December 28, 2017

From The Paris Review (Nadja Spiegelman on Favorite Books of 2017):

This year, I found myself swept away by Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. The jealousy-inducing story behind the book (Rooney wrote the first draft in three months, at the the age of twenty-six) is difficult to reconcile with the tight grace of this novel, though all of the volatility and speed is there. Rooney so expertly captures what it’s like to be young today: the conversations that flow seamlessly from email to text message to unspoken glance, the sexual and creative confidence, the admiration for older men who write emails written in all lowercase. Her first-person narrator, the twenty-one-year-old Frances, is a constant, careful observer, and yet Rooney leaves room for the reader to see all the things Frances herself does not. Frances’s deceptively deadpan tone encases moments of revelation; among the many sentences I underlined: “She made us all laugh a lot, but in the same way you might make someone eat something when they don’t fully want it.” I also loved Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. Machado plays with the oldest archetypes of myth and genre in ways that feel wholly new. And, when composing this list, I was delighted to remember that Emil Ferris’s graphic novel, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, was also published in 2017, albeit at the very beginning, which now feels very long ago. It’s a stylistic wonder, dark and beautiful and form-bending, and a profound exploration of monstrousness, both female and otherwise.

From The Paris Review (Lauren Kane on Favorite Books of 2017):

No writer disorients reality quite like Renee Gladman. Or maybe that’s not the right way to put it. Her expert handling of language is not so much a disorientation as a reorientation. The fact that I can’t quite pin it down speaks to Gladman’s particular mastery. Her Prose Architectures is a captivating (and beautiful) book of ink line drawings in which words inhabit extended physical manifestations that hum energetically on the page. For Gladman, language does not just construct our reality, it exists alongside it in space and time. Language as a form of architecture is also a preoccupation in Gladman’s Houses of Ravicka, the fourth of her Ravickian novels. These novels are set in a fictional city, Ravicka, and Houses follows the city’s comptroller as she obsessively seeks a house that has been lost. What I love about Gladman’s world is that it’s not quite dystopian, not quite science fiction, and not entirely removed from our reality–but it’s not entirely a part of it either. In Ravicka, names of streets are impossible for the reader to pronounce (Czorcic, Flvoder, Monstastrajen, Vibja), as we don’t really know the rules of language in this fictional city. Gladman also peppers her prose with invented words such as feleedpur and tij. Since we can’t pronounce them, we’re left with only the visual comprehension of letters on the page and are confronted with the questions: How can something exist if you cannot speak it into existence? Are these literal prose architectures enough to build a world? Gladman’s artful consideration of linguistic limitation is quietly smart, thrillingly unique, and, perhaps most impressively, translates into an thoroughly absorbing narrative.

From The New York Times:

Tax cuts have been followed by fast income growth at the very top of the pyramid of prosperity. But among the bottom half of Americans they have delivered little.

From The Economist:

After three years of more or less stable emissions, a zippier world economy looks on track to belch 2% more carbon dioxide this year. That amounts once again to borrowing more of the planet’s remaining carbon budget against future removal. It doesn’t take a numerate modeller like Mr Tavoni to grasp that, in his words, “If you create a debt, you must repay it.” The price of default does not bear thinking about.

From Harper's:

Sleep deprivation makes an eyewitness half again as likely to select an innocent person from a lineup in which the perpetrator is absent.