Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Coming in a little late but really excited to share Emma Duffy-Comparone’s to-read pile this month! Her amazing short story collection, Love Like That, just came out and should be on everyone’s shelf. Here’s what she’s reaching for these days.

How Fiction Works, James Wood
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, Steven Pressfield
The Untethered Soul, Michael Alan Singer
Radical Compassion, Tara Brach
Fleabag: The Scriptures, Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Rabbit Angstrom, John Updike
Buddha’s Brain, Rick Hanson
feeld, Jos Charles
The Tradition, Jericho Brown
An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo
We Run the Tides, Vendela Vida
The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen
Are You Enjoying?, Mira Sethi

My to-read piles are officially bicoastal for the moment. And all my West Coast books are from the library (I definitely went to town). Despite my crazy list of new titles, I did take a good chunk of out my to-read pile last month. So I have my East Coast and West Coast piles, respectively:

– NEWIES –
The Divorce, César Aria (trans. Chris Andrews)
Self-Portrait in Bloom, Niloufar Talebi (meant to list last month!)
Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor
Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames, Lara Maiklem
The Odyssey, Homer (trans. Emily Wilson)
A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life and Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Jackson
The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
The Atmospherians, Alex McElroy
American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, Zitkala-Ša
Socialist Realism, Trisha Low
Mend, Kwoya Fagin Maples
Augustus, John Williams
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, Shokoofeh Azar
Sonata, Andrea Avery
The Unreality of Memory, Elisa Gabbert
Broken Places & Outer Spaces, Nnedi Okorafor
Promethea, Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray

– OLDIES  –
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks; The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson (re-read); The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso (re-read); Remembrances, Mir Taqi Mir (trans. C.M. Naim); After the Stroke, May Sarton; Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition, Lisa Fishman; Underworld Lit, Srikanth Reddy; Letters to Memory, Karen Tei Yamashita; Sometimes I Never Suffered, Shane McCrae; Hoarders, Kate Durbin; A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, Hoa Nguyen; The Groundhog Forever, Henry Hoke; Personhood, Thalia Field; Be Holding, Ross Gay; Pricks in the Tapestry, Jameson Fitzpatrick; What Doesn’t Kill You, Tessa Miller; Voices in the Evening, Natalie Ginzburg (trans. D.M. Low)

Goodbye old Julian calendar year, hello 2021. May you treat us even a bit more kindly. We begin the brand new year with Aeon Ginsburg‘s to-read pile! Aeon’s first full-length poetry collection Greyhound came out this fall, and you should definitely take a look. (Full disclosure, I edited this brilliant book.) Here’s what Aeon’s looking to read:

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I Got A Monster by Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg
Now by The Invisible Committee
Virtual Reality – Edition Digital Culture 6
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley (with notes by Rebecca Teich)
Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker
Arts of Living On A Damaged Planet edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt
Surrogate Humanity by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora
Indictus by Natalie Eilbert
Without Protection by Gala Mukomolova
Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon translated by Don Mee Choi
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List Of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen
We Want It All edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel

As for me, you’d think I had a year with endless time considering all the new books I’ve amassed…Still. There are worse things that entering a new year with an ambitious stack.

– NEWIES –
Days of Distraction, Alexandra Chang
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney
The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women, ed. Dick Davis
Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi
Winter in the Blood, James Welch
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
A Fortune for Your Disaster, Hanif Abduraqqib
Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, Nikki Finney
The Red Parts and Bluets, Maggie Nelson (re-read)
Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam
Fierce Attachments, Vivian Gornick
Something Like an Autobiography, Akira Kurosawa (trans. Audie E. Bock)

– OLDIES  –
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks; A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley; Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates; Dream of Europe, Audre Lorde;  New and Selected Poems, Toi Derricotte; The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso (re-read); Defacing the Monument, Susan Briante; Phong Nha, the Making of an American Smile, Tammy Nguyen; Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive, Tinashe Mushakavanhu; Guillotine, Eduardo C. Corral; Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From, Sawako Nakayasu; Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer; Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco; The Essential Ruth Stone, ed. Bianca Stone; Pigeons on the Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen (trans. Michael Hoffman); The Marathon Poet, Åke Hodell (trans. Fia Backström, ed. Kira Josefsson); Life in Space, Galina Rymbu (trans. Joan Brooks); Sonnets, Ulises Carrión; Soviet Texts, Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov (trans. Simon Schuchat, Ainsley Morse); Being Human Is an Occult Practice, Magdalena Zurawski; Notes on Mother Tongues: Colonialism, Class, and Giving What You Don’t Have, Mirene Arsanios; The End, Aditi Machado; Quartet, Claudia La Rocco; Zero Energy Experimental Pile, Alex Cruse