In this episode of Fiction/Non/Fiction, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell discuss Russian-American political machinations with Ukrainian-born novelist Sana Krasikov, and novelist Charles Baxter explores America’s curious fascination with Chekhov and great Russian literature.

Sana Krasikov on the “internal émigré”
“In Russia there’s actually a term for them, which would be ‘internal émigré’… You drop out of the public sphere and you lead a rich interior life. One thing that Russian immigrants have often bemoaned as they’ve immigrated is that the interior life of people in their new country is just not as rich, and they have a point, but I think people can develop that to compensate for the fact that they don’t feel like they can change much in the public sphere. It actually makes me think of this quote from Elizabeth Gilbert—and forgive me guys, I do love my Elizabeth Gilbert—but she was saying why the Italians have the best meatballs. They’re like, if you can’t change your bureaucracy at least you can make the best meatball in the world. So I think of it as the best meatball effect.”

“I think the reason people did say ‘Wow, a lot of this feels familiar,’ wasn’t just because Russia was in the news, it was because a lot of the ideas that have always been there that I was trying to explore are suddenly under the spotlight. I think you can’t help it, as a writer in a modern age, when you’re trying to grapple genuinely with a historical subject, thinking about projecting our own experience on it. I like that it’s sort of this parallel universe where the rules are slightly different, but you get to think to think about very current subjects.” 

V.V. Ganeshananthan on the decline of public education…
“[There’s] the decay of certain institutions of the state that ought to be operating as checks on justice whether it’s the judiciary or, going back to what you said earlier about us having to be accountable for our own votes, in the case of the United States, the really clear decline of public education… I don’t think I’m as surprised as other people that Trump won. I feel already past that surprise. I think I associate that lack of surprise also with communities of color that I’m in touch with, where people are like, come on, this was here all along.”

Whitney Terrell on relating to the characters in a Turgenev novel…
“For me, one of the things that I liked about Russian writers is slightly different—it’s not a class thing, it’s a space thing. In other words as somebody from the Midwest, in Turgenev, for instance, you know in Fathers and Sons, the idea of coming home from college to a rural area, the isolation and separation from the capitals, which is also present in Chekhov’s stories sometimes, really was meaningful to me. It felt like the world that I’d come out of.”

“Maybe we’re moving out of our Chekhov period and into more of our Dostoyevsky period.” 

Charles Baxter on the sly genius of Chekhov…
“One of the things that’s interesting about Chekhov’s stories is that in many of those tales—and in the plays too, particularly—characters have been given almost everything that, at least in America, you would assume would make them happy. They have an adequate income, they’re reasonably civilized, they have all of the features of life that we believe should create contentment, and yet they’re not happy. And they are often articulate about why they’re not happy, and you know, Chekhov is very smart about what happens to people who have too much leisure time and not enough of a sense of what their lives should actually contain. They don’t feel a sense of mission and they don’t know what they should be doing with their lives. I think that resonates with a lot of Americans.”

This episode’s reading list

Burning Down the House by Charles Baxter
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The Patriots by Sana Krasikov
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Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
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The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
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Anton Chekhov “Uncle Vanya,” “In the Ravine”

Other writers mentioned:  Elena Kostyuchenko · Vladimir Nabokov · Svetlana Alexievich · Valentin Rasputin · Anna Akhmatova · Andrei Platonov 

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Recommended reading from a bookseller: For this episode’s In the Stacks section, Ashley Warlick talks about five additional books that fit with the theme. Warlick is the author of the 2016 novel The Arrangement, about MFK Fisher, and one of the founders of M. Judson Books in Greenville, S.C.

Her picks
Colum McCann’s Dancer · Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Russian Debutante’s Handbook · Penguin’s new edition of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov · Janet Fitch’s new novel, The Revolution of Marina M

The symbol representing Gemini, a pair of twins, seems to perfectly encapsulate what most people associate with the sign—duality (or, if we aren’t being poetic, two faced-ness). This symbol originates from the myth of Castor and Pollux, also known as the Dioscouri. The pair emerged from an egg laid by the Queen of Sparta, who was impregnated by Zeus while he was disguised as a swan—for some reason, he gets off on disguising himself as animals and raping powerful women (see Taurus). The mythical hatchlings are technically half-brothers; Castor’s dad was Sparta’s mortal king, whom the queen boned before the possessed swan happened upon her. They did everything together, but tragically, Castor—the mortal twin—died because they got too rowdy. Immortal Pollux was grief-stricken, so he begged his dad to be allowed to visit Pollux in the underworld. Zeus granted Pollux half of Castor’s immortality, so although their constellation lives in the sky forever, they split their time equally between the worlds of the living and the dead.

From this myth comes the typing of Gemini as the sign of fraternity and duality. Combined with Gemini’s planetary signifier Mercury, the trickster god of transit and commerce who serves as a messenger between the worlds, it blesses Gemini with a multifaceted worldview. Take, for example, the most famous line of beloved Gemini poet Walt Whitman (born May 31, 1819): “I contain multitudes.” A Gemini’s truth is never singular. While its opposite sign, Sagittarius, is associated with higher learning, Geminis are inspired by Mercury to explore via traveling and reading, cultivating an expansive worldview from the comfort and convenience of their own neighborhood. While Saggitarian knowledge comes from faraway travels, Gemini’s horizons broaden in shorter commutes. Their personalized philosophies originate from common sense, their research done themselves.

Whitman was clearly inspired by his natal Gemini sun’s self-directed, fraternal spirituality. In “Song of Myself,” he declares:

I Celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Although he centers his own experience, the knowledge he accrues is not, ultimately, self-serving; it also illuminates the experiences of others. Whitman was inspired by fellow Gemini Ralph Waldo Emerson (born May 25, 1803), who founded the Transcendental Club, which turned transcendentalism into a coherent movement. Transcendentalism is basically the most Gemini philosophy ever, arguing that individual experience and intuition take precedence over science and objectivism. Although many disparage Geminis as self-absorbed, always speaking but never listening, there’s more to them than that. They are curious about and engaged with the world around them, but they can only understand it through the lens of the self.

Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins, Giovanni Battista Cipriani

Despite what their detractors may have you believe, Gemini is driven by a brotherly compassion for their fellow man. Progressive and forward thinking, they use their natural talent for writing as a vehicle for their activism and philanthropy. Dr. Cornel West (born June 2, 1953), noted Marxist and critical race theorist, has a Gemini stellium (meaning he has a cluster of major planets in the sign), which has strong aspects to planets in Libra, the zodiac sign associated with justice. Part of Gemini’s bad rap is their brazen outspokenness, which West is certainly known for, but it can—and often does—serve a higher purpose. Rachel Carson (born May 27, 1907), marine biologist and author, ignited the environmental movement when she published Silent Spring in 1962. Carson has a Gemini stellium in her third house, which is the section of the astrological chart associated with writing and research (of course a Gemini would have two careers).

As a mutable sign, Geminis are incredibly flexible. When asked to make a choice between two possibilities, they often suggest that the answer is both, preferring airy flexibility to rigid answers. Novelist Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949), whose writing paints vivid stories drawn from her lived experience, refuses to consider her works as autobiographical. As she explains it, “Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn’t admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence.”

Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich (born May 31, 1948) similarly dismisses categorical divides. The Belarusian writer—whose work explores Soviet history and the emotional effects of world events using witness interviews—rejects the title of “investigative journalist” in the same way Kincaid rejects the label “autobiographical.” Alexievich describes her books as “novels in voices,” sourcing text from interview transcriptions which the author intersperses with personal anecdotes, emphasizing the literary nature and artistic liberties taken in her prose. This rebellion against the fascism of facts reflects the mercurial nature of Gemini knowledge. Fickle Gemini avoids absolutism and carves reality from observation, understanding truth’s malleability. They are not so much duplicitous as they are suspicious of absolutes.

Geminis love experimentation and are highly adaptable, easily learning new ideas and catching onto patterns quickly. Their adaptability also manifests as a short attention span: they get bored then bounce to their next interest. Louise Erdrich (born June 7, 1954), for instance, is a prolific writer whose oeuvre spans from realist fiction to poetry, from children’s books to future dystopias. She also owns an independent bookstore, Birchbark Books, which is an ideal place for an information-hungry Gemini to dwell. Its mission is “to keep real conversations between book lovers alive”—fitting for a store founded by a cunning, chatty Gemini.

Gemini is a highly verbal, communicative sign, so it makes sense that many of the most prized poets in the Western canon are Geminis: Alexander Pope (born May 21, 1688), W.B. Yeats (born June 13, 1865), Allen Ginsberg (born June 3, 1926), and Gwendolyn Brooks (born June 7, 1917), to name a few. Gemini’s ability to mimic the world around them gifts them with the talent for writing and creating realistic dialogue. As the sign of duality, mimicry, mimesis, and mirroring come naturally to them: a Gemini can provide their audience a with the bigger picture just by perfectly replicating a single aspect of life, making for excellent poetry.

Gemini’s airy mutability results in highly creative problem-solving, and they love riddles and unanswerable questions. Their ability to imitate others based on impressions makes them masters of disguise (and great at lying). This might explain why two of the giants of crime fiction were born under this sign. Arthur Conan Doyle (born May 22, 1859) gave us Sherlock Holmes, the world’s most iconic detective. Dashiell Hammett (born May 27, 1894) birthed the “hard-boiled” detective mystery sub-genre and heavily influenced film noir as a screenwriter, ranking him among the best mystery writers of all time. A striking feature of Hammett’s fiction is his dialogue, which makes perfect sense—the Gemini mind is in constant dialogue with itself. Geminis have the ability to hold a conversation with a brick wall, which is a very useful talent for a writer to have.

With unmatched versatility and playfulness, the Gemini’s body of work has a wider range than most. Because of their natural curiosity, ability to communicate realistically, and talent for accurately representing their impressions of the world, Geminis make great artists. They hold a mirror to the world, giving us an image of (at least, their malleable version of) the truth.

I’d been earning my living as a Russian-English interpreter for a decade and a half when I was hired to give English voice to one Svetlana Alexievich, an author slated to appear at the 2005 PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, where I live. I’d never heard of her; back then, few in the West had.

I learned as I prepared for the assignment that she was a former newspaperwoman whose books were based on interviews she did with plain Soviet and post-Soviet folk about their experiences of calamities such as World War II and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Most recently, she had traveled to Chernobyl, borne witness to the consequences of the nuclear disaster, and then reported back, conveying in the locals’ own words their grotesque sufferings and also those of the first responders, ordinary firemen sent into the fray in their shirtsleeves, absolutely innocent of radiation safety training or expertise.

The Russian language lacks a term for oral history, and so, with refreshing disregard for the sometimes heavily fortified border separating fiction from nonfiction, Alexievich had come up with her own, calling her books “novels in voices,” or simply “novels.” This despite the fact that their content came verbatim from taped interviews, had no narrative through-line, and swapped in a new protagonist every couple of pages. In addition to my day job with the Russian language, I was also trying to make a mark as a writer. Having toiled obscurely and intermittently for years in a difficult-to-name genre containing generous helpings of the lived, the observed, and the overheard, I instantly appreciated her confident blurring of distinctions that had long struck me as artificial and unnecessary.

Svetlana came from Minsk, the capital of Belarus, one of those new nations then poking up through the rubble of the Soviet Union. Her country was widely known as the last dictatorship in Europe. When I met her, she was persona non grata back home, having disgruntled the authorities somehow. She’d been living out of a suitcase for years, bouncing from one Western European capital to another, getting by on grants and gifts.

She was a small, sixtyish woman, shy, unpretentious. Her manner of speaking was urgent and heartfelt.

“For days after the blast at Chernobyl,” she said at the festival, and I interpreted, “the bees stayed inside their hives. The worms burrowed a meter down into the ground. Those little creatures knew what to do. But what about us? What did we humans do? As always, we watched TV; we listened to Gorbachev; we played soccer.”

Speaking of her genre and how she came to it, she said, “For us Slavs, talk is paramount. Life’s mysteries are what we discuss. What is the essence, the core? As I sought my literary form, I came increasingly to understand that what I heard in the crowd was far more powerful than anything I was reading, and more affecting than anything that might flow from the pen of a solitary writer. Nowadays, one single person cannot write the all-encompassing book, as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy used to do. The world has grown far too complex. But within each of us there lies a text: maybe two sentences, maybe half a page, maybe five pages, and these could be compiled into a joint opus. I realized that my books were in fact lying scattered about on the ground. I had only to pick them up.”

Channeling her simple eloquence, I felt both euphoria and melancholy. My peculiar, fleeting intimacy with this remarkable woman and the interior of her mind seemed to place me on the cusp of something marvelous. Yet this sense that the best was yet to come was usually an illusion—I knew this. The climax was here; it was now.

She finished speaking; an instant later, I finished, and the main event was done. Over cheese cubes and wine in plastic cups in a rapidly emptying room, a few audience members praised my work effusively. For one moment, I thought that this heady praise was the very miracle I’d felt coming on.

Then I caught the number three train uptown. Full stop.

Except that Svetlana then passed my name to her agent, who passed it to a boutique publisher in the Midwest, who, some time later, approached me to translate two of her books into English.

*

I’d been a Russianist practically forever. I’d laid the groundwork in college, studying conversation, grammar, and literature, later honing my knowledge through total immersion behind the Iron Curtain, reading, movies, and, most important, long, long talks with native speakers from all walks of life. I’d translated books; I’d interpreted for statesmen and scoundrels, who were not infrequently one and the same; I’d devoted my working life to this language. You would think that my relationship with Russian, its writers, and its literature would be one of uncomplicated affection and intimacy.

But no. By my late thirties, my ties to Russian language and culture were growing increasingly tenuous. I had left my Russian-speaking husband years before. I had not set foot in Russia or its satellites in nearly a decade and had no plans to return. (As it turned out, I would go to Lithuania a few years later, but I didn’t know that then, and that trip was unrelated to my work as a Russianist.)

I still spoke very fluently, however, for my immersion, dating to my twenties and early thirties, had been deep. Through the medium of Russian I’d learned crucial, cruel truths. In Russian I had fallen in love, and out. Despite my foreign accent and lapses grammatical, lexical, and cultural, Russian had in this way become almost native to me, as a close friend may become family, absent any tie of blood or marriage.

But that lingering fluency notwithstanding, I was now drawing down credit accumulated years before. Like some exiled Russian countess selling off the last of the emeralds and pearls sewn decades earlier into the hems and seams of her underthings, I was living off diminishing reserves, doing little apart from my daily work to replenish my storehouse of knowledge.

My initial reason for learning the language had been to read Russian literature in the original. Since freshman year in college, in response to the oft-repeated question, why Russian? I’d invariably replied that, having read Anna Karenina in English at age 14, my aim was to take her on in the original, vaulting clear over the heads of Constance Garnett, David Magarshack, and the rest of the literary translator pack.

But somehow, learning Russian had distanced me from Russian literature. It no longer made any sense for me to read the Russians in translation. Learning Russian had been painful—imagine your brain taken apart like a wristwatch, then reassembled, with a few parts left over that no longer fit anywhere. Choosing a translation over the original would strip those sufferings of all meaning. However, approaching Russian literature in the original was still daunting. And so, having devoted years to learning Russian, I now found myself in a limbo nearly devoid of Russian literature. It was as if I had scaled Mount Everest and was failing to take in the view—except during rare bursts, when, somehow mustering the strength to ignore my anxieties, I would binge-read in Russian for a few weeks. In this way, I fell in love with Pushkin, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, and, with time, built up the stamina to traverse vast tracts of Dostoyevsky.

But it took me years and years—well over a decade after I finished college—to make time for the unmediated Anna, and by then, it was not the same book I’d read at 14. No longer was it the story of a fetching woman, the flush of new love rendering her more fetching still, as she mazurkaed in the arms of a dashing suitor at an elegant ball. Now it was about that same woman’s corpse laid out for identification in a railway shed, a cold sneer on her stiffening features; it was about men volunteering headlong for the Serbian-Ottoman War in order to flee their disastrous personal lives. This change was not, I think, due to the chasm that sometimes yawns between original and translation.

