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Aug 3

Week 31 Reading (2026) Virginia Woolf & Samuel Delany

Virginia Woolf. Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. 2nd ed. Harcourt, 1985. The earliest of the five pieces in Moments of Being is “Reminiscences,” begun in 1907. Written when Woolf was just a fledgling writer, it is addressed to the unborn child of her sister Vanessa, who had just married Clive Bell that year. Their son Julian was born the following year. As a result, this recollection of Virginia and Vanessa’s childhood is written a bit stiffly, yet there is great charm to the way in which it is addressed directly to her future nephew/niece. “A Sketch of the Past,” on the other hand, was written in 1939, less than two years before her death and it’s Woolf at her best—casual, humorous, precise, hyper-perceptive, and always aware of a writer’s limits. Before she can properly begin this memoir (which Vanessa urged her to write), she must elucidate “the memoir writer’s difficulties” and tell us why it “is so difficult to describe any human being.” This, in spite of the fact, that she can nail another person in a phrase. The other three absolutely delightful pieces come from her membership in the Memoir Club, a group of her “Old Bloomsbury” friends who started to gather again after World War One to read bits of memoir to each other.

Newly Redacted

Two new books have been added to the constantly growing Redacted bibliography at the top of my blog. Both of these newly added titles were written by Sarah J. Sloat. In Hotel Almighty (Sarabande Books, 2025) she reproduced about one-quarter of the original pages of Stephen King’s 1987 novel Misery and then redacted his original text through pretty much every method possible. Whatever was left became her poetry. Then, on top of each page, she collaged playful imagery. In her second book, Classic Crimes (Sarabande Books, 2025), she did the same thing with the original pages of books by William Roughead, who wrote true crime stories and books for six decades beginning around 1889.

Why did I decide to read Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany’s 1966 Nebula Award-winning sci-fi novel now? Because I love the title and had somehow managed to overlook it when I plowed through science fiction as a teenager. Because it is the book’s 50th anniversary. And because the main character is a poet. Shockingly, Delany’s books haven’t been on my dance card until now. I would have devoured Babel-17 when I was younger. Parts of it still hold up pretty well, even though science fiction has changed dramatically. The central character is a very famous poet, Rydra Wong, who is also captain of an interstellar mission with an interplanetary crew that includes several “discorporated” (or formerly dead) people. The real attraction of the book is that it is about language. It has somehow become essential that Rydra must translate a previously unknown language called Babel-17 if the Alliance is to survive the onslaught of the raiding forces, though I’m afraid the rationale for that passed me by. She also has a crew member who speaks a language that has no pronouns, like “I” or “you.” Try imaging that language.

Jul 27

Week 30 Reading (2026) Martha Ronk & Vanessa Bell

Vertigo (Coffee House Press, 2007) is my first book of poems by Martha Ronk, and it won’t be my last. I picked it up because “some of the titles are revised forms of sentences from W.G. Sebald’s novels.” How could I resist? The speakers in Ronk’s poems are often in situations that they themselves don’t clearly understand, and it is to these moments that Ronk is repeatedly drawn. “When I told my story all over again, it no longer sounded / plausible, even to me.” Ronk conveys a sense of vertigo through sentences that make you think you must have missed an important piece of information somewhere. Or maybe it was just a missing word. The poem that starts out with talk about crossword puzzles is suddenly concerned with tidal charts, for example. By catching the mind at its most confused moment, when it is most vulnerable and open, Ronk exposes the odd truths that emerge when we are forced to make emergency landings. The miracle is that she finds ways for language to mimic these moments. “Events that might have happened otherwise play themselves out / in ways that begin to seem familiar as if the sentence itself / by the one word turned the stream as a jutting rock might do.”

After seemingly reading one book or another by or about Virginia Woolf for several years, I’ve started in on her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell. Although it is not intended to be a full-fledged biography, Wendy Hitchmough’s Vanessa Bell: The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical (Yale, 2025), sketches out Vanessa’s complicated marriage and love life, which was perhaps more radical for its day than her art. But the real focus of Vanessa Bell is on her art. Hitchmough wants to restore Vanessa (1879-1961) to a position in art history that she was denied during her lifetime and largely since. Between male chauvinism, Vanessa’s naturally self-effacing personality, the trials and tragedies she faced, and the accidents of history, Vanessa’s contributions to modern art and design have been largely hidden or were simply dismissed. But, with diligent research and access to newly found materials, Hitchmough has resurrected Vanessa’s many buried, forgotten, and scattered achievements, and she makes the case that Vanessa was “one of the most radical and influential artists working in Britain in the early twentieth century.” Vanessa Bell is loaded with many (mostly) color reproductions of her work, including her designs for the Omega Workshop (which she co-founded with Roger Fry and Duncan Grant) and of the colorfully decorated Charleston, which became her Sussex home after 1916.

