David Castronovo

David Castronovo--a New York critic, essayist, and humanities educator whose work largely concerns modern literature, English and American social life, and the history of ideas--is currently C. Richard Pace Professor at Pace University in New York City.

His latest book is Blokes: The Bad Boys of English Literature (Continuum International, 2009).

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I’m on summer literary manoeuvres these days, which is to say preparing for the next book I’m thinking of writing and kicking back a bit. W.H. Auden’s demanding but very rewarding long poem titled “New Year Letter (1940)” in Collected Poems (The Centennial Edition, Modern Library, 2007) has taken up some time. It’s a pungent, moving survey of civilization on the brink of war. Auden’s subjects in this crisp poetic discourse--very classical in style--are art, the just society, social sin and guilt, European suffering, failed ideologies, and the spirit doing battle with mass culture. He twists and turns his reader’s mind as he describes his own doubts and his hunger to believe in individual men and women.

Edward Mendelson’s superb biography Later Auden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999) is extremely useful for deepening an appreciation of the poem and does what these monster biographies almost never do--provides lucid, searching commentary on the work of literature as well as the writer. Also from the same period is Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. I only knew the title story, but now I’ve found the entire New Directions volume a rich exploration of Jewish life in Washington Heights in the 1930s and 1940s, complete with all the mishegas and misgivings. The sly style, the miseries mixed with the absurdities, the streets and interiors, the speech cadences make this book an original source for those who want to know about the social and intellectual yearnings of Jews in America. The title story--terrible and lovely at the same time--is bold in conception: our narrator watches a movie of his parents as they are about to become engaged in a Coney Island restaurant. But the stories about groups--young people who hang out and argue on Saturday night in “The World is a Wedding,” family in “The Child is the Meaning of This Life”--are wrenching social studies of thwarted lives. Clifford Odets covered such things in “Awake and Sing,” but Schwartz left this much richer legacy for Bellow and Roth. His kibitzers and whiners and yearners have real depth.

Now while kicking back I have enjoyed Irish Brooklyn of the 1950s in Colm Toibin’s beautifully controlled and evocative novel Brooklyn: having been a boy in that borough back then, I can say that he captures the restrained mores of the time and the feel of old downtown with its department stores and nearby row houses. Joseph O’Neill’s masterpiece Netherland is a crazy mix of Brooklyn elements from a different period; it’s an exuberant and very sad treatment of West Indians, American dreaming--and a dream of making cricket a major American sport.

I’m also reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina. I first read Anna in 1970--and believe me, this translation makes it seem like I’m having a completely new adventure. Lucidity and nuance on every page.

Learn more about David Castronovo and Blokes: The Bad Boys of English Literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy J. Shannon

Timothy J. Shannon teaches Early American, Native American, and British history at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (2008), Atlantic Lives: A Comparative Approach to Early America (2004), and Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (2000), which won the Dixon Ryan Fox Prize from the New York State Historical Association and the Distinguished Book Award from the Society of Colonial Wars. He is also co-author with Victoria Bissell Brown of Going to the Source: The Bedford Reader in Early American History (second edition, 2008). His articles have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the New England Quarterly, and Ethnohistory.

Late last month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

It is summer, the time of year when I try to squeeze in most of my pleasure reading. My usual tactic is to pick one contemporary work of fiction and one long-neglected (on my part at least) classic and then to see what those titles lead me to next.

I started off with Dear American Airlines, a well-reviewed debut novel by Jonathan Miles last year. The story is told by the protagonist, a recovering alcoholic and divorced father who is trying desperately to make it to his daughter’s wedding, only to find himself thwarted by the capricious nature of modern air travel. His angry letter of complaint, composed during an interminable and unplanned layover, becomes a confessional account of his life, told with hearty doses of black humor. Of course, I may have been cajoled into reading this one simply by the description of the author’s day job on the dust jacket: he is the cocktails editor for the New York Times.

The classic novel I have selected for the summer is John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. I read some of his short stories in college and his criticism pieces in the New Yorker, but I had never read any of his novels. His death last year made me put this on my list. However, I have not cracked it yet, as I have already been distracted by other things.

My family and I are spending June and July in Britain with a study abroad group, and so I wanted to read something that would put me in the proper frame of mind for travel. George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London seemed like a good choice, as we would be spending time in both cities, and I always wanted to read something by him that was not on one of my high school reading lists. The book reminded me of Orwell’s wonderful dexterity with English prose, and it also proved him to be adept at the brief character study. He does a wonderful job of conveying the personalities of the various down-and-outers he meets while living as a homeless person in London, and his descriptions of working in the bowels of a Paris hotel kitchen will make you think twice about what you are getting on your plate the next time you eat in a fancy French restaurant.