And of my total reading, Russian literature remained a very, very small part. There were great swaths of it that, at this rate, I would never know. During my years spent among the Russians, I had grown used to hearing people say things like, “Last year, I reread all of Russian literature,” and this was actually conceivable, for, as Nabokov says early on in Lectures on Russian Literature (written, of course, in exquisite English), “the beautifully commodious thing about Russian prose is that it is all contained in the amphora of one round century—with an additional little cream jug provided for whatever surplus may have accumulated since.”

But it was still too much for me.

*

The festival people sent a book of Svetlana’s my way to help me prepare, an English translation called Voices from Chernobyl. The festival was coming up too quickly for me to lay my hands on the original, so I broke my no-translation rule.

A few pages in, I was jarringly reminded that reading translations from a language you know can be downright annoying. The errors are plain to see, even without the original close at hand. And a decade later, one mistranslation in that book haunts me still. Some of the first responders, away from home for months, frequented a brothel near the reactor. According to the translation, the “girls” from the brothel willingly went for walks with them, even though the men had been irradiated through and through.

Now, the Russian word gulyat’, “to take a walk,” has a second, more colloquial meaning, vague yet suggestive, covering acts that range from promiscuous to debauched, and including sprees, binges, and escapades of all kinds. Clearly, the girls from the brothel had gone for much more than walks with the doomed emergency workers, but this was lost on the translator; Russian-born, he had left behind the land of his birth and his first language at age six, too young of course to grasp such meanings.

Nor, it was clear, had the publisher provided much oversight. Translation deeply affects a reader’s relationship to any book originally written in a language she doesn’t know, yet the boutique house responsible for Voices from Chernobyl apparently felt that such concerns hardly warranted much effort or expense.

No matter: the book gave me a general sense of Svetlana’s work, which was what I needed to do the job.

*

I was in the middle of my life when the festival people started calling me to work with Russian-speaking authors—Svetlana was not the only one—and my life was falling apart. This was just after I’d been diagnosed with a degenerative, sometimes fatal pulmonary condition. Twice I had been hospitalized with a collapsed lung, and I was in evaluation for a double lung transplant. I had begun sleeping with an oxygen tube in my nose and was so short of breath that I could barely climb a flight of stairs or walk up a gentle slope.

In the face of serious malady, everything crumbles. Simultaneous interpreting being nearly as much about lung power as about language, I was increasingly unable to work. My debts were mounting. My health insurance coverage, which had over the years run the gamut from skimpy to nil, was tilting once again toward nonexistent.

Despite the coughing, weakness, and shortness of breath that were now a regular part of my days, I believed I could still do the festival gigs, which involved standing before large audiences alongside authors who represented the cream of contemporary Russian literature and instantaneously putting their utterances into English. And do them I could—if I spent the day in bed both before and after, and drove myself mercilessly the day of—for they lasted only an hour or so. When the author paused in thought, I sneaked a deep, deep breath and let it out, puff by puff: invisible smoke rings made from air.

And so, for years after I had to decline all other offers of interpreting work, I continued to accept the festival gigs. They were a narrow bridge between my career as an interpreter, which was slipping from my grasp, and recognition as a writer, which I might never attain. For, on top of everything else, I was 40 years old and had published not one single book of my own, only translations of other people’s books. The festival gigs allowed me to hold forth about writing before a rapt crowd, even if the words I uttered were not my own, even if the admiration I basked in was not meant for me.

Plus, they brought in some needed extra cash.

*

Svetlana stayed in touch. Following the festival, she mailed a postcard from Paris and soon after that, a copy of Boys in Zinc, her book on the Soviet war in Afghanistan. On the flyleaf, she thanked me for my work at the festival, spoke of collaborations to come, and urged me to be happy, in spite of everything. A decade later, this untranslatably Slavic phrase remains mysterious to me.

I do not remember now if Svetlana in fact knew that I had translated books before, or if she innocently assumed that my ability to translate her spoken words meant that I would also be able to put her written words into English. Although the words “interpreter” and “translator” have become hopelessly confounded in the popular imagination, the work of the interpreter, who renders speech in one language into speech in another before a live audience or for broadcast, is in fact a far cry from that of the translator, who carries the written word over from one language into another while seated alone at her desk. One is not more difficult than the other; they are simply difficult in different ways.

I had tried for years to make my way in the world of literary translation but had repeatedly gotten sidetracked into translating other things—works of history; monographs on archaeology and philosophy; proposals to address needle-sharing in Kazakhstan, prostitution in Uzbekistan, the resurgence of polygamy in Tajikistan; phone tap transcripts of New York–based Russian organized crime suspects. (“How great to be in America and know we’re not being bugged!”)

I had gravitated toward literary translation in part because I hoped it could provide some writerly grati cation, minus the risk of failure that shadows every attempt at translating the world into words. As I imagined it, I would spend engrossing hours sculpting sentences, and my name would appear on a title page, perhaps even a cover, but with none of the angst that comes of waiting, waiting for the next word to emerge from the void.

However, despite a few modest translation publications and a prize or two, it was not really working out. The good books and the interesting writers were going to other translators.

*

In the time before Svetlana, an eminent literary translator once got my number from somewhere and called in a panic. Her computer had swallowed ten chapters of a major glasnost-era novel that she was putting into English; the publisher was breathing down her neck; could I translate the missing piece, and could I do it right away? But I must not tell a soul, for the author, a dear friend of hers, would be terribly wounded if he learned that she’d farmed out a chunk of his masterpiece.

I knew this book as well as it is possible to know a work you’ve never read. My excuse, this time, was that the great poet Joseph Brodsky had famously dismissed it as makulatura, which literally means “old newspaper” or other dated paper goods fit only for the recycling bin, but can also mean something approximating “pulp fiction,” only a whole lot less racy. It was about a band of Stalin-era university students, once close friends, later flung apart by history, with some rising to positions of power and deciding fates, while others were dispatched to the gulag.

When the book came out to great fanfare in 1987, I’d picked up a dozen copies at the hard-currency store in Moscow and, barely glancing at it myself, handed them out to Russians I knew. For, while it had not come under the censor’s axe (if there still was a censor; this was one of those recurring murky periods in Russian history when no one quite knew what was going on), neither, for obscure reasons having to do with the vagaries of Soviet supply and demand, was it commercially available to ordinary Russians. It was such a hot ticket in Moscow that season that one day, upon returning to my hotel room unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon, I walked in on three chambermaids sprawled across my bed, their frilly little aprons all askew, feather dusters forgotten on the floor, each one leafing through a copy of the book from the pile on the nightstand.

Now I agreed to translate lost chapters 23 through 32, encouraged by hints that this might lead eventually to other work that I could openly claim as my own. The deadline was so tight that I worked from a sheaf of xeroxed pages without seeing the rest of the book, for those chapters were the only ones provided, and I had given away my last copy years before. The respected literary translator massaged my bit to achieve a stylistically seamless fit with hers (and perhaps, it now occurs to me, with those of other subcontractors as well). She paid promptly, and when the translation came out, it landed in my mailbox, her name emblazoned across the cover beneath the author’s, in a slightly smaller font. As expected.

After that, there was not another word from her, ever.

*

Eventually I would conclude, after hearing other translators’ stories, that the best way to become a translator of contemporary literature is not to do uncredited work on behalf of a translator with a big name and few scruples, but rather to fall in with a bohemian crowd when you’re in your twenties, sojourning in some foreign land and soaking up your chosen language.

You start translating as an act of friendship. One obscure, struggling novelist who drives a cab passes you on to another who works as a night watchman, who refers you to an unemployed poet who lives with his mother, and on and on. And if your bohemian pals form a rock band and you get roped in as the drummer or the lead singer, why, all the better, even if the group splits up after just a gig or two, for the shared experience would forge a close bond.

There are people who do this sort of thing and go on to translate entire schools or generations of contemporary authors in obscure Balkan or Slavic countries, some eventually settling and starting families there. You have to keep at it for years, though, doing without remuneration stuff that two or three decades on will make for delightful tales of a madcap youth, until your bohemian friends (well, a few of them, anyway) mature into acclaimed authors, sweeping you along with them, and you all become over-night sensations.

But what if you choose the wrong bohemian crowd? What if their creative strivings come to naught? God knows, it happens every day. We stride backward into the unfurling of time, blind to whatever is bearing down, and so such decisions must always be entirely uncalculating.

*

About a year after I worked with Svetlana at the festival, I landed a job in East Midtown, translating diplomatic correspondence and reports from Russian and French into English. (In a gamble that paid off, I charged the expenses associated with learning French for the job, including the stays in Paris and Montreal, settling the bill after I was hired.)

Passing a door left ajar, I would sometimes glimpse a senior colleague, hunched and Gogolian from decades in the international civil service, brandishing a crumbling typescript entitled Instructions for Translators and railing at some cringing junior translator about their errors: incorrect initial capitalization of treaty names, say, or a stray reference to “England” instead of “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” or failure to follow the house rule of inserting the standard closing for diplomatic correspondence (“Accept, Sir/Madame, the renewed assurances of my highest consideration”), regardless of what sentiment the original might express.

Sometimes I was that junior translator behind the door. Having worked independently nearly forever, I was unaccustomed to such treatment and did not accept it with good grace. But the job paid more handsomely than anything else I’d ever done or might hope to do.

Plus, it came with health insurance.

*

As I was settling into regular employment, the boutique Midwestern publisher sent along some pages from two of Svetlana’s books that were as yet untranslated. Naturally, they wanted to see my work before signing a contract for the translation, and I, too, needed to know if I could inhabit the books daily, intimately, contentedly, for the years the work would take to complete.

On a night soon after the pages arrived, I struggled up the stairs from the subway, stopping as usual at the top to pant a while, then made my way slowly home through the wintry dusk, pausing frequently to force the air in and out of my cold-stiffened lungs. After dinner, I sat down at the computer to tackle a section about Soviet women who had seen combat in World War II.

I was immediately transported to the front lines.

A nurse dragged two wounded soldiers from the battlefield, bullets whizzing overhead in the pitch-black night. She moved one of them toward the infirmary tent, set him down, and returned for the other. When the moon emerged from behind a cloud, she saw that one of the men wore a German uniform. She hauled him to safety nonetheless, and bound up his wounds.

“We tended to the enemy wounded, we Soviets did,” she told Svetlana with modest pride.

A man recalled his role in the Soviet occupation of Germany late in the war. “Sometimes, there would be ten of us servicemen to one German girl,” he said. “Ten men, one girl,” he repeated in disbelief. “I was a good boy, from a cultivated family. To this day, I do not understand: How could I do this?” He paused. “We never, ever spoke to the girls in our unit about what we did. Oh, no. They were our comrades.”

A young woman returned home when the fighting was over. At dawn, while everyone else in the house still slept, her mother shook her awake.

“The whole town knows where you’ve been,” said the mother. “People have heard what you soldier girls got up to in the trenches with the men there. How will your little sisters find husbands if you stay here with us?”

She thrust a bundle at her and a heel of bread wrapped in newspaper.

“Daughter of mine,” she said, “you must leave and never come back. Now, go.”

*

I lavished hours on these brief passages. The words were simple; my dictionaries lay unopened. But each section had its own voice; every few pages, there was a new speaker, with a new idiolect. Each little segment had to sound exactly right.

As I translated, I pondered the changed contours of my days. Everything that mattered—my own writing, which I’d begun to approach with greater seriousness; the myriad details of managing a chronic illness, in itself a second job—had to be crammed now into a few hours a week. In the old, carefree (and nearly penniless) freelance days, I could have translated Svetlana by daylight. Now she too must be relegated to after hours.

I finished the pages and set them aside. Returning to them a few days later, I was dismayed: What had I done to Svetlana? Everything in my rendering was correct, yet none of it was right.

It struck me anew how ill-matched Russian and English are. So many Russian sentences lack an identifiable grammatical subject. Who is performing the action? This makes perfect sense in the Russian-speaking world, where impersonal forces have held sway since time out of mind, deciding fates and disposing with impunity of small and impotent beings.

In English, this leads to incomprehensible gaps. Yet if the subject was left implicit in the original, who was I to put a name to it in the translation? In Russian, everyone understood who was doing what. Hints were rife; unspecified connections were mysteriously clear. But what read as compelling and merely elliptical in Russian became, in English, a loose bundle of irrelevancies and non sequiturs. In Russian, there was a deep, narrow well of unuttered meaning in that small white space between the full stop at the end of one sentence and the uppercase letter that began the next. I might tumble into one of those wells, never to reemerge.

I declined the project, pleading health problems.

Last week, acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge delivered the December 2018 Message from the Library, Brooklyn Public Library (BPL)’s commissioned public lecture series. Past speakers were David Grossman and Edwidge Danticat. Kentridge’s lecture follows below. For more information on BPL’s literary and cultural programming, please visit www.bklynlibrary.org/bpl-presents.

The Smell of Old Books

I draw in old books. Sometimes I draw in the books themselves, but generally speaking I dismember the books, pulling the cover from the glue holding the spine, slicing through the string that is holding the bound signatures and separating the pages. It’s an undoing of what Dante describes at the end of Paradiso when all the pages and all the leaves of the Cumaean Sybil fly through the air and are gathered into one single book, a chaos of knowledge forming itself into a coherence. Although I cut the books mainly for the ease of drawing on the sheets of paper and for the ease of photographing them later into an animated film, it is also a dismembering of order, a disordering of a coherence.

What are the books I choose? In general they are old dictionaries, they are encyclopedias, books that are superseded by newer editions. In general no rare books, no particularly valuable books. They are books found living the end of their lives on the shelves of second-hand and antiquarian bookstores. The books are chosen partly for the association of list-ness in them. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are lists and demonstrate an ordering of knowledge in one form or another, by subject, by alphabet, into a coherence. The drawing on top of them is always a re-inscribing of a different kind of thinking on top of the words of the book.

But the books are usually chosen for the quality of their paper and for their typography and density of ink. A very rough tooth if I’m going to draw in charcoal, a slightly smoother surface if I’m going to use an ink wash and I want to precipitate out the different intensities of ink washes. The amount of size that’s in the paper, how absorbent it is. Sometimes I need a shiny surface if I want to wipe a charcoal mark off with a simple brush of my hand or a chamois leather cloth. Sometimes they are chosen for their size and proportion, how an open book fits into the format of a film frame. And the drawings in the books generally are turned into extended flip books. That is to say variations on themes, each page being a different frame.

The Prisoner in the Books

What is it to have all these different pages, this multitude of different images that one has when one dismantles a book? I do a drawing of a man or an animation of a man walking backwards and forwards. It is a zoetrope, that is to say the movement gets to one position and starts again where it left off, so it can become an endless repetition. The man in the book, just as I am walking in the studio and stride from one side of the page to the other, turns and returns even as the pages are moving. It’s a way of making an extended flip book, not the one-and-a-half seconds of the usual forty-six slightly stiff pages of a flip book. It can turn into a seven- or eight- or twelve-minute film, many thousands of pages.

Associations spread out from this. The pages become two things. They become the frames of a film. So in the same way that a roll of celluloid film with its thousands of frames is a way of transforming time into physical weight, these pages of the book also encapsulate time as if each page is a day in the life of a prisoner in the book who will never escape the book. Whichever page you open, there you are.

One is always aware that even as one looks at a book there’s this duality. There are the words of the text and their relationship to the history of the world coming towards you, and as they do, sitting next to your reading faculty, are all the associations that the words you’ve read bring to mind. And the sense of the book is not deep inside it, but hovers somewhere between the book itself and us, the readers and our projections.

Thinking in Material

There always needs to be a connection between the topic that is being addressed and the material in which one thinks about it. This may be charcoal, it may be ink, it may be the gesture of an actor, but always this has to be one of the ways of arriving at thoughts rather than simply illustrating thoughts that one already has. If one is talking about dismantling books, one is talking about that not just as a technique but also as a way of thinking about the world. Thinking about the world as collage, as disordered fragments being brought together, reordered, making a new alphabet of the pages of the dictionary, the half-images on one page connected to the half-image on another.

This act of reordering, dismembering and reordering is always the essential activity of the studio. The world is invited into the studio, it is taken apart into fragments, the fragments are reordered and then sent back out into the world as a song, a drawing, a piece of theater. This dismantling is not simply a technique or a strategy, but also can be a revelation of the instability of knowledge in the world, its provisionality. The collage and the reordering becomes the subject itself.