Jul 20

Week 29 Reading (2026) – Joiner & Morrison

This turned out to be a week accidentally dedicated to jazz. Any fan of jazz will enjoy Fred L. Joiner’s wonderful book of poetry, The Mirror in Our Music. It includes two series of poems in which he responds to photographs. I also passed the halfway mark in my way through the fiction of Toni Morrison. I finished Jazz, the sixth of her eleven novels. It happened to be the one she wrote the year before she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Despite the title, however, the book’s plot has more to do with murder than with music.

Fred L. Joiner. The Mirror in our Music. Minneapolis: Birds, 2026. This is a dos-a-dos book. You read Side A, then you flip the book over and read Side B. In Side A, Joiner’s poems are dedicated to the music he loves (mostly jazz), some Black writers, and the street life and people of the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where he lived for years. Several of these poems are paired with works of art by Black artists and with one photograph by Irish photographer Mervyn Smith. Side B has two sequences of poems in which each one is paired with a photograph. The first series of poems is in response to self-portrait photographs by Ewané Nja Kwa, from a remarkable series called “What Have You Done With My Ancestors,” in which he depicts himself chained and shackled. Kwa is a Franco-Cameroonian photographer whose work is new to me. In the other series, Joiner’s poems respond to images from the vernacular photography collection of the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina.

Ω

an autochthonous fist,
fingers clinched—together,
not Washington’s
separate & unequal hand

just because
I am showing teeth
doesn’t mean I’m smiling

© Ewané Nja Kwa, from “What Have You Done With My Ancestors”

Toni Morrison. Jazz. Penguin Random House, 1992. In the very first paragraph on the first page, Toni Morrison reveals the essential plot of Jazz. From then on, her narrator seems to improvise, spinning words into music. The plot is pretty simple. In a fit of jealousy, fiftyish Joe Trace kills his teenaged lover who has started running around with someone more age appropriate. Then, seeking a revenge of sorts, his wife Violet interrupts the poor girl’s funeral to try to scar the face of her corpse with a knife as her body lies in its open casket. The narrator returns to these episodes for closer inspection several times, but what Jazz is really about is writing, stunningly beautiful writing. The murder takes place in Harlem in 1926, though the present is interrupted frequently by the past, when we are taken as many as 75 years into the past into the Deep South for the backstories of several characters. For long spells, the narrator appears to be the usual anonymous omniscient voice that narrates so many novels and stories. But every now and then, up pops a first-person “I,” and we realize that someone specific is telling us this story. But who? The likely candidate would be some 1920s Harlem character, except he or she was also there to tell us about those backstories in the South 75 years earlier. While this might seem implausible, Morrison does the implausible all the time in her fiction. But there is also a theory that the narrator is the book that we are holding as we read Morrison’s story. Jazz ends with the narrator saying “Look where your hands are. Now.” Anything goes in this book.

Jul 13

Week 28 (2026) – Morrison, Coetzee and Dimópulos

In the week in which June crossed over into July, I read two short books, totaling about 220 pages in all. I’m in the midst of a run of books on the subject of translation, which will probably last for four or five titles, and I’m slowly working my way through the oeuvre of Toni Morrison.

J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos. Speaking in Tongues. Liveright, 2025. Speaking in Tongues is posed as a dialogue between the Nobel-winning writer Coetzee and the distinguished Argentine writer and translator Dimópulos. They define the central issue of the book as “the problem of transferring literary and nonliterary content from one language to another.” Both come from multilingual families, so it seemed natural that they first discuss the nature of the “mother tongue” and the different outcomes that often result from growing up monolingual versus multilingual. Then they turn to the fascinating questions of why so many languages have a gender system, why English evolved away from a gender system, and how do you translate from a language with a gender system to one without one (and vice-versa)? In Chapter 3 there is a discussion of Coetzee’s recent novel The Pole, which Dimópulos translated into Spanish. The topic of the final chapter is “Words,” which included a conversation about “untranslatable” words, such as colors. That chapter ends with a brief discussion of machine translation, or AI. The point of this stimulating short book, is, as Dimópulos says, to demonstrate that: “Translation isn’t just moving words from one language to another, translation requires engaging in an understanding of the nature of language itself.”

