Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi

Riot Baby felt terrifyingly topical when I read it in January of this year, and then it just got more and more and more topical somehow. It’s about two Black siblings, Ella and Kev, who each have special powers. Jumping around in time, Riot Baby shows us a dystopian America that’s functionally just… America, and Kev ends up incarcerated for living in the world while Black. Using their powers, Ella and Kev pay telepathic (?) visits to each other, as well as to a number of scenes in America’s racist history, and search for ways to bring the whole racist system down.

Tor’s novella line continues to publish absolute bangers, and Riot Baby felt like a gift in a year when America has felt even more like a dystopia than usual. Its leaps through time are deliberately disorienting, so that the reader is never quite allowed to settle into any certainty about what the book is going to be. Instead you’re carried through time and space in a sort of grand tour of American oppression. Riot Baby is imaginative, strange, dizzying, exhilarating.

Butterfly Yellow, Thanha Lai

I can’t remember who recommended Butterfly Yellow to me, but it was this wonderfully quiet and careful YA novel about a Vietnamese girl who comes to America in search of her little brother, from whom she was separated during the Vietnam War. She’s certain that he’ll be delighted to be reunited with her, but instead she finds that he’s comfortable in his new life with his adoptive parents. Hằng befriends a cowboy named LeeRoy and sticks around, patiently trying to rebuilt her relationship with her brother.

Because we see Hằng so much through LeeRoy’s eyes, I kept thinking that she was younger than she was, so it threw me off a bit when she develops a romance with LeeRoy. And overall I think Butterfly Yellow feels slightly more middle grade than YA. Aside from that small area of disorientation, though, it was a book with a great deal of emotional depth. No matter how much we want easy answers, such answers aren’t forthcoming. Instead, it’s a story about perseverance in love and finding joy in an imperfect world.

Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

On a grim day in January, I opened my mail to find an ARC of Harrow the Ninth, upon which I shrieked like a banshee and dived into it with an enthusiasm. Gideon the Ninth, you’ll recall, was the lesbian necromancers in space book, and this is the middle book in the series. We follow Harrow as she struggles with her imperfect Lyctorhood and her fractured memories of what happened at Canaan House.

This book is bonkers. It is bonkers. Every choice that Tamsyn Muir makes in this book is bonkers. It is a symphony of what-the-fuck, with every instrument playing a perfect, terrifying what the fuck variation, and all I could do was let myself be swept along by it. I know that some folks have said they found this one a harder read than Gideon — in Gideon the Ninth you’re in Gideon’s head enjoying her irreverent take on all the horrifying blood and murder events, whereas in Harrow the Ninth you’re living with Harrow’s rage, grief, and self-loathing. So I hope it won’t make me sound like a callous monster when I say I don’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book. I was grinning from ear to ear every time I opened it. I cannot wait for the third one.

Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo

WHEW did somebody say “mastery of the novella form”? I got Empress of Salt and Fortune as an ARC and was not immediately sucked in after reading the first few pages. Then on a Saturday I was like “I’m going to dedicate some actual time to reading this bastard” and sat down and read it all in one sitting. It’s the story of cleric Chih, who is collecting stories on their travels through a country that has been shaped by a powerful empress. They encounter an old woman who used to serve in the royal palace, and settle in to hear her version of the empress’s rise.

Just, wow. I absolutely loved this book. I am not one for secondary world fantasy, usually, but Vo builds her world around material culture: the tooth that was part of the gown the empress wore when she came as a bride to the palace; the dice that she used to play games and cast lots; a map of pilgrimage shrines throughout the empire. The things are the hook into the story of this empress, and the story is about women’s rage. It’s about the refusal to accept the oppression and denial your life has given you, and the overlooked ways women use to communicate among themselves, using tools that powerful men can’t be bothered glancing at twice.

I still don’t quite know how Vo managed to pack so much worldbuilding, emotion, and plot into 118 pages, but I do know that I’m excited for her future career and inevitable superstardom in the world of SFF.

The Good Luck Girls, Charlotte Nicole Davis

ROAD TRIP ADVENTURE YA!!!

Every year for the last few years, there’s been at least one YA novel where I was like “this is just a good fucking adventure story, what a pleasure, what a dream,” and as I look back on them, they are all, one hundred percent of them, road trip adventures. So in case there was any lack of clarity about what I like and whether I am predictable, the answers are road trips and yes, I am very predictable.