Reading the White Spaces

I come from a family of lawyers. Both my parents were lawyers, my grandmother was the first woman advocate in South Africa, and my maternal and paternal grandfathers were both lawyers. It became essential for me to try to find a way of arriving at and making an understanding of the world that was impervious to the techniques and arguments of legal cross-examination.

Years later I discovered that within the Jewish liturgical tradition, there’s both the strand that was very familiar to my family (in its secular form) of taking the laws and dissecting them minutely and finding all the possible interpretations of particular words through a forensic examination of each phrase and argument. Later I discovered that there is also a style of Jewish prayer, a much more ecstatic one, that is less concerned with the details of the law but finds a more direct connection to the religious world (in their words of course, to God).

And that for these people, a section of the Hasidic community, the spaces between the letters, between the lines, the white spaces were as useful in promoting this devotion, this connection to the other world as were the black printed letters of the press. And I thought, “Oh, all my life without knowing there’s been this Hasid in me that is interested in what happens on and beyond the words.”

Pause

One has to understand there is a strange relationship of words to the world. We cannot trust them. The printed book gives a kind of spurious authority to this relationship. In common speech we are much more aware of this difficult and tenuous connection. Do the words have a direct connection to the objects in the world that they name, or are they simply a series of observations that float above the world and invite us to make connections between them and the world? And so in everyday speech, in this talk I’m doing as I walk around the studio, this talk that I am doing now, I realize I’m gesturing with my hand, trying to impress this empty chair or that table or the tripod standing in the corner there, of the rightness that I’m saying. A whole series of gestures, of shirt pulling, of tugging, of finger waving, of arms waving from side to side, of fists moved in emphasis, trying to connect, trying to persuade these inanimate objects of the connection of what I am saying to the world.

There are the gaps between the words which are pauses, breaths, change of volume, of emphasis, which are devices outside of the specific words and their argument to make the connection to the world. We are always implicated in what we hope will be an objective knowledge. We’re busy subdividing and taking the world apart here. We’ve got the words, we’ve got the gaps between the words, we’ve got the materiality of the ink, the specific paper, we’ve got the biography of the reader meeting it. What appeared to start off as a simple book has shattered into all these different strands of possible meaning. The certainty of the book changes into something that is provisional.

*

Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu,
pögiff ,
kwii Ee.

Dedesnn nn rrrrr,
Ii Ee,
mpiff tillff too,
tillll, jüü Kaa

rakete rinnzekete
rakete rinnzekete
rakete rinnzekete
rakete rinnzekete
rakete rinnzekete
rakete rinnzekete
Beeeee
bö

Dedesnn nn rrrrr,
Ii Ee,
mpiff tillff too,
tillll, jüü Kaa

fümmsböwötää
fümmsböwötääzää
fümmsböwötääzääUu
fümmsböwötääzääUu pögiff

The Young Boy

That’s a small fragment from Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate, where words are removed and what you have is simply the effect of the activity of speaking. Compare this to Svetlana Alexievich in her extraordinary series of books which are transcripts of oral recordings of participants in different events in Soviet history. She writes of a young soldier, or she doesn’t write, she records someone talking about a young soldier in the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1970s. “The young boy took a long time to die and as he lay there he said the words for everything his eyes came across, just like a child who is just learning to speak. Sky. Mountain. Tree. Bird. Haversack.”

Here we have language at its most basic, in extremis, trying to tie the word to the world. Somewhere between the two—between Svetlana Alexievich’s young boy and the Ursonate of Kurt Schwitters with all its grunts, pauses, gestures and sounds—we operate with how our language ties us to the world and enables us to make meaning both of the world and ourselves.

I love Maxim Osipov’s prose. I started rereading his stories and caught myself thinking that his prose now reads like something of a diagnosis: an accurate, unforgiving diagnosis of Russian life. Although the author is filled with love for a simple, human existence, he is simultaneously struck by how little this existence actually coincides with his own expectations. The drama of those raised by culture, raised by books. Culture normally protects us diligently from reality, but here it is hardly able to do so, because Osipov is a writer with a double vision: First, he is a doctor—a cardiologist—a profession directly related to time, to the impermanence of man; the heart is nothing more than time. And second, when you live in the provinces, it’s harder for culture to deceive you, harder for it to mask reality with fashionable ideas and superstitions—that of the “Russian world,” for example.

Out in the provinces, everything is in full view, more exposed—both human nature and the times beyond the window. And that’s why the author isn’t moved by the sight of the oh-so-familiar peasant when he sees him running naked through the streets, chasing his mother with an ax, “a crucifix dangling from his neck.” In another story, one of his characters (a policeman) explains to a writer—a naïve man, as he sees it—that murderers are “just your average people.” These stories tell of people who haven’t come to understand the meaning of their existence—what is it all for? Very few of us have, it must be said. The soul is forced to toil night and day. But who has the strength? The author relates to his characters as to patients; he asks them where it hurts and whether . . . in general, does it hurt in the soul? The Russian soul—yet another myth. In reality, there is but one soul; the real question is: Is there a person?

Russia as a country has overextended itself across an enormous territory, and it lives as though time had stopped. And any attempt to speed up time—the October Revolution, for example—has ended in bloodshed. When you delve into Osipov’s texts you see that they are deceptively simple, just like Shalamov’s: Behind this childish ordinariness there lies a hidden chasm. The whole time they leave you thinking how difficult it is to love humanity—wonderful, repulsive, and terrifying as it is—but in order to stay human, that’s exactly what you must do: You must love man. Your soul is restless—it is thinking. To inspire such thoughts—that’s something that only true literature can do.

__________________________________

From Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories by Maxim Osipov. Used with the permission of the publisher, New York Review Books. Preface copyright © 2019 by Svetlana Alexievich. Edited by Boris Dralyuk. Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson.

Svetlana Alexievich trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II
(Random House)

If God existed, or had an ear, she might listen the way Svetlana Alexievich does to the stories of her fellow ex-Soviets. This latest book from the Belarusian Nobel Laureate builds a cathedral from the tales of children. During World War II they were orphaned, uprooted, sold into labor, forced to work, and yet still, amidst it all, children. Their stories have a hallucinatory clarity, like visions or nightmares—except they are made simply from the stuff of life. Would that we could live long enough to absorb what their stories tell us.

–John Freeman, Lit Hub executive editor

Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
(Doubleday)

In a nation where stories of what those in power can do to the bodies of young black men are finally receiving the attention they deserve (e.g. Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, Jordan Peele’s Get Out), Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, The Nickel Boys, is right on time. Whitehead, known as much for shedding light on homegrown atrocities (The Underground Railroad) as he is for inventive, off-the-beaten path narratives (Apex Hides the Hurt, The Intuitionist), takes aim at America’s Hannibal Lecter-esque infatuation with damaging the minds, bodies, and spirits of people unable to protect themselves. The story of two boys sent to a Florida reform school, The Nickel Academy, Whitehead’s novel reminds us that no matter how hard people try to ignore it, this nation’s bloodied past is always with us.

–Mateo Askaripour, Lit Hub contributor

Lisa Taddeo, Three Women
(Simon & Schuster)

Over the course of a decade, Lisa Taddeo followed the lives of the people who would become the focus of Three Women: Maggie, a teenager in North Dakota who is involved with her teacher; Lina, whose sexless and loveless marriage drives her to an affair with an ex-boyfriend; and Sloane, whose husband enjoys watching as she has sex with other men and women. All three of them live, like we all do, in a world that’s often indifferent, if not outright hostile, to women’s expressions of desire, but Taddeo allows her subjects’ desires to fill the page and the narrative, producing an often-uncomfortable but riveting depiction of the urges that so often go unfulfilled and unnamed.

–Corinne Segal, Lit Hub senior editor

Sarah Rose Etter, The Book of X
(Two Dollar Radio)

Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X is simultaneously a familiar story—a young woman comes of age, moves from a small town to a big city, and endeavors to figure out who she is—and one that evokes a constant sense of disorientation. The protagonist is born with a knotted stomach, for one thing; her family makes a living by harvesting meat from a nearby cavern, for another. While the shifts between this novel’s realistic and surreal elements has a dreamlike feel, the emotional resonance present in the narrative is hauntingly tactile.

–Tobias Carroll, Lit Hub contributor

Adrian McKinty, The Chain
(Mulholland Books)

American culture’s preoccupation with missing children shows no sign of abating, and crime fiction is one of the sites where we can see the scope and the intensity of this fixation. Northern Irish writer McKinty has said that The Chain is his American novel, in contrast to his sharp and funny series featuring rebel detective Sean Duffy, enmeshed in the confusion of The Troubles, and The Chain can be read as a chronicle of the troubles of contemporary America. The premise of The Chain is simple and horrifying: a parent is notified that his/her child has been kidnapped, and will not be returned until the beleaguered parent kidnaps another child. In constructing how these parents choose their victim—primarily through social media—McKinty points out how much we casually know about one another and how dangerous everyday people can be when the stakes are raised. When I first read The Chain last December I proclaimed it the thriller of the summer; but upon further reflection I think it could be the book of the year. Nothing else speaks as urgently to our desire to keep our families—the site of our most intimate feelings and desires—intact and safe in a world where it’s all too easy to destroy our closest bonds.

–Lisa Levy, Lit Hub and Crime Reads contributing editor

Karen Olsson, The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown
(FSG)

A turducken of a book comprised of biography (two), memoir, philosophy, history, and criticism in which Karen Olsson explores the relationship of sister and brother Simone and André Weil, revealing how math and creativity and spirituality are related, just as the two Weil siblings are. Simultaneously, Olsson plumbs the depths of her own confrontation with math at Harvard and later, with writing, which provides introspection and compassion to the Weils’s story where forces of literature and logic act upon each other to create a nuanced exploration of abstraction versus a lived life.

–Kerri Arsenault, Lit Hub contributor

Claudia D. Hernández, Knitting the Fog
(Feminist Press)

I usually don’t go for memoirs, but Knitting the Fog is a wonderful hybrid of essay and bilingual poetry. It is deeply personal, but very pertinent to these times. It tells the story of a young girl in Guatemala whose mother flees to the United States without her. When she returns and the family moves to California, she is disillusioned and struggles to fit in. Years later, when they move back home, she finds it isn’t exactly as she remembered it either. Claudia D. Hernández dissects the nuances of identity and assimilation in a way that is biting and beautiful.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks assistant editor

Madeline ffitch, Stay and Fight
(FSG)

Set in Appalachia, a region oft viewed as a microcosm of America’s larger political ills, Stay and Fight by Madeline Ffitch explodes time-old stereotypes about the land and its people, delivering instead some of the most well-drawn and fascinating characters in recent memory. The novel introduces us to Helen, a woman left by her boyfriend to fend for herself on several acres of undeveloped land. She gets by working for Rudy, a government-hating laborer who knows how to survive Appalachia’s brutal winters. When one such winter approaches, Helen invites her neighbors, Karen and Lily, and their newborn son, Perley, to live with her. Together, they form a make-shift family and time passes. Perley grows up and wants to go to school, and Rudy grows fruit-trees on land reserved for a pipeline. The family clashes with the outside world, and by the story’s end, readers are left with a sense of just how complicated protests against government, politics—and each other—can truly be.

–Amy Brady, Lit Hub contributor

Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (Milkweed Editions)

The miniature essays in Late Migrations approach with modesty, deliver bittersweet epiphanies, and feel like small doses of religion. Similar to fellow Milkweed Editions writer Amy Leach, Renkl’s contemplations on life and the natural world are compact, luscious, and unexpected—in an instant, they can weave from crushing tragedy to transcendent joy and then simply pause and listen. Late Migrations is like the spirituality of Krista Tippett’s On Being meets the brevity of Joe Brainard’s I remember.

–Nate McNamara, Lit Hub contributor

Chelsea Johnson, LaToya Council, and Carolyn Choi, illustrated by Ashley Seil Smith, IntersectionAllies: We Make Room for All
(Dottir Press)

If ever a book belonged in every pediatrician’s office, clinic, daycare, shelter, classroom and home, this is it. Introducing the revolutionary concept of “making room” as a means of inclusion as opposed to “tolerance” and “respect” (which while meaningful don’t actually make a case for interpersonal relationship) makes this a stunner of a primer in how to incorporate entirety. Borrowing from Horton, Dr. Seuss’s pachydermian conscience, these authors emphasize “friends can be allies no matter how small.” That a significant part of the text is dedicated to the adult reader makes this book valuable for all ages.

–Lucy Kogler, Lit Hub contributor

Every week, a new crop of great new books hit the shelves. If we could read them all, we would, but since time is finite and so is the human capacity for page-turning, here are a few of the ones we’ll be starting with. What are you reading this week?

FICTION

Marcy Dermansky, Very Nice (Knopf)

A dark comedy in which a famous novelist finds himself in a love triangle with one of his students and her mother; essential reading for writers or those who like to make fun of them.

James Alan McPherson, Hue and Cry (Ecco)

A reissue of the essential collection by James Alan McPherson—who was the first African-American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction (for his only other collection, Elbow Room). Profound, gritty, and deeply human, this is a must read (or re-read) for everyone this week.

Kate McQuade, Tell Me Who We Were (William Morrow)

This collection of linked stories follows the lives and experiences of six women that spiral out from a single event in their young lives—the mysterious death of their beloved teacher, who was found at the bottom of a pond.

Chandler Baker, Whisper Network (Flatiron)

If you’ve been paying attention to media stories in the past few years, you may recognize one detail from this funny feminist thriller: the BAD Men List—that is, “Beware of Asshole Dallas Men,” which circulates around the office where Sloane, Grace, and Ardie work. And when one of the BAD men gets promoted to CEO, they can’t just sit by and watch. And then, as they do in novels, things get out of hand.

Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others (Little, Brown)

Orner is secretly one of the best contemporary writers working today: his characters are indelible, his focus small and piercing, his insights moving. This book contains 44 stories and a novella, ranging widely in length, but all with his special sense for truth, character, and wistful realism.

NONFICTION

Alasdair Gray, Of Me and Others: 1952 – 2019 (Canongate)

“I thought this book would turn out to be a ragbag of interesting scraps,” Gray writes in the foreword to this collection of almost 70 years of essays. “I now think it has the unity of a struggle for a confident culture, a struggle shared with a few who became good friends and thousands I have never met.” Gray is a cult hero and a legendary writer; whether unified or not, this book is sure to be full of delights.

Maureen Callahan, American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century (Viking)

A fascinating—if horrifying—profile of the wildly prolific, highly meticulous, totally unconventional serial killer Israel Keyes, this book will keep you up at night, for a variety of reasons.

Svetlana Alexievich, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II (Random House)

The latest translated book from Nobel Laureate Alexievitch is a captivating oral history of over 100 survivors of the Nazi invasion of Russia, originally published in 1985 and only now making it to the US.

John Zada, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch (Atlantic Monthly Press)

For lovers of nature writing who also definitely want to know about the Sasquatch (so, everyone).

Litt Woon Long, tr. Barbara J. Haveland, The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning (Spiegel & Grau)

In this lovely memoir, Litt Woon Long writes of how she took up mushrooming after the death of her husband, and how the strange plants brought her back to life. An ode to one of the planet’s most fascinating and weirdest offerings, and also to love, and to renewal.

“Our village was set on fire in 1943… That day we were digging potatoes.”

“The noise came from the sky. We heard the noise: rrrrr! This is the impression that remained from the first day of the war—mama, instead of calling us gently as usual, cries, Children! My children!”

“Everything gets stamped in a child’s memory like in a photo album. As separate snapshots…”

It is a rare thing indeed to write an iconic book—one which manages somehow to encompass the experience of a nation or a people at a given historical moment. One which resonates, and of which people say: if you want to understand that, first you have to read this. A first-hand account, perhaps, which sheds light where there was none, such as I Will Bear Witness, Victor Klemperer’s Third Reich diary, which captures like no other the German Jewish experience. Or a novel born of a place and time and person, such as Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, emblematic of the dreams and defiance of southern black women’s lives in the 1930s.

Often—as with both Hurston and Klemperer—form is key. Only a diary kept faithfully and at great personal risk for over a decade, could possibly convey the serial degradations suffered under dictatorship, and the endurance required to survive these; only a precise ear for Floridian black vernacular as well as a precise eye for the viciousness of Floridian social conventions, could make Hurston’s novel (to paraphrase Toni Morrison) as beautiful as it is political.