From Orwell, I moved on in search of some comic relief and found it in Cold Comfort Farm, a satire of English country life by Stella Gibbons. A friend had recommended this title to my wife and I shortly before our departure for the UK. I found a paperback edition in a used bookstore shortly after our arrival and figured it was a sign from heaven. I have never indulged in the sort of works this book was intended to lampoon, Victorian tales of isolated gentry families slowly descending into madness and rot out there in the moors. But now having read it, and smiled the whole way through, I feel like I have digested Wuthering Heights as well. So I am glad to recommend it as a highly enjoyable two-for-one.

The historian Kevin Kenny wrote of Shannon's Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier:

Shannon’s book takes us from the zenith of Iroquois power in the early eighteenth century to its nadir in the Revolutionary era, concentrating on the intricate art of diplomacy in treaty negotiations over war, peace, and trade between the various colonial governments and the Indians. In this account the Iroquois are major players rather than pawns in history, even if their story ends, inexorably, in tragedy. In keeping with the tone of the series, Shannon writes about even the most complex issues in an impressively deft style.

--Marshal Zeringue

Guobin Yang

Guobin Yang is an associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is coeditor, with Ching Kwan Lee, of Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China.

His new book is The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.

Earlier this week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I usually read books somewhat related to what I am writing (but not too closely related). Casual reading is too much of a luxury. This summer, I am working on my book manuscript about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. So I thought I'd catch up with some reading about the global 1960s.

I have just read Kristen Ross's book May '68 and Its Afterlives (2002). The book shows that in the decades after 1968, mainstream social science has constructed a mellow and tame image of the May Movement as a student movement about lifestyles and cultural identity. Ross argues that this image distorted historical reality, contending that the May Movement was a violent, not tame, revolutionary movement about social equality rooted in the fundamental crises of capitalist society and involving broad cross-sections of French society, notably workers, but also farmers, as well as students.

I have always been struck by the numerous parallels in the social activism of the 1960s in Western societies and in China. It is sobering to realize that the mainstream image of the 1960s movements in the West is mellow and quiescent, whereas that of the Red Guard movement and the Cultural Revolution in China is just the opposite -- violent, bloody, and cruel. The unstated commonality between these two images is that neither has anything to do with revolutionary transformation. Ross's book shows how this image is false.

Another book related to violence (and the global 1960s) I have just read is J. Glenn Gray's The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (1959). This is a true classic and sparkles with insights. I came across this title when I was reading Hannah Arendt's little book On Violence (which again has a lot to do with the 1960s). Gray was a philosopher. He received his notice to be inducted into the Army on May 8, 1941 in the same mail that brought him his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. Written with deep pathos, the book is a philosophical meditation on war, death, love, enemy, and guilt based on his own war experiences and diaries. The entire book is highly relevant to the violent realities of our contemporary world, but the most striking chapter for me is the one on "Images of the Enemy." One basic point Gray makes is that violence is often supported by an abstract image of the enemy, because such an image promotes abstract hatred. The book is full of quotable gems. Here is one: "The abstractness of the term [the enemy] promotes in this emotion-drenched atmosphere of war the growth of abstract hatred. I think it is abstract hatred and not the greater savagery of contemporary man that is responsible for much of the blood lust and cruelty of recent wars." (p. 134)

Where does abstract hatred come from? It "arises from concentrating on one trait of a person or group while disregarding other features, not to speak of the larger context in which all the traits coexist and modify each other."(p. 134). Gray also makes the poignant point that soldiers at the battlefront may have a more concrete, and therefore more human, image of the enemy than civilians back at home. He writes: "A civilian far removed from the battle area is nearly certain to be more bloodthirsty than the front-line soldier whose hatred has to be more responsible, meaning that he has to respond to it, to answer it with action. Many a combat soldier in World War II was appalled to receive letters from his girl friend or wife, safe at home, demanding to know how many of the enemy he had personally accounted for and often requesting the death of several more as a personal favor for her!" (p. 135)

Watch a video of Guobing Yang discussing The Power of the Internet in China, and read more about the book at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas Griffin

Nicholas Griffin's books include the historical novels The Requiem Shark and House of Sight and Shadow and the nonfiction work, Caucasus. His latest novel is Dizzy City.

