December is a cruel month for books, a time when new releases often get overshadowed by gift guides and year-end lists — if they come out at all, since many presses are already looking into the new year. As a result, I had to dig a little deeper to produce this column, which is a bit more eccentric than usual. But what a wonderful result. A catalogue from a can’t-miss art exhibit and a trip down memory lane via aughts internet culture sit next to a beautifully translated novel and a reminder of what’s always been at stake in the fight for Black liberation.
As always, in preparing this list I’ve tried to filter “books that I like” through the lens of “books that don’t already have a ton of coverage.” Since these kinds of lists tend to function as a fiction-PR depository, let this be the one to make room for an exhibition catalogue, an anthology, and some poetry here or there. And beyond simply writing about new books, I like to send energy toward the new in general: new writers, new translations, writers trying new things. Ideally, the net effect will get readers to think in a way they haven’t before. I hope this list serves as a last chance to think, feel, or discover something different before 2022 is over.
Publications go out of business in the current media environment so frequently that it hardly registers. (RIP Astra.) But when Cokemachineglow — a most unruly and writerly music website — ceased publication, people felt it. Now fans have a tangible document of how great the site was, while the uninitiated have an opportunity to get reading. With a roster that includes Lindsay Zoladz, Calum Marsh, Brent Ables, Eric Sams, and Dom Sinacola, among many others, Writing Around Music is organized by former editor Clayton Purdom as “a chronological history of its editorial voice.” It brilliantly captures the sense of discovery, obsessiveness, and vitriol that drives the best music criticism.
Aperture’s reissue of this classic photojournalism survey is both a revelation and a scourge. The collection, a series of essays taxonomizing the horrors and inhumanities of South African apartheid, is accompanied by the author’s arresting and empathetic photographs, which show degradations that are chilling for their normalcy rather than their novelty. The new version features an essay by MoMA associate curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo outlining Cole’s artistic impact, and another by the journalist James Sanders parsing out the artist’s biography. As the poet Mongane Wally Serote notes in a stirring introduction, Bondage remains noteworthy not as an artifact, but because of the fury it conjures at how little has changed. Everything is recognizable: from the callousness of police and laws restricting movement to the anti-Black racism baked into urban planning, cycles of poverty, and a lack of access to proper food and transportation.
Point to a historical trauma and aesthetic shifts are not far behind. Hurricane Maria and the botched U.S. response in Puerto Rico checks all the contemporary preoccupations: xenophobia, the question of nation-states, and the disproportionate impact of climate inaction. No existe is a collection of Puerto Rican art that was made in response to Maria — and as Marcela Guerrero, an assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, writes in the book’s introduction, Maria is merely the tide that swept away any pretense that America’s relationship with the island is a tenable situation. Take Gamaliel Rodríguez’s Collapsed Soul, one of the pieces included in the book: It renders ships, surrounded by serene blue clouds, getting swallowed by a gray abyss — an acknowledgement of the island’s colonial past as well as its first reported COVID-19 death: a tourist on a cruise ship on the way to the island.
Duras’s second novel appears for the first time in English with an immensely lucid and incantatory translation by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, plus a firecracker of an introductory essay by Kate Zambreno. Its three-part cycle of tragedy and its aftermath investigates both the ability of people to sway those they love and the question of whether a person’s character is, indeed, fate. A covered-up murder, a suicide, unrequited marriages, and a couple intersecting love triangles provide adroitly plotted action, but much of the drama comes from whether Francine, the novel’s narrator, will cease her cycle of self-absorption and avoidance long enough to process it all. It’s fitting that, by the time she does, she barely recognizes herself.
What a distressing, tender joy to read the title poem of Kevin Powell’s confident and totally unselfconscious collection (a remembrance of the poet taking his elderly mother to the store after she fell ill), only to discover that much of the book navigates similar themes of diaspora, colorism, loneliness, and the pitfalls of prioritizing survival over care. Powell takes big risks: I’ve never seen Kobe Bryant and V, the playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, mentioned in the same sentence, much less as the subjects of odes in the same book. But the strongest poems are those in honor of people such as Sidney Poitier and Cicely Tyson, figures who loom large in the popular imagination of a certain Black generation.
“To be Black means to be in a constant state of migration,” the author of this fantastic debut collection muses in “Maud Martha.” In that poem Sharp imagines herself walking from the Golden Shovel — the setting of Gwendolyn Brooks’s iconic poem “We Real Cool” — with the poet herself to 51st Street to meet Maud Martha, the eponymous character of Brooks’s 1953 novel. Cleverness aside, the book is more about existential crisis than intertextual games. Sharp’s impulse to identify with Brooks and Lorraine Hansberry, as well as with the deaths of Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, and many other Black women, carries the tell-tale signs of depression. But even her darkest thoughts are studded by gloriously repetitive affirmations. “I’ve spent my life running from this birthright” repeats ten times in the middle of a circle, like a bull’s-eye or an unswallowed pill. “I’m in constant state of mourning of my previous self” appears 16 times — tessellating across the page like a disappearing mirage.