Walter Kempowski’s Echolot comes close to such formal perfection too, his compendium of German wartime letters and diary extracts deriving its power from the breadth of experiences it opens out for the reader. In Swansong, the final volume, the day of the German capitulation is described by soldiers taken captive, teenage girls in the Berlin suburbs, mayors surrendering their provincial townships, Hitler Youth in the Volkssturm, and concentration camp survivors. The 8th of May 1945: a single day, the true weight of which can only be felt when borne by the words of a multitude.

Svetlana Alexievich has pursued form like few other writers, giving voice to little-heard multitudes in the process. While Kempowski spent decades accruing an archive from public donations, and then selecting and compiling, Alexievich works with interviews—pure and simple. She eschews context and explanation, offering neither quantification nor qualification, indeed none of the conventional academic padding of introductions and epilogues, or maps and tables.

Assembling oral histories as a litany of first-hand accounts, she renders these on the page unadorned, seemingly verbatim, creating a polyphonic eye-witness chorus. It’s a form she has unquestionably mastered, producing a remarkable body of work. The Unwomanly Face of War (1985) took on Soviet women’s experiences of the Great Patriotic War; Zinky Boys (1989) collated accounts of the Afghan campaigns of the 1980s from Russian soldiers and their families; Voices from Chernobyl (1997) chronicled the lives of survivors of the nuclear disaster—each volume following the same, startling approach.

Last Witnesses (Random House, 2019) was conceived as a companion piece to her first, documenting Soviet wartime childhoods; first published in 1985, it has been extended for this new English translation. From testimonies collected between 1974 and 2008, Alexievich has selected just over one hundred. Keeping faith with the restraint of all her other works, “Instead of a Preface” she provides a question from Dostoyevsky; and even at the head of each testimony, she gives the minimum required to situate the reader: a brief excerpt to serve as a title, the name of the speaker, the age they were when the war began, and the profession they went on to enter.

Zhenya Belkevich. Six years old. Now a worker.
Zina Kosiak. Eight years old. Now a hairdresser.
Misha Maiorov. Five years old. Now a doctor of agronomy.

When war entered their lives, these children were digging potatoes, gathering mushrooms. They were at the circus, or in their schoolrooms, or watching their father shaving, “one cheek covered with lather.” The lilacs and bird cherries were flowering. War was scent and noise and incongruity: a German soldier buttering bread at the family’s kitchen table; a man seen carrying looted sugar in his hat for want of a bag; and the realization that “it’s funny, but no one laughs.”

“The first dead I saw was a horse… Then a dead woman… That surprised me. My idea was that only men were killed in war.” (Gena Yushkevich, twelve years old. Now a journalist.)

“I don’t remember the Germans themselves, but I do remember their technology. Big cars, big motorcycles…” (Zina Shimanskaya, eleven years old. Now a cashier.) “Black sky… Fat black airplanes… They roar down very low. Just over the earth.” (Vania Titov, five years old. Now a specialist in land reclamation.)

These are the memories of Russians and Belarussians, Ukrainians—some as young as three or four when the Nazis invaded, others on the verge of adulthood; many were interviewed in middle age, others were reflecting at the end of their lives. Often, as children, they only understood fear through the adults around them: Zhenia Selenia recalls looking at her mother and realizing “Her eyes are big, instead of a face—just eyes…” Misha Maiorov’s narrative—one of the first—is told in flashes: a series of brief episodes, taking the reader in jump cuts from the wooden pegs she fashioned at her grandfather’s workbench, to finding German soldiers at her grandmother’s stove. From the charred Russian airman she saw led down the village street, his wrists tied with wire; to the burned remains of her childhood home: “A handful of salt… All that was left of our house.”

Testimony follows testimony; name, age, occupation, and then wartime experience; page after page, they continue. But underpinning this apparent simplicity, this purity of form, is a rigor, of course.

Alexievich is an editor par excellence. Reducing each interview—hours of material—to a telling page or two is a skill in itself; Alexievich’s mastery lies in what she retains. Common threads run through these accounts: partisan experiences coming to the fore, along with rural life under occupation, building a terrible familiarity with the Nazi modus operandi: blackened ruins, blackened people, retribution. “Foreign posters and leaflets appeared on the fences and posts. Foreign orders. ‘New rules’ came.” (Zina Shimanskaya again) “Something was hanging from a tree… When I realized that this something was a man, I was stunned. I closed my eyes…” (Inna Levkevich, ten years old. Now a construction engineer.)

Alexievich’s witnesses tell of house searches, village massacres, and dogs chasing down children. Of bombardment too. “Someone taught us that you should open your mouth so as not to be deafened. So we opened our mouths, stopped our ears, and could still hear them coming. Whining. It’s so frightening that the skin on your face and your whole body gets taut.” (Nina Yaroshevich, nine years old. Now teacher of physical education.)

If reading these accounts can be relentless, then so was the war these children endured: it is clear Alexievich wants her reader to feel this. “I missed the time of childhood,” says Vasia Kharevsky, then a four year old, now an architect. “It fell out of my life. Instead of a childhood, I have the war.”

But for all the horror, for all the common experiences, Alexievich’s chorus never becomes a cacophony. That each account remains distinct is testament to her astute eye for the personal, the specific. Inna Levkevich, again: “My sister Irma was seven; she carried a Primus stove and mama’s shoes. She was terribly afraid to lose those shoes. They were new, of a pale-rose colour, with a faceted heel. Mama had taken them by chance, or maybe because they were her most beautiful thing.” Rimma Pozniakova, six years old. Now a worker: “Our house burned down, our garden burned down, there were baked apples hanging on the apple trees. We gathered them and ate them.” Alexievich knows what will stick in the reader’s mind—and what will kick in the gut too. Nina Yaroshevich: “The hanged people were so frozen that, when the wind swung them, they tinkled. Tinkled like frozen trees in the forest…”

While the interviewer’s voice is never there on the page, it must have been instrumental in the room; probing when needed, or consoling, or falling silent. The moral imperative to record and remember has evidently been a driving force for Alexievich—her life’s work has been giving voice to the voiceless, after all. “I remember the war in order to figure it out… Otherwise why do it?” says Nadia Gorbacheva, who was seven when the Germans invaded, and now works in television—perhaps a voice close to Alexievich’s own? “We are the last witnesses. Our time is ending. We must speak…” says Valya Brinskaya, her final contributor, which sounds a lot like a concluding statement. But a key strength of Alexievich’s form is that it resists drawing too much together, or asking one voice to speak for all. These hundred testimonies contain many contradictions, even refusals. “What’s better?” Oleg Boldyrev asks. “To remember or to forget? Maybe it’s better to keep quiet?” Zina Gurskaya goes further: “I can’t tell about it. I can’t, my dear. No, no!”

Remembering is important, but often far too painful; Alexievich accepts this. It can be both imperative and impossible—and can also feel pitifully inadequate when held against lived experience. “So I’ve told you…” says Leonid Sivakov. “Is that all? All that’s left of such horror? A few dozen words…” When you’ve survived the siege of Leningrad and its aftermath, can an interview, however intelligent, however sensitive, ever come close? “I’ve told you about a few days,” says Galina Firsova. “But there were nine hundred. Nine hundred days like that…”

It is a mark of Alexievich’s courage as a writer, as a thinker, that she is willing to include such challenges and questions. War—it seems—has been one of the terrible constants in human experience. What can a book do in the face of that? And in the current climate? Must the children of Yemen bear witness too, and the children of Syria? Will the children of Iran be next?

How to conclude about a book that provides none? I will finish with a quotation—not chosen because it summarizes, or speaks for others, rather because it spoke to me during the reading.

It comes from Nina Shunto—then six years old, now a cook—and it says much about keeping faith, which Svetlana Alexievich does in spades:

What do I have left from the war? I don’t understand what strangers are, because my brother and I grew up among strangers. Strangers saved us. But what kind of strangers are they? All people are one’s own. I live with that feeling, though I’m often disappointed.

I own a picture of a young Ethiopian girl whom I have started to call Hirut. She is in her teens, and her hair is pulled away from her face and hangs down her back in thick braids. She wears a long Ethiopian dress and even in the aged, black-and-white photo, it is easy to see that it is worn and stained. In the photo, Hirut has turned from the camera. I imagine that she is looking down at the ground, doing her best to focus her attention on something besides the intrusive photographer who is beside her, getting ready to shoot.

I have given her a rifle that is the last gift from a dying father, and her fate will be tied to a promise she made to never let it out of her possession. There is a war coming into Ethiopia and she has been told that she must work with the other women to prepare supplies for the men who will fight. It is 1935 and Hirut is orphaned and she has never gone further than five kilometers from her home. When they say: We must defend our country, Hirut wonders to herself: How big is a country? And she will continue to ask this question as Benito Mussolini invades Ethiopia and she is pushed—by decisions wholly her own and not entirely of her making—closer and closer to the front lines until she is holding a rifle and pulling the trigger and wishing all her enemies dead. This is the premise of my novel, The Shadow King.

Just how much can a picture tell us? Photos of Ethiopian girls and women were used to entice Italian men into joining Mussolini’s army. The soldiers were promised a quick war and an African adventure. They marched into Ethiopia singing songs of what they would do to Ethiopian women. Many packed their cameras along, eager to document this great journey that was surely the farthest that most had ever been from home. I have been collecting their photographs for well over a decade, poring over images—of quotidian military life, of deliberate brutalities, of friendships and camaraderie—to find what they may have never intended anyone to see.

I have sat for hours at a time staring at the faces of Ethiopians—men, women, children—who were forced to live with the occupying force. I have tried to read what hovers just out of view. That overly stiff posture of an elderly man next to a relaxed and smiling Italian soldier might hint at deep fear and discomfort. That bruised mouth on a prisoner pointed to ill-treatment, regardless of the casual arm around that prisoner’s shoulder. Those rows of girls, staring bare-chested and blank-eyed into the camera, might be saying more with their remote gazes than any shout for help could convey. That woman in her long dress staring into the camera with defiance might know more about what lurks in the hills behind the photographer’s shoulder than he does.

I was aware, even as I looked at these photos, that they were made by men to shape and reshape their memories. In photographing Ethiopian civilians and prisoners: men and women, boys and girls, these Italian men were re-imagining themselves. Like those familiar photographs that colonialists sent back from the territories they claimed needed “civilizing,” every picture became a narrative that he was creating about himself, about war. What, then, could I really glean from these images? What survived after sifting through the crafted narrative held within each photographer’s frame?

In The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich states that, “Everything we know about war, we know with ‘a man’s voice.’ We are all captives of ‘men’s’ notions and ‘men’s’ sense of war. ‘Men’s’ words. Women are silent,” she contends. I was not sure that women were silent, but I did know that they were not heard. What would it mean to tell a war story with a woman’s voice, with her sense of war, with her notions of what it means to be a soldier? I went back to the photographs in my collection and began to isolate those that specifically depicted women. I glanced away from the male photographer, drew the girls and women around me, and bent towards them to listen. What could they tell me about Hirut?

I built my story of Hirut and the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935 in increments, folding archival research into my own readings of the photographs I was collecting. I set pictures with discernible locations onto a map of Ethiopia, pinning those that I could to dates and battles, recreating historical moments out of fragmented information in order to understand the intimate, personal details that I thought I could detect. What started to crystallize and sharpen in front of me was often breathtaking: a series of lives, once held immobile and silent between shutter and aperture, stepped out of the shadows of history and into brighter light. They lent me words. They pointed me in new directions. They pushed those photographers further away, full of indignation and fury, and beckoned me on towards uncharted terrain—towards their war. Following their lead, I began to write my book.

I had no idea when I sent my fictional Hirut to war that my great-grandmother, Getey, preceded her: flesh and bone, blood and pride, paving the path for my imagination. I did not realize, when crafting Hirut’s story about losing possession of her father’s gun, that my relative Getey had experienced something similar. My great-grandmother’s story was a discovery made during a casual conversation with my mother, one of those moments when she stopped me as I was telling her about one of my photographs to say, But don’t you know about Getey, your great-grandmother? Don’t you remember?

What I remembered were all the stories that I had heard growing up, stories of men going to war: those proud, ferocious fighters who charged at a better-equipped, highly weaponized army with old rifles while barefooted and dressed in white. I imagined these men, so simple to spot, charging into valleys and flinging themselves at the invading foreigners, their throats grown hoarse from battle cries. My imagination tethered all the stories into an extended narrative, the images spinning in front of me then looping when I reached the limits of my comprehension. In this war, men stumbled but did not fall. Men gasped but did not die. Those white-clad men ran towards bullets and tanks, heroic and Homeric, myths brought to life. I would shut my eyes and see it all unfold: a thousand furious Achilles’s shaking off that deadly cut and rising onto undamaged feet again and again. I remembered the war like this, told in what Alexievich calls “a man’s voice,” regardless of who did the telling.

My great-grandmother, Getey, was a girl in 1935 when the Italian Fascists invaded Ethiopia. As war loomed, Emperor Haile Selassie ordered the eldest son from each family to enlist and bring their gun for war. There was no son in Getey’s family who was of fighting age. She was the eldest, and not even she was considered an adult. In fact, she was in an arranged marriage but too young to live with her adult husband. In order to fulfill the emperor’s orders, her father asked her husband to represent the family, and he gave the man his rifle. This act must have felt like a final betrayal to her. (Eventually, she would leave this arranged marriage and a husband she did not like.) She rebelled and told her father she would enlist in war and represent her family. She was, after all, the eldest. When her father refused, she took her case to court and sued him. And she won.

When the judges announced their verdict, she raised the rifle above her head and sang shilela—one of the songs that warriors sing just before battle, when they meld their fearlessness and fighting prowess into melody and rhythm. Then she took the gun and went to join the front lines.

*

I knew Getey as an old woman, essentially bed-ridden but alert. I have no solid memory of what she looked like: to my child’s eye, she was simply old, a petite woman with skin molded almost entirely out of gentle wrinkles. The day I came to visit her, not long before she died, I spent most of my time with other relatives who had gathered in the home she shared with her daughter. I had my camera but I did not take any pictures of her. She was in bed, tucked into a corner of the house, isolated from the talk and revelry happening in the other room. Though stories about her stubbornness and spiritedness had seeped into the descriptions I heard of her, I knew nothing back then of her experiences during the war. She had been relegated to the position of a respected elder, someone gazed upon through the thick haze of time, discernible but essentially unseen.

After learning Getey’s story, what I had suspected from my examination of photographs and news articles solidified into tangible knowledge that came from my own family and coursed through my blood. Women were not only the caretakers in the war against Italy and the fascists; they were also soldiers. Even though it was difficult to find these stories, the more I researched, the more women I found tucked inside the lines of history. A photo here, a headline there, a short article over there. The process was often slow and frustrating, but it was undeniably exhilarating. We were there, I found myself thinking. We were there and here is proof, and I imagined Getey stepping in front of me, rifle raised, a song in her throat, and pushing me forward. Because: how many more were there, waiting to be spoken into being?

Myth: That war will make a man out of you. That aggression—and anger—is the territory of men. That in conflict, the sisters of Helen will wait breathlessly inside the gates of Troy for victory or defeat to decide their fates. That when we speak of war, we speak of tested resolve and broken spirits and wounded bodies and imagine them as masculine figures clad in uniform: filmic images drifting past our imagination, buoyed by stories and textbooks and literature. Yet there is Getey, look at her slinging that rifle over her shoulder, saying goodbye to her younger brothers and father, and marching to the front lines.

Fact: Women enter into struggle, whether political or personal, well aware of the bodies in which they exist. We recognize our strengths even as we are reminded of the ways we can be made vulnerable. We know that the other battlefield on which another kind of war is fought is the one bordered by our own skin. No uniform or alliance can completely erase the threat of sexual assault and exploitation that wants to make us both trophy and contested territory.

Imagine Hirut on the top of a hill, rifle ready, prepared to ambush the enemy. Along the way to this war, she is forced to contend with sexual aggression and then rape by one of her own compatriots. The smoky terrain of the front lines has expanded to engulf Hirut herself: her body an object to be gained or lost. She is both a woman and a country: living flesh and battleground. And when people tell her, Don’t fight him, Hirut, remember you are fighting to keep your country free. She asks herself, But am I not my own country? What does freedom mean when a woman—when a girl—cannot feel safe in her own skin? This, too, is what war means: to shift the battlefield away from the hills and onto your own body, to defend your own flesh with the ferocity of the cruelest soldier, against that one who wants to make himself into a man at your expense.