Toni Morrison. Recitatif: A Story. Knopf, 2022. I bought the stand-alone hardbound copy of Morrison’s very short story “Recitatif” from 1983 because, well, just because. I began by reading Zadie Smith’s Introduction to the book and immediately regretted it. Smith was going to give away the entire story and explain it to me before I had a chance to read it. Morrison’s only short story is about two girls/women who encounter each other over the course of about three decades and manage to have experiences each time that have racialized overtones. The genius of the story is that Morrison has hidden any direct clues to the race of either girl, while she makes it clear that one is white and one is black. Is Morrison testing us? Is she experimenting with us as readers, daring us to choose clues that we think will decide who is white and who is black? Smith’s Introduction, which is longer than Morrison’s story, is thought-provoking in many ways. She provides a very close reading of the story and then goes on to suggest some of the much larger implications that can be construed from the story. But her Introduction should clearly come after the story, not before it. I am also slowly reading Namwali Serpell’s excellent new book On Morrison, which has one chapter on each of Morrison’s books. So I read her chapter on “Recitatif.” She gives mixed support to some of the explanations that Smith puts forward in her Introduction. But Serpell prefers to see “Recitatif” as a series of “misreadings” about race between the two girls, misreadings that the typical reader is also likely to make. She spends much of her chapter on the fascinating origins of the story, which apparently began as a film script years earlier. Then, it seems to me, she spins her gears a little, trying to suggest which authors might have influenced Morrison as she was writing this story. In the end, Morrison’s trickery didn’t exactly win me over. I greatly prefer the richness of her novels.

Jun 29

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Week 26 (2026) – Zawacki, Wittkop & Habermeyer

For years I have been writing a paragraph about every book I read as part of my annual Reading Log, which you can find above. Many of the books I read are from smaller, independent presses or were written by writers who aren’t everyday names, and I would like to give them a bit more exposure. Other books have publishing dates that are years or decades earlier and haven’t been written about much lately. So, I’m going to make a weekly post of these little blurbs I write (assuming I finish any books that week) and not keep them hidden away on my website. Feel free to tell me what you think.

Andrew Zawacki’s Endscape (Photoworks, 2026) has 30 b&w photographs and 24 poems (all sestets). They all come from deep within the countryside north of Athens, Georgia, where he lives, with its dark entangled woods, buggy streams, and wide rivers. Elsewhere the markets might be “panicking” and overhead there are contrails “making a sick wash of the sky.” But in the woods, there is still the slightest hint of slavery and a reminder of the old Minstrel tune “Swanee River.” A bulldozer “tears the horizon down.” More ominously, Hurricane Helene is approaching. Highway “106 got bitchslapped clean, the troposphere / overdyed. Broken, and badly reborn. A black / hole that bends light around it. There / are only ways in: ” The poem and the book ends on the void after that colon. Zawacki is a vocabulary maven, using specialist terms and words from the deepest recesses of the dictionary, along with wonderfully bent clichés, all in the service of a thrilling exactitude. This is Photoworks Photo-Poetry Pamphlet Project P5.

One of the prime locations of Andrew Wittkop’s Literary Voyagers (Belt Publishing, 2026) is Lake Huron’s Mackinac Island in the summer of 1837, when three fabled historic characters met amid hundreds of visitors from neighboring Ojibwe and other local tribes: the American geologist Henry Schoolcraft, who was to publish extensively about the Upper Midwest and the Native Americans who lived there; his half-Ojibwe wife Jane, who collected, translated, and wrote down those stories and more; and Anna Brownell Jameson, a British woman who had followed her husband to Canada. Amazingly, she had made the arduous and dangerous trip from New York to Mackinac Island alone over the winter, which took her nearly nine months. Years later, back in England, she would become an important writer on Italian Renaissance art and an advocate for women’s rights, moving among the intellectual nobility of Britain and Europe. The Schoolcrafts are well-known figures to anyone who has dug a little into Midwestern or Ojibwe history. But Mrs. Jameson was a new figure to me, and a completely surprising one. All three are strong, yet deeply flawed characters, which makes this a fascinating group portrait. In Literary Voyagers, which is named after a handwritten magazine the Schoolcrafts once issued, Wittkop seems to be one of the new cohort of historians who is comfortable using every tool he has to tell his story, using the letters, documents, and other archival sources the participants left behind. But he’s not afraid, based on his knowledge and the evidence, to “dramatize” certain scenes to help fill the gaps in the archival record and make us feel that we are eavesdropping on conversations held nearly two centuries ago. Literary Voyagers is also a visual delight, filled with historic sketches, maps, and beautifully reproduced paintings. I read a PDF of the book, which will be published in October.

