TOBI'S DESK

We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze , 1902. Alone in Vienna, January sky smoothed and silvery over a thin lip of sunlight, streets windless, I sat in the Café Museum before a strudel and a cup of milky coffee, reading an Austrian novel propped open and freshly coffee stained. I was perfectly, touristically happy, a state in which even the most prosaic things partake in the novel glory of a place. I had just dispatched a schnitzel the size and shape of a small umbrella, beaded with oil, as well as a pilsner whose gold-brown glow rhymed with the schnitzel, the coffee, and the dusk lights—everything, in fact, seemed fringed with burnt gold. The booth was crushed crimson velvet, soft but thinly packed and straight-backed, a blithe discomfort surviving charmingly out of the past. Similarly, the waiter—bow-tied, bald head monumentally mounded and catching the light like marble—was un...

We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! One time in New Orleans, during an annual music festival organized by Essence magazine, a lady flagged me down from her car. I was walking through the French Quarter. The air was sufficiently drenched. In a neighborhood that has been steadily losing black folks, the block was suddenly full of us—glowing in bright clothes, and laughing entirely too loud. But this woman was pretty pissed. When I reached her window, she gave me another nod. She squinted at my tattoos, and asked where the nearest parlor was. “But one for us ,” she said. “I’ve already been to four today.” I pointed her to a guy I knew, up the road and around the corner. When she asked if he was black, I winced, because he was not. “He’s good though,” I said. “I mean it. He’s done me twice.” The lady looked deeply skeptical. But then she said, “Okay.” “Listen,” she continued. “I don’t know about that. But I’m...

We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Like the holy books, long novels are more often maligned than read. Critics complain that they’re exasperating or impossible or not worth the time. But in the history of my reading life, I’ve encountered nothing like the caveat lectors surrounding Marguerite Young ’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling . They feel less like user warnings or cautionary tales than being forced to gaze upon the skeletons of those who had previously made the attempt. When it was published in 1965, the critic Peter Prescott gave up after two days, even though his editor offered him four times the normal rate (everyone else had refused). The online reader reviews I found vary between naked revulsion and sheepish endorsement. One Amazon reviewer claims he gave a copy of the twelve-hundred-page novel to each of his friends and promised that if they finished, he would pay for their children’s college education. “...

The event corner of the Nigerian literary scene has again gone quiet after our two major literary festivals have come and passed. Aké Arts and Book Festival—in its sixth year—happened only four days before the Lagos International Poetry Festival—in its fourth year—both in Lagos. In the time that these festivals have existed, there has been […] from Brittle Paper http://bit.ly/2GIdPBQ

During my first year in New York, I learned that an old theater, not far from my apartment, showed It’s a Wonderful Life at Christmastime. I was new to the city, still acclimating to its competing layers of freedom and constriction. I craved the familiar. I missed my mom. I had grown up watching George Bailey, and some of my friends had too. We purchased tickets in advance and made a night out of it. For me the movie was steeped in ritual. In one of my earliest memories, I’m laying in a heap of pillows at my aunt’s house, sipping hot chocolate, surrounded by a pack of cousins. It’s snowing out, an early snow, the same fat flakes that blanket Bedford Falls at the start of the film. I’m younger than young George Bailey is, but I remember wondering how many of the actors are still alive. We watched the movie every year, once shortly after Thanksgiving, then again on Christmas Eve during the NBC telecast. We quoted it readily: “I wish I had a million dollars. Hot dog!” “Every time a bel...

We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Donald Hall, who died in June this year at the age of eighty-nine , was a prolific poet, essayist, and editor whose work has had an enormous impact on American letters. He was The Paris Review ’s  first poetry editor, and he served as the U.S. poet laureate. His   Art of Poetry interview   appeared in our Fall 1991 issue.  Before his death, he compiled one final book of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety , an excerpt from which appears below.  Donald Hall, 1977. When I was sixteen, I read ten books a week: E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster—but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down. Thirty years later, in New Hampshire with Jane, I made a living by freelance writing all day, so I read books only at night. Jane ...

We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Alfred Hitchcock, The  Birds , 1963, still from a color film, 119 minutes. In 1849, when twenty-seven-year-old Gustave Flaubert left Paris for his life-changing trip abroad, his homeland was in the grips of Egyptomania. The fad had invaded the arts, design, and the home decor of the upper classes. For Flaubert, like for many of his fellow Frenchmen, the Orient, as it was often called, was a source of endless fascination, but visiting wouldn’t be easy on his wallet or his waistline. It was an arduous journey: from mail coach to riverboat to railway then finally to a room aboard an ungainly and fragile boat named Le Nil , which was equipped with a sail, a tall funnel, and a pair of paddle wheels. “The ugly little ship staggered the length of the Mediterranean like a drunkard,” writes Geoffery Wall , author of Flaubert: A Life . After eleven days on board Le Nil , Flaube...

