Shabbat
Reading List

Daniel May (publisher): On March 17th, Israel resumed its bombing of Gaza, killing in one overnight attack 436 people, among them 183 children. Here is how the Associated Press described the scene at one of Gaza’s few remaining emergency rooms: “One nurse was trying to resuscitate a boy sprawled on the floor with shrapnel in his heart. A young man with most of his arm gone sat nearby, shivering. A barefoot boy carried in his younger brother, around 4 years old, whose foot had been blown off. Blood was everywhere on the floor, with bits of bone and tissue.” Reading these words, I found myself returning to a grim set of questions, well-worn by the days and weeks and months of the last year and a half: How much to keep reading? How much to look? Does staring into this void force me to face it? Or does the staring just build mental calluses that wrongly soften the blows? Is looking away simply necessary self-protection, or am I building up the muscles of avoidance? And what is the point of these questions anyway; isn’t this all a slide into narcissism, when children’s legs have been blown off?

In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, the Egyptian American journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad faces the void—and stays there. Over 187 pages, he tracks the emotional and political toll of witnessing Gaza’s devastation. In form, the book is a polemic, an assault on the myths that the West tells itself and the hypocrisy of American liberals who proclaim their commitment to human rights while insisting that the unfolding destruction of Gaza is justifiable. For El Akkad, this is a story of many losses—above all the losses of Palestinians murdered by those who profess their commitment to freedom, but, most personally for him, the loss of a belief in American ideals that, as a child growing up in Egypt and Qatar listening to Nirvana records whose covers had been blackened by censors, provided inspiration from afar. Covering the wrath of America’s war on terror as a journalist showed him “the ugly cracks in this thing called ‘the free world.’” And yet, he continues, he “believed that the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable. Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”

The book describes what happens when that belief is abandoned. One outcome is anger, directed primarily at politicians, journalists, and arts institutions that describe the destruction as “tragic,” but are in fact most offended by protestors whose tactics they find distasteful or those who buck liberal dogma by refusing to vote for the president who supplied the bombs. When the Democratic president supports genocide, he writes, “an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: ‘vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more’ starts to sound a lot like ‘vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.’”

As scathing as that indictment is, I found the book most affecting, and most troubling, when El Akkad turns his gaze inward. “What is wrong with me that I can’t keep living as normal?” he asks. “What is wrong with all these people who can?” And what is to be done when every action seems so limited, at best symbolic? Ultimately, the book lands on a call for refusal: a refusal most practically to support the machinery of war economically, but, more broadly, a refusal to participate in any institution that contributes to or supports the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza. He calls this “negative resistance” and suggests that while the state is well equipped to handle protest, it has no answer for the person who says “I will have no part of this.”

It’s not entirely clear what this might mean in practice, at least for most of us. How exactly are we—as taxpayers and students and workers and rent-payers in the heart of the empire—supposed to “have no part of this?” El Akkad finds some solace in recent protests and boycotts, but given the darkness of the book, it isn’t surprising that he is most moved by the extreme sacrifice of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation. This example points to the central dilemma of withdrawal as a form of political resistance: The most meaningful sacrifices seem beyond what most could be expected to offer. For this reason, Thoreau’s famous refusal to pay taxes to a slave nation always felt to me both the only morally defensible position and of limited political power. I can’t say, though, that I have answers for what to do in the face of such unrelenting horror. But in reading El Akkad’s book, I realized just how much, over the last year, I have trained myself to stop asking these questions. I know the reasons why I’ve done so, but it is still a moral and political failure. Wherever we go, El Akkad is correct that we must start with refusal, if only the refusal to look away.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): When the French director François Ozon is on his game, there are few filmmakers who can equal his ability to draw out the uneasiness, the pure creepiness, that dwells beneath the surface of his characters’ lives. In his work desire is omnipresent, though often expressed obliquely, and nothing and no one is safe from its depredations. Secrets abound, and what people show others is merely a screen concealing who they really are, what they really want.