In Necronauts (Stillhouse Press, 2026), Ryan Habermeyer uses the fiction genre of the “found manuscript” to create a group portrait of a mythical Utah town, taking us back to the 1980s of Ronald Reagan. Habermeyer, it turns out, has fortuitously “discovered” in his attic nearly a thousand obituaries his father had written for the local newspaper. Ninety-five of these sometimes charming, sometimes alarming obituaries are combined with a matching set of portrait photographs from his own extraordinary collection of vernacular photographs, many of which would normally be considered rejects or accidents. They suggest we are observing the very moment in which death envelopes the town’s eccentric characters. Life and death in Calypsee, Utah, managed to foreshadow the absurd and frightening America we live in today. I wrote more about this book here.

from Andrew Zawacki, Endscape

Jun 26

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Ryan Habermeyer’s “Necronauts”

“It is with sadness that we communicate the passing of the street sweeper, a curious man who came home from the war with a scar above his ear shaped like a pretzel. There was talk he had one of those Japanese microchips in his brain . . . On the weekends he set up a kiosk at the mall recruiting for the Army. The cosmonaut boy, fresh off a bump of Special K, listened as the street sweeper told stories of what was happening in Grenada and Beirut. Rolling out a constellation map, he showed the crowd of boys the galaxy clusters already being partitioned between Russian and the USA. World War Three will be fought in outer space. Nobody will hear the screams, he said. Everyone signed the dotted line.”

In his first novel (after two books of short stories) Ryan Habermeyer’s Necronauts uses the fiction genre of the “found manuscript” to create a group portrait of a mythical Utah town. “Calypsee rarely appears on maps. It was founded by nine polygamist families of Swedes and Germans in 1857, sent by Brigham Young to mine silver.” Habermeyer, it turns out, has fortuitously “discovered” in his attic nearly a thousand obituaries his father had written for the Calypsee newspaper. In the ninety-five examples that he has selected for Necronauts, he transports us back to the 1980s of Ronald Reagan and the nascent years of our nation’s journey into Christian fundamentalism. Rumors and outright lies are becoming much more appealing than facts. Calypsee is better known for having manufactured a mildly radioactive green glass that collectors crave, which might be one of the reasons why the locals die such strange deaths. The town once had a crematorium with peephole windows in the furnace “so grieving families could watch the process” of their loved ones going up in flames. But it closed after mismanagement, then quickly reopened as a pizzeria. It’s that kind of town.

Wikipedia tells us that a necronaut “is a term derived from the Greek words nekros (νεκρός), meaning “corpse” or “dead”, and nautes (ναύτης), meaning “sailor”. There is definitely something alien about the way the inhabitants of Calypsee sail to or through death. There is the grocer found dead after “an erotic game gone wrong with his mistress, a synthetic doll.” Or there is the woman who worked days cleaning motel rooms and nights at the gas station. Although she was convinced that her son, a “test tube baby,” was the next Messiah, he was nevertheless hit by a cement truck, thus becoming only “a blob on the road like a gobstopper that had been licked one too many times.” There is the ex-blackjack dealer who became “God’s postman, because his brain acted “like a strange radio transmitting frequencies to heaven.” At the local playground, he told the cosmonaut boy who was playing in the rocket ship: “This is Utah, prayer is our drug of choice.” And then there is the septic man, whose wife went out to buy milk and diapers and didn’t return. She had to be a Russian spy, he told everyone. At times he “considered there was something the matter with his head filled with so many thoughts, as if God were whispering in his ear, but he couldn’t quite say what, or maybe words words were just an undiscovered variation of diarrhea.”

Habermeyer has illustrated these sometimes charming, sometimes alarming, but always off-kilter obituaries with a matching set of portrait photographs from his own extraordinary collection of vernacular photographs. Some show people whose faces has been scratched out (perhaps by the author?), and many are photographs which would normally be considered rejects or accidents of one form or another. They have been overexposed, double-exposed, poorly photographed, or badly processed in ways that lend the photographs eerie, other-worldly auras which suggest we are observing the very moment in which death envelopes Calypsee’s eccentric characters.

Understandably, Necronauts has been compared to a “Spoon River Anthology [that] had been written by David Lynch” (Brian Evenson) and to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (Chris Bachelder), two books that tell the stories of the residents of small American towns. To these examples, I would add Michael Lesy’s obsessed 1973 cult book Wisconsin Death Trip (it has been reprinted twice since). Wikipedia’s description of Lesy’s book is hard to beat. “It charts numerous sordid, tragic, and bizarre incidents that took place in and around Jackson County, Wisconsin between 1885 and 1900, primarily in the town of Black River Falls. The events are outlined through actual written historical documents, primarily articles published in the town newspaper . . . accompanied by contemporaneous photographs and portraits taken in Black River Falls by photographer Charles Van Schaick. Thematically, the book emphasizes the harsh aspects of Midwestern rural life under the pressures of crime, pestilence, mental illness, and urbanization.”