We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! On Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home . What Novalis says about philosophy—that in reality, it is a homesickness—is true also of country music, though philosophers and country singers have different ideas about what home is. In philosophy, home is a state of perfect understanding. Philosophers, Novalis writes, long to “be at home everywhere.” Country singers, on the other hand, long not so much for the outside world—or, for that matter, the world to come—but rather for the world as they once knew it, typically in childhood. The philosopher hopes for a home she’s never seen while the country singer mourns for the home she may never see again. Of all the homesick country albums by all the homesick country singers, few explore homesickness more searchingly than Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home . In eleven bittersweet songs, lasting a little over thirty-three minu...

Nigeria’s leading travel writer Noo Saro-Wiwa has been included in luxury and lifestyle travel publication Conde Nast Traveller‘s 30-name list of the “World’s Most Influential Women Travellers” of 2018, alongside American actress Angelina Jolie and Jordanian monarch consort Queen Rania al Abdullah. The daughter of the iconic activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, Noo Saro-Wiwa was born in 1976 and […] from Brittle Paper http://bit.ly/2rST643

“WHEN I GROW up I want to be a mechanic, so nothing ever stays broken in my life,” says Gaby, the 10-year-old narrator of Small Country, the English translation of the French-language novel Petit Pays, the literary debut by long-time rapper Gael Faye which has sold more than 700,000 copies, been translated into 35 languages, and […] from Brittle Paper http://bit.ly/2AgyHKZ

We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! “Ultimately, we don’t belong in the world governed by time,” says Michael Cremo, a guest on KNWZ, a radio station in Palm Springs, California. “As beings of pure consciousness, we are essentially timeless.” It is around two thirty A.M. in Palm Springs and around eleven thirty A.M. in Paris, where I am tidying my apartment. Cremo is talking about the end-time, which he thinks could well be imminent, but his point is relevant to the experience of listening to local radio from somewhere I am not. I love listening to radio, but sometimes I don’t want to listen to a particular station, genre, or category. Sometimes I want to listen to a time of day. Which is, of course, entirely possible thanks to the rise of online streaming at the expense of older analogue broadcast methods. If I am feeling afternoony in the morning, I can leave the world that is “governed by time” and join which...

We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Vilhelm Hammershøi, Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne  (Dust motes dancing in sunbeams), 1900. The color gray is no one’s color. It is the color of cubicles and winter camouflage, of sullage, of inscrutable complexity, of compromise. It is the perfect intermediate, an emissary for both black and white. It lingers, incognito, in this saturated world. It is the color of soldiers and battleships, despite its dullness. It is the color of the death of trees. The death of all life when consumed by fire. The color of industry and uniformity. It is both artless and unsettling, heralding both blandness and doom. It brings bad weather, augurs bleakness. It is the color other colors fade to once drained of themselves. It is the color of old age. Because I have no style, I defer to gray. I find it easier to dress in gray scale than to think. I buy in bulk, on sale, in black and ...

We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Winslow Homer, Sunlight and Shadow , 1872. “I vant to be alone,” my mother used to say distractedly, channeling Greta Garbo, when my brother and I were wrecking havoc at home. In fact, though Garbo’s character said the line in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, Garbo herself never said it. What she said, when faced with a scrum of journalists at a press conference a few years later, was “I want to be let alone.” But in our culture, the distinction between the two statements has been conflated. For us, “I vant to be alone” means I want to be off the grid, no iPhone, no email, the 24-7 connectivity of our lot. I want to be let alone to be alone. No wonder that, to a writer—to readers, to all overwhelmed people now—solitude suggests not loneliness but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity. We speak of being alone to recharge our batteries—even in our reach for solitude, we seem ...

