ELIF BATUMAN, THE

POSSESSED (2010)
In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the
result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles
some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for
Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s
the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger;
and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a
summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and
spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering
clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature
and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis,
cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity,
intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to
her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse,
setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following
digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for
herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of
the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward,
surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the
collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—
like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s
character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my
most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also
curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might
even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much
as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

ROXANE GAY, BAD FEMINIST (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you
laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My
favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble,
her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television
criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an
entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is
accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as
likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about
friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if
there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and
pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated
to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after
the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the
bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing Bad
Feminist that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep
discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power
of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor
RIVKA GALCHEN, LITTLE
LABORS (2016)
Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be
of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other
people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but
otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact
of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out
(or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about
motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about”
her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in
babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not
interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered
her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a
preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest
isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more
dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book, the eleventh-
century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers.
There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen
continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to
remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the
realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are
days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to
read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –
Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

CHARLIE FOX, THIS YOUNG

MONSTER (2017)
On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity
for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent
question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell. This Young
Monster (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald
Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges
“direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t
linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody
otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to
shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own
invention.”
If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges
Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-
sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in
the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course.
The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of
monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites
visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take
one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal
characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione
(“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like
The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-
treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is
free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the
dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from Artforum, Dazed & Confused,
and Time Out.It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a
conveyor belt for cultural criticism.
In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter
Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s
mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know
how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend
of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic, This Young Monster considers how
monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-
production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed
scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor
ELENA PASSARELLO, ANIMALS
STRIKE CURIOUS POSES (2017)
Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks
out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they
deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction
but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which
Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather
than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s
intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human
civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told
through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make
our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes
in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the
oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly
mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion
so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that
Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both
thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain,
something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand
on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which
encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the
mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the
imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world
disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of
life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a
storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of
contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG, THE

COLLECTED SCHIZOPHRENIAS (2019)
Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental
health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a
different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a
holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected
Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It
is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the
technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual (DSM-5)’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal,
telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched
her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun
Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab
researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience
while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader.
Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On
saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as
the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with
disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox
blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways
she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high
fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing
essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places
her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on
groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and
depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender
Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented
Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The
Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not
forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written
and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor
ROSS GAY, THE BOOK OF
DELIGHTS (2019)
When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he
envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point
of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped
his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in
blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still
produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this
moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The
Book of Delights, which wanders from moments of connection with strangers
to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a
friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on
my back, saying everything is possible. Everything.”
Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that
delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his
attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small
moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions
of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–
hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and
philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he
thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior
Editor