also read nearly a book a month for @ajbwells's great books section at the berliner mag; i think my favorite just might've been ariane koch's brilliant and beguiling little novella "overstaying": the-berliner.com/books/overs…
"It was amazing to imagine your city was a novel, and that for you to walk around within it meant that you were in language, you were in a thinking text. I had been placed inside of something dreaming, its citizens dreaming, the novels we had all written dreaming."
-Renee Gladman
More books I read &liked this year: Renee Gladman, My Lesbian Novel & TOAF; Yoko Tawada, Suggested in the Stars, trans. Margaret Mitsutani; Ibrahim Nasrallah, Palestinian, trans. @FakhreddineHuda; Willy Thayer, The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University, trans. D. Bret Leraul
ALT Hand holding My Lesbian Novel & TOAF in front of some leaves
ALT Hand holding Suggested in the Stars
ALT Palestinian on a World Poetry bag with a red and yellow maple leaf
ALT Hand holding Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University with a beer and a wine
A few more that I read and liked this year: Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (incredible, very shocking); Tom Comitta, The Nature Book; @Amy_De_Ath’s Not a Force of Nature❤️; @DanicaSavonick’s Open Admissions—a great discussion of 4 poets teaching in New York, when college was free.
ALT Adania Shibli, Minor Detail
ALT Tom Comitta, The Nature Book, on my dog
ALT Amy De’Ath, Not a Force of Nature
ALT Danica Savonick, Open Admissions, still wrapped in plastic
Halliday got at exactly what Dorothy is up to as a press, in a way I've been trying to do for many years: "Is this a novel about [xyz]? Occasionally, yes—but mostly it is a novel about the narrator and her relationship to the world."
Delighted to find a review of MY LESBIAN NOVEL in The Guardian this morning!
"Gladman’s reading of popular romances feels so genuine, the love scene so easy a fusion of readerly and writerly delight, that another kind of novel seems possible..."
theguardian.com/books/2024/d…
NYC friends, Damion and Emma are both brilliant translators and readers. Hope you can make it to their event tomorrow (Monday) night @mcnallyjackson Seaport!
Jen George dropped this STUNNER of a debut story collection in 2016 & has been quiet ever since. As I reread this book (for the third time), I hope to god she's quietly writing a novel.