Each time I try to do it right, I fail myself. I’ve tried all I could but I keep getting it wrong. The other day, someone’s comment on my wall made me want to give up writing but I told myself I would write again and again and again but I keep failng and failing … Continue reading Writing Is Not For Little Children → from NaijaStories.com http://bit.ly/2V8cDdZ

Year in Reading is done. (“That’s all there is, there isn’t anymore,” to paraphrase the famous fictional nun referenced in Emily St. John Mandel ‘s entry earlier today.) This concludes what I believe is our 14th year of running this series at the site. There were 74 participants , dozens if not hundreds of books recommended, and expressions of melancholy and joy and generosity and rage and befuddlement and petty grievance and pleasure and everything else that makes up a year in books and in life. Thank you for sharing it with us. -Lydia Kiesling The post A Year in Reading 2018: Outro appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://bit.ly/2rRukBa

In 2018 I had recurring fantasies of deleting my Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Slack accounts. (Not Tumblr, because their new content policy basically did the job for me.) This wouldn’t be a personal conflict of interest except that I’m the social media editor of the site you’re currently reading, and completely disavowing the most basic terms of my own employment would be, as internet parlance so disdainfully puts it, Not A Good Look. So instead I sublimated my professional death drive in reading. Even without intending to, I found myself gravitating toward books about people who dared to leave it all behind. My Absolute Darling came out in 2017 but I didn’t get to it until this year. It’s sere and visceral and made me want to move to the Pacific Northwest, so beautiful were its descriptions of the natural world out there. The novel is a cautionary tale about retreating from contemporary society, but it also shows what we lose by living within our current, constantly Linked...

I carried Katie Ford’s If You Have to Go with me for much of this year—the book lingers, and is as fine a work of longing as I have ever read. Ford is a poet of unique and deep emotion, and she is also a student of theology, and that union fills a need that I share with many readers. A space for wonder and doubt. In my interview with Ford for The Millions , she felt that “readers are tired of ironic renderings of faith and doubt. I think people want to believe the author is sincere.” The poets who I am drawn to the most in this particular moment—Ford, Ada Limón , Jericho Brown , Traci Brimhall —encounter faith and doubt with refreshing sincerity. I have my own beliefs; I don’t look to poets for that. I look to poets for a language for a weary soul. I want to see how others envision the absence or presence of God, and I find poets particularly gifted in that practice. Add to that list a book that I discovered this year: The Book of Trees by Sean M. Conrey . An interpretation of th...

Twelve notes for a Year in Reading essay: 1.     Do you have holiday traditions? Here’s one of mine: every December, I log into The Millions staff portal to upload my Year in Reading piece, and am somehow always astonished to discover that I haven’t written anything for The Millions since my last Year in Reading piece, a year earlier. 2.     Does anyone who isn’t independently wealthy have enough time to do everything they’d like to do? I suspect not. My affection for The Millions hasn’t dimmed since I started writing for the site nearly a decade ago, but I have an almost-three-year-old, who takes up all of the time that I don’t spend working on my new novel or chasing lecture fees to the far corners of the country. Time can be found here and there in the margins sometimes—hello from the Dallas airport!—but I do not believe that I can have it all. There are always improvements to be made in time management and efficiency—for example, you can save a lot of time...

For the last two years, I’ve felt like I’ve forgotten how to read well, much less write about it, as it’s become harder to find the space and quiet to do much more than simply let sentences (and tweets, and news alerts, etc. etc.) wash over me. I’m not alone in this, I know, but it’s been a lonely experience; literature has always been my tether to the world, and it feels like that tether’s dangerously frayed. A couple of times this year I’ve tried to bridge the growing distance between my literary life and daily reality by tackling fiction and nonfiction that feels closer to the world in which I live, commonly known as Texas. Sometimes it’s worked — I read  Philipp Meyer ’s The Son in the spring and found it a pulpy, compulsive, enjoyable novel of the Lone Star State, complete with oil booms and bits of Cherokee and careful descriptions of the Hill Country, my actual home, and the Llano Estacado, my spiritual one. But sometimes the strategy’s fallen short: I tried and tried aga...

For my first ever Year in Reading at The Millions, I will only be featuring books which I checked out from the local public library in my sleepy Massachusetts town a few miles north of the Red Line’s terminus. Constructed in 1892 and modeled after the Renaissance Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, I’ve made this sandstone building a regular part of the itinerary on my way back from Stop ‘n Shop. The library has a resplendent mahogany reading room, the edges lined with framed 17 th century drawings, with the back walls decorated with an incongruous painting of Napoleon ’s ill-fated Russia campaign and a North African souk scene, all oranges and lemons in the sun. This room contains all of the new novels that come through the library, and after moving to Massachusetts and getting my card I made it a point to come every other week, and to take out more books than I had time to read. I will not be considering books that I bought at the Harvard Co-Op or Grolier Poetry Bookshop, which wit...