What We Loved This Week

This week I went back to my roots and got deep into a few great lit mags. The summer issue of The Stinging Fly was delivered in its usual white mailer (the same envelopes I packed myself ten years ago). As my job-alma mater, I have a lot of affection for the magazine, but it’s also fantastic. Based in Dublin, Ireland, and now edited by Conversations with Friends author Sally Rooney, the new issue has new fiction from Booker-longlisted Sophie Mackintosh, a great essay by Brian Davey, and poems by Caoilinn Hughes (author of Orchid & the Wasp). I also got a sneak peak at the new issue of Granta, which includes an excerpt from Miriam Toews’s next novel, a predictably amazing short story by Ottessa Moshfegh, and an incredible essay by Fernanda Eberstadt’s which we’ll publish here on Lit Hub later this month.

–Emily Firetog, Managing Editor

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I actually finished The Third Hotel last week, but it’s since taken up residence in my brain and will not leave, so it’s earned its place as the first thing on my list. If you like horror movies, fever dreams, unusual explorations of grief and identity, and/or deeply atmospheric writing, this is for you. Even if you don’t like any of those things but you happen to love someone who will one day die, you should read it. In short: just read it. It’s really that good. Sometimes I like reading to music, and even though the book isn’t set in Italy (but does engage extensively with horror film) my musical pairing for The Third Hotel was the brilliant, giallo-inspired soundtrack of Berberian Sound Studio. Unlike The Third Hotel, that movie is not for everyone, but it is very, very good (and giallo-inspired, and about moviemaking).

Also, last night I mustered the wherewithal to go to an event! I help run the Liars’ League reading series, and we just had our second show of the year at the KGB Bar. Things went great: stories about child fight clubs, queer sex, time-travel, and pyromania were performed, 300% more of my friends showed up than expected, I learned that Twilight‘s original title was Masters of the Universe and folks played trivia and won various erotica titles. The next one should be in September, so consider this an open invitation to submit or come to the show.

–Miriam Kumaradoss, Editorial Fellow

This week, I finally got my hands on a copy of Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, the opening section of which is just as delicious as you have been led to believe. The second section isn’t bad either, but come on: multiple sex scenes starring a thinly veiled Philip Roth? Consider me interested. The writing is also good and stuff. In other news, after four years of periodic nagging, I have finally convinced my partner to watch Community (which I will now get to rewatch in the process). Three episodes in, it’s safe to say that he loves it. Yes, this is because I am right about everything. Thank you for noticing that.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

This week, I love Emily Fridlund. I love History of Wolves, a story about belonging and the gravity that brings you to other people. I love the way Emily Fridlund describes the dusk as having snuck up on someone, the way she says a dog is “looking for a squirrel to tree.” To tree! Tree, as a verb! I love the fact that when my best friend read this book on her Kindle, she accidentally started halfway through and kept reading on my recommendation, thinking it would all make sense later (undeniable proof that the physical copy is always better). And I love the cover of her collection of stories, Catapult, which I am excited to start reading next.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

This week, I’ve been reading Roadside Picnic, by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, an excellent read for the subway given that both the book’s setting and the subways themselves are, in a way, interstitial zones ruled by no one. The title of the book refers to the story’s unusual interpretation of a first contact story, brilliantly explained in an introduction by Ursula K. Leguin as a story about humanity’s insignificance. The aliens show up, take off, and leave behind a bunch of deadly space trash that black marketeers called stalkers collect while risking death, dismemberment, and other unspeakable horrors, as scientists attempting to understand the alien technology find themselves doubting the nature of causality itself. Roadside Picnic is one of many science fiction novels by the Strugatsky brothers—who along with Stanislas Lem, were the Soviet Union’s most respected and prolific writers of science fiction—and is the basis for the cult classic Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, a film which I once tried, and failed, to watch without subtitles. Tarkovsky is best known for his film adaptation of Stanislas Lem’s Solaris (butchered in a remake with George Clooney but impeccably strange in its original Soviet form), but Stalker has inspired plenty of cultural obsession—Geoff Dyer even wrote an entire book about his obsession with the film, appropriately titled Zona.

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

I spent part of my holiday with a friend who is a book critic, and among her library were a lot of the books that fell off the shelves of FSG when I worked at the house twenty-one years ago. So in between meals I took down the diaries of Edmund Wilson from the ’30s, which are a fascinating glimpse of a time in America when the most official forms of literary culture were not allergic to activism—it’s hard to imagine today’s equivalents of Malcolm Cowley and Wilson, Mary Heaton Vorse and Waldo Frank going to a miner’s strike and getting run out of town, which this lot did in 1932. Not long before this Cowley had even vowed to take the New Republic in a communist direction; Cowley would later resign from the leftist collective he created with Langston Hughes, Lillian Hellman and others because it had become too communist. Wilson threaded his way through this turbulent decade with fury and grace, going out and seeing what the Depression had done to America and writing about it in American Jitters and then telling the story of revolutionary thought and socialism in To The Finland Station, a book he had to teach himself to write (learning Russian along the way). Of course socialism could be on the rise again, but first we have to dismantle what rose in the vacuum of communism’s failure and the destruction of unions, the assassination of black activists—which is the gangster capitalism you see in this White House and its crypto-fascist plutocratic partners around the world. You could almost see it coming fifty years ago in Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, another book I reread this week. One thing I took away from Didion’s great collection about the chaos of America then was how the joylessness we feel today in certain forms of distraction was present then in the form of unwired, degraded myths. Fantasies of being American, when what she saw was the crime scene the west would become. I wanted to feel the book was glamorous, and it is, just only in its sentences, what it was a saying: I don’t think we listened.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

This week I’ve been reading Ben Marcus’s forthcoming story collection Notes From the Fog. I picked it up having enjoyed two of his recent stories for the New Yorker—“Cold Little Bird,” about the sudden behavioral shift of a possibly sociopathic young child, and “Blue Prints for St. Louis,” about unhappily married architects whose business is primarily large-scale monuments to victims of terrorism, all of which are accompanied by a pharmacological mist forcing visitors into a state of somber contemplation. It is the latter of these stories that sets the tone for the most of the collection: most of the stories in Notes from the Fog take place in what feels like a gently dystopic vision of the near future in which the devil’s pact between technology and capitalism has grown only slightly more sinister and ridiculous than it is now. Marcus’s characters are prescribed mysterious mood-stabilizing drugs that must be liberally coated in butter to swallow or subjected to dangerous, face-melting experiments by desperately pivoting startups. Notes from the Fog is grim, frequently funny, and filled with surprising images: like the sight of regurgitated white pills glinting diamond-like across a green lawn.

–Jess Bergman, Features Editor

After starting, and quickly abandoning, two boring-ass dud novels earlier this week, I got back in the groove with a pair of gems: China Mieville’s mind-blowing The City and the City—a noir/weird fiction hybrid novel about a murder investigation taking place in two separate Eastern European city-states that occupy the same space simultaneously—and Hannah Tinti’s wonderfully humane and suspenseful The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley—the story of a young girl, and her troubled-but-loving career criminal father, trying to make a new life for themselves in her deceased mother’s Massachusetts hometown.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

I am very excited to crack open the galley of Danielle Dutton’s Sprawl, which is being reissued by Wave Books this September. I loved Dutton’s dagger-bright novel, Margaret the First, and insofar as Sprawl is described as “a poetics of the suburbs,” it feels like a book written just for me. (And yes, I know this feature is called “What We Loved” but I loved that I got my hands on this.)

–Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief