Category: Nonfiction

(by Jeanette Winterson) This book is partly a memoir, partly a work of literary criticism, partly a reflection on the world and its problems, and partly a retelling of some of the stories from One Thousand and One Nights. I think the retellings were my favorite aspect of the book, though there were other things…

(by Val McDermid) This is a very writerly and very Scottish book about winter: McDermid talks about how she looks at bare tree branches in the winter as she works on her latest novel, and how she takes walks and works through plot and dialogue in her head, and also about going “guising” (like trick-or-treating…

(by Nick Hornby) Nick Hornby writes a column for The Believer called “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” and periodically those columns are collected and released in book form. This is the second of these books that I’ve read, and it definitely makes want to go back to the beginning and read the ones that I missed.…

(by Christina Thompson) This book isn’t just about the settlement of the Polynesian Triangle—it’s also about history and anthropology and archaeology and epistemology: it’s about what non-Polynesian people have known (or not known, or guessed, or tried to figure out) about Polynesia and how (and when) it might have been settled, and how sources of…

(by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer) There are family secrets and then there are family secrets: when she was ten, Annie Ernaux heard her mother telling someone about having had “another daughter who died of diphtheria at age six.” She described this child as having “died like a little saint,” and having been…

(by Hanif Abdurraqib) In her introduction to this essay collection, Eve L. Ewing writes that this “is a book about life and death—in particular, though not exclusively, Black life and Black death.” Many of the essays use music as a through-line or a jumping-off point, but the book isn’t a collection of music criticism per…

(by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker) Some parts of this 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics have definitely not aged well (the parts about race and skin color, the parts about women’s bodies) and some parts are about things that I don’t know enough about to have opinions on (costumes…

(by Kim Phillips-Fein) This was an interesting book to read after having seen the documentary Drop Dead City back in May. The book and the movie cover the same time period/events (the fiscal crisis in 1970s New York City) but each has its own slant, the slant of the book being that the crisis gave…

(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) I found this series of essays about language (and, more specifically, about speaking/writing in a language other than one’s first language) to be really pleasing even though I speak neither Japanese nor German, which are two of the languages that come up most. (Tawada was born in Japan…