It seems like every time I'm about to proclaim Katherine Anne Porter the best writer of her era, I stumble upon one of her enormous, stinking turds. Not like the stories here, among her earliest, should be stamped in gold or something, but the way she draws her characters is nothing short of exquisite—a frustrated artist, a dying woman, an Irish (County Sligo) immigrant living in Connecticut, a Mexican bride-turned-murderer, a 15-year-old Mexican girl who's never been kissed, a Mexican revolutionary's female confidant, a husband and wife who get into an enormous fight after he randomly decides to buy rope—the people and their relationships are all so finely detailed, densely woven, and true-to-life they carry you through some rather thin narratives. I'd imagine a writer, like any craftsman, who masters the basics would become eager to take bigger and bigger swings. And here her big swing is a huge whiff, a convoluted, overcrowded story about Russian filmmakers from California working in Mexico that pretty much bored me to tears (for the record, her later enormous swings in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" knock it out clear of the park.) I guess I can't in good faith say you should all run out and read this book, unless you happen to want to study the characterization techniques of someone who probably did it better than anyone. So, yes, that’s right, most of the stories here feel like little more than character sketches but, I gotta say, they're pretty god damn great sketches. Three stars.
"Fifty-Two Stories" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2021)
I think of all the fiction I've absorbed over my life—books, TV, movies—and I find it stunning that I can read Chekhov and think that I've never seen humanity depicted so accurately before. The all-confused whole of humanity is so acutely depicted, in classes grand and wanting, I actually find it difficult to explain to you just what he did (in one story, Chekhov repeatedly mocks a novelist for writing stories about people that could never happen in reality.) What does that say about us now? That a guy in 19th-century Russia could look at another person and see a wealth of contradictory motivations, whims, desires, behaviors, and inner thoughts and we just look at people and attach to them the comfort of familiar archetypes and little much else? It's really quite remarkable what he did, simply and economically. And it's also quite remarkable if you consider where we all eventually ended up. I really hope you get to read "The Name Day Party" some day. Five stars.
"Everything That Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O’Connor (1965)
Flannery O'Connor said she was intimidated by William Faulkner, a Southern contemporary, but I honestly think if she hadn't been dying of lupus in the process of writing, this book could have been one of the all-time greats. She's better than Chekhov. She's better than Hemingway's god damn baby shoes schtick. Her short stories are better than any of the stories Faulkner tried to write, and I've read most of them. However, if you've read her earlier, much more famous stuff then you might just label her a God-tooting moralist—“Wow, a good man really is hard to find!” But here, you come out of these stories feeling mostly confused: (1) Why would the guy who got a huge tattoo of Jesus Christ on his back end up crying against a tree? (2) Why would someone who's merely trying to behave as virtuously as she possibly could, only going by what she's been taught through sheer circumstance, still get ruthlessly punished by God? (3) Why would an author who uses the n-word liberally end another story by depicting a woman who hallucinates a bunch of n-words entering heaven before she did? It's a cycle of nine stories that illustrates the title, that each of us, race-gender-class-location-citycountrywhathaveyou, will have to meet and confront each other if we both intend to climb any further than we already have, and that (except for one story) doesn't necessarily portray faith as something that elevates: Jesus-loving woman believes she's saved by following Sunday school theology to a tee for all her life, but hates LITERALLY every other human being alive = Jesus-mocking tattooed man somehow finding the lure of God literally inescapable = seemingly kind woman finds stray bull teasing her herd, tries to raise children: fails, tries to run farm: fails, tries to steamroll over other people: fails, tries to be a strong woman: fails, yet when she gets gored by that stray bull you're kind of glad it happened to her. Flannery O'Connor makes it look easy. But what she tried to achieve with her stories was really hard, and must have taken an inordinate amount of thought. And a lot of mystery. And they almost get to "classic level," they really almost get there. What is it that I think that stops them? There are a few times throughout the book where your view doesn't feel expansive, but instead feels restrictive and plain—in other words “bad simple.” As if she was too tired to think about it all. Considering how successfully the rest of the book hides enormous complexities within simple-seeming frames, this feels like a sin. Four stars.
"El Filibusterismo" by José Rizal, Translated by Harold Augenbraum (1891, 2011)
You know when someone accomplished in non-literary fields, someone very intelligent, says they're going to write a novel? And the descriptions are fine, and the dialogue is fine, and the characters are fine, and the ideas are fine, and the cliffhangers are fine, and maybe there's a liberal heaping of esoterica, in this case many many Latin phrases, and maybe it follows that escalating plot curve thing to a tee, and maybe Chekov's gun ends up going off, and at first glance it all appears to be fairly competently put together? And even the writing itself as a whole seems perfectly fine, everything except for the sense of joy experienced by the reader, which falls jaw-droppingly flat? This book does that. The joy part, it turns out, is screamingly difficult to engineer. One star.
"Dancing in the Streets - A History of Collective Joy" by Barbara Ehrenreich (2006)
I suppose all books like this bend the truth, it's only a matter of degree ("The Dawn of Everything" apparently bends the truth quite a bit in service of its ultimate point.) So, was public celebration really discouraged by the rise of Protestant discipline-fed capitalism? Was ritualistic dancing really seen as a threat to public order? Do we really live according to the dictates of a culture that sees benefits in our separation, that celebrates individualism and identity both as a triumph of selfhood and as a method of organization (if you identify as "gay" then I know what to sell you,) that peddles products to alleviate the dismay that the culture itself causes? Is what we're experiencing now the result of centuries of human repression at the service of power, control, and money? Beats me—most of the relevant information I know comes only from personal experience and this very book. Once again, Ehrenreich starts by examining something simple, in this case "joy", and spins it out into all sorts of enormous threads—Why do we, as humans, relentlessly seek out so much pointless joy? And why do people seem to find this so threatening? I can't tell you if she's onto something for certain. But it's something to think about, for sure. Four stars.
"Dinner with Friends" by Donald Margulies (1998)
There are only four characters, two couples, and the plot hinges on a simple infidelity. But each small revelation somehow gets you to question your own moral compass, and gets you to ponder why people could treat each other so violently when they're also being so myopic. No heroes, no villains. Three stars.
"Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes, Translated by Edith Grossman (1615, 2003)
There's really a lot you can say about this book, a lot of truly deep things too, about human nature and comedy and what constitutes a great story and philosophy and religion and eternal life and modern literature and pratfalls and all of that—you really can go on for quite a while (even if you exclude all the drearily facile takes concerning the power of imagination and just who's the crazy one here.) So I'll attempt to summarize everything I feel by saying this: Don Quixote is the most perfect, most wildly imperfect book I have ever read, and probably ever will. What a great ride. Five stars.
"Creating Fiction - Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs" Edited by Julie Checkoway (1999)
Imagine my delight upon seeing someone's recommended list of writing books and discovering that I had already owned five of seven—a validation of my instinctive ability to sniff out quality writing advice! That included this and the benefit of this book over others as far as writing instruction goes is you get a variety of teaching styles in one sitting—you don't just get one person's theory, you get about thirty of them! Some very insightful and high quality, some of them asinine: the advantage of confidently declaring yourself an "expert" in a field like creative writing, a field that very few people actually understand, a field highly susceptible to wistful, windswept sentimentality, is that the chances an impressionable young hopeful will listen to you with unquestioning, shining adoration are very, very, very high, which is an attitude that’s remarkably easy to exploit. Some of these writers seem guilty of that. But, because of the book’s scattershot nature, the chances you'll run into unusually considered and highly worthwhile wrinkles of narrative craft are also very high. So, on the whole, I think it's rather good. At the same time, I've read this book before, as an unquestioning, shining, young idolator. And I think I wrongly took away lessons from the more flashy, inspirational teachers than from the ones who preached classical, grinding restraint in a minor key. Now that I look back, I think it's their fault. Three stars.