A few days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I'm heading toward the end of nine months of research for my next book. That means I've read around 120 books, all non-fiction, as well as several hundred articles. The problem with research is not only that so much of it is dry, most of it is happens to be irrelevant to your own end-result, but even the author doesn't know exactly where he or she is heading at this stage. Among the dross, I read many first rate books, two of which, Nelson Mandela's Long Road to Freedom and Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold stand out.

Writers need patience, but patience itself is put in perspective through Mandela's accomplishments, always pushing outwards, reaching outwards, observing, even when all he had was a quarry on Robben Island and years of confinement ahead of him. God and Gold by Walter Russell Mead is one of those 'big' books, filled with history and bright ideas but refreshingly unapologetic to the place the US and UK carved out into the world. It stops short of the current financial crisis, but the thesis is still key ... whoever understands the working and movement of money and trade gets to control the world. With the pound taking a nose-dive last year and the dollar presumably not far behind, it makes you long for the days where innovation was tempered by experience and fear.

In my back-pack for my holiday is the new book by Steig Larsson and David Grann's The Lost City of Z. Can't wait.

Read an excerpt from Dizzy City and learn more about the book and author at Nicholas Griffin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Dizzy City.

--Marshal Zeringue

Esther M. Sternberg

Esther M. Sternberg's latest book is Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being (Harvard University Press, 2009).

This weekend I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I generally prefer non-fiction to fiction, and tend to read historical biographies, particularly biographies of accomplished women. Most recently I have read the biography Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, by Brenda Maddox; the biography Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis by Kim Todd; and the biography Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin. All three of these books not only provide detailed descriptions of the era when these women lived, but also give fascinating insights into the hurdles that they had to overcome in order to accomplish their goals in periods in history when their fields were very much male-dominated. The books are thoughtful in that they reveal character traits in each of these women that helped them make their great contributions despite these challenges and against all odds. The books nonetheless also explore traits that may have hindered them in fully achieving recognition in their own time. The books about scientists (Merian and Franklin) also reveal the history of their particular fields of science, which I find fascinating, in the context of what we know about these fields today.

The most recent book I am reading in this genre is not about one individual, but is rather an ensemble biography: A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martin Johnson Heade by Christopher Benfey. Rather than focusing on the challenges faced by the women in this cast, it addresses the challenges of the era surrounding the civil war in the United States, and the role that these intellectuals who all knew each other, played in the abolitionist movement. The symbolism of hummingbirds as a symbol of freedom figures prominently throughout the book, whether depicted in the written or spoken word, or in paintings, by each of these highly creative people. Their foibles and weaknesses of character, and how these did or did not impact their creative products and geniuses are also explored.

When I do read fiction, it is often historical fiction. Most recently I have read Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks, and am part way through Saving the World: A Novel by Julia Alvarez. Both books explore the personal impact on the books’ characters of the great infectious scourges of these eras – in the case of Year of Wonders, the impact of the plague in 17th century England, and in Saving the World, the impact of smallpox globally, from the point of view of a woman of early 19th century Spain, alternating with the story of the fear of AIDS in a woman of our own time.

Finally, one of my favorite fiction writers is Jhumpa Lahiri, whose short stories in Unaccustomed Earth and The Namesake I love to read, both for their lyricism and poetic style, as well as for their subject matter of adjusting to life in a new country and culture. These stories resonate with me in part because I am a first generation Canadian/American, whose parents came from Romania before and after World War II. The experience of having a foot in two cultures has also deeply informed my own writing.

I find all these books interesting not only from a historical, scientific and psychological perspective, but also in terms of their dramatic structure and literary style. Their ability to make the reader keep reading, and to raise suspense through the arc of their stories, helps me in my structuring my own non-fiction books on different aspects of the science of the mind body interaction (The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions Holt, 2001; and Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being Harvard University Press, 2009). In my books, I try to make the reader feel like they are right there with the scientists whose characters and discoveries I describe. I am convinced that science can be presented to readers who do not have a scientific background in a compelling, interesting, accessible, non-condescending and even poetic and lyrical way, all held together by the glue of narrative. Reading these books provides me important insights on how to continue to do so for my own readers.

Esther M. Sternberg, M.D., author of the newly released Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being and The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions, has done extensive research on brain-immune interactions and the effects of the brain's stress response on health. She was on the faculty at Washington University, St. Louis, prior to joining the National Institutes of Health in 1986.

