"Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics" by Anton Chekhov, Selected and Edited by Louis S. Friedland (1924)

I picked this up because I assumed it would be filled with insights into his writing process, a distillation of his much larger collection of letters into select, juicy nuggets of creative wisdom. It's not. The vast majority of it, actually, reads like gossip. In fact, you get the sense that Chekhov wrote these letters believing that there was no way in hell his survivors would ever approve the commercial publication of his private correspondence,* which can be characterized by their emotional erraticism, the sense that he found the state of modern culture entirely stupid, and his hatred of seemingly every other human being on earth (I laughed out loud at the harshness he doled out on this female writer for saying, "The aim of life is life itself," calling it bafflingly insincere, and then ending his tirade by basically saying, "Ah, she's a good lady"; there's also a very memorable exchange where he tells the head of a young writer's association that, no, he won't join their young writer's association because young writer's associations are stupid.) There's a much more recent collection of his "writings for writers" which edits things to give you only a spiritually uplifting picture of an esteemed, moral thinker, which is pretty much wholly anti-Chekhov, and which seems to me a book to cherish only if you happen to be dumb. As for this one, there are perhaps loads of grand statements (he really hated grand statements) to be made connecting his realistic fiction with the stunning emotional range of what is said here (in turns: wise, scared, demanding, childlike, mean, kind, horny, ascetic, probably drunk.) Though, for the purposes of writing instruction, maybe this should simply be considered an endorsement for the energizing, even inspiring, power of creative hatred. Three stars.

*I’ve read Flannery O'Connor's letters and in comparison, in hindsight, they now feel very, very, very carefully controlled.

"Kudos" by Rachel Cusk (2018)

Book three of The Outline Trilogy. Was this whole thing a meditation on femininity the entire time? Featuring a main character whom you barely ever see? If so, wow. Four stars.

"Kieślowski on Kieślowski" Edited by Danusia Stok (1993)

Basically an oral autobiography, which ends while he's in the middle of making Three Colors. If you come here looking for insights into films that are notably *not* passive entertainments, then you might actually find them—it's a little refreshing when someone is talking and you can sort of tell that they're not trying to sell anything, or burnish their reputation, or relive past glories, or even merely turning themselves "on" for the crowd: they're just talking, trying to be as sincere and as in the moment as possible. How can you tell? Well, at one point he starts musing out loud about how, if none of us individually believes that we have an ounce of evil within us, how is it possible that evil can exist in the world? And later he goes on a long, somewhat sloppy, cigarette-fueled rant about how terrible Polish people are. Three stars.

“Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte (1847)

Dickensian, in effort, that is to say alternately wasteful and worthwhile. A paltry tale of feminism, I think not. To decry "feminism" of this work deems most simplistic and, hence, most degrading. Difficult, dear reader, to impart modern tribes to so distant a world, duly acknowledged. The portrait of a woman is drawn strong, indubitably, but perceived strength oftwhile yields insufferable ignorance, hurtful to those perhaps underserving. Characters as symbol, by definition, hardly bests character as character, indecipherable and mystery full, I fain. Maybe that, reader, is the impart: the truly honest don't make any rational goddamn sense. Three stars.

"Ivanov - A Drama in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1887, 2004)

The very first thing you see is someone pointing a gun at Ivanov's face. The very last thing you see (hear, actually) is Ivanov shooting himself. It's "Chekhov's Act I gun" in plain sight. But the rest of the play is kind of bad. Like it's overstuffed and rushed at the same time. Maybe it's okay if you see it in action, but I doubt it—his plays tend to assume obtuse forms, and this feels like an embryonic version of what he'd later refine. It's just funny that the epitome of his famous mantra, its literal manifestation, espoused as sacred gospel by generations of writing teachers, guarded as untouchable formula by generations of writing students, really kind of stinks. Two stars.

"It's Not Easy Bein' Me" by Rodney Dangerfield (2004)

If you didn't have a Rodney Dangerfield impersonation before you started this book, you will have one afterwards. It's jarringly odd to hear him talk about bouts of severe depression. Oddly, the most I laughed out loud was the chapter he talked about his best friend, the funniest guy he knew, a non-comedian named Joe Ancis. Two stars.

