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by Siena Oristaglio
Two performers, Asun Noales and Sebastian Rowisnki,
stand in a circle of small jaguar heads.
The heads are sculpted from pearl-white plastic
by an artist named Susana Guerrero.
The heads are perfectly identical.
Their mouths stretch agape, as if caught mid-roar.
Beyond rows of jagged teeth,
each throat swells with inky black.
by Tess Crain
Having read, last year, with a certain stringent intensity, I tried to be more omnivorous and relaxed about my choices in 2019. Perhaps because of this, I’m not sure which books were the best. Here are five, however, ranging from the second to the twenty-first century in origin and including both fiction and nonfiction, that made a singular impression—all also share a probing interest in the human relationship to scale.
by Robb Todd
"I loved that, no matter where the characters went underground, they came out into the same space," said Mack, who might be best known for his two-decade run in the Village Voice with the comic strip “Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies." "I could see a double-paged spread showing a huge old fashioned attic — full of the different entry points. To me, the story said, whatever you think you know about the rules of life, forget it, ain’t necessarily true."
by Zack Graham
It’s that time of year again. The late capitalist clusterfuck some call the holiday season. Or, as literary folks know it, “Best Of” Hell.
by Caroline Hagood
My love affair with monsters can be traced to my eccentric childhood, of course.
by Tess Crain
I began reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1947), in mid-2016, casually. I’d bought the book by mistake several years prior, thinking it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version—that is, the seminal German Faust. I am not the first to have confused the two authors.
by Frances Nguyen
The Great Disappearing
It helps to know, especially
when you’re hiding.
by Lana Spendl
Suada stood in her curlers at the kitchen table and cut with scissors into a cardboard box. Her brother, who had remained with his family in Norway even after the war had ended, had sent her a package for her birthday. She ripped the last bit of the tape with her fingers and opened the flaps.
by Cat Fitzpatrick
She grins to herself, then, since they friended
each other at some point during that night,
she opens messenger and starts to write
a message: “Hi. It’s been a while
but I’d still like to be your friend.”
by Zack Graham
There are few if any American writers who can vocalize the crushing despair of late capitalist malaise in a mere five sentences.
by Meher Manda
P and Aliza fought often, and in these battles P always managed to leave reminders of himself. Like the time I found her with three of his fingers imprinted on her right cheek. Red, engorged, the fingers had distinct boundaries, and touching her right cheek meant you climbed up an edge over the echoes of his fingers, and then wheeled over downwards for her face again. Long welts for long fingers. Really showed his hands. A worker’s hands, Aliza would say. Great for pleasure.
by Harris Lahti
I laugh too hard, for too long. Maybe owing to the fumes. Or perhaps owing to what my lawyer said. That this lawsuit could go for up to a year. Or longer even.
My cell phone rings, and I pick up: Hello, Mickey Mouse.
by Lynne Steger Strong
Too many stories teach us, my friend said to me the other day as we walked aimlessly around the city, that we’re all supposed to be heroes of our lives. He blamed capitalism. Perhaps too easy a foil in 2019. But all the systems that we build are implicated in and bolstered by the other systems under which we function. We can’t tell any stories in the western world not informed in some way by capitalism, by all the specific and myopic (see also: mostly white male) stories that we’ve been told before. We can’t tell stories that look like those stories without amplifying or reaffirming aspects of these systems in and under which we’re all functioning.
by Siena Oristaglio
As the only mammals that can fly, they are often
imagined as something not-quite-mammal,
a species dancing in the liminal space
between bird and rodent.
by Sean Gill
The cover of Martin Amis’ Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores, and the Best Machines really sets a tone.
by Tess Crain
Spanning 1929 to 1936, Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller Essays, out this year from NYRB Classics, circles the question: Why is the art of storytelling dying out? The collection comprises thirteen pieces of diverse form and audience that nonetheless share a thematic lineage. Just as the salient features of grandparents (a curved nose, full lips) may suddenly manifest in the faces of a younger generation, here, concepts and even whole passages from an earlier meditation will resurface, slightly altered or not at all, a few essays later. At the end of the book, short writings by contemporaries (Bloch, Lukács) and inspirations (the playful Hebel, Herodotus) are appended. From an ardent cross-pollination of ideas, traits of these authors, too, crop up in Benjamin’s work.
Sophia Shalmiyev writes, “Jeannie Vanasco’s second book, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl, has a narrative structure and aim that is completely new, charged, activated. The book will leave people stunned. Jeannie Vanasco performs a lot of labor in this book to examine the male side of sexual assault, which usually escapes our purview and any responsibility, even if a man is arrested for assault. Arrests or convictions happen so rarely, it is staged as a crisis to be examined through the lens of justice, through a scarcity of justice model, but we still do not get the story, we do not get the understanding the victims and survivors need. The shape of violence lives invisibly inside of a woman. Now, the narrator is sharing a sliver of that burden with the perpetrator, and they are both wearing it, or are about to, publicly: she as the author; he, as a man with a pseudonym who has willingly submitted to being interviewed by the woman he wronged when she was a girl.”