The Good Luck Girls tells the story of a group of girls fleeing from the brothel to which they were sold as children, trying to escape the consequences of a patron’s death. They are seeking asylum in a place they’ve only heard about, a place that for all they know doesn’t even exist — but they have to try and get there, or else resign themselves to spending their lives being hunted by the raveners who have been tasked with finding them and punishing them.

As dark as this premise is, Davis does a terrific job of writing a book that doesn’t feel doomed, yet also doesn’t gloss over the genuine trauma these girls have been through in their lives. Aster is determined to get all her friends to safety, whatever the cost to her; she’s smart and resourceful and angry and driven, and I cherished her. There’s a slow build-up of grudging respect between her and the house favorite at their brothel, Violet, which of course I adored, and the stakes of their road trip escape remain high, high, high, so there’s this lovely release of tension any time they have the chance to stop and rest and be happy for even a short time. And the set-up for book two just really thrilled me. Can’t wait for more!

The Dark Fantastic, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Whoever decided to get Paul Lewin to do the cover for this book deserves a trophy. Also, I love Paul Lewin’s art. One of my goals for this year is to read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, not just because I need to read more of Octavia Butler’s work, but also because if I like it then I can maybe buy the editions that feature Paul Lewin’s fancy, gorgeous covers.

Anyway, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games digs deep into major fantasy properties to explore the ways Black characters in those franchises have been used and abused by both the stories themselves and the audiences who received them. Thomas is a terrific, insightful cultural critic, and her work is particularly notable for how clearly she loves these properties and wants better for them. Her readings of the texts and their audiences enriched my understanding of these books, movies, and TV shows, and I’m so excited for whatever this author plans to do next.

Norma Jean Baker of Troy, Anne Carson

Before *waves hands* all this, I attended a conference at which New Directions had a booth, and you just wouldn’t believe the shriek of joy I emitted when I realized that Anne Carson had a new book. Anne Carson is the translator, poet, and genius behind If Not, Winter (an amazing translation of Sappho) and Nox, a book-in-a-box I incepted myself into being able to afford the first year I lived in New York.

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy combines the story of Helen of Troy with the life of Marilyn Monroe, whose name before fame was Norma Jeane Baker. It’s expectedly strange and funny and devastating.

In ancient Greece you use the verb [I am too lazy to recreate this in WordPress], which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum, and gives us English rapture and rape — words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.

Anne Carson is a queen on etymology. If you liked the above quotation, I refer you to Nox, which does a lot of this kind of thing.

Realm of Ash, Tasha Suri

Remember when I was lowkey obsessed with Empire of Sand, Tasha Suri’s debut? Well, in an exciting twist, I loved Realm of Ash even more. It maintains the same Angry Girl / Soft Boy romance dynamic, but dials the anger and the softness up by several notches.

Even saying that feels like a disservice to Realm of Ash, because it ignores the absolutely wonderful worldbuilding and plot work that Tasha Suri is doing. It’s the kind of sequel that Diana Wynne Jones would write, where the book is set in the same world under (some of) the same set of assumptions, but it’s far more of a companion novel than the type of sequel where you’re like, aw, yeah, gonna get some answers now. Realm of Ash is about the crumbling Ambhan Empire, and the efforts of a widow and a prince to understand the limits of their forbidden magic.

I just… I loved this? Again I say that I tend to struggle with secondary world fantasy, but authors like Tasha Suri and Nghi Vo seem determined to undermine my carefully established opinions. Tasha Suri comes out of fanfic, and you can really tell by the way she makes relationships so central to her plotting. I loved this book, and I cannot wait for Suri’s 2021 book The Jasmine Throne. I love her.

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

This round-up includes three nonfiction books (unless you count the book of poetry; in which case, four), and I stand by all of them. Because Internet is a linguistics book about the language of the internet, and it’s 24-karat gold in my opinion. Gretchen McCulloch talks about all the things you’d expect, like the development of emojis and the reason why memes work or don’t, as well as a whole slew of things you wouldn’t, like how Arabic-speakers convey the Arabic alphabet on Twitter and why old people use so many ellipses in their emails.

