On Fortunes, Uprisings, & a Home in Harlem
Carriage Return for 9/4/2016
Carriage Return is The Ribbon’s (more or less) weekly round-up of useful links from around the literary web. A reset for your week, tabs to open, and perhaps some context for your next book browsing visit, wherever you are.
Peter Ho Davies, friend of Literati and professor of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, was interviewed at LitHub about his phenomenal new novel, The Fortunes.
The form came as something of a revelation, evolving over the course of several years in response to the material. I think of it now as a kind of multigenerational novel about a community, Chinese Americans, whose history (from the “bachelor society” of the Gold Rush to the recent influx of baby girls adopted from China) is one of broken or discontinuous lines of descent. The characters in the four sections of The Fortunes aren’t related by blood, but they are bound to one another in some essential sense.
Peter will launch The Fortunes across town at Nicola’s Bookstore on Thursday, September 8th at 7pm.
On this week’s edition of Inside the New York Times Book Review, James Forman Jr. discusses Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Heather will present her book — which the New York Times called a “superb work of history” — at Literati on Monday, September 19 at 7pm.
Also discussed is Luke Dittrich’s Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets, a staff favorite of Literati booksellers Kelsey and Mairead.
Helen Zell Writers’ Program alum Jia Tolentino’s latest column for the New Yorker’s website discusses, among other things, Emma Cline’s novel The Girls:
Cline, perceptively, keeps beauty at the center of Evie’s motivations. She’s not particularly adventurous: it’s the desire to be like the other girls at the ranch — who are beautiful, and constantly told that they’re beautiful — that draws her in. “As an adult,” Evie thinks, “I wonder at the pure volume of time I wasted. The feast and famine we were taught to expect from the world, the countdowns in magazines that urged us to prepare thirty days in advance for the first day of school. Day 28: Apply a face mask of avocado and honey. Day 14: Test your makeup look in different lights (natural, office, dusk).” It’s such an ordinary message: to excel is to be a prototype. It’s the best-looking trap in the world.
The Girls is a Literati staff pick and was the June selection for Literati Cultura, our monthly signed first editions club. Cultura is heading into its second year: you can sign up for yourself or give a loved one a gift subscription here.
Literati bookseller Lillian Li writes about the fraught experience of recommending books to her mother over at the Michigan Quarterly Review’s blog:
I suppose that both of us, after months of practice, wanted to show off what we could do. What neither of us realized was that the person we were showing off for, while appreciative of the effort, required none of it.
University of Michigan professor Linda Gregerson is interviewed on the latest Kenyon Review podcast by Corey Van Landingham. Linda’s most recent book is the beautiful Prodigal: New and Selected Poems.
The I, Too Arts Collective is working to convert the longtime Harlem home of Langston Hughes into an arts center. NPR reported on the story last weekend; since then, the organization has raised $115,000. We’ll let Langston have the last word:
I could take the Harlem night
and wrap around you,
Take the neon lights and make a crown,
Take the Lenox Avenue busses,
Taxis, subways,
And for your love song tone their rumble down.
