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Read like the wind
June 2021 Are factoids about other peopleâs jobs interesting to you? I hoard them like fine treasures. Once, in central Oregon, I was chastised by a rancher for asking how many cows he owned. First, he said, this was a rude question because I was basically asking him his net worth. Second, he said, one wouldnât say âcowsâ but rather âhead of cattleâ â as in, âI have 500 head of cattle, not that itâs any of your business.â He went into finer detail, but we donât have room for it here. The point is that an inappropriate icebreaker yielded a trove of Rancher Info that I often visit and admire in my own brain. It sits in a glass case between Phlebotomist Info, Plywood Trucking Info, and many others. This nosiness about other peopleâs jobs is likely driven by the fact that my job, to a fly on the wall, looks very boring. Iâm sure many people would say the same about their jobs; nothing is more tedious than your own obligations! But even by objective standards, my âprocessâ offers sub-paint-drying levels of stimulation: I sit in a chair all day. After a while my neck starts hurting. The first book below inveigled me not with its plot or its cover, but with the main characterâs job description. I came for the vocation. I stayed for everything else. â Molly Young Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
Fiction, July 20 When we meet our unnamed narrator, she has recently come to The Hague from New York, having accepted a position as a staff interpreter at the International Court of Justice. (Objectively an extremely cool job.) A dual life soon unfolds before her, shaped by efficient public transportation and high-tech espresso machines outside of working hours, war criminals and heinous acts of global significance at the office. Working at the court, as it turns out, requires immense dissociative abilities. One day a deposed president on trial at the court specifically requests the narratorâs services. (A why me? moment if there ever was one.) She is placed on his case and begins, against her will, to empathize with him â even as she interprets witness testimonies about his monstrous record. Meanwhile, Unnamed Narratorâs boyfriend has vanished to Portugal for nebulous reasons, and she is left alone at his apartment trying to figure out if sheâs being ghosted. (I will not spoil the answer.) Kitamura writes the kind of minimalist prose that can feel skeletal if done poorly. In this case, the austerity is enthralling â all the more so because I couldnât figure out how she pulled it off, even after I read the book twice with a pencil in one hand. How did she make so much happen with so few words? A better technician of prose could figure it out; Iâm happy to marinate in bewildered reverence. RIYL: Rachel Cusk, vibrating with tension, [this]( Judith Leyster painting, ulterior motives Preorder at [Bookshop]( A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann NÃ GhrÃofa
Hybrid, June 1 I used to work with an Irish woman and a fun game she invented was writing down Irish names on a piece of paper and then making me guess how to pronounce them. The distance between my guesses and reality was always vast, and therefore hilarious. Here, you and I can play the game together now: How do you think the name âCaoimheâ is pronounced? Answer at the end of this blurb.* Even if youâre not a person for whom foreign phonemes are a source of ecstasy, A Ghost in the Throat is a thrilling voyage into the lore of Ireland, motherhood, marriage, blood, and guts. Iâve listed the genre as âhybridâ above because it is part literary analysis, part memoir, and part fiction. The author, Doireann NÃ GhrÃofa, is a poet who becomes ensorcelled by an 18th-century lament, primarily composed by a woman named EibhlÃn Dubh NÃ Chonaill. The lament describes EibhlÃn Dubh falling in love and subsequently finding her husband murdered and then drinking handfuls of his blood from her palms, among other things, and GhrÃofa â or the bookâs narrator, who may or may not be synonymous with GhrÃofa â becomes obsessed with retranslating it from the Irish. She choreographs warp-speed library visits with her young children in tow, racing through the stacks while one kid blasts a diaperload and the other eats a forbidden banana. Once she saps the local libraries, she sneaks into university collections to excavate histories and journal articles. In this piecemeal way, GhrÃofa assembles a cache of information on EibhlÃn Dubh, composing her translation during minutes stolen away from domestic tasks. This is both a page-turner and a raw but erudite expression of a totally unique consciousness. *Caoimhe is [pronounced]( âQUEE-vaâ or âKEE-vaâ RIYL: Following a pet obsession to the bitter end, fairy rings, going to the beach in winter, [Ellen Dissanayake](, marginalia, W.G. Sebald Buy at [Bookshop]( Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood
Fiction, 1977 The sole blurb on the cover of my copy of this novella describes it as âpowerfully malicious,â which might be the only two-word descriptor on earth that guarantees I will drop everything for hours until both the power and malice of the book at hand have seeped through my eyes and blackened each of my gray cells. The premise here is that an English girl is sent to live with her grandmother after a minor operation in London, with the logic that she will be exposed to âsea air.â (Wouldnât it be terrific if modern health insurance considered âsea airâ reimbursable? We all know it works, even if we canât prove it.) Granny Webster follows in the grand literary tradition of sadistic English caregivers, speaking entirely in poisoned darts and reveling in acts of irrational tyranny. She keeps her mansion as cold as a morgue for frugal purposes while living in terror of âdraughts,â not allowing the window of her Rolls-Royce to be lowered more than a crack on drives. She hates âcolors.â She serves needlessly austere meals on heirloom silver â pinpoints of margarine on an engraved butter dish; minute portions of canned spaghetti arranged on a banquet platter and delivered by a servant. Baroque cruelty toward children is only entertaining in fiction, and usually only when written by Roald Dahl or Charles Dickens. But in this case, as the internet says: âShoot it into my veins.â The author (full name: Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood) is famous for a number of things: her inherited wealth, as heir to the Guinness fortune; her wit; her alcoholism; her marriage to and[immortalization]( by Lucian Freud. All of this biographical tinsel has eclipsed her writing, but maybe we can change the course of history. The person who[recommended]( this to me anonymously cited one of the blurbs on their copy of the book, which compared it to âa box of chocolates with amphetamine centers.â RIYL: Shirley Jacksonâs We Have Always Lived in the Castle, brainstorming a mordant inscription for your future gravestone, Michael Aptedâs âUpâ documentary series, decline Buy at [NYRB Classics]( WHY DONâT YOU⦠Duck dive into this [monument]( to African surf culture and then mail me an envelope of WELL-CONCEALED CASH so I can book a ticket to Ghana? Thanks in advance! Add a little SALT to your diet with a [typically saline novel]( by Lionel Shriver â which is like if Barbara Pym and Martin Amis collaborated on a Black Mirror episode? Tick all the boxes as you careen through [the new Edward St. Aubyn novel](? Elegance? Yes. Drugs? Oui. Depravity and suffering? Of course. A prose style so charming that it envelopes you like A BLANKET OF RARE FIBERS? Nothing less! Grope in the dark with Emily Presentâs LASER BEAM of a [poetry chapbook]( â tiny, mighty, and occasionally blinding â to light your way? Collect the FLOTSAM AND JETSAM of your mind and examine it closely via this [new edition]( of Emersonâs Self-Reliance, accompanied by 12 mini-essays by the genius Jessica Helfand? Sharpen your claws on Lisa Taddeoâs WHETSTONE of a [Los Angeles novel](? [Bonus Image]
SUGGESTED PAIRING Beach reads donât have to be lightweight â they just have to be riveting enough to distract you from the ice-cream truck and the screaming children. This tale of [an American family grappling with schizophrenia]( will have you on the edge of your towel. [Recommend me a book.](
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