If you’ve ever been like “I am extremely online, but why?”, I highly recommend that you read Because Internet. It won’t explain why you are so online (who could?), but it will describe your life in terrifyingly accurate terms.

The True Queen, Zen Cho

I could just as well have put The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water on this list, because Zen Cho blessed us with two new releases in the last two years, but The True Queen was the one that I really loved. This may reflect my general preference for the novel-length format. The True Queen is a follow-up to the 2015 Sorcerer to the Crown, and I loved it so so so so so much. It’s set in an alternate version of the nineteenth century, as Sorcerer to the Crown was, but it focuses much more on people who aren’t English. Yay!

I love Zen Cho for so consistently writing books that could have been dark and grim but are, in fact, funny and light-hearted. In these quarantimes, it feels like a particularly revolutionary writing choice. The True Queen deals with a lot of heavy themes (imperialism, family conflict, etc.) in a way that isn’t too grim but also doesn’t feel like a cop-out by the author. I just truly loved this book, as I have all her books to date. I had so much fucking fun reading it, and in a year where fun was few and far between, I value that so so so much. ZEN CHO.

The City We Became, NK Jemisin

Yes, I was furious at the offhand way in which NK Jemisin dismissed New Orleans in this book, and yes, it made me cry on podcast. But apart from that gripe, which while not minor to me was minor in terms of the space it occupied in the book, I really loved NK Jemisin’s latest novel. It’s about the city of New York becoming sentient, manifesting itself in the avatars for each borough, who must come together to fight against an evil white Lovecraftian tentacle creature.

In perhaps the clearest measure of success, The City We Became made me feel agonizingly homesick for New York City. I was supposed to visit it in 2020! Reading this reminded me so keenly of what the city is like, in all its boroughs, in every iteration, and I just got really fucking emoshe about it. NK Jemisin’s writing is typically beautiful, her plotting typically tense, and I was left with a mighty yearning for more of this series.

A Song Below Water, Bethany Morrow

It’s the misogynoir fantasy novel of your dreams! Tavia has known for years that she’s a siren, and she knows that she must be careful never to reveal what she is. Living in the city of Portland, she has plenty of opportunity to see the kind of oppression faced by other Black people, especially Black women, especially sirens. In the aftermath of a siren murder trial, Tavia learns that an idol of hers is also a siren, and she begins to understand that she has no alternative but to use her voice to pursue her values.

I loved the worldbuilding in A Song Below Water, and I dearly hope that Bethany Morrow has plans for more books in this universe. Though Tavia struggles mightily with understanding what it means to be a siren, sirens are not the only magical being in this world. I would love to see books that deal with other kinds of magic and their implications — not least because Tavia’s beloved sister Effie has secrets of her own that are uncovered in the course of the novel. I love sister stuff! I love it! And this book is about sisters who are absolutely ride-or-die for each other, which was great to see — I love a complicated sibling relationship, but I also love the kind of relationship that’s all about love and loyalty.

Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall

Mirabile, Janet Kagan

Okay, I confess that this one’s on me. My aunt has been trying to get me to read Mirabile for, like, six years, and every time I was like “oh yeah yeah I’ll get to it for sure” and then because I couldn’t easily access the book, I did not for sure get to it. Last year, my aunt totally got me by just lending me the mf book, so it was either I read it promptly or I became one of those people who borrows a book and never remembers to return it. And y’all know I refuse to be that person.

Mirabile, which was published in 1991, is about xenobiologist (?) / xenoecologist (??) Mama Jason, who is responsible for researching and keeping under control the many mutant life forms that inevitably arise on the planet colony of Mirabile. This is a novel in stories (not usually my favorite thing), most of which were published in Asimov’s Science Fiction before being collected in novel form, and each chapter deals with a specific life form, from the Kangaroo Rex to the Loch Moose Monster. It’s the kind of low-stakes SFF novel that I’m constantly searching for: Though Mama Jason is tasked in some ways with the survival of the colony, there’s never any real question that she’ll succeed in her endeavors. She has a funny, wry narrative voice, and it’s overall just great to see an older woman protagonist in SF. My aunt was right. I should have read this sooner.

Part two is coming your way soon! Probably!

The post All the Books that Blew My Mind in 2020, Part 1 appeared first on Reading the End.