Read an excerpt from Healing Spaces, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

Dr. Sternberg is internationally recognized for her discoveries in brain-immune interactions and the effects of the brain's stress response on health: the science of the mind-body interaction. A dynamic speaker, recognized by her peers as a spokesperson for the field, she translates complex scientific subjects in a highly accessible manner, with a combination of academic credibility, passion for science and compassion as a physician. Learn more about her research, publications, and professional activities at Esther M. Sternberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin Kenny

Kevin Kenny is Professor of History at Boston College, where he teaches the history of Atlantic migration and popular protest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is author of Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (Oxford University Press, 2009), The American Irish: A History (Longman, 2000), and Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (Oxford University Press, 1998); and contributing editor of New Directions in Irish-American History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) and Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2004). He teaches courses on the history of American immigration, race, and ethnicity.

Earlier this week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I am currently reading Peter Kolchin’s American Slavery, 1619-1877. A classic in its field, American Slavery was first published in 1993. The current Tenth Anniversary edition comes with a new Preface and Afterword by Kolchin. Accessible to specialists and general readers alike, this elegantly written book covers the period from the beginnings of American slavery through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Kolchin offers a remarkably balanced account of a highly contentious topic, viewing the “peculiar institution” from the perspectives of the slaves, the slave owners, non-slaveowning Southerners, and Northern observers across the political spectrum. He shows how American slavery, far from being a static or monolithic evil, changed over time and spread across space, assuming very different forms in different periods and places. And he interweaves the relevant scholarly controversies into his narrative with a nice, light touch. As the author of Unfree Labor (1990), a study of American slavery and Russian serfdom, Kolchin also excels at placing his subject in comparative contexts, especially Brazil and the Caribbean. He describes American Slavery, 1619-1877 as a “short, interpretive survey” and it is without question the best of its kind.

I have just started reading Timothy J. Shannon’s Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Penguin, 2008), a volume in the new “Penguin Library of American Indian History.” From their base in upper New York, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy were the dominant Native American power in the northern American colonies during the eighteenth century. Through a combination of expert diplomacy and the threat of military force they claimed sovereignty over most American Indians in the present-day Northeast and Midwest. They also served as intermediaries between Britain and France in their long struggle for imperial mastery over North America. Shannon’s book takes us from the zenith of Iroquois power in the early eighteenth century to its nadir in the Revolutionary era, concentrating on the intricate art of diplomacy in treaty negotiations over war, peace, and trade between the various colonial governments and the Indians. In this account the Iroquois are major players rather than pawns in history, even if their story ends, inexorably, in tragedy. In keeping with the tone of the series, Shannon writes about even the most complex issues in an impressively deft style.

For pleasure, I am reading Andrea Camilleri’s August Heat (La vampa d’agosto, trans. Stephen Sartarelli). The hero, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, fights crime in the small but hopelessly corrupt town of Vigàta, in Sicily. He maintains a passionate but distant love affair with Livia, who spends most of her time in Genoa but occasionally comes to visit. His assistants, Gallo and Catarella, out-do each other in clownishness, but beyond the comedy lie layer after ominous layer of corruption and intrigue. Camilleri misses no opportunity to skewer the local mafiosi, the Berlusconi administration, and northern Italian fascists. Montalbano loves nothing more than to be alone, to swim, and to eat good food. Camilleri’s mouth-watering descriptions of his hero at table, always with simple, fresh ingredients in just the right combination – shrimp or baby octopus tossed in olive oil with chopped parsley – exquisitely reveal Montalbano’s inmost self. Food is his refuge from an otherwise sinister world. When Livia comes to Sicily with two friends and their young son in the midst of the August heat, the holiday soon turns into a disaster. Beneath the apartment he has rented for the family they discover a second underground apartment, and in that that concealed apartment they find the body of …

Read more about Peaceable Kingdom Lost at the Oxford University Press website, and see the related essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “The ‘holy experiment’ was too good to last,” and his recent entry on OUPblog, “Immigrants and Native Americans.”

Learn more about Kevin Kenny's scholarship at his Boston College faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alissa Hamilton

Alissa Hamilton holds a Ph.D. from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a J.D. from the University of Toronto Law School. She has been a Graham Research Fellow in International Human Rights at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She is currently a 2008-2009 Food and Society Policy Fellow with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).

Her new book is Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice.

Recently, I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

It's summertime, the season for a great romance, thriller, or mystery, whether read between covers or viewed on the big screen. And yet all I seem to be reading these days is non-fiction, the film equivalent of the documentary, which you might think is more fall/winter appropriate. Think again. Docs can be entertaining: remember March of the Penguins, when the two pudgy penguins too impatient to wait their turn get momentarily stuck, Abbot and Costello style, in the hole in the ice on their way fishing?