Helen of Troy, gazing across the bloody battlefield of the Trojan War, cannot imagine herself independent from the men who wage war in her name. When that great Trojan warrior, Hector, approaches her, she looks at him and understands that she is as much bound to the battle unfolding beyond the gates as any soldier. She laments the decisions of the gods, of Zeus, who have turned her body, her self, into a catalyst for conflict. “Hereafter we shall be made into things of song for the men of the future,” she tells Hector in Homer’s The Iliad. She can never extricate herself from the war. She will never have an identity beyond that of prized possession and stolen treasure, something to be reshaped and reconfigured, and then sung by men well into the future. She may not have known that while she mourned her fate, Pentheselea, that mighty Amazon warrior, would soon stand bravely in front of Achilles and wage battle with such unrelenting ferocity that Achilles would mourn while killing her, sensing a fighting spirit like his own, perhaps.

While developing Hirut’s narrative, I read the stories of female soldiers from across the centuries. From Artemisia of Caria in 480BC to the women in the army of the Kingdom of Dahomey in early 18th century Benin, to the more recent Yazidi women’s army that fought against ISIS, I have come to realize that the history of women in war has often been contested because the bodies of women have also been battlefields on which distorted ideas of manhood were made. If war makes a man out of you, then what does it mean to fight beside—or lose to—a female soldier? For centuries, women have been providing their own answers to this. But history—that shape-shifting collection of memories and data replete with gaps—would want us to believe that every female soldier plucked out of oblivion and brought to light is the first and only one. But that has never been true, and it is not true now.

__________________________________

Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is out now from Norton.

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, the best poetry collections, the best memoirs of the decade, and the best essay collections of the decade. But our sixth list was a little harder—we were looking at what we (perhaps foolishly) deemed “general” nonfiction: all the nonfiction excepting memoirs and essays (these being covered in their own lists) published in English between 2010 and 2019.

Reader, we cheated. We picked a top 20. It only made sense, with such a large field. And 20 isn’t even enough, really. But so it goes, in the world of lists.

The following books were finally chosen after much debate (and multiple meetings) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

***

The Top Twenty

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010)

I read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow when it first came out, and I remember its colossal impact so clearly—not just on the academic world (it is, technically, an academic book, and Alexander is an academic) but everywhere. It was published during the Obama Administration, an interval which many (white people) thought signaled a new dawn of race relations in America—of a kind of fantastic post-racialism. Though it’s hard to look back on this particular zeitgeist now (when, and I still can’t believe I’m writing this, Donald Trump is president of the United States) without decrying the ignorance and naiveté of this mindset, Alexander’s book called out this the insistence on a phenomenon of “colorblindness” in 2012, as a veneer, as a sham, or as, simply, another form of ignorance. “We have not ended racial caste in America,” she declares, “we have merely redesigned it.” Alexander’s meticulous research concerns the mass incarceration of black men principally through the War on Drugs, Alexander explains how the United States government itself (the justice system) carries out a significant racist pattern of injustice—which not only literally subordinates black men by jailing them, but also then removes them of their rights and turns them into second class citizens after the fact. Former convicts, she learns through working with the ACLU, will face discrimination (discrimination that is supported and justified by society) which includes restrictions from voting rights, juries, food stamps, public housing, student loans—and job opportunities. “Unlike in Jim Crow days, there were no ‘Whites Only’ signs.” Alexander explains. “This system is out of sight, out of mind.” Her book, which exposes this subtler but still horrible new mode of social control, is an essential, groundbreaking achievement which does more than call out the hypocrisy of our infrastructure, but provide it with obvious steps to change.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010)

In this riveting (despite its near 600 pages) and highly influential book, Mukherjee traces the known history of our most feared ailment, from its earliest appearances over five thousand years ago to the wars still being waged by contemporary doctors, and all the confusion, success stories, and failures in between—hence the subtitle “a biography of cancer,” though of course it is also a biography of humanity and of human ingenuity (and lack thereof).

Mukherjee began to write the book after a striking interaction with a patient who had stomach cancer, he told The New York Times. “She said, ‘I’m willing to go on fighting, but I need to know what it is that I’m battling.’ It was an embarrassing moment. I couldn’t answer her, and I couldn’t point her to a book that would. Answering her question—that was the urgency that drove me, really. The book was written because it wasn’t there.”

His work was certainly appreciated. The Emperor of All Maladies won the 2011 Pulitzer in General Nonfiction (the jury called it “An elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.”), the Guardian first book award, and the inaugural PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; it was a New York Times bestseller. But most importantly, it was the first book many laypeople (read: not scientists, doctors, or those whose lives had already been acutely affected by cancer) had read about the most dreaded of all diseases, and though the science marches on, it is still widely read and referenced today.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)

As a strongly humanities-focused person, it’s difficult for me to connect with books about science. What can I say besides that public education and I failed each other. When I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I found myself thinking that if all scientific knowledge were part of this kind of incredibly compelling and human narrative, I would probably be a doctor by now. (I mean, it’s possible.) Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, and her cells (dubbed HeLa cells) which were cultured without her permission, and which were the first human cells to reproduce in a lab—making them immensely valuable to scientists in research labs all over the world. HeLa cells have been used for the development of vaccines and treatments as well as in drug treatments, gene mapping, and many, many other scientific pursuits. They were even sent to space so scientists could study the effects of zero gravity on human cells.

Skloot set a wildly ambitious project for herself with this book. Not only does she write about the (immortal) life of the cells as well as the lives of Lacks and her (human, not just cellular) descendants, she also writes about the racism in the medical field and medical ethics as a whole. That the book feels cohesive as well as compelling is a great testament to Skloot’s skills as a writer. “Immortal Life reads like a novel,” writes Eric Roston in his Washington Post review. “The prose is unadorned, crisp and transparent.” For a book that encompasses so much, it never feels baggy. Nearly ten years later, it remains an urgent text, and one that is taught in high schools, universities, and medical schools across the country. It is both an incredible achievement and, simply, a really good read.  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (2010)

Timothy Snyder’s brilliant Bloodlands has changed World War II scholarship more, perhaps, than any work since Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, an apt comparison given that Bloodlands includes within it a response to Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil (Snyder doesn’t buy it, and provides convincing proof that Eichmann was more of a run-of-the-mill hateful Nazi and less a colorless bureaucrat simply doing his job). Snyder reads in 10 languages, which is key to his ability to synthesize international scholarship and present new theories in an accessible way. But before I continue praising this book, I should probably let y’all know what it’s about—Bloodlands is a history of mass killings in the Double-Occupied Zone of Eastern Europe, where the Soviets showed up, killed everyone they wanted to, and then the Nazis showed up and killed everyone else. By focusing on mass killings, rather than genocide, Snyder is able to draw connections between totalitarian regimes and examine the mechanisms by which small nations can suddenly and horrifyingly become much smaller.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010)

Wilkerson’s history of the Great Migration is a revelation. When we talk about migration in the context of American history, we tend to focus on triumphalist stories of immigrants coming to America, but what about the vast migrations that have happened internally? Between 1920 and 1970, millions of African-Americans migrated North from the prejudice-ridden South, lured by relatively high-paying jobs and relatively less racism. It takes a whole lot to make someone leave their home, and Wilkerson does an excellent job at reminding us how awful life in the South was for Black people (and still is, in many ways). The Warmth of Other Suns is not only fascinating—it’s also thrilling, taking us into the lives of hard-scrabble folk who were equal parts refugees and adventurers, and truly epic, telling a great story on a grand scale. Don’t think that means there aren’t small moments of humanity seeded throughout the book—for every sentence about the conduct of millions, there’s a detail that reminds us that we’re reading about individuals, with their own hopes, wishes, dreams, and struggles.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2012)

While Robert Caro first came to prominence for The Powerbroker, his 1974 biography of divisive urban planner Robert Moses, it’s Caro’s ongoing multi-volume biography of LBJ, America’s most unjustly maligned president (fight me, Kennedy-heads!), that has cemented his legacy. It’s hard to pick one in particular to recommend, but The Passage of Power, which covers the years 1958-1964, captures the most tumultuous period of LBJ’s life in politics, as he went from feared senator, to side-lined VP, to suddenly becoming the post powerful figure in the world. There’s something profoundly moving about the vastness of these works—Caro is 83 now, and has dedicated an enormous part of his life to this singular project. His wife is his only approved research assistant, and together, they’ve upended half a century of LBJ criticism to reveal the complex, problematic, but always striving core of a sensitive soul.

I had a teacher in high school who spent 20 years working on her dissertation on LBJ. She’d spend each weekend at the LBJ Library at UT Austin, while working full time as a public school teacher, and kicked ass at both. There’s something about LBJ that inspires people to dedicate their entire lives to trying to figure him out, and in the process, trying to understand the world that made him, and that he made. Thanks to Caro, we can all understand LBJ a little bit better.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (2012)

Tom Reiss opens his biography of Thomas Alexandre-Dumas, father of author Alexandre Dumas, with a scene that seems right out of an academic heist film. At a library in rural France, Reiss convinces a town official to blow open a safe whose combination was held only by the late librarian. What Reiss discovers are the rudiments of a grand and, until then, largely unknown story of the man who inspired some of his son’s most beloved tales. The Black Count is also a case study of complex racial politics during the age of revolutionary France. Dumas was born in 1762 in Saint-Domingue, the French Caribbean colony that would become Haiti. As the son of a French marquis and a freed black slave, Dumas was subject both to the privileges of the former and the kind of indignities suffered by the latter. His father, for instance, sells him into slavery when he is 12 only to purchase his freedom later and bring him to France, where the young man receives an aristocratic education. A final rift from his father prompts Dumas to join the military. Reiss creates a dynamic, if somewhat speculative portrait of Dumas based on letters, reports from battlefields, Dumas’ own writings, and more. By the time he is 30, Dumas has vaulted in the ranks from corporal to general and commands a division of more than 50,000 soldiers. It’s no accident that the thrilling militaristic feats Reiss describes sound like events out of The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers. Though the general becomes a cavalry commander under Napoleon Bonaparte, Reiss suggests that it was Napoleon himself who ruined Dumas not only from a personal standpoint, but civilizational as well. Napoleon reintroduced slavery in Haiti, after all, in contradiction to the republican dreams of Dumas’ contemporary, Toussaint Louverture, another rare and successful 18th-century general of African descent. Reiss unearths the ultimately tragic story of a man who was infamous in his own time for enjoying social and professional advantages that would’ve been unheard of for a mixed-race man in the US, a nation which of course went through its own revolution one generation earlier.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (2014)

The premise of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book is a simple scientific fact: there have been five mass extinctions in the history of the planet, and soon there will be six. The difference, Kolbert explains, is that this one is caused by humans, who have drastically altered the earth in a short time. She points out on the first page that humans (which is to say, homo sapiens, humans like us) have only been around for two hundred thousand or so years—an incredibly short amount of time to do damage enough to destroy most of earthly life. Kolbert’s book is so unique, though, because she combines research from across disciplines (scientific and social-scientific) to prepare an extremely comprehensive, sweeping argument about how our oceans, air, animal populations, bacterial ecosystems, and other natural elements are dangerously adapting to (or dying from) human impact, while also tracing the history of both the approaches to these things (theories of evolution, extinction, and other principles). It’s a depressing and horrifying argument on the face of it, but it’s made so delicately, even poetically—Kolbert’s concerned, occasional first-person narration, and her many interviews with professionals capable of the pithiest, most perfect quotes (not to mention that she interviews these experts, sometimes, over pizza) make this book a conversation, more than a treatise. Kolbert talks us through the headiest, most complicated science, breaking down this mass disaster morsel by morsel. This might be The Sixth Extinction’s greatest achievement—it is so smart while also being so quotidian, so urgent while also being so present. And this fits the tone of her argument: our current mass extinction doesn’t feel like an asteroid hitting the planet. It’s amassed by the small ways in which we live our lives. We are crawling, she illuminates, towards the end of the world.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me 1) won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015, 2) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and 3) was deemed “required reading” by Toni Morrison. What else is there to say? To call it “timely” or “urgent” or even “a prime example of how the personal is, in fact, political” (as I am tempted to do) does not quite capture the unique, grounding, heartbreaking experience of reading this book. Framed as a letter to his teenage son, Between the World and Me is both a biting interrogation of American history and today’s society and an intimate look at the concerns and hopes a father passes down to his son. In just 152 pages, this book touches on the creation of race (“But race is the child of racism, not the father”), the countless acts of violence enacted on black bodies, gun control, and anecdotes from the writer’s own life. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic, exercises a journalist’s concision and clarity and fuses it with the flourish of a novelist and the caring instinct of a father. It is a wonderful hybrid. The way the topics, the tones, bleed into one another reads so naturally: “I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, and that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store…” The list, of course, goes on. Between the World and Me brilliantly forces us to confront these tragedies again—to remember our own experiences watching the news coverage, to see them in the context of history filtered through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ unsurprised perspective, and to see them anew through the eyes of his disillusioned young son. There is an amazing generosity to these personal glimpses, the moments when the writer turns to his son (says “you”). They catch you off guard. (There are even photographs throughout, like a scrapbook you aren’t sure if you’re allowed to look through.) There have been many books about race, about violence and institutionalized injustice and identity, and there will be more, but none quite so beautifully shattering as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature (2015)

Andrea Wulf’s 2015 biography of 18th-century German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt—one of the most famous men of his time, for whom literally hundreds of towns, rivers, currents, glaciers, and more are named—is so much more than the story of a single life. Aside from chronicling a remarkably fertile moment in the history of European ideas (Von Humboldt was good buddies with his neighbor in Weimar, Goethe) Wulf reveals in Humboldt a true forebear of present-day ecology, a jack-of-all-trades scientist less concerned with the reduction of the natural world into its constituent specimens than with our place in a broader ecosystem.

And while it doesn’t seem particularly radical now, Humboldt’s proto-environmentalist ideas about the wider world, much of which he mapped and explored, stood in stark contrast to prevailing notions of Christian dominion, that dubious theological position conjured up in aid of empire. Insofar as Humboldt was among the first to understand and articulate the complex systems of a living forest, he was also the first to sound the alarm about the impacts of deforestation (much of which he encountered on his epic journey across the northern reaches of South America). Part adventure yarn, part intellectual history, part ecological meditation, The Invention of Nature restores to prominence an exemplary life, and reminds us of the tectonic force of ideas paired to action.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Stacy Schiff, The Witches (2015)

It’s surprising that with a topic as popular and recurring in American culture as the Salem witch trials there have not been more books of this kind. Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the bestselling Cleopatra, Stacy Schiff takes to the Salem witch trials with curiosity and a historian’s magnifying glass, setting out to uncover the mystery that has baffled, awed, and terrified generations since. She pokes at the spectacle that Salem has become in mainstream and artistic depictions—how it has blended with folklore and fiction and has hitherto become a sensationalized event in American history which nonetheless has never been fully understood. Schiff writes that despite the imagination surrounding the Salem witch trials, in reality, there is still a gap in their history of—to be exact—nine months; so the impetus of the book and the intent of Schiff is to penetrate the mass hysteria and panic that ripped through Salem at the time and led to the execution of fourteen women and five men. In her opening chapter, Schiff chillingly sets up the atmosphere of the book and asks key questions that will drive its ensuing narrative: “Who was conspiring against you? Might you be a witch and not know it? Can an innocent person be guilty? Could anyone, wondered a group of men late in the summer, consider themselves safe?” At the heart of Schiff’s historical investigation is the Puritan culture of New England—but part of her masterful synthesis is that she picks apart at each thread of Salem’s culture and evaluates the witch trials from every perspective. Praised for her research as well as her prose and narrative capabilities, Schiff’s The Witches has been described by The Times (London) as “An oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller”; Schiff herself, by the New York Review of Books as having “mastered the entire history of early New England.” A phrase that still haunts me for its resonance throughout human history, is: “Even at the time, it was clear to some that Salem was a story of one thing behind which was a story about something else altogether.” –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Svetlana Alexievich, tr. Bela Shayevich, Secondhand Time (2016)

A landmark work of oral history, Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time chronicles the decline and fall of Soviet communism and the rise of oligarchic capitalism. Through a multitude of interviews conducted between 1991 and 2012 with ordinary citizens—doctors, soldiers, waitresses, Communist party secretaries, and writers—Alexievich’s account is as important to understanding the Soviet world as Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Second-hand Time first appeared in Russia in 2013 and was translated into English in 2016 by Bella Shayevich. As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker, “There are many worthwhile books on the post-Soviet period and Putin’s ascent…But the nonfiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history…” It is shockingly intimate, Alexievich’s interviewees sharing their darkest traumas and deepest regrets. In their kitchens, at gravesites, each character tells the story of a nation abandoned by the Kremlin. Like much of Alexievich’s work, it is radical in its composition, challenging with its polyphony of distinctive, human voices the “official history” of a society that presented itself as homogeneous and monolithic—an achievement the Nobel committee recognized when it cited the Belorussian journalist for developing “a new kind of literary genre…a history of the soul.” Like her more recent The Unwomanly Face of War and Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II, Alexievich’s project is one of the most important accounts being produced today.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Jane Mayer, Dark Money (2016)

In addition to being an incredible work of reporting, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is a historical document of what happened to America as a small group of plutocrats funded the rise of political candidates who espoused policies and beliefs that had been, until then, considered a part of the fringe right wing of the Republican Party. Mayer describes this group as “a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and voted.” Mayer’s painstakingly reported work is a monumental achievement; she lays out, in as much detail as could possibly be available, the mechanisms that allowed this group to channel their wealth and power, with the help of federal law, to a set of institutions that aim to fight scientific advancement, justice-oriented movements, and climate change. In doing so, they have overhauled American politics. As Alan Ehrenhalt put it in a review of the book for The New York Times, she describes “a private political bank capable of bestowing unlimited amounts of money on favored candidates, and doing it with virtually no disclosure of its source.”