The director’s latest film, When Fall Is Coming, is Ozon at his most Ozonian. None of the characters are who or what they initially seem to be; their acts at first appear to contradict their nature, but gradually their logic emerges. The film revolves around Michelle, a beautiful and stylish octogenarian who lives in a middle-class home in the French countryside. Against this rural backdrop, she carries herself with a distinctly urban grace. Her closest friend is the chain-smoking and down-to-earth Marie-Claude, who is much more of the region. But despite their apparent incompatibility, the two women are close enough that Michelle regularly drives her friend to visit her son, Vincent, in prison. Michelle’s quiet life in retirement is disrupted when her beloved grandson arrives for an extended visit, escorted by his mother—who is poisoned by mushrooms picked by Michelle. While she insists it was a terrible accident, accusations fly that the poisoning was intentional, and the visit is quickly terminated. There are hints of Michelle’s louche past, which has destroyed the mother-daughter relationship and ruined her daughter’s life.

While Ozon sometimes explains what in the characters’ pasts drives them in the present, for good and ill, a zone of shadow lingers over the edges of every life and action. Did Michelle mean to poison her daughter, after all? Certainly not—unless she did. Even she’s not sure. Why, when Vincent is released from prison, does he develop a strangely close relationship with Michelle? And why does he say he’s going to hang out with friends late at night but actually head to a deserted playground, where unexplained figures occupy the swings? We expect things to go badly awry, and indeed they do—or perhaps they don’t, and all is for the best. In When Fall Is Coming, Ozon presents us with a world whose inhabitants are much like the mysterious mushrooms. Are they toxic or a delicacy? It’s almost impossible to tell.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): I first encountered the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival in 2014, where—accompanied on stage only by his guitar and his wife, Amanda Shires, playing fiddle—he performed memorable melodies from his breakthrough album, Southeastern. In the following months, I grew attached to the album, the release of which capped off a comeback narrative for Isbell. A one-time songwriting prodigy for the Drive By Truckers, he had been kicked out of the band for excessive drinking, but thanks to the steadfast love of Shires (also a talented songwriter and musician in her own right), he had managed to get sober. Southeastern chronicled this tale with songs like the classic love ballad “Cover Me Up,” and alt-country jams like “Stockholm” and “New South Wales.” But here and on his next LP, Something More Than Free, Isbell also dabbled in richly drawn fictional portraits, inhabiting the psyches of lost Southern men trying to maneuver their way toward emotional attachments. Throughout much of college, whenever I was running out of time before a paper deadline, I’d drag myself to a back corner of the library, face the wall, put on Southeastern or Something More Than Free, and white-knuckle my way through the writing. Shockingly, this association hasn’t diminished my love for the albums: The melodies were just that catchy, the lyrics just that clever.

Isbell released his next few records under the name “Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit,” reflecting the pride-of-place of his full band (including Shires). These albums, particularly 2017’s The Nashville Sound, continually elevated his stardom in the Americana world, earning several Grammys, but I was less captivated. The band is talented, and a real treat to see live, but outside of a few standout songs, many of Isbell’s melodies seemed less specific, his songwriting voice less unique. And the narrative—of his and Shires’s world-conquering love—was beginning to get, well, repetitive. Isbell had aced the straightforward pledge of devotion with “Cover Me Up,” and the much-acclaimed “If We Were Vampires” couldn’t live up to it. Forgive me, but there are parallels here to Taylor Swift, who spent several albums spooling a meta-narrative about escaping scandal and finding the perfect man, which resulted in her writing the same song again and again.

At the end of 2023, though, Shires and Isbell divorced. All too soon after, Isbell, now in his mid-40s, had shiny white veneers on his teeth and a new 29-year-old girlfriend. As with fans’ reactions to Swift’s 2023 breakup from longtime beau Joe Alwyn and subsequent fling with edgelord 1975 frontman Matty Healy, many die-hard Isbell fans were none too pleased to see their oracle acting, well, like an asshole. (And if you think pop stans are the only dramatic ones, you should see the folk-rock bros melting down over Isbell’s betrayal on Reddit.) But just as Swift responded to this friction with some daring songwriting, the personal turmoil seems to have driven Isbell back into the studio—alone with only a guitar, where he recorded Foxes in the Snow, released last month, his most intimate and interesting album since his earlier solo efforts. Here, Isbell’s deft guitar picking manages to do the work of a full band, swelling and fading in a multiplicity of voices. The songwriting is simple and focused, relying on Isbell’s natural ability to churn out choruses that sound like instant folk classics. Lyrically, the songs offer honesty, even when uncomfortable: “I was a Gravelweed and I needed you to raise me / I’m sorry the day came when I felt that I was raised,” he sings, on the best song, “Gravelweed,” sounding both penitent and bitter. The next line doubles as an apology to both an ex and an audience that seemed to prefer an older, better-behaved version of him: “And now that I live to see my melodies betray me / I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.” (On “True Believer,” the narrator has harsher words for the meddling fans: “Why y’all examining me like I’m a murder suspect?”) Elsewhere, on “Good While It Lasted,” he captures how the giddy anxiety of a new relationship can share some of the same emotional hallmarks of heartbreak: “For a moment in the afternoon / I almost didn’t think of you / And it was good while it lasted.” It’s not a perfect album, and there are a few snoozers here—“Don’t Be Tough,” “Wind Behind the Rain”—but Isbell’s return to the core songwriting skills that make him great is something to celebrate.

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board): The Encampments, opening this weekend at the Angelika in NYC, is a new film that tells the story of the past year’s student protest movement—in its own words and on its own terms. At the movie’s center is the US-backed genocide in Gaza, and the activism of Columbia students who sparked a nationwide uprising when they demanded that their university divest from the war economy. Narrated by Columbia students, including Mahmoud Khalil, the film tells the story of how student protestors escalated their tactics and grew the movement, all as the genocide grinded on and repression from Columbia’s administration grew. Their work led to the launch of the Gaza solidarity encampment and the occupation of Hind’s (Hamilton) Hall in April 2024. The film shows how the protest movement spread across the country, in some places garnering significant attention, such as the encampment at UCLA, where students were attacked by fascist mobs, as the administration and local police stood by.

At the screening I attended, Munir Atalla, who heads production for the Palestinian-led Watermelon Pictures film label, which helped produce the movie, described Mahmoud Khalil as “the beating heart of the film.” Listening to Khalil’s kind voice and watching his steady presence between press conferences and negotiations felt particularly poignant and urgent in this moment, as he continues to languish in ICE detention, waiting to be reunited with his pregnant wife and community.

The other beating heart of the film is, of course, Gaza, and specifically its young people living under Israel’s war of annihilation. We hear from Bisan Owda, the award-winning storyteller and journalist from Gaza, who weeps as she speaks of what the students’ solidarity has meant to her, what it feels like to know that her people are not forgotten or abandoned. Back at the Columbia encampment, we see an evening meeting open with the news that a student had lost more of her relatives in Gaza that day. The students remind each other: This is why we are here. Gaza is not a world away; we are all connected, and all complicit.

As the Trump administration wages its war on universities under the false pretext of fighting antisemitism, watching the film felt like a powerful corrective, and—dare I say—even a balm, to the crazy-making of being gaslit by misinformation and smear campaigns. As Israel’s daily atrocities in Gaza continue, and the repression across the US worsens, the film is also a reminder of the call for justice that, despite everything, is growing and that the powerful are desperate to stifle.

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): I am forever working through a backlog of novels that came out a decade or two ago, but that I never managed to read. The upside of this practice is that I read books that have stood the test of time; the downside is that sometimes they don’t feel so current. But the most recent novel I finished, Louise Erdrich’s LaRose from 2016, very much does. The book begins with a tragedy on the first page: While hunting deer, Landreaux Iron accidentally shoots and kills his best friend’s five-year-old son, Dusty. This first loss is followed quickly by another. As a kind of justice, the Irons give their own five-year-old child, LaRose, to Dusty’s parents to raise as their own. But the novel is not about either of these events, both of which occur within the first few pages. It is about everything that happens in the aftermath.

The question of how we heal from the irreparable, or how we move forward from the unforgivable, feels paradoxically hyper-relevant and hyper-irrelevant to me right now. As the genocide in Palestine continues, its death toll climbing by the day, it seems like the wrong time to think about repair. And yet I don’t know how to banish the question from my mind—because every unspeakable act brings with it a seemingly unanswerable question: How will the world ever recover from this? How will anyone ever heal from what has been done?

I thought often, while reading LaRose, about something a restorative justice practitioner once told me: “Forgiveness and healing are not expectations of the process,” she said. “The hope is just to move the needle in some way.” In the novel, no one ever heals from Dusty’s death; his loss is just as devastating on the last page as it is on the first. But—and I realize this is a strange thing to say—it’s an uplifting novel. In those first few pages, it’s hard to imagine how the book can even go on. The fact that it does is an achievement worth noting.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some years ago, in a review of the first-ever American exhibition of the paintings of the great early 20th-century Austrian painter Richard Gerstl, I mentioned a few other figures who deserve a far more prominent place in art history and institutions than they actually occupy. One of the underappreciated artists I cited, Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946), is now the subject of a magnificent show at David Zwirner Gallery, up until April 12th. The eponymous exhibition—the first show dedicated to Spilliaert in New York in nearly 50 years—is perfectly curated and organized. Despite the modest scope, it’s an absolute blockbuster.