Never doubt that if there is a good article about The Westing Game, I will include that article in my links round-up. The Westing Game 5ever! (link)

Someone has to stop Paul Hollywood. Brian Phillips has a plan. (link)

The bind of being first. (link)

A fact: I will virtually ALWAYS pick up a whodunnit set in India & written by an Indian author. (link)

Catullus is a wonderful, rebellious, vulgar mess. Also, Cy Twombly. Because why wouldn’t Anne Carson write about both? God, I love Anne Carson. (link)

Talia Levin wrote about white supremacist online spaces, and the results are… expectedly horrifying. She talks about it here with ZORA‘s Anjali Enjeti. (link)

Rediscovering women authors from the heyday of ghost stories. (link)

This piece about anonymous Republican critics of Trump is a biting indictment of its own genre. (link)

I am Second Murderer but I did quietly disapprove of Macbeth’s policies. (a companion piece to the above) (link)

DOLLY PARTON. That is all. (link)

An appreciation of Witch Week. (link)

Nisi Shawl is very smart on the topic of what to think about when you’re considering writing a story about a marginalization you don’t share. (link)

This is a wonderful interview with two wonderful romance authors, Olivia Dade and Rebekah Weatherspoon! (link)

And this is an also-wonderful interview with some of my favorite SFF editors, talking about how SFF has changed and where it’s headed. (link)

Dwight K. Schrute kinda typifies our Political Moment, which makes it hard to watch him. I personally stopped my The Office rewatch sometime in season four because I couldn’t take Dwight OR Jim OR Michael, so ban men, basically. (link)

I guess “ban men” is not a bad note to leave things on! Stay safe out there, friends!

The post Fixing the Great British Bake-Off: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

….Here are some links.

Atul Gawande knows how to stop the spread of coronavirus when we reopen.

A VP at Amazon resigned in disgust due to the treatment of whistleblowers about the treatment of warehouse employees. Word.

God, Anne Carson rules.

Why we miss our weak ties so much in the age of COVID.

COVID has added a new clause to America’s racial contract.

Jaya Saxena signs up for oodles of online experiences, and reports back.

G….osh, I have learned some things about author Emily Giffin this month.

Antarctican isolation offers the perfect opportunity to observe a new accent as it forms. Antarctica also offers insight into why people are starting to go extra crazy in these exact days that we are now in.

SL Huang considers the vagaries of genre labels (as a writer whose books straddle the line between SF and thriller).

The hero our quarantine needs: The filmed staged version of Hamilton (with the original cast!) is coming to Disney+ on July 3rd.

The translation of women by women is a feminist project.

If you’re like me and have been mopity-moping around since 2013 about the lack of new Sarah McCarry books, your struggles are at an end!!

What are you up to these days, my lovely friends? Has anything from the internet particularly tickled your fancy? Drop me a line and tell me all about it!

The post Atul Gawande Saves the Day with Common Sense: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Disney princesses reimagined as cement mixers.

Here’s what’s going on at Tumblr.

Period-tracking apps benefit men, and marketers, and medical companies–not women.

What it’s like hearing Anne Carson lecture.

This journalist went to a Scholastic book fair and didn’t find it as magical as she remembered — but somehow this article just made me feel MORE fond and MORE magical about Scholastic book fairs. So, win?

“The work of black public intellectuals is shaped by white gatekeepers….There is power lost when the oppressor serves as interlocutor.” Mychal Denzel Smith on what it means to be a black public intellectual.

Jezebel talks to a biographer of Queen Anne to find out the truth behind the new movie The Favourite.

Here’s all the money the American taxpayer is spending on Confederate monuments and iconography.

An excellent profile of NK Jemisin, who is an excellent writer. Yay!

What happens when a fic goes mainstream?

Another excellent piece about the missing mothers of SFF, this time by Aliette de Bodard, a writer I like more and more as time goes on.

Author Ijeoma Oluo unpacks a few of the ways systemic racism functions in this interview.

Let’s find a way to put to rest the idea that there are “male brains” and “female brains.” (Yay Cordelia Fine!)

Here are the stories of eight “token black actors” from 90s TV shows.

The post ‘Tis the season for NPR Book Concierge!: A links round-up appeared first on Reading the End.