Similarly, Non-fiction can be gripping. I'm going to take a chance and pick Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life as proof. I confess I have not read this year-in-the-life, but it's on my shelf, next in line. Kingsolver, who appropriately made her name writing delicious fiction (The Bean Trees was her first novel), begins Animal, Vegetable, Miracle with an elaborate drawing of an every-vegetable-plant followed by the evocation:

Picture a single imaginary plant,

bearing throughout one season all the

different vegetables we harvest...

we'll call it a vegetannual

With a start like this, I'm confident it won't disappoint. Especially since squash, which may be my single most favourite vegetable, crowns the drawing.

If you're more in the mood for a thriller, I recommend A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle With a Deadly Industry, by David Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Kessler was largely responsible for exposing and cracking down on the tobacco industry. Although the book was published in 2001, it is timely given a recent article co-authored by Kelly Brownell, Yale psychologist and author of Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About it, and Kenneth Warner, tobacco researcher and Dean of the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, about the similarities in the marketing tactics used by the food and tobacco industries.

Hot docs for what I hear is going to be a hot summer.

Visit Squeezed's home page at the Yale University Press website, to view reviews, an excerpt, and more.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caitlin O'Connell

Caitlin O’Connell is the author of The Elephant’s Secret Sense (Simon & Schuster, 2007; paperback by University of Chicago Press, 2008) and the upcoming The Boys Club (Harvard University Press, 2010) about male society from the elephant perspective. She is also co-author of a children’s nonfiction science book called The Elephant Scientist (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). Her essay in the August issue (2009) of The Writer magazine strives to assist the nature writer in “casting words in nature’s best light.”

Last week I asked O’Connell what she was reading. Her reply:

Because I teach a creative writing class for Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, I’m always on the lookout for books to recommend to my students on the craft of writing. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott was recently recommended and it didn’t take long to see why. Part of my phobia of self-help books is the assumption that they deliver dry facts on how I should behave within the discipline of writing and inevitably make me feel like I’ve somehow failed at my craft if I’m not able to do my daily writing exercises, keep a diary and be religious about outlining prior to writing. Anne Lamott blows those fears out of the water with her wonderful and frank personal narrative about a writer’s struggles, failures and successes, while weaving in motives for trying some concrete, very accessible tools to assist writers in moving forward with their goals. I highly recommend this book to writers, would-be writers, as well as readers looking for a fun personal narrative.

In my never ending pursuit of strong character-based fiction, members of my book club recently recommended Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, which I found to be an unexpected mind-bending delight on many levels. This very slim novella is a fascinating journey that twists and turns through time, emotions and raw consciousness. An enriching experience.

A last recommended recent read is Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, a memoir about growing up in Zimbabwe in a troubled time with a troubled yet colorful family. What struck me most about this story was the unique and often breathtaking depiction of a land that is very familiar to me given my work in the neighboring Namibia on elephants, and yet made all the more rich and resonant with her lyrical prose.

Read an excerpt from The Elephant’s Secret Sense and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Elephant’s Secret Sense.

--Marshal Zeringue

Josh Weil

Josh Weil received his MFA as a Jersey Fellow at Columbia University. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals including Granta, Story Quarterly, and New England Review.

His new book is The New Valley, three linked novellas which, according to Tim O'Brien, "shine with a strange and intense luminosity that is at times heartbreaking, at other times triumphant. There is a magic and gentle beauty in this book that makes me remember why I had always wanted to be a writer."

A few days ago I asked Weil what he was reading. His reply:

I've noticed this can happen with short story collections, even the best ones: you pick it up, read a few stories, love them, and then something else gets in a way and you never finish the collection. Unless it's really, really good -- and then you pick it back up, maybe a year later, and dive back into it and think: how did I ever set this down? That's where I'm at right now with Don Waters' collection, Desert Gothic. It's set in America's dry, hot, sun-backed places: mostly around Reno, Nevada. And it pulls off darkness and light, heat and chill, as naturally and as cleanly and as inseparably as the desert landscape does. These are stories about grief and loss and the places in us that are hollowed out by both, but Waters manages to dig around those places with a gentleness that makes me want to exist there a little longer with each story, even if it's difficult, even if it's sad. He has lots of talents, but the main three that are striking me as I dive back into this are these: 1. He sees details most of us would miss, and when he points them out they're the kind of thing that feel so vital we'd have missed the whole point without them. 2. In much the same way, the rhythm of his language feels both fresh and natural to the stories. 3. Finally, and most importantly, he hits on that surprising yet absolutely right feeling near the end of each story: he finds ways to bring the stories together with events that are utterly pleasing. What I mean by that is that they are the perfect events to end the story without ever feeling like the easy way out. It's good stuff.

