A gift guide from New England Literary News
New England Literary News
Dear colleagues, readers, writers, poets, pals, all, for the next few weeks, a change to the usual doings of New England Literary News. As we barrel into gift-giving season, I offer you a selection of books — fiction, non-fiction, poetry, graphic novels, and art books — by New England authors or put out by New England presses. I’ve drifted through the NELN archives and pulled out some of my favorites from the near-decade of aiming the spotlight on books from the region. The typical gift guide focuses on books put out in the last year; here you’ll find books from this fall back to 2016, ones you might’ve missed, ones that might be just the thing for the reader in your life (or for you). Shop local. Read local. Support your local bookstores. Support your local authors. (And below, a few chances to attend a Winter Solstice reading with me in libraries and barns around Massachusetts.)
Boston native Kate Wisel’s sharp and propulsive collection of linked stories, Driving in Cars with Homeless Men (University of Pittsburgh), won the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. These fierce, fiery Boston-set stories are jagged but never jaded. Wisel’s characters possess a steely wisdom, the kind of smarts born out of bad nights and big hurts. She writes with a poet’s attention to cadence and precision of description — “The Citgo sign sinks, then disappears completely as we go down through the snake-cage flicker of of the underpass.” The city, and its people, live, breathe, and flame on the page.
Cambridge native Dan Mazur’s Lunatic (Ninth Art) is a moving wordless story of a woman’s ardent relationship with the moon. We move from her infancy to her adulthood, and the atmosphere of illustration shifts as time moves. Mazur, a co-founder of the Boston Comics Roundtable and the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo, uses ink washes, pencil and nib pen, acrylic paints, giving each lifestage a distinct energy. The main character has a force and vitality to her; there’s ardor in her, and melancholy, too. Mazur takes her on an otherworldly journey, and opens us to the different incarnations intimacy and life meaning can take.
“I did not survive girlhood. I avoided it,” writes Ani Gjika in her powerful, sensual memoir, An Unruled Body, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Gjika, a poet, translator, and teacher based in Framingham, opens herself in this intimate unfolding. She writes of childhood in post-Communist Albania, of being raped at age 12; she writes of immigrating to Boston. She writes of the heady tumult of long-distance love, of a body and its needs. It is, in part, a story of sexual awakening. And more, it’s about what it is to say instead of not, to put to words what is most difficult to express. Gjika shows her growing fluency with the language the body speaks, and how to listen to what it says. “Love is where I am,” she writes. It’s where we all are, all the time, if we’re brave enough to remember.
Taylor Johnson holds hands with the unknowns in their rich collection of poems, Inheritance, from the Maine-based Alice James Books. A rich rurality — rabbits, pine forests, muscadines — of life with their grandparents in Virginia is balanced with their native Washington D.C., swampy and thumping. Johnson keeps close listen to the heat and wildness inside. “I’d like to be as animal as language,” they write. The lines convey a sensual exuberance: “I’m not in love with anyone, but what else can I call the way I buried my face in the purple salvia plant in the bouquet I got from the farm share. Everything unfolds magnificent around me.”
Peter A. Browne, a naturalist born in 1782, had an obsession with hair. He collected samples from people and animals all over the world. He put together twelve volumes of samples, lion manes and sheep fleece, hair from men, women, writers, criminals, ministers, carnival workers, and locks from the first fourteen presidents of the United States. Specimens of Hair: The Curious Collection of Peter A. Browne (Blast), offers a look at the inventory. It’s beautifully, meticulously photographed by local photographer and artist Rosamund Purcell, celebrated for the depth of detail in her nature photography. In the strands and curls and whisps and fuzz, in the coarse, the beardy, the satiny, the blonde, brown, strawberry, black, and shades between, we see the animal in us, our shocking fur. The volume is at once both exquisite and grotesque, which, it turns out, can also be said about hair itself.
“What makes a person themself rather than someone else?” asks Helen de Bres in her lively, provocative book How To Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins (Bloomsbury). De Bres, an associate professor of philosophy at Wellesley College, joins her experience as an identical twin with her background in philosophy in a series a linked personal essays. One need not have a special interest in twinhood to find much here that lights up the mind. De Bres raises questions on the nature of self, free will, and details what she describes as the “special freakishness” of twins. She offers an expansive notion of friendship, romance, family, and the blurring and blending of all three, suggesting that a capaciousness in our sense of relations might allow us to enjoy a richer meal of life.
An erotic force moves through Martin Edmunds’s collection of poetry, Flame in a Stable, from the local Arrowsmith Press. He writes of a Zoom funeral and candles lit “against the backward / smudge of gloom” and later channels lyric poetry from the 5th century: “If I could sleep I’d sleep / with my hands in the fire / of your hair.” He writes of here and elsewheres—Italy, Spain, the ocean, “desert varnish,” cordgrass, glasswort, elkskin, Orion. These are poems with a seductive sense of cadence, and the aural texture creates its own heat and friction. “I am these / red seeds / on a white plate,” he writes, and later, “you are … the ache / and suck of the sea.” There’s “no parchment paper left after / buttering their slits and tucking the gutted / trout in the oven.” The sensuousness, even when dark, communicates a raw and glowing joy.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s barreling novel Sketchtasy (Arsenal Pulp) sets itself in mid-nineties Boston, following a 21-year-old Alexa, a debauched, worldly-wise, and dyed-haired queen, as she navigates her world in a decidedly uptight and change-averse city. It’s a window into a gay culture in the cold shadow of AIDS, and explores, with a throttling sense of ecstasy and desperation, a search for place, for understanding, for finding the way with friends who become family. Sycamore’s prose is a living thing, hot in the hands, and moves fast. It reveals a recent-past in the city while also holding up a mirror to Boston’s provincialism and fear.
In Cambridge in 1650, a woman was accused of bewitching her friend’s child to death and hanged. Shortly after the execution, it came to light that the child froze to death because his nurse left him in the woods during a lover’s tryst. Such are the facts that drive Cambridge poet Denise Bergman’s taut book-length poem The Shape of the Keyhole (Black Lawrence). The poem unfolds over seven days, from the accusation to the too-late truth. Nightmare and Silence are powerful forces on the scene, and Bergman’s examinations of the different wavelengths of fear is deeply perceptive. “Fear like smokehouse fire fills her loins.” She uses slant echoing—words get repeated, altered, reformed—giving the sense of trying to make sense of something that’s happening too fast. “Her demons / have outgrown their skins.”
As a form of “sibling-to-sibling pep talk,” G’ra Asim addresses his brother Gyasi, 14 years his junior, in his warm and wide-ranging debut Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother (Beacon). With each chapter tied to a particular song, the book is an electric and illuminating blend of critical and cultural theory, memoir, and music enthusiasm, as he guides his brother about race, power, masculinity, creativity, and resistance. The book swoops between Didion, Ellison, Emerson, Anti-Flag and Operative Ivy, between Hegel, Arendt, Minor Threat, and The Bachelorette. The result is the welcome feeling of the older brother’s arm around you, asking have you heard this song? Have you read this book? Which is another way of saying: I know what you’re going through, let me show you what helped.
The nights continue to lengthen; we’ve got three weeks of darkening days before the light begins its slow creep back. I’m doing a handful of readings for Winter Solstice over the coming weeks. I promise hush in the midst of the December frenzy. Come say hello, I’ll sign your book, I’d love to see you there.
Tuesday, December 9 at 7 pm at the Wellesley Free Library. For more info, click here.
Thursday, December 11 at 6:30 pm at the Canton Public Library. For more info, click here.
Tuesday, December 16 at 6:30 pm at the Waltham Public Library. For more info, click here.
Saturday, December 20 at 6 pm, the Barn Winter Solstice, with a reading by me and music by Louisa Stancioff at Eva Zasloff’s Arlington barn. Drop me a line for more info on this one.
Thank you, as always, for being here. I’m glad to do this work, and it is work. If you can afford to pay, please pay. With my warmth and gratitude always.
Makes me want to read a bunch of these books….
Thanks Nina for this amazing list of great titles and stories, I don’t know if I should buy them all for myself or to gift to family and friends (or maybe both) 😀