Books From The Future: In the mail this week was my advance copy for Priyanka Mattoo’s Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, her long awaited memoir if you know her and want to just make her write all her stories down, Resentment-style, due this June from Knopf; and The Long Run by Stacey D’Erasmo, a comrade of many years who as a slim volume coming in July on how to survive and make art and survive even by making art, out from Graywolf.
Books From This Week: I finished Kelly Link’s The Book of Love—a novel now published as of the 13th—sometime this afternoon, and it is a shimmering shapechanger love gift of a novel, about sibling rivalry, and how it is dangerous even for demons and wizards to try to beat the love of sisters for each other, their brothers, mothers, boyfriends or girlfriends or Someday Girls, in a small Massachusetts town. It was an arc when I began.
Neighbors And Other Stories by Diane Oliver also publishes this week, with a stunning cover (see above) and an introduction by my friend, the writer Tayari Jones. Oliver died tragically at the age of 22 in a motorcycle accident leaving behind these stories inspired by her life in the Jim Crow South. Jones says the collection “evokes the feeling of sorting through a time capsule sealed and buried in the yard of a Southern African Methodist Episcopal church in the early 1960s.” It comes with blurbs from other favorite people: Jamel Brinkley, Dawnie Walton, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Dantiel Montiz and Deesha Philyaw. I am really excited to read it.
Three great stories:
“Poor Houdini,” a short story by Anne Carson:
Four very thin trees stand above their own reflections and hesitate, as cold girls do. She thinks of rhymes for girls do. Whirls through. Pearls anew. Use it in a sonnet? Eddy’s mother lives by a lake. It is a gray and glassy evening. Supper was all reminiscences, Eddy recalling slow white mists drifting over the schoolyard each day at five, when the chemical plant incinerated its Styrofoam, and how he broke his collarbone and no one believed him for three days, his mother at the head of the table smiling and continuing with her fruit cup, his brother sitting opposite with his head down, a man tall and thin as a door, closed like a door. He ate as if expecting more. Four, chore, whore, underscore ran through her mind perkily. She mumbled something, got up from the table, and left. Now, at the lake, no one swimming, she watches the water slide from slate to black.
“That Girl,” a short story by Addie Citchens:
Underneath the huge, old, rusty awning, it was three shades darker and ten degrees cooler than in the street. Theo had been sitting on the porch rocker watching Shirlee go back and forth. It was strange to see a girl walking alone, but Shirlee was always out and about by herself. She always looked the same, too: once-upon-a-time-white canvas shoes, T-shirt tied above her belly button, jeans pulled up into her crotch. With one hand on her hip and the other shading her eyes, she stepped into the yard.
“Stalin, Lenin, Robespierre,” by Brandon Taylor:
That winter, Per was thirty-two and worked in a bookstore in SoHo. He lived with a couple in a fifth-floor Hell’s Kitchen walk-up, where he slept on a pull-out in what they called the living room but which was really everything that wasn’t the narrow strip of kitchen and the skinny bedroom. The toilet was in a closet and the tub was in the kitchen. Per didn’t mind sleeping on the pull-out, and he appreciated that the lack of space kept him from bringing books home from the store – strays, he called them. He stowed his things in a corner behind a Japanese screen and on a clothing rack behind the couch. He lived a tidy, monastic life amid the clutter of the couple, who for the most part alternated between doting on him like a helpless child and resenting his very presence with an alienating silence.
There’s an article I keep thinking about from the Times last month, on how there’s so many unexploded bombs in Gaza—this seems impossible but, ok—that Hamas is even able to arm itself out of them.
Weapons experts say that roughly 10 percent of munitions typically fail to detonate, but in Israel’s case, the figure could be higher. Israel’s arsenal includes Vietnam-era missiles, long discontinued by the United States and other military powers. The failure rate on some of those missiles could be as high as 15 percent, said one Israeli intelligence officer who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
By either count, years of sporadic bombing and the recent bombardment of Gaza have littered the area with thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance just waiting to be reused. One 750-pound bomb that fails to detonate can become hundreds of missiles or rockets.
Israeli officials knew before the October attacks that Hamas could salvage some Israeli-made weapons, but the scope has startled weapons experts and diplomats alike.
Israeli authorities also knew that their armories were vulnerable to theft. A military report from early last year noted that thousands of bullets and hundreds of guns and grenades had been stolen from poorly guarded bases.
From there, the report said, some made their way to the West Bank, and others to Gaza by way of Sinai. But the report focused on military security. The consequences were treated almost as an afterthought: “We are fueling our enemies with our own weapons,” read one line of the report, which was viewed by The New York Times.
This profile of Kali Reis at Vulture by Roxana Hadadi was a great introduction for me to the actor, for those of us watching True Detective.
Today in Tabs is still where I go to understand what exactly people are talking about online and sometimes it is even more fun to just go there instead of on social media.
As for essays, Rebecca Solnit was mesmerizing me at the LRB, writing about what Silicon Valley has made of San Francisco:
Seeing cars with no human inside move through San Francisco’s streets is eerie enough as a pedestrian, but when I’m on my bicycle I often find myself riding alongside them, and from that vantage point you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand. Since August, driverless cars have been available as taxis hailed through apps but I more often see empty cars than ones with backseat passengers. These robots in the shape of cars don’t move like those with human drivers. While I waited next to one at a busy intersection, the vehicle first halted at the yellow light, then rolled into the intersection, where it stopped when the light turned red, confounding the traffic around it.
Next newsletters include a Stonehenge mysteries visit and the topiary cat I didn’t know I needed. Coming soon: the launch to the next season of the newsletter as I switch platforms, as discussed.
Until next time,
Alexander Chee
eeeeeeeeeee! i left so many stories out btw - like when i nearly died! OOPS! we will discuss in person.
That Solnit essay was a banger.