"If Only We Could Know! - An Interpretation of Chekhov" by Vladimir Kataev, Translated and Edited by Harvey Pitcher (2002)

One: Someone at the College of DuPage Library clearly has a hard-on for Anton Chekhov and, as far as I can tell, I'm the only person living in the district who appreciates it. Two: Yes, it's an academic book. So let me just say that the only reason I feel I should highlight it is because, as far as my experience goes, the interpretations of Chekhov's works are ALL OVER THE PLACE. And part of the reason for this, as far as I can gather, is that Chekhov's irony is bone-dry: for instance, in "The Student" a depressed character by the end reaches a grand, uplifting epiphany, struck by the eternity of human beauty, which leaves you the reader feeling pretty good unless you ask yourself, "How is a 22-year-old student supposed to confidently know all that?"; but you're barely force-fed the question, and if you miss the question it's easy to miss the point of the story. So the reason I'm highlighting this book is because I think (naivety pending) Kataev probably gets closer to what Chekhov was actually trying to do through his work than anyone else who has tried to explain him. Which is, basically, point out that not one person living on Planet Earth could ever possibly know what the hell they're talking about.* Chekhov, I imagine, died a lonely man. Four stars.

*Excerpt: "'Why should a little one have to suffer so much before dying?' the grieving Lipa asks the old man 'from Firsanov' (In the Ravine) / 'We can't know all the whys and wherefores,' he replies. 'A bird's meant to have two wings, not four, because two's enough to fly with; same thing with man, he's not meant to know everything, but only a half or a quarter. He knows as much as he needs to know for getting through life.' This is a very rare example in Chekhov of a character who accepts not knowing 'everything' calmly, as the inevitable lot of human beings."

"Insurrecto" by Gina Apostol (2018)

This book kind of makes you wish the story of the Philippine-American War and its aftermath were written by a white person, or any other ethnicity really. At least that way, using an outsider's point of view, they would know what to edit and how best to curb one's excesses. One star.

"In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" by William H. Gass (1968)

(1) You know those books that people gush about, especially in educated circles, but when you push them to explain exactly why they liked it so much you can never really squeeze out a clear, considerable answer? Partly because its reputation, particularly in educated circles, seems to have surpassed its actual quality? Something, among certain educated circles, you're supposed to like more than anyone actually does? Something you'll spend a proud year telling everyone about, all your educated friends, and years later struggle to remember? This is one of those books; (2) Maybe the reason revisiting postmodernist works feels so deeply unpleasant is that time has proven their “things are so fragmented truth no longer exists” theory absolutely, 100 percent correct. One star.

"In Love" by Alfred Hayes (1953)

There's this danger if you write a long prose piece using the rhythmic, structured beats of poetry, that the rhythm eventually becomes so incessant, like the steady drip of a faucet somewhere in the background, that the story actually takes a back seat. So while I kind of get it, that short, clipped, kinda calloused, clauses strung together can capture both the neurotic energy of New York City and the elevated inflammations of love, eventually all I heard was that damn dripping faucet—it was hard to absorb the story of a (somewhat standard, and therefore interesting) love affair because technique drifted into the spotlight. As if the disciplined grammar of poetry makes the story the writer's to dictate, not the reader’s to hold and inhabit. Still kinda good though. Three stars.

"Humboldt's Gift" by Saul Bellow (1975)

It's quite the rollercoaster ride, this book. Any attempts to reduce it to something pithy and sharp feels off in some respect. Is it a metaphysical farce? Is it a screwball satire on art and artists? Is it a highly intellectual adventure? You spend the entire book with one man, perhaps the world's most insufferable overthinker, as he gets overwhelmed by an extremely elaborate, continents-spanning plot. You eventually get the impression of a man, presently consumed with Rudolf Steiner's thoughts on spirituality, who so desperately wants to distance himself from a messy humanity (mainly characterized by a scheming, grimy, lawless, 1970s Chicago) whose constant propulsions and collisions become more and more impossible to evade (viewed through a modern lens, it can actually be considered a book-length argument for how the term "introvert" is nothing more than a sympathetic rebranding of "being a crassly antisocial, isolated jerk.") Can you sustain a one-thing-after-another, coincidence-laden, farce-like pace over 500 pages of text, though? Maybe? Almost? You never quite get lost, even as yet another name is thrown onto the pile, and yet another secret is unraveled, and yet another philosophical treatise is expounded. But, at the same time, there were too many moments where I slid my bookmark in at night and said, "No more. No more book. Please, please, no more book," and not at all in a teasing, curious way. I feel like this one's been forgotten, which it shouldn't, it's quite the unique novel—I can't think of too many modern urban novels that remind you of a relentless Indiana Jones film. But you kind of end the rollercoaster ride sensing the whole thing was soundly built, craftily designed, even inspired (I mean, instead of a giant boulder, the guy's trying to outrun humanity itself) but still lacking some sort of ... hard to place ... perhaps even harder to conjure ... spark. Maybe it simply needed more laughs. Three stars.

