Further Adventures with Your Favorite Books
We’re reinventing literary criticism by opening it up to new voices, hybrid forms, and tons of creativity. In these short, collectible volumes, acclaimed writers explore iconic books in surprising ways.
Dear Knausgaard: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle by Kim Adrian
The Curious Operations of Intimacy in Literature
In a series of warm and often funny letters, essayist and memoirist Kim Adrian delivers a compelling feminist critique of the 6-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. Adrian’s book of letters begins as a witty and entertaining response to a seminal work and transforms into a fierce and powerful interrogation of the darker social and cultural forces informing Knausgaard’s project. Through an examination of the curious operations of intimacy demanded on both sides of the page by all great literature, Dear Knausgaard ultimately provides a heartfelt celebration of the act of reading itself.
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The Wanting Was a Wilderness: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and the Art of Memoir, by Alden Jones
The Long Walk to the True Story
How did Cheryl Strayed turn a solo hike into an inspirational memoir, beloved by millions? Memoirist and professor Alden Jones sets out to explore why. But when a sudden personal crisis occurs while she is writing, Jones realizes she must confront some difficult truths, both in her life and on the page. The Wanting Was a Wilderness is a profoundly original work that blends criticism, craft analysis, and a memoir of Jones’s own time in the wilderness. The result is a celebration of Wild and a map of our long path to self-discovery.
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Looking Was Not Enough: Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex by Irena Yamboliev
What Does It Mean to Transform?
Middlesex is the story of a character who changes profoundly in order to remain fundamentally himself. It’s about recognizing how risky and contingent any physical description is, and how ambiguous dualities can be blended into beautifully coherent wholes. As the child of Bulgarian immigrants, Irena Yamboliev knows what it’s like to construct your own identity. In Looking Was Not Enough, she uses her background in biology and literary scholarship to put Middlesex into conversation with Barthes, Ovid, and other texts that examine the way our gender, sex, nationality, and culture can experience a metamorphosis. The result is an illuminating theory of our own self-formations.
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Bizarro Worlds: Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude by Stacie Williams
Is Gentrification the Supervillain of Our Time?
As a black woman and a comics geek, Stacie Williams identified strongly with one aspect of The Fortress of Solitude—its portrayal of gentrification. For Jonathan Lethem’s characters, and for Williams in her own life, gentrification is a stand-in for racism—the “Big Bad” that affects education, policing, and housing policy. Tracing her experience of living in Chicago, Boston, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Lexington, Kentucky, Williams tests the limits of how far Lethem’s superhero narrative frames the most American of experiences.
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New Uses for Failure: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 by Adam Colman
How (and Why) to Write Fiction Like an Essayist
A brave new mode of literature is emerging in the work of Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and others. Call it what you will; Adam Colman calls it essayistic fiction. In this sharp, playful book, Colman dives deep into Ben Lerner’s 10:04 to create a “how to” manual for anyone who wants to write, or simply understand, essayistic fiction. A manifesto, a critical analysis, and a winking work of satire, New Uses for Failure marks the arrival of a sparkling new genre.
Interview at Chicago Review of Books
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EBOOK | $5
I Meant to Kill Ye: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian by Stephanie Reents
Enter the Strange Void at the Heart of Blood Meridian
After teaching Cormac McCarthy’s bloodiest, most challenging novel to her students for years, Stephanie Reents feels no closer to the strange void at the heart of Blood Meridian than when she began. So she journeys west, following the trail of the historical Glanton Gang across the desert landscape that McCarthy loves. In his archives, she discovers an obscure note about the kid—the novel’s enigmatic protagonist—that might explain why this infamous novel is so hard to shake.
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A Cool Customer: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking by Jacob Bacharach
A Cool Customer turns The Year of Magical Thinking into a blueprint for grief and self-discovery.
Reading Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Jacob Bacharach’s thoughts are never far from his brother Nate, who died of an opioid addiction. Although he tries to be a “a cool customer” like Didion, he finds Nate’s story breaking through the text, stirring memories of their tight-knit childhood and defying his attempts to uncover “the truth” about a tragic death.
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An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 by Jonathan Russell Clark
The more he learns about the writer’s unlikely life, the less it makes sense.
After devouring 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, Jonathan Russell Clark does what any good literary critic would do—he reads everything by Bolaño he can get his hands on. Bolaño cultivated ambiguities and false identities, almost as if he were laying a trap for his future biographers. Clark’s investigation into the author’s magnum opus is a stumble through a labyrinth where fiction and self-mythologizing converge.
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Paperback is temporarily out of stock - please order from Small Press Distribution
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A Little In Love with Everyone: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home by Genevieve Hudson
Growing up queer in the deep South, Genevieve Hudson longed for stories about lives like her own.
So she turned to Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking graphic memoir, Fun Home. In its panels, she found sly references to Bechdel’s personal influences. A Little in Love with Everyone is Hudson’s journey down a rabbit hole of queer heroes like Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, and Adrienne Rich, who turned their stories into art and empowered future generations to embrace their own truths.
“This is the queer commentary book I needed as a teenager, and in my twenties, and today. Genevieve Hudson is a bold and intelligent new voice.”
—Chloe Caldwell, author of Women & I’ll Tell You in Person
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