In the past few weeks, I’ve read some astonishing books: Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” a story collection that’s raw and funny and breathtakingly great; “The Visiting Privilege,” by the bright-bleak grand master of short stories, Joy Williams; and Álvaro Enrigue’s brilliant “Sudden Death,” which will be out in February and is about a tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo, wherein they use a ball made out of Marie Antoinette’s hair. (It’s also about colonialism, utopias, and sex.) And I’ve been so distraught that there are no more Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante to come after the fourth, “The Story of the Lost Child,” that I’ve re-read the entire grand novel project.
—Lauren Groff
People might expect that, as a copy editor, I’d be absorbed in the new usage manual by Frank L. Cioffi, “One Day in the Life of the English Language,” or the latest book on punctuation by David Crystal, “Making a Point.” They wouldn’t be that far off. As it happens, I have a sudden rage to read a work of fiction about a proofreader: “The History of the Siege of Lisbon,” by José Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. It’s been on my shelf, approximately, since 1998, when Saramago won the Nobel Prize. The first sentence begins, “The proof-reader said, Yes,” and it goes on for five pages. The other book I’m eager to read is something I acquired more recently, at Parnassus Books, in Nashville: a novella titled “Parnassus on Wheels,” by Christopher Morley, first published in 1917 and reissued by Melville House in 2010, in a beautiful little paperback. The Library of Congress has it catalogued under the following subjects: booksellers and bookselling, travelling sales personnel, single women, women farmers, brothers and sisters, women booksellers, and tramps. What a progression!
—Mary Norris
If I’m being honest, most of the non-work-related books I actually manage to finish these days are the ones I read aloud, to my five-year-old. I’m enjoying “The BFG.” (He finds it a little scary.) I cried at the end of “Charlotte’s Web.” (He didn’t, and was alarmed at the idea that his father might be the kind of emotional basket case who gets weepy over a kids book about farm animals.) Lately we’ve graduated to Tintin. On my own, I’ve been re-reading Peter Robb’s extraordinary book about corruption and rot (and food and art and beauty), ”Midnight in Sicily,” and I just started Benedict Kiely’s “Proxopera,” a slim, haunting novel about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. I’m very much looking forward to my colleague Larissa MacFarquhar’s “Strangers Drowning,” which has just come out. And, on a plane some time later this month, I will officially become the last person on earth to read Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch.”
—Patrick Radden Keefe
My current subway book, which I’m just about to finish, is “The Long Loneliness,” the autobiography of Dorothy Day, who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement. I started it before Pope Francis mentioned Day in his speech to Congress—a fact I’m mentioning here out of a twinge of pride, although reading a book called “The Long Loneliness” on the train can be a miniature lesson in the “poverty of spirit” that carried Day through the “tireless work” that the Pope mentioned. The book may not be the most thorough account of Day’s life; she leaves out some formative events—such as the abortion she had as a young woman—and, in her enthusiasm for writing about her fellow-travellers, it sometimes becomes unclear what she did, exactly. She notes in the introduction that writing such a book, like going to confession, is hard, “because you are ‘giving yourself away.’ ” But she’s generous with her memories and feelings. She provides a front-row seat to the early-twentieth-century social-justice movements and to the scene in New York City, and she writes plainly and frankly about her own dealings with the despair, sadness, and, especially, the loneliness that she sees at the core of the basic human struggle.
—Andrea DenHoed
Sternberg Press’s “On the Table” series, edited by the culinary historian Charlotte Birnbaum, combines exquisite design with the most delightfully esoteric subject matter: the art of napkin-folding, Bernini’s set design for the feasts held at the Vatican in 1668 in honor of Her Most Serene Majesty Christina Queen of Sweden, and a recipe for peacock-testicle pie. The most recent addition is a new translation of the Italian artist F. T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Cookbook,” originally published in 1932. As New York City inches toward winter, I will resist the siren song of pasta, which Marinetti calls “a passéist food,” responsible for making its consumers “heavy” and “brutish,” and dine instead on the Sant’Elia Architectural Meal, the Futurist Aeropoetic Meal, and, if I dare, the White Desire Dinner.
On another note, a friend, the writer Robin Sloan, recommended the New York Public Library’s @NYPLRecommends service to me: on Fridays at 10 A.M., you tweet at them with a book or two that you liked, and a librarian responds with two or three more recommendations. I have already read and loved one of the novels they chose for me (Meg Wolitzer’s “The Interestings”), so I have high hopes for the other two: “The Autobiography of Us,” by Aria Beth Sloss, and “Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald,” by Therese Anne Fowler.
—Nicola Twilley
All of the Elena Ferrante books have now sent me on to finally read the so-often-recommended to me Elsa Morante; I’m starting with “History” and “Arturo’s Island_._”
—Rivka Galchen
I’ve just read Tom McCarthy’s ”Remainder,” which is a sort of anti-novel. Technically, it has characters and a plot, but the characters are what E.M. Forster would call “flat”—in fact, they’re practically cardboard cut-outs, which is appropriate in a book about superficiality—and it’s often difficult to distinguish what is “actually” happening from what is merely a fantasy in the narrator’s brain. In the end, it doesn’t much matter. It’s a novel of ideas, but one refreshingly devoid of windbaggery.
—Andrew Marantz
I’m planning to re-read Orwell, especially “Down and Out in Paris and London,” which was given to me years ago one Christmas by George Trow, when I was trying to be a writer. He also gave me “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” by James Agee. Both books are written in the first person, and George was providing me with a model of how I might do that. Agee is ornate, and Orwell is not, and I could see from their books that what mattered, and it seemed to be all, was to get the thing down right on the page, if I could. Reading him again, I hope to recover parts of someone I remember being.
—Alec Wilkinson
I’m reading Mary Karr’s new book, “The Art of Memoir,” for a second time (I saw an earlier version in manuscript). Karr is such fun to read—who else would combine the name Nabokov and the phrase “out the wazoo” on her very first page?—that it’s hard to resist getting drawn into it again. She takes you on a brilliant literary tour of great memoirs, and launches a two-fisted defense of truth in the form, and talks about the sometimes excruciating conversations a memoirist has to have with her family.
—Larissa McFarquhar
My reading habits are improvisational, mainly governed by the accidents of ownership and inclination, rather than by the schedule of new releases. But there’s a new biography of Orson Welles coming in November, “Young Orson,” by Patrick McGilligan, which takes the directorial hero from his birth to the threshold of “Citizen Kane.” I’ve only just started it and can so far confess to fascination and pleasure; the wealth of detail and the measured tempo are up to the Shakespearean complexity of Welles’s character.
Meanwhile, the New York Film Festival will be screening “Miles Ahead,” a bio-pic about Miles Davis, that stars and is directed by Don Cheadle. Advance reports indicate that it’s anchored in the second half of the nineteen-seventies, the time of Davis’s withdrawal from public performance, and that it dramatizes his friendship with a journalist (played by Ewan McGregor) who helps to coax him back to the stage. There is at least one journalist, the late Eric Nisenson, who was in fact befriended by Davis in just that interregnum; Nisenson wrote a book, “ ’Round About Midnight: A Portrait of Miles Davis,” which I’ve started to read. It’s both a biography and a view of Davis’s life in a sort of self-imposed exile. Whether it maps onto the movie or just coincidentally coincides with it, we shall see.
—Richard Brody