"Contagious - Why Things Catch On" by Jonah Berger (2013)
It's written in that extremely annoying "This American Life"-inspired conversational style which was in vogue during the (awful, just purely awful) 2010s. Plus, it's directed towards people who work in marketing and advertising. Nevertheless, the ordinary person gets a breezy, Wharton-kissed explainer about six major ways people try to manipulate your behavior. For instance, "Stories thus give people an easy way to talk about products and ideas. ... They provide a sort of psychological cover that allows people to talk about a product or idea without seeming like an advertisement." Read it, and maybe you'll be able to see through a lot things that typically slip past your bullshit detector. Now, if you happen to be an evil person, (1) you've likely already read this book; and (2) I'd think a person who had committed themselves to evil would be able to handle much more sophisticated reading material. Three stars.
"Commodify Your Dissent - Salvos from The Baffler" Edited by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (1997)
Its attacks on 90s pop culture—from Details Magazine to Donna Tartt to Henry Rollins to Quentin Tarantino to Wired Magazine to alternative rock (geez, how the hell did they set up Q101 just six months after Nirvana "suddenly shocked the world"?)—are still pretty thrilling, at least perhaps to me, someone who lived through it all as an impressionable teen, some of it I ate up, some of it not. The attacks on everything else are kind of boring, as if the pop culture stuff were the things the writers were most familiar with. Some of it seems dated, some of it seems hyperbolic, but mostly a lot of it just seems like precursors to issues we still deal with (there is an advertising executive here who preaches "disruption".) Most strikingly, they call out how we spend money on things that feel liberating or purposeful or rebellious or even meaningful to our identities when, all along, we're doing exactly what a bunch of people in a board room had planned and budgeted for. It may sound a little simplistic, but are our movie theaters filled with comic book blockbusters because that's what we as an audience demanded? Or did a corporation steer us towards a product that was highly addictive and, thus, easier to predict and reproduce? Three stars.
"Collected Stories" by William Faulkner (1950)
I'm only 200 pages into a 900-page book but I feel I have enough: If you're interested in reading stories that were sort of shat out whenever Faulkner was strapped for cash and oftentimes very much read like it, then this door stop is for you. Also, don't be fooled by the 1951 National Book Award for Fiction—he probably won it more for the earlier series of extraordinary novels everyone ignored at the time; in fact, many of these stories feel like a writer working out his ideas more than one who dearly cared for the craft of the short form. One star.
"Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Fourth Edition" by Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors (1999)
It's a 500-page book about classical rhetoric, so I'll try to keep this brief. Maybe it's too late for you to become a stronger writer, but in the event your child shows a knack for words it might be a good idea to get this book on their radar. For some reason, I went through most of my life never once hearing about it, until it was referenced in an academic paper I was reading about advertising. Which means either the state of the humanities had been in decline for much longer than we thought, or narrow-minded parents were desperately dissuading their children away from writing as a career. I've found, if you dissuade a talented, budding writer away from a writing career, you're pretty much sentencing your peculiar, creative child to a long, sad, unfulfilled life (an unusually large number of these children grow up to be financially secure, emotionally damaged Asians.) So if you want to spare those kids a future, decades-long SSRI/Xanax dependency, just know this might actually be the best book on the nuts-and-bolts craft of writing I've ever read. (Sidenote: I can now recognize, thanks to this book, the advertising agency Fallon McElligott, in their heyday, more than anyone else, made use of classical rhetoric precepts in their work.) Five stars.
"Chicago: City on the Make" by Nelson Algren (1951)
I suppose I should feel affinity towards someone whose sweeping love letter to his hometown spends a great deal of time shitting on it mercilessly, but I don't. Two stars.
"Chicago - A Literary History" Edited by Frederik Byrn Køhlert (2021)
I sure am glad this book was good, because I paid over a hundred dollars for it: it helped me understand why the city is full of complete bastards. Four stars.
"Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage" by Bette Howland (2019)
Off the top of my head I'm not totally sure of her background but I'd imagine these are the kinds of short stories you'd get if a lifelong copy editor decided to try their hand at fiction—meticulously assembled and boring as fuck. "Public Facilities" is pretty good though. One star.