"Heart of Junk" by Luke Geddes (2020)

Well, it's good in the way seeing some random improv troupe pull off a surprisingly successful Harold is: even though it's kind of sloppy it's extremely satisfying, maybe uplifting even. You might even recommend the troupe to others, if it ever comes up in conversation. Maybe one day, it wouldn't surprise you if you ended up seeing that troupe on TV. For now though, chances are you're not going to remember any of it come tomorrow. Three stars.

"Having and Being Had" by Eula Biss (2020)

As far as meditative, book-length nonfiction prose poems about capitalism go, as far as I know this is the only one. Four stars.*

*Biss spends great deal of time ruminating over what is actually expressed through a single word.

"Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales" (1993)

I'm only on page 200 of 600 but I'm just gonna go ahead and call it: After you get past the novelty of finding out the original, violent versions of the Disney fairy tales we all know, you start to come across a bunch of German folk stories that seem to have been collected from the town insane lunatic—they have no point, they go nowhere, and they read like a series of wacky, random events all crammed together into one short story. If it wasn't depressing enough that a lot of stories feature innocent people getting chopped into little bits for no reason, and evil people humiliating the good, and oftentimes end with a moral that just basically says, "Welp, the world sure is unfair," soon the stories make you remember the time you were trapped at a party and the marijuana ran out before it got passed to you. I can't believe I have 400 more pages of this. (I suppose I should caveat that even as a child I couldn't stand fantasy—"What? People can't have wars in space. Why are you making me watch this?!") One star.

"Good Behaviour" by Molly Keane (1981)

I suspect the book is better than I'm giving it credit for—it's hard for a Filipino kid who grew up in a Chicago bungalow to easily relate to the horsey goings on at an Anglo-Irish estate in shambling decline at the turn of the 20th century. But I'll say it's a very densely packed book that gives you a hell of a lot to think about. Let me attempt to explain: the bulk of the book is spent inside the head of a Michael Scott-like character, an unusually tall, unusually self-conscious, unusually put-upon misfit named Aroon St. Charles who's prone to avoiding harsh realities and desperate to feel loved. Now, marry this with the revelation in the very first chapter that she eventually ends up ruthlessly murdering her own mother. All the tension is found in between those two spaces. And it's a neat little trick that kind of lingers with you even after you've left behind the final word. Possibly four following a re-read, but for now. Three stars.

"Flyboy in the Buttermilk - Essays on Contemporary America" by Greg Tate (1992)

What's truly shocking as you go through the essays, some full of jazz-like riffs and others more baldly academic, is how little cultural criticism I've read over the years was written with a proudly Black voice (in one essay, he criticizes an Afro-centric art book for assiduously excluding white influences: "Black art historians shouldn't just talk about how the massive mandalas of a painter like the Africobra school's James Phillips draw on Coltrane's modal solos and African textile patterns, but how he proposes fresh uses for African-inspired geometry in painting when Cubism and Constructivism were thought to have exhausted them.") Though this may explain why I had never run into the work of Greg Tate before he died last year. It's hard to explain how this realization makes me feel. Kind of like I've been duped. Like I've been had. At one point he laments the lack of a cohesive Black artistic community because white corporate America is offering them enough money to work as a Creative Director and buy a suburban home. Probably an oversimplification. Then again, no mainstream outlet would ever, EVER, publish great, insightful, perspective-shifting stuff like this. Unfortunately, white people got the money. And they prefer their edges smooth. Three stars.

"Fire on the Prairie - Chicago’s Harold Washington and the Politics of Race" by Gary Rivlin (1992)

An imperfect book, only because occasionally it gets muddled telling an extremely complicated story with many ancillary characters. But for the most part it's clearly written, and not at all hagiographic towards its subject. It's a book forged from old-school, objective journalism. On a personal level, the book upset me at many, many points: it helps me understand why I so desperately hate a city that I can't help but love (Why do people from Chicago tend to have great bullshit detectors? Because, if so many people are trying to fuck you over from seemingly all sides, you learn to develop a good sense of the kinds of people you should trust. Also, no one who has ever grown up in Chicago knows what "controlling your emotions" means, for better or for worse.) Four stars.

"Flying Home and Other Stories" by Ralph Ellison (1996)

I guess most of these stories are from before "Invisible Man" and were published posthumously which might explain why most of them read like small character sketches rather than complete stories. Honestly, while reading these I couldn't help but think back to my writer's workshop classes, where even the most talented students would routinely turn in works that felt clunky and incomplete. If "two stars" would indicate flawed but not worthless, and "one star" would indicate pretty much worthless then I guess I really have no choice here. Reading this book was unpleasant. One star.