Antigonick is a translation of Sophocles’s play Antigone, with tangentially-if-at-all related illustrations by Bianca Stone. It’s written in Anne Carson’s handwriting, with small capitals, black and red text, and only occasionally punctuation. The effect of this is a little like reading Don Marquis, if his cockroach poet were inclined to write poems set in ancient Greece (and of course if he were writing by hand rather than on a typewriter).

Carson is not concerned with a literal translation, letting her characters remark upon various interpretations of Antigone throughout history — Brecht, Hegel, George Eliot. They employ modern turns of phrase — when Kreon says to Antigone, “You’re the one?”, she answer, “Bingo.” What Carson appears to be after is not the grandeur of the play but its oddness, how the tragedy lacks that inevitability that you find in Oedipus and just feels strange, unnecessary. She captures completely the inconvenience of Antigone’s morality, an Antigone feature of which I am very fond as it reminds me of my unflinchingly moral big sister. Viz.:

Ismene: you are a person in love with the impossible
Antigone: and when my strength is gone I’ll stop

The oddness of the play generally and Carson’s translation of it in particular are enhanced by illustrations by Bianca Stone on translucent vellum paper. The relationship of these illustrations to the text of the play is obscure (and at times nonexistent), but they are tonally a perfect match for Carson’s translation.

There is one for you to look at. You can’t get quite the full idea of the book without seeing the translucent pages against the black-and-red text, but use your imagination. Stone and Carson have produced a strange and lovely book, which I recommend both for its ideas and for its physical beauty.

The post Review: Antigonick, Sophokles (translated by Anne Carson) appeared first on Reading the End.

To recapitulate, Nox is a version of the journal Anne Carson made after her brother died. They had been estranged for years, and she heard of his death several weeks after it had happened, because it took that long for his widow to find Anne Carson’s phone number. The organizing principle of the book is a poem by Catullus in which he travels to his brother’s grave, reaching it only long after his brother has died. It’s a beautiful poem, difficult to translate because its rhythms are so crucial to it, though Anne Carson does give it a try, late in the book.

In If Not, Winter, her translation of Sappho, Anne Carson proved that she is a fan of the fragment. Nox is equally a creation of fragments. We see scraps of a letter from Carson’s brother, a few sentences that she remembers him saying in their rare conversations, a photograph or two of Carson and her brother as children, short excerpts from Herodotus or from a book on haiku. As in If Not, Winter, and to similar evocative effect, Carson leaves the reader to wonder (as she wonders herself) what might fill in those gaps.

Each verso in Nox includes a single word from the Catullus poem, formatted as a dictionary entry. Midwayish through the book Carson plays with the double meaning of “entry” as an item in a dictionary and “entry” as a way in to something (a way in to her brother). What seems at first a straightforward definition of mutam becomes something slightly else in Carson’s hands. She gives the examples “mutum dico, I do not say a word; tempus magis mutum a litteris, there was a better reason for not writing”, and on the opposite page:

What he needed from me I have no idea. When I caught up to him in high school (he was older by four years) he liked me to do his homework but that wasn’t it. My moral advice he brushed aside, you’re different. He called me professor or pinhead, epithets implying intellectual respect but we never had a conversation about ideas in our life. And when he telephoned me — out of the blue — about half a year after our mother died he had nothing to say.

I took a (very dull) philosophy of art class in college, and I remember one of the things we talked about as a possible element in defining art was that a piece of art was something that had been purposefully assembled to convey an emotion. I’m not saying that has to be the definition, but it’s a definition that Carson’s book fits. Nox feels assembled rather than written, almost more like an artifact than a book. I like liminal (entry again!) art objects, that hover on the border between art and the everyday (Cf. this, just because I really liked it when I saw it and now I want to share it.). Nox is something like a book, and something like a private journal, and something like a mixed-media painting.

As I was reading Nox (very slowly, over several consecutive nights, to make it last longer), I felt intensely grateful to my awesome Latin teacher, for giving me so many of Catullus’s poems in Latin, and making Catullus a poet who matters to me. My Latin teacher was devoted to her subject in a way that few of my teachers have been, and I can still hear her voice in my head every time I approach a Latin text. Nox resonated with me immediately because Catullus has been living in my brain for years, pledging eternal-but-qualified love to Lesbia and trudging drearily across many lands and over many oceans to say his hail and farewell to his long-dead brother.

