What Writers Are Reading: Jonathan Lethem & Tania James
Jonathan Lethem
For me, Lucy Sante’s memoir I Heard Her Call My Name was the most galvanizing window into gender dysmorphia, precisely because under her previous name, as the author of Low Life, The Other Paris, and Maybe the People Would Be the Times, she’d been one of my one of my favorite writers on urbanism, crime, art and music. The memoir explains how a lifetime of denial opened suddenly into self-knowledge, using the same meticulous scrutiny Sante had previously brought to cultural and historical subjects. In fact, we learn how her intellectual life had been arrayed as an armor against self-knowledge. A humbling and beautiful book.
Jonathan Lethem is the author most recently of Brooklyn Crime Novel.
Tania James
I just finished Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan. It was pressed into my hands by a bookseller at Daunt Books (who published the UK version) and when a bookseller starts testifying at me like that, I do what any sane person would do and listen. I love this book. Being from Kentucky, I thought I knew what I was getting into, and was ready to resist a quaint, airbrushed narrative about horse-racing. But Scanlan manages to narrow our gaze so intently on this particular and wonderfully idiosyncratic point of view — that of a female horse trainer — that I found myself very frequently in a state of surprise or sorrow or delight.
Tania James is the author most recently of Loot.