The stakes here extend beyond American politics; Mayer points out that Koch money upholds some of the institutions most vigorously fighting climate activism and defending the fossil fuel industry. In 2017, she told the Los Angeles Times, “There are many things you can fix and you can bring back, and there are sort of cycles in American history and the pendulum swings back and forth, but there are things you can damage irreparably, and that’s what I’m worried about right this moment … And that’s why this particular book—because it’s about the money that is stopping this country from doing something useful on climate change.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

David France, How to Survive a Plague (2016)

To call How to Survive a Plague extensive would be an understatement; France’s account of the epidemic’s earliest days is overwhelmingly generous, letting the reader experience those days, and everything that followed, from within the community that faced it first. France recounts the ways in which scientists and doctors first responded to the virus, tracing the evolution of that understanding from within a small circle to a broad cry for awareness and resources; meanwhile, he shows how a community of people fighting for their lives mobilized alternative systems of communication, education, and support while facing an almost inconceivable wall of barriers to that work. The importance of language in this fight is at the forefront here, from the scientific question of what to call the virus, to its reputation in popular culture as “gay cancer,” to the disagreements within activist groups about how to tell their stories to an unsympathetic world.

This is an enraging history, one of various institutional failures, missed opportunities, hypocrisies, and acts of malice toward a community in crisis, motivated by hatred and horror of queer people and gay men in particular. But I felt equally enraged and in awe. This is a humbling history to read, especially if, like me, you come from a generation of queer people that has been accused of forgetting it. I’m grateful for France’s testimony; it won’t let any of us forget.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery (2016)

Reséndez’s The Other Slavery is nothing short of an epic recalibration of American history, one that’s long overdue and badly needed in the present moment. The story of the assault on indigenous peoples in the Americas is perhaps well-known, but what’s less known is how many of those people were enslaved by colonizers, how that enslavement led to mass death, and how complicit the American legal system was in bringing that oppression about and sustaining it for years beyond the supposed emancipation in regions in which indigenous peoples were enslaved. This was not an isolated phenomenon. It extended from Caribbean plantations to Western mining interests. It was part and parcel of the European effort to settle the “new world” and was one of the driving motivations behind the earliest expeditions and colonies. Reséndez puts the number of indigenous enslaved between Columbus’s arrival and 1900 at somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million people. The institution took many forms, but reading through the legal obfuscation and drilling down into the archival record and first-hand accounts of the eras, Reséndez shows how slavery permeated the continents. Native tribes were not simply wiped out by disease, war, and brutal segregation. They were also worked—against their will, without pay, in mass numbers—to death. It was a sustained and organized enslavement. The Other Slavery also tells the story of uprising—communities that resisted, individuals who fought. It’s a complex and tragic story that required a skilled historian to bring into the contemporary consciousness. In addition to his skills as a historian and an investigator, Resendez is a skilled storyteller with a truly remarkable subject. This is historical nonfiction at its most important and most necessary.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies (2016)

One night, facing a brief gap between plans with different people, I took Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies to a bar. A few minutes after I ordered, deep in Traister’s incredible, extensive history of single women in America, a server came over to offer me another, more isolated seat at the end of the bar, “so you don’t feel embarrassed about being alone,” she said, quietly. I assured her I was okay, trying not to laugh. She was just so worried.

I turned back to my book to find Traister describing this kind of cultural distress—a woman, alone, in public?!—at a new generation of unmarried adult women, who are more autonomous and numerous today than ever before. Far from marking a crisis in the social order, Traister writes, this shift “was in fact a new order … women’s paths were increasingly marked with options, off-ramps, variations on what had historically been a very constrained theme.” She examines the history of unmarried women as a social and political force, including the activists who devoted their lives to establishing a greater range of educational, familial, and economic choices for women, with particular attention to the ways in which that history is also one of racial and economic justice in the US. Traister also highlights the networks of social support that women have created in order to survive patriarchy and establish lifestyles that did not depend on it; intimacy and communication among unmarried women, she shows, were the backbone of activist and reform movements that successfully challenged the dominant order.

The book draws on interviews from dozens of women of varying backgrounds, and their firsthand accounts are a portrait of life amid a historic shift toward female autonomy. Their stories, and Traister’s analysis, make it clear that even as options for many women are expanding, those options are not equally available or beneficial to all women. This is a stunning reckoning with the state of women’s independence and the policies that still seek to curtail it.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires (2017)

Prairie Fires, Caroline Fraser’s Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder is not just a painstakingly researched and lyrically realized account of how the Little House on the Prairie author decanted the poverty and precarity of her homesteader family’s existence into narratives of self-reliance and perseverance—although it is that—it is also a meditation on the human need “to transform the raw materials of the past into art.” Full disclosure, I did not read the Little House on the Prairie books as a child and have no sentimental attachment to Laura, Pa or Ma. But in looking at the life behind the books, Wilder emerges as a tenacious, sometimes fragile figure, and as a literary operator of uncommon nous and self-awareness. Drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Prairie Fires has all the essentials of a great history book. Most importantly, Fraser’s great skill is in pulling back the veils of mythology that have enshrouded her subject and the era her works helped to define, enabling us to see both the real people and the myths themselves with fresh, critical eyes. There is no romanticizing of the Frontier, and a very real understanding of the sentimentality and bias of an overtly racist understanding of “westward expansion.” It is a remarkable book.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018)

In 2017, monuments commemorating heroes of the Confederacy were being debated, defaced and toppled throughout the United States. That same year, months before President Trump signed a law creating a commission to plan for the bicentennial of Frederick Douglass’ birth, he infamously seemed to suggest that Douglass was still around, doing an “amazing job” and “getting recognized more and more.” The irony was hard to miss: it was easy to eulogize a past that was not comprehensively, nor even fundamentally understood. One achievement of historian David Blight’s monumental study of the former slave turned abolitionist is the thoroughness with which it examines the man’s development across three autobiographies he produced in the span of ten years. The popular image of Douglass has long been that of a bushy-haired man affixed to Abraham Lincoln’s side, delivering rousing speeches on abolition and the sins of slavery. And while there is basic truth to that, Blight sets out to fill the gaps in public understanding, guiding readers from the Maryland slave plantation where Douglass was born to the many stops along his European speech circuit, when he established himself as one of the world’s most recognizable opponents of slavery. The vague circumstances of Douglass’ birth (he was born to an enslaved woman and a white man who may also have been his owner) later compelled him to create his own life narratives, a task that he accomplished both in writing and oratory. Blight’s engagement with Douglass’ writing also marks the biography as a triumph of public-facing textual criticism. For decades before Prophet of Freedom astonished critics and general readers, Blight had been making his name as one of the leading Douglass scholars in the US. Blight’s work was not historical revisionism, but rather a considered analysis of a man who relied on actions as much as words. Many may be surprised to learn, for example, what a vocal supporter Douglass was of the Civil War and violence as a necessary means to dismantle the system that had nearly destroyed him. Prophet of Freedom feels as definitive as a Robert Fagles translation of Homer—we hope it’s not the final word, though it will take quite the successor to produce a worthwhile follow-up.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (2019)

One hesitates to label any book by a living writer his “magnum opus” but Macfarlane’s Underland—a deeply ambitious work that somehow exceeds the boundaries it sets for itself—reads as offertory and elegy both, finding wonder in the world even as we mourn its destruction by our own hand. If you’re unfamiliar with its project, as the name would suggest, Underland is an exploration of the world beneath our feet, from the legendary catacombs of Paris to the ancient caveways of Somerset, from the hyperborean coasts of far Norway to the mephitic karst of the Slovenian-Italian borderlands.

Macfarlane has always been a generous guide in his wanderings, the glint of his erudition softened as if through the welcoming haze of a fireside yarn down the pub. Even as he considers all we have wrought upon the earth, squeezing himself into the darker chambers of human creation—our mass graves, our toxic tombs—Macfarlane never succumbs to pessimism, finding instead in the contemplation of deep time a path to humility. This is an epochal work, as deep and resonant as its subject matter, and would represent for any writer the achievement of a lifetime.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True History of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland (2019)

Attempting, in a single volume, to cover the scale and complexity of the Northern Ireland Troubles—a bloody and protracted political and ethno-nationalist conflict that came to dominate Anglo-Irish relations for over three decades—while also conveying a sense of the tortured humanity and mercurial motivations of some of its most influential and emblematic individual players and investigating one of the most notorious unsolved atrocities of the period, is, well, a herculean task that most writers would never consider attempting. Thankfully, investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (whose 2015 New Yorker article on Gerry Adams, “Where the Bodies Are Buried”, is a searing precursor to Say Nothing) is not most writers. His mesmerizing account, both panoramically sweeping and achingly intimate, uses the disappearance and murder of widowed mother of ten Jean McConville in Belfast in 1972 as a fulcrum, around which the labyrinthine wider narrative of the Troubles can turn. The book, while meticulously researched and reported (Radden Keefe interviewed over one hundred different sources, painstakingly sorting through conflicting and corroborating accounts), also employs a novelistic structure and flair that in less skilled hands could feel exploitative, but here serves only to deepen our understanding of both the historical events and the complex personalities of ultimately tragic figures like Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and McConville herself—players in an attritional drama who have all too often been reduced to the status of monster or martyr. Once you’ve caught your breath, what you’ll be left with by the close of this revelatory hybrid work is a deep and abiding feeling of sorrow, which is exactly as it should be.  –Dan Sheehan, BookMarks Editor

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Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011)

Maggie Nelson, if evaluated from a first glance at her authored works, may appear to be a paradox. That the author of Bluets, a moving lyric essay exploring personal suffering through the color blue, also wrote The Red Parts, an autobiographical account of the trial of her aunt’s murderer, may seem surprising. Not that any person cannot and does not contain multitudes but the two aesthetics may seem diametrically opposed until one looks at The Art of Cruelty and understands Nelson’s fascination with art on the one hand, and violence on the other. Nelson hashes out the intersection of the two across multiple essays. “One of this book’s charges,” she writes, “is to figure out how one might differentiate between works of art whose employment of cruelty seems to me worthwhile (for lack of a better word), and those that strike me as redundant, in bad faith, or simply despicable.” The Art of Cruelty is a self-proclaimed diagram of recent art and culture and does not promise to take sides, to deliver ethical or aesthetic claims masquerading as some declarative truth on the matter. So cruelty is very much approached from Nelson’s poetic sensibility, with a degree of nuance, and an attitude of reflection and curiosity but also one of a certain distance so that all the emotions—anger, disgust, discomfort, thrill etc.—can be viewed as part of a whole rather than in isolation. Cruelty, counterbalanced with compassion—especially with reference to Buddhism—is certainly not hailed by Nelson as a cause for celebration but worthy of rumination and analysis so that it is not employed tacitly and without recourse. No book could ever, I think, provide an exhaustive evaluation of this topic, nor is Nelson’s approach that of a philosopher or art-historian looking to propose a theory. Nevertheless, she dexterously, and creatively, manages to hold a mirror to our culture’s fascination with cruelty and invites us to reflect on our personal reasons for indulging it.  –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Óscar Martinez, The Beast (2013)

For over a decade, Martinez has been a witness and a chronicler of the ground-level effects of the war on drugs, reporting from across Latin America with a special focus on Central America and his home country of El Salvador, where more recently he’s been writing about the bloody culture of MS-13 and other narco-cliques that have expanded their power. Before that, he was charting the plight of migrants running the terrible gauntlet across borders and through narco-controlled territories. Martinez rode the dreaded train known as “The Beast” and collected the stories of those traveling north on this perilous journey. While crime isn’t strictly the focus of the book, Martinez looks at the direct effects of mass crime at a regional/global level, as well as the outlaw communities springing up to prey on the vulnerable. The subject matter is dark, but Martinez writes with the terrible, piercing clarity of a Cormac McCarthy. The Beast is a dispatch from a nearly lawless land, where families struggle and suffer, narcos get richer, violence spreads, the drugs head north, the guns head south, and so it goes on. Forget the rhetoric, the politics, and the propaganda. The Beast is the real story of the drug war. “Where can you steer clear of bandits?” Martinez asks. “Where do the drugs go over? Where can you avoid getting kidnapped by the narcos? Where is there a spot left with no wall, no robbers, and no narcos? Nobody has been able to answer this last question.” To call this book prescient disregards how long our problems have persisted, and how long we’ve managed to ignore the chaos our country’s policies have created.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Matthew Desmond, Evicted (2016)

There are more evictions happening now, per capita, in the United States, than there were during the Great Depression. As it turns out, there’s a lot of money to be made from poverty—not, course, for those who need it, but for the landlords who orchestrate the kind of housing turnover that traps people in deeper and longer cycles of debt. Poverty in America has long been conflated with moral failure, but as Matthew Desmond’s Evicted illustrates in great detail, if there’s any moral failing happening, it’s with those who would take advantage of such systemic and generational iniquities.

Desmond, a Princeton-trained sociologist and MacArthur fellow, went to see for himself in 2008, at the height (depths?) of the housing crisis, undertaking a year-long study of eight Milwaukee-area families, spending six months in a mobile home and another six months in a rooming house, creating much more than a journalist’s snapshot of life as an American renter. With Evicted, Desmond has widened our perspective on cyclical hardship and its disproportionate impact on people of color, illustrating (with neither the leering nor the condescension of so much reporting on the poor) that eviction is more often a cause of poverty than a symptom.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government (2017)

I recommend this book to those who wish to demonstrate their physical strength in public and show off that they can read a giant Russian history book one-handed, but also I recommend this book to everyone, ever, in the world, because it’s so fantastic. At first glance, this is a lengthy tome inspired by a Tolstoyan approach to lyrical history, ostensibly concerned with the history of an apartment complex that was home to much of the early Soviet elite—and was subsequently depopulated by Stalinist purges. Within this apartment building, however, lay the central irony of the revolution—those who believed deeply enough in an idealistic system to embrace violent, repressive means of revolution, were soon enough subjected to those same mechanisms of repression. From this central irony, Slezkine, always concerned with how the micro fits into the macro, zooms out to look at the Soviets as just another bunch of millenarians (and to understand what an insult that is, you’ll have to pick up the book).  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami (2017)

Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for The Times of London, begins his book by describing the way his office building in Tokyo shook in March 2011 when an earthquake hit the city. He called his family and checked that they were OK and then walked through the streets to see the damage. Used to quakes, this one seemed bad, but not the worst he had lived through. Less than an hour after the earthquake, though, a tsunami killed an estimated 18,500 Japanese men, women and children. In Ghosts, Parry focuses his story on Okawa, a tiny costal village where an entire school and 74 children washed away. In somewhat fragmentary threads, Parry explores the families that survived, the ghosts that follow them, and the landscape of a place that will never be the same. In localizing the story in one community, Parry is able to clearly define the painfully individual fallout of a national tragedy. It is emotionally draining to read, which is a warning I give everyone when I recommend the book (which I do constantly). But it is one of my favorite books and I would be remiss not to include in our list for best nonfiction of the decade.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019)

I grew up in a town named after a body of water—Rye Brook—and went to a high school also named after that body of water—Blind Brook—but growing up, no one seemed to actually know where the brook was, at least none of the kids. We didn’t talk about it, except to note its hiddenness—it’s behind the school, someone once told me, while another person said it was behind that hotel, behind the park, behind the airport. Recently, I decided to find it on a map and noticed, for the first time, that the brook, far from being a hidden thing, defines the majority of Rye Brook’s borders. Recognizing this foundational feature of my hometown for the first time, more than a decade after I left it, was disorienting, completely re-rendering my perception of the place I thought I knew best.