Like his more famous compatriot James Ensor, Spilliaert was born and spent most of his life in the seaside city of Ostend, Belgium. The place features prominently in many of the works on display. Indeed, Spilliaert specialized in scenes of a resort in its dead season—the empty shore, the empty promenade, empty streets and the empty sea. In one 1909 work, the curves of the Ostend promenade and of the Kursaal (a spa building) rising from the sands produce a kind of unsettling fisheye perspective that accentuates the barrenness of the most touristy part of the city. In another 1909 study of the promenade, dripping India ink summons a shadowy melancholy. And in The Foreshore or the Steamer, Spilliaert uses different materials—watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, and chalk—for each natural element, transforming a seemingly simple scene into a rich tapestry of feeling.

Even when Ostend isn’t explicitly present, the chill of the North Sea can be felt in almost everything on display. Take, for instance, Spilliaert’s icy portraits, which bear the obvious influence of Edvard Munch, like his ghostly, blank-eyed 1908 self-portrait, suffused with a sickly green, or the eerie Lady with Lorgnette. But perhaps most striking is the immense 1912 work The Hanged, in which dead bodies dangle from the bare branches of a tree. While an American viewer can’t help but read the image as one of a mass lynching, it is in fact an illustration of a poem by the medieval bandit poet François Villon, likely written while awaiting his execution. Spilliaert beautifully captures Villon’s anguished call: “Brother humans who will live after us / Don’t harden your hearts against us / For the pity you show we poor ones / God will feel for you.”

Spilliaert is, in a way, a cursed artist. When, after decades of neglect, London’s Royal Academy of Art finally held a major show of his work in 2020, the timing made it pass relatively unseen. Lord knows when a show of his work will next make its way here. It shouldn’t be missed.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): In 2013, nine months after the death of the radical feminist luminary Shulamith Firestone, Susan Faludi published an impressive, heavily researched account of Firestone’s life in The New Yorker, laying out the personal and political dramas that separated the brilliant author of the Dialectic of Sex from the movement she helped found, and catalyzed her lonely spiral into poverty and madness. An explosive writer and organizer, Firestone was at the center of the New York City-based radical feminist movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s that tore itself apart almost as soon as it announced itself in earnest, and just as its ideas were gaining ground. Faludi’s article details this implosion in a vivid, claustrophobic catalog of leftist folly: call-out culture (they called it “trashing”) and impossible purity tests, factionalism, and a self-destructive penchant for tearing down its leaders. By 1970, the movement appeared gutted, with most of its prominent leadership tossed and groups splitting down to the atom. Several women suffered nervous breakdowns; some ended up homeless; several others committed suicide. Firestone was one of those destroyed leaders. “Basically, I don’t believe finally that the revolution is so imminent that it’s worth tampering with my whole psychological structure, submitting to mob rule, and so on, which is what they’re all into,” she wrote to her sister in 1970. A few years later, she had a full schizophrenic break.

This portrait of a movement driven crazy by movement work, leaving women who aspired to sisterhood in extreme isolation, is the backdrop to Airless Spaces, Firestone’s second and last book, published in 1998 after nearly a decade spent in and out of public psychiatric hospitals. (Semiotext(e) recently reissued it with an introduction by Chris Kraus and an afterword by Faludi, but I read an old copy and can’t speak to these new additions.) The jacket copy refers to the book’s collection of intimate, tragic vignettes as “short stories,” and I suppose they are, but they are more a collection of people, such as you might find in a terrible waiting room lit with buzzing fluorescent lights: exhausted, forgotten, barely hanging on. Sometimes they are Firestone—she is recognizable despite the various names she gives herself in third-person tellings, as well as in the “I.” Much of the time they are sharply observed portraits of others, people whose lives outside the institutions have come to make even less sense than they do inside. It’s a bleak read, to be sure—the last section is a collection of “Suicides I Have Known,” ending with that of her brother—but the writing is crisp, entertaining, and alive, a reminder that our guide to this gallery of life’s “losers” is none other than the great Shulamith Firestone.

