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Friday Reads: November 2016

November 18, 2016 Reviews

By MAX FREEMAN, OSTAP KIN, and ANNA BADKHEN

November’s Friday Reads features selections from three Issue 12 contributors: poet Max Freeman, translator Ostap Kin, and essayist Anna Badkhen. All three are reading and recommending poetry this month, verses of otherness, foreigness, complexity, and intelligence. In this month, in this year — when the easy, the soundbitey, and the distorted seem to dominate us — we’re happy to endorse these thoughtful recommendations.

Recommended:

Chord by Rick Barot, Orchard Lamps by Ivan Drach, Garden Time by W.S. Merwin, and Dark Archives by Andre Bradley.

Friday Reads: October 2016

October 21, 2016 Reviews

By RALPH SNEEDEN, SEAN BERNARD, EMILY CHAMMAH, ERICA DAWSON

In celebration of the release of Issue 12, October’s Friday Reads recommendations come from four of our Issue 12 contributors—poets, essayists, storytellers. As you might then expect, the breadth of their reading stretches wide: stories set in California on the brink of apocalypse or a bizarre state-sponsored research lab; poems rewoven eerily from dark fairy tales, or mixed from myth and history. If you hurry, you might just have time to read them all before Issue 12 hits your mailbox.

Recommended:

The Anathemata by David Jones, In an I by Popahna Brandes, Gold Fame Citrusby Claire Vaye Watkins, and The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith.

Friday Reads: September 2016

September 23, 2016 Reviews

By MEGAN TUCKER ORRINGER, ANDREW WILLIS, SUNNA JUHN, NAYEREH DOOSTI

This month’s Friday Reads recommendations will take you from an Amsterdam dinner table to a New York City hospital room, and from 1970s Sarajevo to modern-day Seoul. These captivating books highlight conflict and memory in equal parts, and the results are certainly worth a spot on your fall reading list.

Recommended:

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, The Dinner by Herman Koch, The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon, and The Vegetarian by Han Kang.

Friday Reads: August 2016

August 19, 2016 Reviews

By ELIZABETH WITTE, EMILY EVERETT, ALI ROHDE, LISA ALEXANDER

Our recommended books this month explore unfamiliar territory, in both form and subject. We’re reading formats that do something different with time, place, and space on the page, through writing that is fiercely modern and refreshingly curious.

Recommended:

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Lui, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, That That by Ken Mikolowski, and Shining Sea by Anne Korkeakivi

Friday Reads: July 2016

July 22, 2016 Reviews

By SARAH WHELAN, FLAVIA MARTINEZ, JACKSON TRICE, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

This July, join our summer staff in going deep with your beach reading. We’re taking on ambitious projects: books that span lifetimes, begin series, and jump between planes of existence. Here are novels for your existential angst, elegies for your crises of purpose, works to help you through your election-related anxiety—what better time than summer to disappear into a world that could take over your mental world for perhaps thousands of pages, letting you take on life’s most daunting questions?

Recommended:

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, My Struggle: Book I by Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Friday Reads: April 2016

April 15, 2016 Reviews

By BARBARA MAYER, KELCEY PARKER ERVICK, SUJATA SHEKAR, MELODY NIXON

Politics and history crackle through the plotlines of our recommended books this month, as we travel the world experiencing struggle and mourning in a many-layered collage of contexts. Here are four varied works of “healing imagination,” as books both simple and unconventional examine trauma unflinching and then look to what happens next.

Recommended:

Nora Webster by Colm Toibin, Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel, The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan, Jam on the Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett

Friday Reads: March 2016

March 11, 2016 Reviews

By NALINI JONES, JAMES ALAN GILL, MORGAN ADAMS, GBOLAHAN ADEOLA

This month, invest in a book you can begin knowing you’ll return many times. These works range the world from Bombay to Russia to Nigeria to San Francisco, and in page count from the “slender” to the “massive”—you’ll find something here for every interest, every schedule, every commute length. But each of this month’s recommenders chose their work in part for the fact that it seems to yield a new story on every visit; as Nalini Jones puts it, you’ll “feel the world tilt to the side” in a new direction every time you dip into these pages.

Recommended:

Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of their Popularity by Whitney Otto, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Famished Road by Ben Okri

Friday Reads: February 2016

February 5, 2016 Reviews

By MARIAN CROTTY, NICK FULLER GOOGINS, GRANT KITTRELL, SARAH SMARSH

How much more palatable is any dish when “imbued with the stories of home”? We’re exploring that this month in our recommendations, which variously braid entertainment and education in their reading experiences. Grow as a writer, a poet, a consumer, a human being—and do it while laughing, remembering home, or teetering on the edge of your seat.

Recommended:

The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury, The Door by Magda Szabó,Ennui Prophet by Christopher Kennedy, Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love by Simran Sethi

Friday Reads: January 2016

January 15, 2016 Reviews

By DIDI JACKSON, MICHELLE ROSS, JENNIFER ACKER, ALEKSANDRA BURSHTEYN, BEN SHATTUCK, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

We’re charging into the new year reading slim volumes with grand ambitions. These books and their authors look to visual art, science, medicine, and history to pull literature—and with it the reader—in a new direction. We’re reading deeply in order to carve and reclaim human stories from disease, politics, the simplifying narratives of recorded history, and a monolithic literary canon. In 2016, read to embrace the “exquisite ache” of complexity with us!

Recommended:

I Watched You Disappear by Anya Krugovoy Silver, Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya, High Dive by Jonathan Lee, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art by Julian Barnes

Friday Reads: December 2015

December 4, 2015 Reviews

By AURELIA WILLS, ALI ROHDE, SCOTT GEIGER, DWYER MURPHY, JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN

Join our recommenders this month for a little formal experimentation—a collection of works that suck you in with lists, collages, instructions. Here we have a “novel of voices”; a “pointillist portrayal” of a family through vignettes; a work of ekphrastic metafiction; a “madcap” novel that begins with a catalog of ailments and their cures; a book of assurances and instructions to a reader on the cusp of a momentous change. These are books that will break you down into your component parts, rearrange you, and put you back together.

Recommended:

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, Mrs. Bridge by Evan Connell, 10:04 by Ben Lerner, The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya, Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood by Anne Enright