Necronauts (Stillhouse Press, 2026) is a weird, funny, heartbreaking novel that is a brilliant example in which the text and the accompanying photographs do each other justice. Both take on serious forms, in obituaries and in death-haunted photographs, yet both are handled tongue-in-cheek. Life and death in Calypsee, Utah, managed to foreshadow the absurd and frightening America we live in today.

May 29

Genevieve Kaplan Erases Virginia Woolf into Poetry

“Nothing was simply one thing.” Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse.

If you opened Genevieve Kaplan‘s chapbook Settings for these Scenes (Chicago: Convulsive Editions, 2013) and didn’t know how her poems were made (and you wouldn’t know that until you got to the final page), her first poem might appear to be more or less straightforward, perhaps informed a bit by Imagism. Even the space surrounding the words doesn’t look all that strange these days. But start turning the pages and the syntax in the remaining poems starts to disintegrate. The phrases get shorter and the space between words expands. There are barely any punctuation marks, but some intriguing word repetitions start to appear. One poem of twenty-four words in length repeats the word “in” eleven times to make its point. Another somewhat longer poem uses “in” fifteen times. The grammar of these poems (such as it is) has an occasional sharp corner that might suggest there is something unwritten that we are not seeing.

Kaplan’s opening poem

This beautifully produced small chapbook contains eleven, airy untitled poems which are all created by the imaginative recycling of the words plucked from one brief paragraph in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. The colon- and comma-heavy paragraph that Kaplan has chosen comes from an important moment that occurs in Chapter 8, very near the end of the end. This is the first time since his mother has died that we are inside James Ramsey’s mind, reading what he is seeing and thinking. James, now 16 years old, is steering a small boat that is finally taking him, his sister Cam, their father Mr. Ramsey, Macalister (the boat’s owner), and Macalister’s son to the Lighthouse, after a delay of more than a decade. The wind has gone slack and James looks over at his father, who is calmly reading a book. In the paragraph preceding the one used by Kaplan, James thinks, “I shall take a knife and strike him to the heart.”

He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended upon him—without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his bare legs, where it had struck him when he was a child) . . .

But then James begins to see his father in a different light. In the first half of Woolf’s book, Mr. Ramsey had repeatedly blamed bad weather as an excuse not to take James and his siblings across the bay to the Lighthouse, an outing James especially craved. But now, ten years later, he wonders if his father couldn’t help himself. James “supposes” an image of a child seeing a wagon “ignorantly and innocently” crushing someone’s foot. He equates this image of the wheel with the manner in which his father heedlessly commands everyone around to obey him, in effect, crushing them in the process. But perhaps like the wheel, his father has always acted like this ignorantly and innocently. Then comes the paragraph that Kaplan uses for her redacted poems:

But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what garden did all this happen? For one had settings for these scenes; trees that grew there; flowers; a certain light; a few figures. Everything tended to set itself in a garden where there was none of this gloom and none of this throwing of hands about; people spoke in an ordinary tone of voice. They went in and out all day long. There was an old woman gossiping in the kitchen; and the blinds were sucked in and out by the breeze; all was blowing, all was growing; and over all those plates and bowls and tall brandishing red and yellow flowers a very thin yellow veil would be drawn, like a vine leaf, at night. Things become stiller and darker at night. But the leaf-like veil was so fine that lights lifted it, voices crinkled it; he could see through it a figure stooping, hear, coming close, going away, some dress rustling, some chain tinkling.

Woolf’s prose, at times, approaches music, its grasp of comprehension nearly gone. This dream-like vision of a frictionless childhood moment is a massive contrast from Jame’s’ thought only a moment earlier that he would murder his father. In another moment, James is going to look up and see that they have almost arrived and he will say to himself “So that was the Lighthouse, was it?” But wait. “No, the other was also the Lighthouse.” He thinks about that distant object they used to see across the bay from the house as children. That, too, was the Lighthouse. “Nothing was simply one thing.”

Kaplan has chosen a paragraph that lends itself to great poetic potential and variation. A good portion of Lighthouse takes place in a garden very much like the one that James “supposes.” It’s adjacent to the house on the Isle of Skye where the Ramsey family traditionally spent their summers—the parents, all eight children, plus several adult roomers. In the novel, the garden acts as a kind of theater where people eye each other across the grass, summoning up minor complaints, old grudges, moments of curiosity, or flashes of admiration for one another.

