Reflection and Refraction
Carriage Return, 1/4/2017
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.
Happy New Year.
I want you to know about the things I believe after more than thirty years of thinking about my father’s death. His death forced me to try to answer a bunch of difficult questions; it shaped the way in which I view the world.
I want you to know that the questions you face, and the solutions you find, or are presented with, are solutions that many of us were faced with as well.
United Arab Emirates Ambassador to Russia Omar Saif Ghobash is the author of Letters to a Young Muslim, a collection addressed to his sons. Yesterday, one of the letters was excerpted in Time Magazine. Ghobash also spoke with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross this afternoon.
Literati welcomes Omar Saif Ghobash to Ann Arbor, at Rackham Ampitheater, on January 9th. He will be joined in conversation by David Serio, Education and Public Programming specialist at the Arab American National Museum.
Looking further forward: Vulture has released its list of its 25 most anticipated books of 2017. Some staff favorites — Edan Lepucki, Patricia Lockwood, Roxane Gay, Jesmyn Ward, Teju Cole (ok, we’ll try not list them all — David Sedaris’s diaries!) — make the cut. Listed as well is Dan Chaon’s (author of staff pick Await Your Reply) Ill Will, another literary thriller from the author. “Few writers are as gleefully creepy” as Chaon, says Literati bookseller Sam, “fewer still are as sympathetic to the often flawed, misguided ways we try to reinvent ourselves.” Chaon will visit Literati in support of Ill Will in March (stay tuned to our online calendar for details).
And looking back: lithub’s Bethanne Patrick suggested “10 Overlooked Books by Women in 2016,” noting “ The New York Times Book Review Best Books of 2016 included just one book by a woman.” Lithub also compiled “The Year’s Best Overlooked Books, According to Booksellers,” where Literati owner Hilary Gustafson again sang the due praises of Miss Jane, “ an attempt to understand a single person’s being and their loneliness, and the different ways that loneliness is chosen or imposed on one’s life.”
John Berger, who’s Ways of Seeing is not just a staple on our art shelves but many a student’s curriculum, passed away on January 2nd. While you may, “revisiting the book now, […] find it reduced,” Josephine Livingstone recalls its power and, in frank prose, its limitations for The New Republic:
It’s a book about art history and the media, but it’s also a magic trick. Berger takes his readers beyond the visible, towards a closer understanding of the world as it really is — the one capitalism, patriarchy, and empire try to hide from you. By the same token, however, professors assign Ways of Seeing to college freshmen because it is easy. Berger synthesizes, paraphrases, and boils down large swaths of important cultural theory into a work that is both inspiring and intuitive to understand.
One more casual glance back at the year: Literati booksellers see (and try to artfully arrange) a good deal of book covers. More, lamentably, than books we read. We often complain about seasonal trends of reds or greens or blues, the odious women’s back trend, purposefully confusing upside-down covers (you know who you are). But the well-designed ones are certainly appreciated, even cherished. Electric Lit has compiled a fine (and, we’ll note, very geometric!) list of their favorites:
What half-blind is like:
like two microscopes in my head
each with differently stuck objectives.
So begins Ann Arbor-based poet and dear friend to Literati Ray McDaniel’s poem The Interchangeable World of the Micronauts in the January issue of Poetry Magazine. Also featured is Zell Writers’ Program Alum Jia Tolentino, who explains how “poetry taught me how to write everything but poetry” in her essay “Mind No Mind.”