My search that day came after I read Jenny Odell’s account of her similar awakening to the ecology of her hometown, Cupertino, and all the features in or around it: Calabazas Creek, nearby mountains, and the San Francisco Bay. “How could I have not noticed the shape of the place I lived?” she writes, and, later, describing her own disorientation in a way that resonates with my own, added, “Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along.”

One way of describing the premise of this book is to say “that which has been present all along” is reality itself: each of us, from day to day, living our physical lives in a physical place. But in 2019, life doesn’t usually feel like that; it feels like an onslaught of forces that aim to turn our attention away from this reality and monetize it in a shapeless virtual space. In that environment, Odell writes, doing “nothing,” or finding any way to disrupt the capitalistic drive to monetize, is an act of political resistance, even as she recognizes that not everyone has the economic security or social capital to opt out. “Just because this right is denied to many people doesn’t make it any less of a right or any less important,” she writes. This book also draws on philosophy, utopian movements, and labor organizing to describe how various people have attempted to “do nothing” in their own way throughout history, with an outlook that is grounded in ecology. (And bird watching!) Ultimately, Odell writes, the act of doing nothing creates space for the kind of contemplation and reflection that is essential to activism and to sustaining life. I experienced this book as a space of sanity and as a beginning; I hope you do, too.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

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Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Peter Hessler, Country Driving (2010) · Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (2010) · Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy (2010) · Marina Warner, Stranger Magic (2012) · Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012) · Oscar Martinez, The Beast (2013) · Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2013) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2013) · David Epstein, The Sports Gene (2013) · Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial (2013) · David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service (2013) · George Packer, The Unwinding (2013) · Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (2013) · Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (2014) · Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (2014) · Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring (2014) · Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald (2014) · Mary Beard, SPQR (2015) · Sam Quinones, Dreamland (2015) · Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning (2016) · Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson (2016) · Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers In Their Own Land (2016) · Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures (2016) · Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life (2017) · David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) · Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart (2017) · Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals (2017) · Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown (2017) · Michael Tisserand, Krazy (2017) · Lawrence Jackson, Chester Himes (2017) · Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon (2018) · Beth Macy, Dopesick (2018) · Shane Bauer, American Prison (2018) · Eliza Griswold, Amity and Prosperity (2018) · David Quammen, The Tangled Tree (2018).

How can I be sleepy when the world is melting? my daughter asked at age nine the night Elizabeth Kolbert lectured at our local university, in response to my whispered We should go, you have school tomorrow, aren’t you tired? Kolbert was speaking about Shishmaref, Alaska, and arctic glacial loss, her slender, petite frame backlit on the stage so that she looked like a jeweled nightingale, her song pitching higher and louder as the night went on, as though she were trying to reach the ears of the moose and the alpenfolk, the penguin and the reindeer, the execs at Exxon and the driver of the Tahoe Expedition who cut me off in the parking lot that evening. We are running out of time, I remember Kolbert saying, in response to an unintelligible, long-winded question from the audience, and of course, as an apology to the glaciers, which she could clearly hear from here, roiling in drips and drops, ions floating in a new sea.

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“When, as a child, I heard the word ‘Siberia’ it meant but one thing for me: dire peril to the bodies, sure torture for the souls of the bravest, cleverest, and most independently minded of our people,” wrote anthropologist Maria Czaplicka, who organized an expedition of women to Siberia in 1914. This is the imagined Siberia, an endless frozen mass, riddled with ice and swamps, searing heat and unsurvivable cold, a land of prisons and labor camps, permafrost and exiles. “To outsiders who know about Siberia only through hearsay,” writes historian Valentin Rasputin, “it is a huge, austere, and wealthy land where everything seems to have cosmic proportions, including the same frigidness and inhospitableness as outer space.”

The surface area of Siberia would make it the largest country in the world, yet its population is smaller than that of California. A nippy day hovers around minus thirty degrees, the truly cold days closer to minus fifty. Anna Reid, author of The Shaman’s Coat, writes that winter can be so cold that “Exhaled breath falls to the ground in a shower of crystals, with a rustling sound called ‘the whispering of the stars.'” The name Siberia is of unknown origin, although it is thought to originate from a Tatar word for “sleeping land,” as though the land itself had little to do with its own reputation, a slumbering giant unaware of its own capacities for brutality, its own dimensions of frozen beauty. Writer Ryszard Kapuściński tells us in his journalistic memoir of his childhood, “There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is not created for such measurelessness.”

This somnolent land has long served as the largest prison cell in the world, one that held the likes of Mandelstam and Solzhenitsyn and fourteen to eighteen million others for years, decades, whole lifetimes, for infractions as small as the offhand remark recounted in Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets:

Fathers were taken away at night; they’d vanish into thin air. That’s how my mother’s brother disappeared . . . he was taken away for something stupid, total nonsense. . . He was at a store with his wife, and he said, ‘The Soviet Regime has been around for twenty years, and they still can’t make a decent pair of pants.’

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Permafrost sounds a bit like a refrigeration system designed for housewives in the 1950s to replace the antiquated term “icebox,” but it is actually a scientific term for perennially cryotic ground. In order to qualify as permafrost—as opposed to taryn, a Siberian description for temporary icing that can survive the summer—the ground must be frozen for at least two years. The permafrost of Siberia is one of the last frontiers.

We have done our best to scope and map and violate the oceans, to enter and flee the atmosphere, to pasteurize the forests, but we have not been able to wholly violate the bowels of the earth with our physical bodies. The permafrost, of course, has been cored; we have sampled the interior of this delectable ancient Popsicle, but much of its contents remain mysterious. What lies buried deep within it is not only our past—flash-frozen in fragments of bone and lichen, bracelets in the tombs of princesses, the cryogenically preserved heel of a fox—but also our future.

It is a silo of sorts, a granary of diamonds and ore and oil and bone, a bank shamelessly uninsured by the feds. “Earth’s creator got so cold flying over this region that he dropped a wealth of treasures: gold, silver, diamonds, oil,” Karl Gorokhov, a Yakut, told National Geographic in April 2013. Because the contents of this box are not completely known, they are more priceless, and because they are priceless, they are also worth robbing, strip-mining each of these exquisite layers of memory with the heat generated by our voracious appetites, releasing each secret from its dendritic vault long protected in the mortal substratum of ice.

Stored in this vast basement of strange frozen treasures are millions of years of memories left behind from the tundra’s former inhabitants: species, eras, mothers, trappers, love. There are lost lice, icemice, tusks and teeth, the bodies of steppe lions and lion cubs, all of their whiskers still there, the little pads on their feet, even their little tufted ears, paleontologist Dr. Daniel Fisher at the University of Michigan told me, tens of thousands of years old, and many even older than that. Arctic hares and arctic wolves are surfacing as the permafrost melts, perfectly preserved, quite possibly purposefully buried by our human ancestors to protect them from predators; their bodies frozen midruminance, their limbs frozen midflight. There are seeds in the stomach linings of Ice Age squirrels, the kurgans (graves) and bronze treasures of lost Scythians and Pazyryks in the Altai Mountains, mummies complete with hair and tattoos, preserved in ice lenses, the eggs of forgotten species of frogs, iron horsemen, the remains of rhinoceroses and kings.

Somewhere in the Valley of Death there are rumored to be seven metal cauldrons large enough to sleep seven explorers; a kingdom of alien life is rumored to still have a presence beneath them in the ice. There are cosmic clues to the 1908 Tunguska event, which flattened 830 square miles and 80 million trees, believed by the indigenous to be a visitation by a god, who had cursed the area. According to NASA, when an eyewitness finally spoke to Leonid Kulik, who curated the St. Petersburg meteorite collection, he said, “Suddenly in the north sky. . . the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire. . . At that moment there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash. . . The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns firing.”

And of course, in the permafrost, there is carbon, and methane, mercury and smallpox, anthrax and Spanish flu, half sleeping in wait. “In this frozen ground, corpses never rot. In these graves which rest on foundations of ice, life and death are separated by nothing more substantial than a breath of air. Bring back the breath, and the body is ready to live again, to come back and share in the slow, chilly existence of the wooden villages, rounding up stray horses, building snowplows, or leading pilgrimages to milder pastures,” the narrator of Chris Marker’s strangely beautiful 1957 documentary, Letter from Siberia, tells us. Three more degrees of warming, and ground that has been stable for 18,000 years will release even more of its perils and treasures. Just last year, a pair of 42,000-year-old cryogenically preserved female roundworms were uncovered from an ancient squirrel burrow, and came back to life in a petri dish. Liquid blood was discovered inside of a Lenskaya foal this year, marking the discovery of the oldest blood in the world, a discovery that quite likely will lead to a resurrection of this long-extinct species.

As this world melts, perhaps even the bodies from these kurgans will be ready to live again, as though messianically being called forth into this world.

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Excerpted from Heather Altfeld’s “The Magical Substratum” in Conjunctions: 73, Earth Elegies, which is available now.

This is not a list of the best books of the decade. (This is, if you’re interested.) This is a list of books that, whether bad or good, were in one way or another defining for the last decade in American culture. (A global list would be nearly impossible, for obvious reasons. Accordingly, I’ve hewed to English-language and/or US publication dates, when relevant.) This is a list for general readers and followers of literary culture; it includes both major bestsellers and literary standouts, books that have become pop culture phenomenons, and books whose influence has been quieter and/or localized in literary circles. Obviously, it would not suffice for specialist purposes—I imagine a scientist would have selected a very different list of 100 books. (Or 100 books give or take: on a case by case basis, I have counted series as single books, or let the first book in a series stand in for the whole.)

Some of you may wonder if there’s been enough time and/or distance to really evaluate the last ten years in literature, or in culture for that matter. And the answer is probably . . .  no! Or at least, our assessment of the last decade will certainly continue to change and harden as time goes on (if in fact it does—let’s cross our fingers and also vote). But even if hindsight is 20/20, there’s something to be said for a contemporary assessment, an in-miasma reading, if you will. So to that end, here are the 100 books that the members of the Literary Hub staff consider to be the most defining, important, transformative, and/or illustrative of the decade that was.

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Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (2010)

There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness.

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Essential stats: Franzen’s follow up to The Corrections was a #1 bestseller; sold almost 100,000 copies before Oprah called it a masterpiece and picked it for her book club; won the John Gardner fiction prize and was a finalist for the LA Times book prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

What did the critics say? They were torn. Here’s Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times:

Jonathan Franzen’s galvanic new novel, Freedom, showcases his impressive literary toolkit—every essential storytelling skill, plus plenty of bells and whistles—and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life. With this book, he’s not only created an unforgettable family, he’s also completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight of this country into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters.

But here’s Ron Charles in The Washington Post:

So what is it about Jonathan Franzen and poo? In 2001, his wonderful breakthrough novel, The Corrections, was momentarily stunk up by a scene in which a senile old man imagines his feces talking back to him. A decade later, Franzen’s more staid, more mature, but all around less exciting Freedom reaches its comic zenith when a young man searches through his own excrement with a fork. What seemed like a sophomoric indulgence in that earlier tour de force now smells stale.

Behind the title: “But since we’re all friends here,” Franzen once explained, “I will mention that I think the reason I slapped the word on the book proposal I sold three years ago without any clear idea of what kind of book it was going to be is that I wanted to write a book that would free me in some way.

And I will say this about the abstract concept of ‘freedom’; it’s possible you are freer if you accept what you are and just get on with being the person you are, than if you maintain this kind of uncommitted I’m free-to-be-this, free-to-be-that, faux freedom.”

But is it a Great American Novel? If you believe TIME, then yes.

And to be perfectly fair, I took this book everywhere until I finished it: bars, birthday parties. But, yo J Franz, I’m really happy for you, and I’mma let you finish, but Jennifer Egan had one of the best novels of all time this year. One of the best novels of all time!

Franzen on Oprah:

Extra credit: Jonathan Franzen’s 10 Rules for Novelists · Jonathan Franzen on Alice Munro’s Runaway · Jonathan Franzen in conversation with Wyatt Mason

The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter.
I am trying, standing in the door,
To discover in the distant echoes
What the coming years may hold in store.

–Boris Pasternak, “Hamlet” (from the poems of Yurii Zhivago, trans. Ann Pasternak Slater

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One sunny, almost-spring day last week I was out walking in my Maine neighborhood; various neighbors in side yards were either raking leaves or shifting around piles of almost-melted snow. One of them greeted me as I passed and remarked that coronavirus was a “sign from above” that we need to live better lives. His view would be shared by many who over millennia have tried to make sense of the suffering that comes with monumental disruption. The claim that there is no such thing as a natural disaster rightly asks us to consider how differential responses and pre-existing infrastructures make a huge difference—but perhaps downplays the extent to which nature does, after all, play a starring role. And not just, as some nature writers might have us think, as a mode of consolation, but as the evil star, the dis-aster, the killer.

How do we tell the stories of disaster?

That is the question du jour, and it’s also the question I put before my group of 28 undergrads in January, when we embarked on what would be my last time teaching a class I call Catastrophes and Hope at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. The college is a residential liberal arts school with about 2,000 students. Most of the kids in my class are environmental studies majors, with a few from psych and lit thrown in. With the possible exception of the two aspiring writers in the bunch, I’m not sure they knew what they were in for.

“Environmental Studies” after all can suggest something vaguely policy-oriented, providing aspiring greens with tools for social change, an understanding of the basics of ecology, some key terms like Anthropocene and resilience. Cost benefit analysis and GIS. But my background is in Russian lit, and Catastrophes and Hope has become more adamantly humanistic the longer I’ve taught it. I’ve wanted them to read poetry, not policy. The work we engage with offers up voices of pain, rage and longing, testimony at least as important as the work of theorists and planners.

We start with Noah, not just in the Genesis version but in the Koran and a feminist midrash that is one long lamentation (all those dead bodies, floating in the surrounding sea: even medieval icons urge that anguish). We move on to modern inundations and arks: The Day After Tomorrow, whose Hollywood aesthetic we all blithely critiqued, particularly the ridiculously rapid onset of a world-changing disaster (a week! How silly!). We read Candide, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Doctor Zhivago (how much pain—environmental, human, cultural—do civil wars rain down on the heads of the innocent?); and then Svetlana Alexievich’s magisterial Voices from Chernobyl. We finish with Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. 

It’s a syllabus filled with legends, warnings, trauma; war, dismemberment, famine; lyrical horror, a bit of humor, and pithy take-homes, including this gem from Voltaire, spoken to Candide by a man in Surinam, about how he lost his limbs to a slave master: “It’s the price I pay for the sugar you love to eat.” Indeed.

This is, however, the first time I’ve had to contend with disaster in the midst of teaching a course on the topic.  Social scientists think about “hazards” (naturally occurring, things like fire or flood that can be essential parts of ecosystems) and how they become disastrous for humans, plotting how environment and social relationships all play into vulnerability. As [the geographer] Nigel Clark puts it in Inhuman Nature, “what are catastrophes for soft, fleshy creatures like us are for the earth merely minor and mundane readjustments.” The word itself—dis-aster—has something to do with stars, with being born under a bad one. It’s a view of the catastrophic that has more to do with fate than human foibles.