As I read and reread Kaplan’s poems, I found myself pausing to look at words in isolation, in combination with the words above and below, and then becoming indecisive about which words were supposed to connect across the broad spaces. Was the word “s o” in the poem above supposed to be read with a stutter? These poems are suggestive of more possibilities than we normally take from a standard poem with directional reading. In the poem on the left immediately below, it is possible to read “One / voice / in the / the breeze” and “came / a / rustling” by following cascading lines rather than reading strictly left to right. And, as several of these poems suggest about themselves, they are visually “very thin,” full of space. Woolf’s paragraph contains 167 words, while Kaplan’s poems economically use between 14 and 38 words. Yet, skeletal as they are, each of Kaplan’s microcosms reflect Woolf’s original paragraph and novel in ways that I find haunting.

Because the same words appear in the exact same geographic locations on the page in different poems, we can see that Kaplan is working from a fixed version of Woolf’s paragraph and is simply plucking out the words she doesn’t want to appear. This leaves the remaining words—the current poem, if you will—glued in place. The placement of the words is fixed; Kaplan can’t adjust their location.

Genevieve Kaplan’s erasures of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse underscore the ephemeral nature of the vision that James Ramsey “supposes,” which “drawn, like a leaf / and leaf-like / could / go away” in an instant.

Vintage Classics Edition

[Check out the Redacted Poetry tab at the top of this blog, where there are bountiful fascinating things to read.]


May 11

“The Wound” by Laurent Mauvignier

“very far away there are reasons, connections, networks, invisible things working on us and we don’t understand a thing about them.”

A small village in rural France in the early 2000s, some forty years after the brutal Algerian War of Independence ended in 1962. Bernard unexpectedly shows up at a party for his sister Solange’s sixtieth birthday and retirement. Four decades earlier, he had been drafted and sent to fight in Algeria before he was even old enough to vote. After the war, his life slowly fell apart. He married, had children, worked in a factory in Paris, and then, ten years ago, reappeared alone in this village where he grew up, refusing to talk about the past. He mooches off people and drinks too much. And now he has appeared at the party, all spiffed up, with an expensive gift for his sister that the whole village knows he can’t afford. Solange gets angry at him and people get testy. Suddenly he spies Chefraoui in the crowd, the head of the village’s only Arab family. Bernard wants to know why that “dirty sonofabitch” Arab has been invited. Before the afternoon is over, Bernard has gone to Chefraoui’s house and barged inside, threatening his wife and children. By the time he has finally left, the family dog is found lying in the yard, bloodied and nearly dead.

There are two kinds of wounds in Laurent Mauvignier’s chilling novel The Wound. There are personal injuries that come from words said, promises not kept, money stolen. These are wounds that can never be fully unpacked or understood. In someone like Bernard, they can burn like an eternal flame within, sending a life off on a crooked and destructive arc. So many wounds are, in reality, misperceptions, like misreading the intent of someone’s comment. Small events like these, left unattended for decades, assert their rights to be taken more seriously, and then they become burning passions, compulsions, the points at which tempers overflow.

The other kind of wound comes from the Algerian War. In his Foreword to the novel, Nick Flynn writes, “The Wound is a quiet novel with a war in the middle of it.” But oh, what a war! It’s vicious, visceral, inhuman. The French army fought with a racial hatred and a total unconcern for the civilian population, and the Algerian independence fighters replied with a cruelty they hoped would scare the French back to France. Neither side was bound by any universal “rules” for warfare and no soldier came back unharmed. In its midsection, The Wound follows the war experiences of Bernard, his cousin Rabut, and their friend Février. Bernard might suffer from PTSD, but Mauvignier is here to show us how immensely oversimplified that stock label is.

For about 100 pages, we read about these three very young men as they fight in a brutal and utterly dehumanizing war. If the French soldiers weren’t racist when they arrived in Algeria, the Army was there to make it clear to them that they could destroy property and kill people with impunity. Mauvignier captures the fury, the bloody brutality, and the ferocious carnal instincts that characterizes this kind of modern war of independence from longstanding colonial chains—the determination of the French Army to crush anyone who remotely looks like an Algerian independence fighter or supporter, and the tenacity of the Algerian fellaghas to frighten the French off their territory no matter what it takes.