There were a few strong attempts by intergenerational groups of feminists to build a community around Firestone in her later years, but ultimately they did not last, as the women moved away or themselves grew ill. She died alone in her apartment, face down on the floor. “Care” has become a kind of buzzword in movement spaces. But if the term has become cliched, its practice remains elusive. If there’s anything to glean from Firestone’s story—in movements and mental institutions that were more malady than cure—it’s that we cannot stop talking about care until we learn how to do it. Otherwise, our political communities will end in tatters; our ideals will come to nothing.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Women’s consciousness-raising groups of the late 1960s and early ‘70s—apart from serving as the pilot light of second-wave feminism—had a significant theatrical life. Feminist theater companies that sprang up across the country half a century ago often staged the inherently dramatic process of CR participants discovering that the oppression they thought was theirs alone was in fact shared by others, that the problems they faced were not individual but structural. As these groups fizzled out over the years—casualties of internal conflicts over sexuality, race, and class; the institutionalization of feminism; and especially conservative backlash—pop culture began treating them as a joke. The movies Women in Revolt (1971), Annie Hall (1977), 10 (1979), and Private Benjamin (1980), for instance, as well as many early SNL sketches, mocked the insights women drew from CR groups.

In 1988, a moment marked by Reaganism’s triumphant ascent and glossy magazines that extolled the “new traditionalist” women who were fleeing unfulfilling jobs to find contentment in serving their husbands and children, Wendy Wasserstein’s play The Heidi Chronicles premiered to rave reviews and major prizes. A touching and troubling comedy, its passive protagonist essentially blames the women’s movement—and not, say, the failure of men to share equally in housework or the expense and scarcity of good childcare—for not having enabled well-educated, upper-middle-class white women like herself to enjoy both satisfying family lives and flourishing careers. Lauded as giving voice to the disappointment women were reluctant to air, the play’s portrayal of a CR group showed a hilariously touchy-feely encounter where women constantly hug and vacantly reassure each other.

Now, a generation later, the wonderfully shape-shifting playwright Bess Wohl has returned CR groups to the stage, but this time with genuine curiosity, complexity, self-reflection, and yes, humor. Her poignant new play, Liberation—running Off-Broadway until April 6th—depicts a group of six diverse women in CR meetings held in the gym of a rec center in Ohio in the ‘70s. Over the span of several years, we see them tentatively, then more forthrightly, take up issues like workplace discrimination, the overwhelming responsibilities of caregiving, and stifling marriages (“Now my kids are grown, and my husband is retired which means he’s home all day,” says one, by way of introduction. “I’m here because I need things to get me out of the house so I don’t stab him to death.”) In a moving, anti-titillating second-act opener, the women sit together naked, exploring what they like—but really, mostly hate—about their bodies. They bond, they fight, they reveal their hypocrisies, they become politicized.

But the play is not simply a chronicle of this process; it’s a deep and emotional, even desperate, inquiry by the daughter of the CR group’s initiator, looking back on the ‘70s from the present. As the framing narrator of what the play’s subtitle calls “A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember,” the daughter is an affable host, setting the scene and walking in and out of it, playing her own mother in the CR group sessions. As a writer both beleaguered by and adoring of her own children, she is looking belatedly for guidance from her recently deceased mother: “My devoted, dutiful mom who sewed the costumes for every school play and cooked every family dinner and did all the dishes and took me to every piano lesson and sat through it and never, ever missed a recital even though I was definitely not a musician—she was actually . . . a radical?” the daughter wonders aloud. In the strange space of theater, even one that’s fairly realistic in its depictions, she can do what a lot of us yearn to do: meet a deceased parent and ask what we never asked about their pre-parenthood life. In a beautiful, gut-wrenching scene toward the end, the daughter does exactly this—only to find that the search for a usable past is as failingly personal as it is political.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Jonathan Schell’s The Village of Ben Suc—recently reissued by NYRB Classics—originally appeared as a long article in the July 8th, 1967 issue of The New Yorker. Schell, then just 23 years old, was on the scene in January 1967 when the Vietnamese village of Ben Suc, a hotbed of activity by the freedom fighters of the National Liberation Front (known by Americans as the Viet Cong), was, as the phrase went at the time, “destroyed in order to save it.” It was a village that, like others in the triangle on the Saigon River, loyally paid its taxes to the NLF and housed many of its members. The Americans therefore decided to clear thousands of people from their homes and fields, parking them in a makeshift space that resembled nothing so much as a lightweight concentration camp, its inhabitants forbidden from passing its perimeter on pain of death. While Ben Suc was not, like My Lai, the site of a massacre, the American GIs innocents certainly killed civilians callously and carelessly. When it first appeared, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Schell’s text was a work of moral and political immediacy; today it remains essential reading as the patient examination of one of our great crimes as Americans.

