RELEASE DAY RECOMMENDS : 8.12.2020
Every week the publishing industry opens the gates of brand spanking new books and out comes a deluge of new and possibly amazing releases. And every week our Founder and sometimes reviewer, Noah Sanders, will act as your donut-shaped floatation device to keep you and your brainy little head above the waters of what you should read.
This week: a stunning new book of poetry, Diane Cook’s fascinating new piece of dystopian speculative fiction and so much more.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12TH
you better imagine
like your life depends
since it does.
- “Imagine”
It took one half of one poem for me to know I was going to love Nate Marshall’s powerful second collection of poetry. Marshall’s words are a muscular combination of slang and breakbeat rhythm with a hard-edged nostalgia driving it all forward. This is an exploration of Black vernacular, the power and the potential prison of words. It is the rare scathing collection of poetry that is also totally a joy to consume.
The New Wilderness
Diane Cook
Harper
Okay, so in the future (seemingly the near future) the world is a smoggy shit hole and nearly everyone lives in a sprawling, smog-soaked metropolis and the scant remaining taste of wilderness is contained within an aptly named swath of land - the Wilderness State. A mother, her dying daughter and sixteen other test subjects are plonked down in the wilds to see if humans can be in nature without destroying it. Sure, the real world is burning and maybe cracking open a novel with this terrifyingly similar concept seems like a lot to stomach but under the pen of Diane Cook (the short story collection Man V. Nature is considered a recent classic) this is absolutely a must read.
The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays
Elisa Gabbert
FSG Originals
I’m not even going to through out a trigger warning for The Unreality of Memory. Times are absolutely f’ed up and like it always has, literature absorbs its context and spits it back out into the world. Take Elissa Gabbert’s new essay collection about climate anxiety, disaster culture, doom-scrolling, the way we as humans have started to sink and sink and sink and instead of trying to claw our way out, we just snap pictures and mouth “oh my god.” Gabbert is a poet so we imagine this tour of the edges of the toilet bowl is going to be absolutely gorgeous to read.
Evil Geniuses : The Unmaking of America :
A Recent History
Kurt Andersen
Random House
I should probably change the title of this column to “Depressing Things You Should Read” because clearly it’s what I’m into. Kurt Anderson’s (Fantasyland) new book is a deep, deep dive into the crash-down calamity of recent American history. To paraphrase the book jacket - Andersen draws a line from The New Deal to The Raw Deal. And though sure, maybe tearing the bandaids of the wounds when they are still freely breathing might not seem like your cup of tea, but if I’m going to be hip-deep in this shitshow I’d at least like to know what broke the sewer pipe.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Isabel Wilkerson
Random House
Isabel Wilkerson wrote The Warmth of Other Suns, a National Book Critics Circle winning exploration of the Black migration from the South to the North. And now, in this moment when the more we learn the more f’ed up it becomes increasingly obvious everything is, she drops Caste, an exploration of how our culture is fractured by “a hierarchy of human divisions.” There is nothing that I want more than to have a writer of Wilkerson’s immense talent and elegance to further pull back the rotten milk skin of American culture so I can see just how bad it is underneath.
Noah Sanders on occasion enjoys books that do not make him want to cry into his soft, soft hands.