With only a few days to go before returning home, having fought a war he doesn’t understand against a people he had no grudge against, Bernard can’t “help feeling that if he were Arab he’d probably be a fellagha.” “We’ve come to bring them peace and civilization,” he thinks, with great irony. But he also understands the untenable position of the harki, the French citizens who have lived in peace in Algeria for generations and now are being hounded back to France, unwelcome. In the end, he decides “You can’t believe anybody. They lie everywhere. He thinks he’s been lied to forever.”

And once the brutalized young friends returned home from this hellish event, Rabut finds “it bizarre that nobody asks you anything.” After a while, “you tell yourself it’s as if you never left [France]. As if Algeria never existed.” The Wound takes place over twenty-four hours beginning with Solange’s party, but the wounds it describes won’t be healed in this lifetime.

One of the distinctive elements of Mauvignier’s terrifically controlled novel is the way that his writing is intensely cinematic. The book is very visual, with Rabut, who is its primary narrator, mostly describing what he sees and hears. This gives it the feel of a documentary film. For example, the descriptions and recapitulations of the opening scene in which Bernard arrives at the party, surprises Solange with his gift, and then is ejected after his insult to Chefraoui, consume the first 32 pages of The Wound. This crucial event is viewed several times from several vantage points, often in what feels like slow motion. Here’s one example in which Rabut reexamines a few seconds of the party. This moment occurs after a woman named Marie-Jeanne has accidentally screamed on seeing Bernard offer the expensive brooch to Solange and Rabut realizes that the mood in the room suddenly turned as a result.

And everybody started to laugh, well not everybody yet, no, only the people who were right next to them and had witnessed the scene and could testify later, after he left, that everything was definitively settled and over at that very moment. Because he didn’t laugh at all. He looked at Marie-Jeanne, her iridescent pearl necklace glittering on her large, bulging bust, her apple-green dress and her hooded collar, her dyed hair with glints of mauve and mouse gray, and her smiling mouth, laughing now that he was the one feeling astonishment and stupor, not her anymore. And him not stammering, not a word from him as he faced her, while she was laughing and looking around for the approval of others, for the approval of her husband, Jean-Claude, who had walked over when he heard his wife and then kept laughing, him the husband, wanting to be cute, thinking he was funny, suddenly drawing himself up, blustering almost as he repeated,

Watch out, I’ve got my eye on you, pal.

But, during military maneuvers, everything speeds up.

Outside, the sound—they listen—of more doors being kicked in. You can hear the big clay jars thrown down, smashing apart on the ground. And children, babies crying. And dogs barking. Then a shot. They jump. Goats. A dog, someone killed a dog. And they search the adolescent. Then the others. Then someone gropes the girl’s djellaba. Then the girl looks at her mother as her hair escapes undone, falls over her shoulders. Then she opens her mouth to express surprise. She clenches her fists. The soldier lingers, searching, groping her breasts for a long time. Mouret and Février watch without saying anything. The Février walks up to the girl, the other soldier moves over, Février touches the djellaba and stops when the girls lets out a soft cry, almost nothing, and then takes refuge in silence. Her anger must be kept in the background—she knows, she repeats to herself that she can’t lose her head, above all she can’t get mad, she can’t scream, she absolutely can’t scream, can’t insult them, you have to wait, have to keep quiet.

Mouret looks at Février and motions him to drop it.

In an archived interview with Mauvignier conducted by Julien Bisson in France Today held in 2009, just after The Wound (Des Hommes) was originally published to great acclaim, the writer spoke about the origin of the idea for his novel and his ideas about literature.

This project originated long ago in something very personal, though shared by millions of people from my generation,” says Mauvignier of his astonishing novel. “My mother used to show me pictures my father took in Algeria, where he was stationed for 28 months. In these photos there was no sign of war, or of the violence my mother would talk about. They were almost like holiday pictures, with smiling kids, nice landscapes, sun, the city of Oran. But when my father committed suicide, the question began to gnaw at me: Did the Algerian war have something to do with it? If so, who will speak about what has been silenced? What is it that has been silenced?”
…
I don’t really know what the purpose of literature is,” he replies. “Maybe it is its uselessness that makes it indispensable in a world where everything needs finality. I only know it is a tool for me to expose something I sense is present, very near to us, but has no body, no voice, and whose silence demands to be broken. It is a tool to expose what lies beneath the stones.

Laurent Mauvignier. The Wound. University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Translated from the 2009 French original Des Hommes by David Ball and Nicole Ball.