When the college went to distance-learning in mid-March, I had decisions to make about transitioning to a kind of teaching I’d never done before. Given the size of my classes, and the geographical spread of where students live, I opted against what we’re calling “synchronous” classes on line: instead I made short video presentations that students can watch at their own convenience, and then split the class into groups of seven or eight students. They meet twice a week to discuss readings, and someone posts for the group on our course blog. I’ve also asked them to write individual posts that can be about anything.

Professor Costlow on the last day of classes before Bates College closed down because of the coronavirus pandemic. Photo: Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

The individual posts are what has been most interesting to me: the writing has become more informal and also more observant. It is often deeply moving, sometimes melancholy, sometimes wry and self-deprecating. They write about time, and disappointment. They write about being bored; about loving their families and being annoyed with them. They write about trees coming into blossom, and slow internet, but they also write about fear, and having to work, and family businesses that must close; they worry about parents who work at hospitals, and elderly grandparents, and whether or not they’ll be able to afford Bates come fall. I’ve asked two students for permission to use quotes from their blog posts:

One student says that amidst the feeling of being “stuck” she’s been “working to mindfully change this mindset of stuckness” into something like safety. “Rather than saying I’m stuck at home I encourage myself to say I’m safe at home.”

Another writes of worrying about a grandmother he calls Big G “for sass.” “She told me that she made a collage. It spelled hope. Her nursing home has been infected by the virus. I cried.”

Through all this, the formality and caution of our “normal” classroom has begun to erode. We peer into each other’s bedrooms, family pets join class, I see other members of the household moving in the background, we share recipes and news about the weather. Students who had never spoken in class now participate in their zoom square, and make interesting observations on the blog. It’s not all great, by any means. There are students who are no-shows, as there were before. It’s harder to focus on a common text, to sustain conversation and push deeper into the meaning of an image or passage…

One day we stage a reading of Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl, with each student sharing a section they’ve chosen and rehearsed. The point isn’t to offer commentary, but simply to bring these voices into our shared audio space, to inhabit someone else’s moment of attenuation and confusion. In an essay called “Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe,” Alexievich talks about her books as “novels of voices.” As she wrote her books on Chernobyl and Soviet experiences of war, she “began to understand that what I was hearing people say on the street and in the crowds was much more effectively capturing what was going on than anything I was reading in print.” My hope is that her symphony of “human feelings and human turmoil” might help us find our own voices.

I originally started teaching the course because I was tired of hearing environmentalists say that climate change was so unprecedented that no previous human experience was relevant to dealing with it. My experience of life first in the Soviet Union and then in post-Soviet Russia had convinced me of the opposite: that people in extraordinarily constrained political and economic conditions make lives of dignity, lives inflected with moments of joy and commitment. I wanted my students to read a book like Zhivago because it’s about a society that comes apart, lives that are profoundly—viciously—unsettled, and yet there are forms of endurance, too.

Over the years I’ve taught Pasternak’s novel I’ve come increasingly to appreciate just how dark the novel’s vision is, how much violence and suffering it contains. The book begins with a funeral and the boy Zhivago standing on his mother’s grave, howling like a young wolf. The liturgical ritual of burial is interrupted by something feral and raw. It’s not just revolutions that interrupt human culture. The boy who will become a poet howls like a peasant woman. Maybe this is what death teaches us: to howl our way beyond cliché and false comfort.

The course discussions have never focused much on hope; it’s the easiest part of the course to ignore, despite my urging that we consider George Frederick Watt’s haunting painting of a masked woman and her stringless harp. The image hung in Nelson Mandela’s cell, and led Obama to title his memoir The Audacity of Hope. I try to convince my students that hope is everywhere in these stories, lying hidden in plain sight… But the frisson of disaster is enticing, and so we head toward the edge of the cliff, in the company of various idiots and saints, whose lives (thank God!) we don’t actually have to live.

This semester I invited students to write on resilience in Zhivago: one of the students who took the prompt produced a remarkably moving paper, insisting that there’s nothing remotely like resilience in the novel. Nature may continue, but humans are unfaithful and die; the only ones left in a destroyed village are those near death themselves. Maybe this student’s resistance to the word is in fact something to feel hopeful about (the novel speaks powerfully to the catastrophe of political rhetoric). Pace my student, there is hope, maybe even resilience, in Zhivago’s world: it’s just not pretty. It’s Voltaire’s resilience, not Pangloss’s, born of bitter experience.

There are of course vast differences between this moment and almost every disaster we’ve read about over the past three months. My house has not sustained weeks of high water; there has been no earthquake; I have not been ordered to gather my belongings and leave forever the house in which I’ve raised my children; crowds have not gathered to burn at the stake or otherwise attack miscreants held responsible for the current suffering. My pantry is well stocked; I have a house full of books, a neighborhood to walk in, technology that brings me into the homes of my friends. But something has been disrupted, and something beyond death and economic decline might come of this moment.

This is my last term teaching, so I won’t be returning next fall to a classroom. If I did have more semesters ahead of me I hope I would resist returning to something called “normal.” Zhivago returns from WWI to a Moscow on the eve of revolution; he longs for the life he’d lived before, but it is not to be. What might teachers learn from this moment of what is called “distance” learning, brought about because we’ve been reminded that in some sense there is no such thing as distance? My students are grappling with the existential realities of texts that have always seemed to be about some other life: maybe what’s needed isn’t a different body of stories, but a new way of reading them, of entering into their realities and making them our own… Time, horror, impatience, what nature offers us and what it doesn’t and in fact can’t.

In early April I had a three-act dream about my Bates colleagues, some living and some dead, who visited me in different rooms. One of the rooms is a vast but overly full storehouse, a kind of machine shop with hanging fluorescent lights. My desk is in a dusty, airless corner. The next room is smaller, and has a big round table and a four-poster bed. The final room is actually a transplant from my childhood home, with a big open archway between rooms, a row of potted flowering plants sitting on the floor where the rooms meet. Even before the coronavirus too much of my life as a teacher felt like living in a machine shop; even at a place as well-heeled as my college, the classes are too big, and the students too often are looking for tools instead of questions. Too many of our conversations feel abstract, not connected to human experience and intuition.

But paradoxically enough, this experience of teaching about disaster in disaster, distanced but strangely intimate, reminds me of what teaching can be—what teaching could and must be, if we hope to avoid the worst repercussions of the inevitable evil stars of our future. Zhivago and his family planted potatoes in well-composted ground, and in the evening they read novels and talked about them. People who survived Chernobyl became mystics convinced that we must change our relationship with the more-than-human world. The men and women who survived Katrina speak now with blistering clarity about the forces that undid their lives.

We have always existed within this symphony of voices, stretching all the way back in time. Candide can get to the garden only by leaving his sheltered home, following the path of misery and mischief to its end. Where do we head when this thing ends, when we encounter the sign post that instead of Catastrophe reads “Hope”? These voices urge audacity, and perseverance.

Alexander Lukashenko, the first and only president of Belarus, a man who is often referred to as Europe’s sole dictator, has been lashing out like a cornered animal since mass protests began in his country following his dubious re-election in early August. It’s clear that most Belarusians actually supported Lukashenko’s opponent, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a woman who has since fled with her children to Lithuania.

The anti-Lukashenko opposition, comprising hundreds of thousands of people, has never been so vocal, and thousands of protestors have been detained by state police, beaten, and tortured. When it became clear that protestors would not be deterred by such violent reactionary tactics, Lukashenko’s administration began targeting leaders in the uprising.

One day after 200,000 protestors staged a demonstration in Minsk, a Coordination Council was formed to work toward a peaceful resolution to a national crisis.

Since then, however, most members of the council have been arrested or exiled, including, most recently, lawyer Maxim Znak. Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian journalist and historian who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, is the last original member of the Coordination Council who is active in Belarus.

Last month, Alexievich had been the subject of a criminal investigation by Belarusian authorities who accused her of undermining national security. Despite the intimidation attempts, Alexievich has refused to leave her country.

After people in ski masks attempted to break into her apartment, Alexievich, arguably the most popular Belarusian cultural figure, asked supporters to come to her home in Minsk. By Wednesday morning, pictures were circulating of Alexievich surrounded by journalists, fans, and sympathetic European diplomats.

In a conversation with the New Yorker‘s Masha Gessen this week, Alexievich called this show of support “resistance through presence.” Thousands of volunteers have submitted themselves for consideration to join a new version of the Coordination Council called the Expanded Council, whose members will be anonymous.

Despite her fear and uncertainty, Alexievich knows that her actions carry weight for the people of Belarus. “I don’t want people to lose the last remaining hope,” she told Gessen. “So I’m going to be here to the end.”

I became interested in oral history after encountering Studs Terkel’s Working and the early works of Svetlana Alexievich and even Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, which could be read as the most entertaining fictional oral history ever. My book New Yorkers is a portrait of the city featuring nearly 80 real narrators. Each voice is part of a chorus that, I hope, will reflect the vitality and resilience of the place.

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Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time
(Random House Trade)

When I read her books, I marvel at how Svetlana Alexievich is both there and not there, never overbearing but present in outline in her encounters as she introduces a span of Russian voices that brings me—a resident of the west—into the memories and even the textures of the last days of the USSR. I go back to this book whenever I’m curious why is Russia the way it is. It’s all there in Secondhand Time—not just the recent past but intimations of what the country will become. In awarding her the 2015 Nobel prize the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy said that Alexievich’s work amounts to ”a history of emotions—a history of the soul, if you wish.“ The great lesson from Alexievich is that if this history is to be soulful, its language cannot come from those who are paid to think, paid to speak, whose words are dulled by any sort of PR officialspeak.

For anyone writing oral history, this official language is death. It’s not language at all. Alexievich knows how to sit with her interviewees and appreciate that they may be strange, morose, reticent, but ultimately willing to offer a version of their story that hasn’t been drained of life. The encounters are intimate. I can almost smell the kitchens where these conversations take place and throughout the text Alexievich is alive to the pauses, the recalcitrance of human encounters. ”She falls silent“ is a phrase repeated over and over. I love Secondhand Time for the moments when Alexievich’s presence is fully revealed. She steps into the scene. The journalist merges, even just for a moment, with the subject. At the end of a particularly brutal and moving section in which an Armenian refugee offers up an account of a pogrom, Alexievich concludes with the italics: [And both of us cry].

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield
(New York Review of Books)

I know this book inside and out. I know its cramped typesetting and I’ve nearly memorized the intro in which the great English writer Ronald Blythe describes his interviewing project, which unfolded in 1966-67 and was published in ’69. Perhaps because I wrote a follow-up of sorts in 2006 I know the flatlands and hollowlands of the villages in East Anglia where Blythe conducted his interviews with farmers, orchard workers, thatchers and saddlers. (This was all long before I showed up in the era of commuters, gravel drives and gourmet pub lunches.) Blythe’s eloquent introduction features one tell-tale line: ”The book is more the work of a poet than a trained historian“—which is probably why he is alive to all the chewy language of the region, all that Suffolk voice, with its peculiarities and phrasings that occasionally seems to be plucked straight from the old testament.

While working on my own book, Return to Akenfield, I heard some of those old voices in council homes in the village, including when I visited an ancient rag rug picker. In 1966 Blythe’s interviewees reflected on the great industrial changes of the early 20th and even late 19th centuries. There are plenty of high points in his epic, but I always love the way the book ends, with the gravedigger, ”Tender“ Russ, whose two budgies, Boy and Girl, drown out any bad news that comes across on the radio. ”Dust to dust they say, It makes me laugh,“ Russ says. This is Suffolk. ”Mud to mud, more like.“ Russ tells Blythe he wants to be cremated. ”Straight from the flames to the winds, and let that be that.“

Jean Stein and George Plimpton, Edie: An American Biography
(Grove Press)

Stein worked with Plimpton to produce an oral history that was ostensibly about the actress and fashion model Edie Sedgwick. It must be. She’s there in the title. She peers out from the cover of my edition. But the brilliance of the book is in its structure and the way Edie swerves away from Edie. Sedgwick ”touched so many worlds,“ Stein once said in an interview, ”These different, alienated worlds in the 1960s—and the story is as much about all of those people as it is about her.“ Words like ”tapestry“ and ”chorus“ often get thrown around in discussions of these voice-driven books, but Edie is truly orchestral. Stein used Sedgwick’s brief life to investigate both the main players and peripheral figures of the Pop art scene in New York, as well as a whole cast that connects to Sedgwick’s patrician New England roots. The resulting book allows for a surprising variety of tone, and ends up an account of an entire era giving way to the next. All the while the narrative moves toward and away and around the tragic, wide-eyed figure at its centre.

Studs Terkel, Hard Times
(New Press)

Certain images linger from Hard Times, Terkel’s sprawling account of the Great Depression. A man who worked the San Francisco waterfront describes the scene when four jobs were offered to a crowd of hungry workers:—“a thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs” over them. I return to Hard Times for its imagery and its range. Terkel created a masterpiece out of dogged legwork. He got there, he tracked down the voices, including those who could provide expert testimony on dust bowl poverty and White House policy. He moves from the accounts of social activists to men riding boxcars. Each time I return to the book with more respect for the rich trove of personal details that might have been lost in the work of other historians. Terkel found fit to gather the quirks of speech and images a person carries with her—the stuff that wouldn’t show up in a polite obituary. And none of it feels like medicine. Terkel entertains throughout. You can tell he’s a collegial interviewer and I love knowing he criss-crossed the US with a clunky recorder. Much of the work that goes into oral histories remains off-screen. How does a writer set the stage to encourage his subject’s eloquence? Studs listened with respect and enthusiasm, and he passed to his readers a sense of discovery. Don’t tell us too much. Let character emerge from cadence, language, word choice. Let a person emerge in her own words.

Tony Parker, People of Providence
(Eland)

I wrote a book about London. Tony Parker was smarter. Instead of the whole city, he chose one housing estate south of the river and spent about eighteen months in the early 80s hanging around and listening to the thoughts of its residents—and you can sense, in each interview, how that time was spent building trust and familiarizing himself with individuals who then gave him, piece by piece, a collage of urban life. The book burbles along—there’s no other word for it—and part of the pleasure is following the flow of London language. The issues of Providence are revealed, including accounts of racism, classism, and the slog of poverty, but Parker is so patient with his interviewees that the large themes end up embedded in the living world of Providence with all its rich details. What I admire about the book is how deep Parker sinks into one setting. Writing about an entire city means a lot of movement, a lot of territory to cover. Parker finds in one tower block an entire world. Travel writing, he reminds us, doesn’t mean straying far.

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New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by Craig Taylor is available now via W.W. Norton and Company.

Welcome to Lit Century: 100 Years, 100 Books. Combining literary analysis with an in-depth look at historical context, host Catherine Nichols chooses one book for each year of the 20th century, and—along with special guests—takes a deep dive into a hundred years of literature.

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In this episode, Catherine Nichols discusses Svetlana Alexeivich’s 1985 oral history The Unwomanly Face of War with author Megan Buskey. The conversation covers the ways World War II is remembered in Russia versus in the United States, the feminism of the 1970s that created an audience for a book of this kind—and the topics it can’t cover—as well as ways that the experiences of Soviet soldiers in World War II can shed light on the current war in Ukraine.

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From the conversation:

Catherine Nichols: She’s definitely an insightful listener to these stories. To the extent that she’s shaping the stories or that she’s just listening, you definitely have a feeling of—I feel like I know what it would be like to be in a room with her. It might be false, but I think at the end of the book, I had a feeling. You know what it was? It was partly a feeling of optimism about the project itself.

There’s something kind of optimistic about the idea that unsayable things could be said—and that the world was ready to hear things—that has things in common with feminism in the 1970s in other parts of the world also. The idea that if you can just say things clearly, if you can just say what has been unsaid for so long, then that alone is powerful enough to change things and to improve people’s lives. There’s something very hopeful about the project, even if it’s also devastating to read.

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Megan Buskey is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family History of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023). A former Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, she has been traveling to and studying the former Soviet Union for 20 years. She has written for The Atlantic, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications.

Catherine Nichols is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in many places, including Jezebel, Aeon, and Electric Literature. She lives in Brooklyn.