Each month, our desks at the Review pile up with dozens of soon-to-be published books. This November, in addition to translator Jennifer Croft’s memoir Notes on Postcards and From Julio, a volume of Julio Cortázar’s selected letters, we read a political thriller-cum-radio broadcast about a Ukrainian barricade pianist. Sometimes, looking through these galleys for invention or inspiration, I keep a few passages for myself. Here’s what struck me lately.
—Emma Eaton, editorial intern
The German poet Ernst Herbeck, who was institutionalized for schizophrenia at twenty, began writing poems at the encouragement of his clinician. He often wrote in response to a prompt, which would then form his title. This poem, from Herbeck’s In His One Languages (World Poetry), translated from the German by David Brazil and Gary Sullivan, is called “The Cigarette.”
The Cigarette.
is a monopoly and must
be smoked. So Thatit
goes up in flames.
*
Mark Danner’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Betrayal of American Democracy, 2000–2026 (NYRB) offers a comprehensive collection of the writer’s essays from Bush v. Gore to the second Trump administration. From an essay on Obama:
He seems slender and slight and young, astonishingly young, and you notice first of all, for it is impossible not to, the physical grace; he moves like an athlete much more than a politician, taking pleasure in his body: bursting up onto the stage, the lanky highly stylized movement, shoulders bent slightly concave, gathering everything into those constantly clapping hands, using the hands in their clapping to acknowledge the crowd, his head nodding all the while, as if he is drawing his energy only from them and showing that energy with his clapping and nodding, with the bursting energy of his body that is an embodiment of theirs, an embodied picture of what they’re giving him. He prances with evident pleasure around the little stage, moving his head in big theatrical nods, embracing each politician in turn, big full-bodied embraces, and again one thinks of an athlete on the sidelines or in the dugout: all of it is done with the unhindered pleasure of the body, all of it says confidence and pleasure, as if this, being bathed in the huge cheers, taking sustenance and energy from the wave of sounds and the shouts of his name, is the place where he breathes his true oxygen, where he really lives. He seems made to be precisely here—in the midst of these thousands of sundrenched cheering people.
*
Simon Garfield’s The Pen: A Human History (Crown) introduces us to the characters of pen history, from Joseph Priestley—the eighteenth-century scientist who, in addition to discovering oxygen, was the first person to shove a metal nib onto a quill—to Milton Reynolds, the millionaire inventor of the Reynolds Rocket, the worlds’ first ballpoint pen. In this scene, he’s visiting Axel Nier, “nib specialist”:
Towards the end of my time in Nibs, my eye was drawn to a single woman in a dust-proof room writing figure eights. This room was known as The Aquarium and was the final stage; the woman was testing nibs for resistance, smoothness and flow, and also sound. “The ideal sound is hard to understand,” Nier explained to me quietly, “but she knows.”
*
The Polish futurist Aleksander Wat wrote his diary primarily in an invented and vowel-less code of his own invention. The loose-leaf papers on which his entries were typed were found after Wat’s death in 1967. NYRB’s new collection of the entries, Diary Without Vowels (NYRB), translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles, does include some vowels:
November 7, 1963
How strong I was today, how resilient, though the day was rather cold and windy, and my pains were mild, despite all the nerves, efforts, and worries.
*
Some more weather in Siamak Vossoughi’s The Friend Seekers (Sarabande Books), the author’s third book of short stories:
It was a Saturday afternoon and the sky was gray in a way that seemed like Saturday afternoon was always going to be gray from here on out.
*
A passage from Yuri Andrukhovych’s Radio Night (NYRB), translated from the Ukrainian by Mark Andryczyk:
Lady Gaga was heading for Rotsky with such unwavering aim (while limping, no less) that he didn’t have the least bit of doubt: he would now be offered drugs.
Emma Eaton is an editorial intern at The Paris Review.