May 1

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Wolfgang Koeppen’s Trilogy Redux

In a promotional email, the publisher New Directions is hyping the idea that Wolfgang Koeppen’s great trilogy of novels written in the early 1950s “has finally returned in Michael Hofmann’s breathtaking translation.” What New Directions really means is that Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, and Death in Rome are all finally being published as a uniform set by a single publisher for the first time. Originally written in German in 1951, 1953, and 1954, respectively, these captivating post-war novels, which each reflect back on the Nazi era in different ways, were actually translated by Hofmann in 2020, 2001, and 1992. The Hothouse and Death in Rome had previously been published by W.W. Norton & Co., while New Directions somehow got the rights for Pigeons on the Grass in 2020 when no other publisher seemed to have an English translation.

The upside of the republication of these novels by New Directions is the attention and new readers they are drawing. Already there have been major reviews in The New Yorker (April 27, 2026) and The New York Times Book Review (April 28, 2026), where Dustin Illingworth called the trilogy “one of the great reading experiences of my life. . . Taken together, the novels compose a grand taxonomy of resentment, one of the most cleareyed ever written.”

A little more than six years ago, I wrote about each of these three books. Take a look!

In Pigeons on the Grass, this wonderful, often antic but deadly serious novel, we follow the actions of approximately two dozen characters through a single day in post-war Munich. The Germans, along with a handful of their American “conquerors” who now occupy the city, shop, have coffee, run errands, pawn their valuables, and generally go about their daily lives. Everything is leading up to one main evening event: a lecture by an important American visiting poet, Edwin.

The Hothouse follows a few days in the life of Herr Keetenheuve, a member of the postwar Bundestag. In 1933, just as Hitler rose to power, Keetenheuve, who describes himself as an ascetic, a Buddhist, a disciple of Zen, and a pacifist, fled Germany to Canada. He then returned at the end of the war, optimistic and “eager to reinvent the nation as a liberal democracy.”

Death in Rome funnels everything toward one culminating event, a performance of a new piece of symphonic music by the young German composer Siegfried Pfaffrath, which will take place in a concert hall in Rome sometime in the years shortly after World War II. Siegfried doesn’t know it yet, but his parents, one of his brothers, and an uncle are also in Rome for a unique kind of family reunion. The most prominent of these relatives is Gottlieb Judejahn, a former SS general who has been convicted and sentenced to death in absentia at the Nuremberg Trails, but who now runs the military of an unnamed Arab nation under an assumed name. The family hopes to convince Judejahn to return to Germany to help revive the struggling National Socialist cause. Unbeknownst to everyone, Judejahn’s son Adolf is also in Rome, waiting to be ordained as a Catholic priest. Throughout the novel, we will follow these family members as they explore the Eternal City, meet in various combinations, plot, sin, and discover family secrets.

Apr 25

“Sebald Remembering” Program, Berlin, June 6, 2026

Lettrétage, “an anchor institution for Berlin’s independent literary scene,” has announced a special program devoted to W.G. Sebald in their Berlin space on June 6, 2026, called “Sebald Remembering.” The event website says: “At the heart of Sebald’s work lies a deep understanding of crises, an exploration of the effects of catastrophes on the human psyche, both individually and collectively. He vividly describes the narrative disintegration and self-alienation that accompany exile, having spent the second half of his life in Great Britain. In works such as A Natural History of Destruction, he also addressed German wartime suffering and the destruction of German cities, always with an eye toward the politics of the past.”

The event is centered around a quotation from Sebald’s last novel Austerlitz (2001): “I have always resisted the power of time, driven by an inner compulsion that I myself have never understood, and cut myself off from so-called current events, in the hope—as I believe today,” said Austerlitz, “that time does not pass, has not passed, that I can go back to it and then find everything just as it once was, or more precisely, that all moments of time have existed simultaneously.” The event is free, open to the public, and begins at 20:30.

During the first half of “Sebald Remembering,” writers Marcel Krueger, Paul Scraton, and Madeleine Watts will discuss Sebald’s work and his legacy in a conversation moderated by Sanders Isaac Bernstein. The discussion will be held in English. Following a short break, Berlin-based writers are invited to read from their works inspired by Sebald. Readings may be shared in any language. 

Drawing inspiration from Sebald’s work, we invite writers to submit work that is about CRISIS. Submissions do not have to be imitations of Sebald and should not be about him. Instead, we are looking for approaches that seek to make sense of a state of crisis (present or past, proximate or remote), that problematize the act of witnessing, that dig into geography, and that attempt to pry apart layers of history to see what’s inside. Place writing, fact camouflaging as fiction and fiction as fact, and multimedia experiments all encouraged.

Selected readers will be invited to share their work at the event and will have their work published online and in a printed zine commemorating the evening.

Proposals are due by May 17. For submission details and more information about the event, see the website.

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