(This isn’t to say that you can’t enjoy Nox without having read Catullus before, because I am confident that you can. It’s beautiful and elegiac, and Anne Carson translates the poem anyway, eventually.)

Speaking of Latin things, who here knew that Cinderella actually named Gus-Gus Octavius? Get it? Get it? ROMAN EMPIRE JOKE ALERT. (Octavius = Caesar Augustus) If someone from work hadn’t mentioned this to me, I would never have known, because I think Cinderella is saccharine and have no intention of ever rewatching it. But this Octavius business makes me feel very slightly a teeny bit fond of it.

The post Review: Nox, Anne Carson appeared first on Reading the End.

The reasons I thought I was going to be disappointed when I opened the box Nox:

1. Anne Carson and Anne Sexton are the same person.*
*Fun fact: No, they aren’t. Anne Carson translated Sappho, and Anne Sexton hit her children and killed herself.

2. Anne Carson killed herself over thirty years ago**, therefore all her stuff has already been published, therefore this will just be fragments o’ crap they are trying to make interesting by putting them into a book and then putting the book in a fetching little box.
**No, she didn’t. That was Anne Sexton. Stop it, brain.

3. I love things that come in nice boxes. Not only do they have a prearranged storage unit that makes them seem tidy even when strewn around my room like all my other stuff, but also they feel like a present. The publisher knows this and is trying to seduce me.

4. Many things look pretty because someone came up with a good marketing scheme, but then when you dig a bit deeper, they turn out to be not nearly as awesome as the marketing scheme that made you want to dig a bit deeper.

5. I read how Zachary Mason (whoa, y’all, I never reviewed The Lost Books of the Odyssey. Stand by.), whom I will of course be marrying someday, sent The Lost Books of the Odyssey to reviewers inside of a little wooden Trojan horse. No box containing a book will ever win more than that.

But then I opened the box, and the book wasn’t a book, but one long, foldy paper that folded out accordion-style. And the first page after the copyright and acknowledgments contained a smudgy copy of Catullus 101, the poem he wrote after going to see his brother’s grave. I may have shrieked out loud. It was like running into an old friend unexpectedly. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this to you, but I love Catullus. I love him. (I wrote I love him three more times, but deleted them because I know you get the picture with me just saying it twice.) He has such a lovely, human variety of poems — some of them are whimsical, some are pining, some are vindictive, some are really filthy, and some — like 101 — are heartbreaking. I am utterly fond of that poem and realized last year that I remembered a surprisingly high percentage of it from memorizing it in a grade school Latin class. Catullus travels to his brother’s grave, getting there of course long after his brother has died. He says he’s come ut…mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem, to speak in vain to his brother’s silent ashes.

Anne Carson the poet and classicist created a journal of scraps and reflections following her brother’s death, and Nox, this book in a box, is the closest approximation to that journal that she could manage. Each fold-out verso contains a single word from the Catullus poem, with a translation of that word and some examples of its use. The rectos have a variety of things on them, memories and photographs and thoughts about history and night-time and memory.

There is nothing not great about this. Except, obviously, that Anne Carson’s brother died. The book is in a box. It’s Catullus. It’s Anne Carson-not-Sexton, whose haunting, evocative scraps of translated Sappho in If Not, Winter won my heart, as if my heart needed winning. (Catullus adored Sappho’s poetry, by the way. Catullus loved Sappho so much that when he had to use a fake name for his married girlfriend so her husband wouldn’t catch on, he nicknamed her “Lesbia” after Sappho’s island home of Lesbos.) The papers fold out.

Okay, this is not a review. I didn’t read the book yet although I really really want to. I didn’t buy it because I am about to get a bunch of new books from another source, and since I am poor, and new books are not a regular feature in my life, I’d rather space out the new book acquisitions. My plan was to wait until some week when I was having a really, really bad day, and then buy the book for myself as a lovely treat. Only it occurred to me that Nox is published by New Directions Publishing Company, and it is a small press, and what if I waited and then when I went to buy Nox I couldn’t find it? That would make a bad day worse, not better. Thoughts?

P.S. Frances of Nonsuch Book loved it, and has pictures. Ditto Emily of Evening All Afternoon.

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