In the year between reading the beginning of Desert Gothic and going back to it, I read three books that blew me away: Jim Harrison's Returning to Earth, Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing and Paul Yoon's Once the Shore.

Returning to Earth is about the process of coping with loss -- before it happens (when it is looming) and afterwards -- and it's probably the most moving book I've read in a couple years. The story circles around a man who is dying from Lou Gherig's disease, and is told through multiple perspectives: his and that of of those who love him. But the story isn't really why it's so powerful. It's, in some ways, the fact that it doesn't quite feel like a story. There are elements that feel very narrative, almost like fables, but they only serve to point out the miracle that Harrison pulls off: these characters feel almost more real than real people ever could, and the way they struggle to come to grips with their relationships, the way they unearth understandings about each other and themselves, feels almost unconstructed. There isn't a false or contrived note. Somehow, Harrison makes the book feel as if it just naturally happens, and when that kind of deep veracity is accompanied by the kind of love for characters and empathy for their pains that fills Returning to Earth it's deeply, achingly affecting.

Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing affected me for very different reasons. I'm not going to go into paroxysms of praise about McCarthy's prose, his voice, his worldview, his all around amazingness: we all know that. But I will say that The Crossing made me remember all that in a way nothing of his has in a while. I love his older work - Outer Dark, Child of God, Blood Meridian - and I was mildly blown away (McCarthy is one of the few writers who blows me away even with his work that isn't my favorite) by The Road and No Country for Old Men, but, of all his books that I've read, I liked All The Pretty Horses least. So what a tremendous thrill to read the second book in his border trilogy and find myself absolutely bowled over by the man's work again. There are so many reasons to read The Crossing, but, for me - and my writing - it was important mostly because of the narrative drive, the way that it slams relentlessly forward without ever feeling contrived, without rushing, without following any well-worn trails: it just lights out into the wilderness of story and crashes through the brush and doesn't look back. There's not explaining, here. There are no deep moments of introspection. There's no blind adherence to momentum, either. It has it's moments where it breathes, long, its stride lengthening, its footfall slowing. It has its moments where it veers off in wild directions. But it never sits still. And it feels, for all its blood and bruises and filth and dirt, so clean: it feels like perfectly clean storytelling. Each event is surprising in ways that make me crazy with envy and with pleasure and never want the book to end. It's that good.

Finally, there's Paul Yoon's collection, Once the Shore. I read that one straight though, sipping it each night like a big glass of cool water, till I'd drained the thing and could lie there in the dark feeling utterly sated. Yes, Yoon's voice is beautiful; yes, his stories are moving; but the most important, and striking, thing is that he's doing something different with these stories than the usual stories you come across in journals and collections: he takes you and sits you down and shows you a fully realized world, and keeps you sitting there until a moment has come and gone in that world, and then he lifts you under the arms and takes you to another part of his world and sits you down again and shows you that. And you begin to know the world with every bit of richness and reality and wonder and magic that the real world contains. These aren't stories about characters taking action to move through life -- though that's there, too. At heart, I think these are stories about the way life moves through characters, and they are all the more powerful for that.

Visit Josh Weil's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Van Booy

Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. In 2002 he was awarded an MFA and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Prize. His journalism has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and the New York Post. His new book is Love Begins in Winter.

Earlier this week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Lately I have been reading about everything from fashion to Proust, metaphysical investigation to new children's tales. For me, one of the pleasures of reading is pulling from a variety of sources to amalgamate an image of the world and our consciousness of it. Books are ingredients in a recipe that ultimately helps to make up our minds over the course of years of reading. For instance, I have been reading Walt Whitman, whose expansive elegies constitute vast feasts of American life to me. And Guy de Maupaussant, whose delectable stories taste of bitter irony, and are served with such simplicity that I savor them like nice Port. Also, the contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose grasp of the utter futility of life is somehow comforting, and his wit is like a balm to the soul, not to mention the repugnance of some of his ideas. My agent recently gave me a galley of a book due out this fall, called Persian Porn and Iranian Rappers, which I am really enjoying. It's the memoir of a young Englishman who travels around Iran and learns how incredible the country and its people truly are. Beyond that, I plan on reading some serious essays on composting.

Visit Simon Van Booy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue