contemporary American techno-office space, having all day to watch the shadow on the sundial. An exploration of the in-between time after being let go, fortuitously at the start of summer, and set in the Austin suburbs, it’s the spiritual descendent of Austin’s founding art export, Richard Linklater’s Slacker, updated for the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, the rangy associative episodic approach maintained (~100 days instead of ~100 characters), with the ensemble cast suitably reduced to a single curatorial intelligence dealing with, for example, the imminence of AI instead of the eventuality of band practice sometime in the afternoon, but still nevertheless very much interested in semi-famous and obscure minutia and overlaps in dates and observations, the literary equivalent of Madonna’s pap smear.
Looking forward to the next one to complete the trilogy or complicate the tetralogy or whatever length the project takes. The smaller format plump paperback is a well-made and becoming physical object but I imagine, if you read the ebook, being able to easily search for some of the lesser-known names would nicely extend the book’s dimensions. I looked up not nearly enough unknowns but when I did was always glad I had.
It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays by Tom McAllister
Apparently when someone drowns they see their life flash by. This is sort of the literary equivalent. Expected something like Bill Burr imposing upon himself the constraint of writing an autobiographical essay for every year he’s been alive. But it’s not really that, since the author, despite at times in his past seeming like a Philly-area analogue pursuing literary writing instead of stand-up, has been busy differentiating himself, year by year becoming Tom McAllister, a man who would like to see himself as “being open to all the universe has to offer.” These excellent, often unpredictable, amusing, omni-critical (of self and contemporary American and online culture), insightful, moving (on family, friendship, aging, death), and increasingly socio-politically minded annual essays, particularly those covering the past decade or so, often seemed to me like a call (if not quite a cry) for help. Which made me think that for his next “trip,” maybe he would benefit from guided psychedelic therapy at Johns Hopkins or Stanford. That is, it feels like a memoir of a spiritual crisis, albeit unaware of itself as such (despite The Brothers Karamazov inclusion)? To bring it back to Bill Burr: in his semi-recent special shot at Red Rocks he talks about taking mushrooms for the first time and how he experienced a few years of therapy in six hours, realizing that he’d felt like no one was ever there for him when he was a child. In many ways, this reads like the first part of a spiritual-awakening memoir, before our hero finds God in some conventional way (AA maybe) or via alternate mystical paths. Regardless, an enjoyable, engaging, originally conceived read. (Disclosure: I’ve known the author for exactly half of the years covered in this — ie, since 2004 — and the “2006” entry describes a party in the backyard of the house where I lived on the night an F2 tornado came right through Iowa City.)
The Delegation by Avner Landes
Thanks to this one’s totally unique tri-level structure I couldn’t help thinking of it as hierarchical, with the “premier league” fictive content up top, the note from the author of the fiction (that is, Izzy Shenkenberg, not Avner Landes) in the “championship league” middle, and the footnotes as a shifty unstable foundation aka League One. The structure subtly seems to suggest sacred text sans seeming defamatory, more to relate to how the world is broken, multi-planed at least, and we have an obligation as citizen readers to, if not put it back together again, than at least to make sense, with commentary and questioning and the telling of stories, of distinctions we perceive. With Infinite Jest’s famous footnotes, DFW wanted to fracture the narrative and he recommended that the reader wield two bookmarks. Along those lines, The Delegation opens with a suggestion that three bookmarks be used to track one’s progress through its three levels — or maybe layers is a better word, with its geological, psychological (superego, ego, id), and onion and/or cake-related resonances? Loved early on the criticism in the Notes section of schmaltzy Borsch Belt, Klezmery, kvetchy stereotypical expectations of Jewish art, and loved how this expectation is subverted with the focus on a black American singer athlete Communist. I also very much liked creatively misreading the title as “The Relegation” when I found my eye preferring to track along the “lower leagues” before returning to the main attraction. Published by a new small press capable of producing a becoming paperback, there’s nothing “low” about the level of the artistry, energy, and innovation on display here. When you peel back this one’s layers, it’s all cake.
Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home by Stephen Starring Grant
Read tremendously well by the author, a really strong, engaging performance complete with plentiful differentiated accented voices and all. Generally, I was often thinking that if JD Vance could ride his Appalachian memoir all the way to the White House, there’s no reason Grant can’t do the same for the Dems. Or maybe that’s just an impression relayed by the patriotism on display at regular intervals.
The first time it got real patriotic I was on a pre-dawn run and deemed it “excessive patriotic malarkey” and switched to something else. But then encouraged to keep at it by the writer friend who’d recommended it, I pushed on and am glad that I did, not only for descriptions of Blacksburg and environs, for an inside look at the postal service, for impassioned pleas for a modernized fleet of mail trucks (electric, with AC for goodness sake), for recommendation of the best sort of mailbox most appreciated by carriers, and for how smoothly it integrated research and reams of info while maintaining a coherent narrative, but also and mainly as a memoir of a crackup, for seeing around the narrator, as they say in creative writing classes.
Sometimes seemed like Moby-Dick narrated by Cliff Clavin transplanted from a famous Boston bar in the ’80s to the winding roads of rural Virginia during the recent pandemic, suffused with patriotism, class tourism, a predilection for military lingo (author had been in the Boy Scouts and ROTC for a bit), pro-gun talk (bullets are often “chambered”), his professor father shot during the shooting at Virginia Tech, the author shot in Austin in the late ’90s, the prostate cancer, the job loss at the start of the pandemic, the high-level marketing career, the glossed-over/unmentioned dual MFAs in poetry and fiction from Iowa. . . . the takeaway for me, the single lingering impression (as Ethan Canin often said in workshops the author may have attended) was that this is more interesting as a memoir of a man losing his shit than it is about delivering the mail.
Or, for me, listening to this driving around, doing errands, on runs or at the gym, the message I received was a manifestation of early 2020s sociopsychological shitshow, a skewed stump speech, a wild heave-ho attempt at riding the craziness as far as it would take the author. Again, JD Vance is VP of the USA, and I enjoyed interpreting this as a sort of well-written, engaging, warped criticism/emulation of Vance’s memoir, which I haven’t read.
Otherwise, I listened to this thanks to a strong and repeated recommendation of a writer friend who lives in Blacksburg and knows the author, and I suppose I know the author too from grad school twenty years ago. We weren’t in workshops or seminars together the one year we crossed over, and I don’t remember interactions other than one at a party at my girlfriend’s house when the cops came after someone shot out a streetlight in the alley with a BB gun. I also sort of remember always respecting him for the story that he had walked out of a Marilynne Robinson workshop when she’d refused to discuss a story of his that involved sex or violence or something she considered unworthy of attention.
Definitely worth a listen, and for whatever he’s running for (or from, more so), he’s got my vote!
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Previous irregularly issued end-of-year rundowns and prestigious award winners: 2024, 2023, 2021, 2018, 2017
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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (from New Directions). Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox (from Barrelhouse). Or The Shimmering Go-Between from me (Atticus, the publisher, is kaput).