Schell writes of the assault on Ben Suc in a measured tone and with a specificity that underlines both the cruelty and stupidity of the American effort in Vietnam. We learn, for instance, that only one member of the American forces in Ben Suc spoke Vietnamese, which obviously inhibited their ability to communicate with people who had been deprived of their homes, supposedly for their own good. And when the army provided their victims rice, it was not Vietnamese but poor-quality American rice; for the villagers, this was tantamount to being fed dog food. He portrays the American soldiers not as murderous goons, but as young men infected with a casual racism they felt no need to hide—and which he dutifully records in painstaking detail. Small wonder that the US and its local puppet allies lost the war for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese.

For me, as for many of those of my generation, a life on the left has been a life of defeat after defeat, and often of discovering that we supported the wrong causes, even if for the right reasons. But as The Village of Ben Suc affirms, strident opposition to the war in Vietnam—and advocacy for true justice, not just the mealy-mouthed “peace” so many restricted themselves to—was perhaps the most correct cause of my life. (For a comprehensive demonstration, I also recommend Geoffrey Wawro’s The Vietnam War, a thorough and frank military history that shows how the US could under no circumstances have won the war, while unflinchingly documenting the innumerable crimes committed in our name.) Reading Schell’s text now renewed my disgust for the ubiquitous sentimentality and lachrymose verbiage about our veterans; I, for one, will never thank anyone who took part in that calamity for their service.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): For those of us who identify as “readers,” it can be difficult to disentangle who we are from what we’ve read. I have often in my life—though I admit, mostly when I was much younger—had the sensation that a book was a direct message, sent to me by some higher power (even when that was, well, a teacher). Like a most accurate tarot reading, it said this is what you need to know right now, or even, this is who you need to be, in characters and symbols at once clear and obscure.

In Bibliophobia, the critic Sarah Chihaya attempts to take stock of her reading life, and to understand its intertwinement with her severe depression. In place of, say, a family tree, or a character list, the book’s very first pages are a list of the texts she will discuss in order of appearance, suggesting both love as well as a formidable loneliness. “Since I was a child,” she writes, “I have secretly believed that if I read enough, one day the right book would come along and save me.” Of course, if books have the power to save, they can also destroy—either directly, by shattering some defense or mendacity (The Bluest Eye does this for an adolescent Chihaya trying to understand her own experience of race as a Japanese American in lilywhite Ohio), or simply by withholding the anticipated salvation. “For me,” Chihaya writes early in the book, “being a depressed person and being a reader-writer are knotted up in each other all the way back to the beginning.” The book braids together close, impressionistic reads of various meaningful texts with passages tracing Chihaya’s suicidal thought habits from her youth through adulthood. She consistently reads her own life as just another text, and yet the triumph of the book is that in its writing, you begin to feel her finally inhabiting this life as fully as the stories of others, where she previously preferred to dwell.

For me, one of the joys of the book was actually the personal inventory it inspired me to perform. How have I been changed by literature? Which pieces specifically? What did they do? I can rattle off the texts that destroyed me and put me back together—Angels in America, Gilead, Giovanni’s Room, Villette—but unlike Chihaya, an inveterate re-reader adept at weaving literature into her own biography, I find it difficult to answer these questions with as much particularity. It was always about language, that much I know, and the sense that despite all the fumbling to communicate in real life—the fundamentally doomed linkage between signifier and signified—these books were a place where language had, impossibly, won. Here I was, somewhere else, seeing something in my own mind’s eye, thinking a thought I had always known but never articulated. I suppose I’m describing an experience of hope, though I’ve never thought of it in those terms before. In the weeks since I’ve read Bibliophobia, I’ve been trying to isolate different texts in my mind, to imagine myself without them. It is never so straightforward as a major life lesson missed, merely a small, subtle glitch in my form: an imperceptible blurring in part of my outline, a dull discoloration on a small patch of skin. But without all those books, it would be obliterating.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In the mysterious opening of Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film, a group of youngish people are gathered in a room as an old computer is wheeled in. The device contains ten-year-old footage from a movie that was never completed, which we soon get to see: A handsome young man is on the balcony of an apartment building with another man in drag; they go to a crowded market and soon wind up in bed together. One of the men in the audience makes a call and asks the person on the other end to come see him. The recipient, it turns out, is one of the actors in the unfinished film, who has aged well, and the man summoning him is the director of the material, who explains that he wants to complete the project, jumping over the decade between shoots. (During this interval, he explains, the footloose and fancy-free young man we saw has become a wildly successful real estate magnate.) They have limited time to complete the film, due to the actor’s prior engagements—and the imminent birth of his child. So they agree to rush the process, squeezing it all into the 15-day Lunar New Year of 2020. But with only a few days to go, word comes that a dangerous epidemic has broken out in Wuhan.