"Birds of America" by Lorrie Moore (1998)
I pulled this off my shelf expecting to be enchanted. Instead, I finished it bored out of my mind. I've read this before and what's striking is none of the stories except one seemed familiar—apparently, I had easily forgotten them. Now, the one story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" is still pretty fantastic, but coming after 200 pages of quippy protagonists who are fond of wordplay, and starring yet another quippy protagonist who is fond of wordplay, to be followed by yet one final quippy protagonist who is fond of wordplay and also accidentally murdered her friend's baby, even this stellar story caused my eyes to glaze over at one point. The cynical thing to say is, stories about white people who work in academia can't possibly be all that interesting. But if I were to try to dig for a deeper reason for its failure, I think it's that the book perfected writer's workshop tenets at the time: it's the epitomy of Carver-like minimalism. It's the "epiphany of the tiny moment, the power of the unsaid" writing writ ideal. In 1998, this book was considered a remarkable gem. By those rules, this book is an unprecedented triumph. Little did anyone at the time realize though, the rules they enforced and celebrated were arbitrary and not universal. One star.
"Black Dada Reader" Edited by Adam Pendleton (2017)
What I thought I could finish in two or three days ended up taking two-plus weeks. It's interesting; I often put the book down and found myself dizzy; I enjoyed the deep dives into art school academia; I did not quite enjoy the art. Gertrude Stein was a great poet. Gertrude Stein was a Nazi sympathizer. Am I convinced abstraction is an equalizer? I can be talked into it. Three stars.
"Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought - Selected Letters and Commentary" Edited and Annotated by Simon Karlinsky, Translated by Michael Henry Heim (1973)
The audience, I'd imagine, is limited. And you can pretty much tell what you're going to get from the title, so let me just add this: Every letter features extensive footnotes which offer a look at 19th century Russian history through its street life and pop culture, if that sort of thing interests you—it might be the collection's leading virtue. Also, Karlinsky takes on an oddly catty tone throughout, gleefully debunking the many misperceptions of the man, Soviet-bred or otherwise (maybe he adopted that tone because a lot of the selected letters are kinda flat.) As for the letters themselves (185 here, out over 4,000 to choose from) one thing I noticed, having read other collections, the letters here seem much more even-keeled and less emotionally all over the place—you get the impression that Chekhov was a person who tried to maintain his sincerity in all situations, but only once in a while does any of the messiness sincere people tend to get themselves caught up in, and that I've seen expressed elsewhere, peek through the editing process (he, memorably, in more than one letter, brags about banging a bronze-colored Hindu woman under a tree in Singapore; his final recorded words involved mocking the way German women dressed; and he sent the following letter in its entirety to some kid who asked him to take a look at their story: "Cold, dry, long, not youthful, though talented. -Chekhov.") It's kind of funny how the truth about sincere people somehow becomes badly mangled, actually—one collection I read painted him as an eternal fount of saintly wisdom, one as an emotionally messy, deeply flawed human being, and this as a practical, sober-minded, stately celebrity. I'm betting the messy, flawed one is the honest one (somehow the story of a trained doctor who flat-out ignores his own tuberculosis for nearly 10 years, and the story of someone who said he wanted to be married as long they remained independent and apart, frustrating his new wife who was shocked to find out that he actually meant it, tends to get buried.) Three stars.
"An American Summer - Love and Death in Chicago" by Alex Kotlowitz (2019)
Two things alarmed me recently. One was hearing a Radiolab producer say that they never once aired a story that didn't have some sort of positive ending. The other was when I noticed how obsessed YouTube reviewers are with "character development". Alarming because that means people's idea of what the "golden rule" story consists of is becoming narrowed and calcified, which means a lot of stories that do not fit that idea do not get told. So it's downright shocking to read a nonfiction book full of stories that don't end well, that have no justice, where characters don't grow, where those that try to grow can't, where moral behavior is not rewarded, where immoral behavior is not punished, and where people's stories end more confused than where they started. Of all the books you hear tossed around anti-racism book clubs, I'm floored that this one never seems to come up. Because I would think that understanding how inner city people actually live their daily lives is far more valuable than understanding theories of systemic racism. Will you feel uplifted when the book ends? No, most certainly not. Because many stories worth telling aren't clean like that, and assigning quality to the satisfaction of character development is what unthinking, ignorant people do. Five stars.
"All Around Atlantis" by Deborah Eisenberg (1997)
Fiction via overthinking. Fell asleep twice while reading. Two stars.