Books That Saved My Life

If I were to write “reality” in quotes, as David Shields does in the first page of his new book Reality Hunger, you might think I’d been hitting the Sartre a little heavily. Despite our post-post-modernism ideals, when we talk about reality we still generally mean “something uniformly true.” As an agreed-upon consensus, however, reality requires plenty of daily effort in its construction. In Rawi Hage’s book, Cockroach, the main character has lost the will to keep putting out the effort.

The main character of Cockroach calls himself a thief, though he rarely steals anything—preferring to try on people’s shoes, read their letters, even imagine he’s entering their dreams. “I see people for what they are,” says the thief, “I strip them of everything and see their hollowness.  I strip them, and they are relieved of the burden of color and disguise.”

The thief is part of an immigrant community in Montreal and his name, like his ethnicity, is never quite clear (he calls himself a “hairy Arab” but his history seems Lebanese, although since Lebanon itself is a mishmash of cultures that hardly clarifies things). The author, himself an immigrant living in Canada, settles us firmly inside his main character’s head by describing not just the thief’s perceptions but his vivid stream-of-consciousness. When the thief presses his nose to a restaurant window he doesn’t just see well-heeled customers having business meetings, he sees a maitre-d who guards the boundaries between worlds—“the hunger police.” (more…)

This month we have a piece by Catherine Lacey on her love-affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first book, This Side of Paradise (and with a certain hollow-eyed lad who played literary house with her in an old abandoned mansion).

Paradise was not the first book Fitzgerald sent out for publication, he’d already had one novel rejected, but it marked his first interaction with a young editor at Scribner named Maxwell Perkins.  Perkins, who would later go on to edit such literary lights as Ernest Hemmingway and Tom Wolfe, saw something in this brave new writer and interceded on his behalf to get the novel published.   (more…)

By Catherine Lacey

“Catherine Lacey, You need to fucking read this book, I tell you. Now, I know I just met you and all, but, man oh man, you should go to your local library and get this book and read it as soon as possible, ok? I mean, it’s only going to change you life completely. You’ll recognize every fucking person in there.”

Though I just met Robert on the wooden back porch of a diner in Tennessee, and though he was high on stolen amphetamines, I fell in love with him instantly. This was complicated by another boy at our crowded table, a slouchy-shouldered blonde named Sam, who had been my boyfriend for almost two years. But no matter, I fell in love with that over-zealous dark-eyed boy in the way that only sensitive, irrational 18-year-old girls can fall in love. It doesn’t matter if he’s speaking in a shout, barely knows you, or is sweating conspicuously through his threadbare T-shirt. Sam glanced suspiciously at Robert and I as we talked with stunning intensity about writing and books; he was on his fifth draft of a bad novel and I wrote stacks of bad poetry and bad fiction. After I revealed that I had recently been forced to participate in an old-south coming of age ball, Robert demanded that I read This Side Of Paradise.

“I mean, do you have a library card? Do you visit your local library on a regular basis? Of course you do, Catherine Lacey. That’s the fucking kind of people we are! Jesus! (more…)

In April, Penguin is releasing Gods And Monsters: A Penguin Anthology of African American Fiction, edited by Tin House Magazine’s Rob Spillman.  

“It includes fiction and non-fiction by writers from all over the continent, including Chris Abani, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Nawal al-Saadawi, Alain Mabanckou, Binyavanga Wainaina, Doreen Baingana, Leila Aboulela, Ngugi wa Thiong’o.”

It also includes an essay by Laila Lalami on the politics of reading.  More in-depth review to come in April.