Watching An Unfinished Film, which is shot in a compelling documentary style, you can’t help but feel that you’re there in the midst of the original Covid outbreak. The handheld camera follows the cast and crew as they are struck by panic and descend into chaos. The director does his best to hold everything together, but it’s futile; they try and fail to flee to their homes as security forces blockade them into the hotel in which they’re shooting the film, in accordance with China’s strict quarantine procedures. The lead actor, desperate to get home to his wife and infant, scuffles with the police to no avail. And so the world is reduced to a hotel room.

Ye, one of China’s most respected directors, expertly blends the footage from the supposedly old film fragment (which is actually a current work-in-progress of his own) into the many layers of the present, mixing fiction with actual scenes of China under lockdown. He elegantly deploys split-screen to capture the uncanny but all-too-familiar multiplication of images in video calls, in which each speaker appears twice: on the screen of the film, and on the miniature screen-within-the-screen. But it is the claustrophobia and fear of the terrible first Covid months that pack the main punch. An Unfinished Film is a masterful “making of” film of a film never made—but it is also a documentary of a real-life disaster.

Maia Ipp (contributing editor): What if there was an MFA program for stand-up comedy? This is the premise of Camille Bordas’s wonderful new novel The Material, which dives into a world where aspiring young comedians workshop each other’s routines and their mid-career faculty begrudgingly advise them while trying to get their own careers and personal lives back on track. I was delighted by how Bordas made it feel effortless to take on Big Ideas and serious emotional content alongside so much genuine, sometimes painful humor. Indeed, the question of cruelty in comedy comes up throughout the book in interesting ways, and the book’s commitment to narrative is matched by its sharp intelligence. And perhaps most importantly for a book about comedians, it’s very, very funny. I loved it. (And I’ll avoid spoilers, but one of the student’s bits, about an interactive Holocaust survivor hologram, might be of special interest to the JC audience.)

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): For those of us who live under a rock, awards season is the one time a year when new music and movies make their way to us, often via insistent recommendations by family and friends. This year, I’m grateful to this form of compulsory cultural education for bringing me the music of Chappell Roan. All I previously knew of Roan was that she had refused to endorse Kamala Harris over Palestine, and had responded to a Biden White House invitation to perform for Pride month with a memorably artistic “fuck you.” Turns out she’s got more than just good politics: This girl has got pipes. Roan’s now-soulful, now-fluttering vocals are the heart of her album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which I devoured in one sitting last weekend.

The album is a spectrum from bop (“Femininomenon,” “HOT TO GO!” “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl”) and ballad (“Coffee,” “California,” “Kaleidescope”), but the best stuff lies somewhere in the middle. This includes the irresistible “Pink Pony Club,” a queer anthem that starts with a Tennessee-to-Santa Monica bildungsroman and ends with “I…’m gonna keep on dancing at the Pink Pony Club” playing in a loop in your head for days to come. Other mid-spectrum gems include “Red Wine Supernova,” a glittering dance number about early love with a pre-chorus so catchy that a lesser singer would have stopped right there; “Picture You,” a song whose soft, almost-growled verses slide up to a soaring refrain that shows off the storytelling power of Roan’s vocal creaks; and “Casual,” a low-fi, Avril Lavigne-esque production that, together with Roan’s relatively-restrained vocals, allows her absurdly diaristic lyrics to take center stage.

And what lyrics they are. These are not your mom’s ballads, nor the bops from gym class. “Red Wine Supernova” opens mid-scene with “her canine teeth in the side of my neck”; “Picture You” masquerades as a slow-dance track but is actually the most aching song ever written about masturbation; and “Casual” features a chorus so R-rated that parents are substituting the lyric “green beans on the passenger seat and you’re freaking me out” to be able to listen to it with their kids. I get it; you do what you need to do to listen to great music, and Midwest Princess is certainly that—emotionally hefty, vocally beguiling, gay as all hell, and designed to make you feel both young, and how much younger you could still be.

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): It wasn’t until I was reading an article about British composer Daniel Blumberg’s Oscar win for his soundtrack for The Brutalist that I realized I know his work in a totally different genre. Before he turned his attention to the more orchestral, avant-garde music for which he’s now famous, Blumberg spent a few years as the guitarist and singer for an indie rock band called Yuck. The news of his victory sent me back to their self-titled 2011 album—the only one featuring Blumberg, who departed in 2013—which I loved then but hadn’t touched in at least a decade. As critics noted at the time of its release, there’s nothing sonically groundbreaking or even particularly adventurous about Yuck, which wears its influences (namely, the fuzzy and melodic alt rock of the ‘80s and ‘90s) on its sleeve. I wasn’t sure how well its aesthetic would age, especially with another 14 years of artists working in that tradition, wearing out its tricks.

As it turns out, Yuck sounds nearly as fresh and vital today as the original progenitors of that style, while putting most other inheritors to shame. This is not to say that it’s not nakedly derivative; the emulation is just particularly exquisite. Barn-burning opener “Get Away” summons a squall as sublime as Dinosaur Jr.’s; “Operation” rides a riff as rousingly chaotic and irresistibly propulsive as Sonic Youth’s; “Stutter,” “Suck,” and “Shook Down” achieve the laconic loveliness of Pavement’s last record. Where other followers of those artists often feel like rote imitators, Yuck deploys these familiar moves like an old language in which they’re entirely immersed, somehow making it their own even as they decline to innovate. I’ve had the record on loop all week; if your tastes are anything like mine, you’ll find its raucous beauty and nostalgic glow the perfect companion to the first glimmers of spring.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In literature and film, baseball has long been associated with sentimentality, trading on its leisurely pace, its bucolic playing field, the mythology of its rural roots. (Never mind that, as Kevin Baker’s book The New York Game demonstrated, it was the city of all cities, New York, that was the real cradle of the national pastime.) Carson Lund’s delightful new film, Eephus—named after a difficult-to-hit pitch in which the ball is lobbed in a high arc to confuse the batter’s timing—at first leads us to expect a rerun of the pinnacle of baseball romanticization, Field of Dreams. The entire film takes place on a playing field in a quiet Massachusetts town: On a pleasant October day, two teams of local amateurs are facing off in Soldiers Field, a rundown stadium that’s about to be torn down to allow for the construction of a school. The film opens with a local old codger, opening his folding chair, setting up a folding table and taking out his scorebook. It’s all a perfect setup for schlock sentimentality.

But Lund isn’t interested in the familiar hooey about baseball representing a purer, bucolic America—or rather, he is to the extent that he uses it to betray our expectations. He does so with humor, affection, and enormous insight into the place the sport—and more broadly, competition and failure—play in our lives. The film is suffused with a charming bemusement at its characters. Indeed, the players are a slovenly lot. They’re out of shape, dressed in mismatched uniforms, and spend the game drinking; one smokes a cigarette, which he’s acquired by sending a child spectator to go out and get him “some smokes.” They’re hardly serious sportsmen. The players on the opposing teams converse while they’re on base, and an older teammate even offers a younger one a job in the middle of the game. Yet Eephus is also a tribute to the characters’ profound dedication to what they come to realize is an absurd endeavor: playing ball.

This commitment comes through clearly after the game is cut short by the ump, who decides to shut it down due to darkness when the score is still tied. But there are no ties in baseball, and a game can hypothetically carry on forever. (Appropriately, the pitcher who throws the titular eephus describes it as a move that freezes time, as the lobbed ball seems to hover in the air.) And so, the players press on without an ump, calling balls, strikes, and outs by the honor system, backed by the lone fan in the stands. The game drags on meaninglessly, as even the players admit, into the dark of night, the ball invisible to all. After all, this is the last game at Soldiers Field, and they must press on. But why? The word “pointless” comes up over and over. And when the game is finally decided, the players simply walk away, ignoring the celebratory fireworks, having realized they’ve pursued a goal to its end—that is, to no end.