Chekhov is easier to know and read than the other Russian giants. He doesn’t look big or talk big. He’s funny on purpose. He shows us how to read him; he quietly attunes us to place and situation. We observe more than judge his characters’ actions; we detect their mental and emotional states through their physical symptoms. Chekhov began his professional career as a writer while in medical school. Even as he imagined the agitations and disruptions and occasional explosions of his characters, he was always also a doctor. He describes what it feels like to fall in love, to be pregnant and to miscarry, to bully one’s children, to flutter about helplessly while seeking someone to love, to have typhus, to cringe with embarrassment over a bespattering sneeze, to blather like a professor, to be struck dumb by love, to beg for sympathy, to grieve, to menace the innocent, to be conscious of but prey to one’s weaknesses, to be overworked to the point of hallucinating, to be ruthless.
He himself didn’t do most of that; his fiction was where he streamed into other consciousnesses and cut loose, fell apart, ambled like a shepherd, or strode like a wife on her way to or from an assignation. His imagination and professional knowledge allowed him to depict passions he did not act upon. “So many hereditary negatives were turned into positives,” Michael C. Finke writes in his new biography.
At heart, crappy things promise more than they deliver. They are inherently dishonest in the ways they are made and promoted. I chose this word out of dozens of potential others—junk, trash, stuff, kitsch, tchotchkes—because “crap” alone both suggests the full scope of this kind of stuff and also succinctly captures the cynical, degraded, and often degrading aspects of these things—as well as the false sentiments inherent to them.
Now, post-cancer diagnosis, I am awash in a sea of medical-related crap. Case in point: I find myself in yet another exceptionally unremarkable exam room, spoken to by yet another unfamiliar nurse about my treatment. Like so many others, she, too, comes bearing the glossy literature of industrialized medicine, a genre which has become all-too familiar to me. This is late capitalism’s medicalized equivalent of the smooth and persuasive tongue of Lou Bookman, a skilled sidewalk pitchman portrayed in an early episode of The Twilight Zone whom we meet in Crap’s Introduction. Bookman’s ability to rhapsodize about everything from ordinary sewing thread to artificial silk neckties enables him to enchant even Mr. Death, who has come for our affable protagonist but is too distracted by the pitch to successfully carry out his duties.
I don’t remember when I first saw that particular photograph of Alice Liddell but it changed something about my relationship with Wonderland, seeing this real girl who was the real inspiration for such an extraordinary story captured on film. I wonder often about that girl who became a piece of modern myth, about that boat trip and those sisters who requested a story, for what a tale they received.
Such comprehensive cover design initiatives tap into the same power as branded objects. It might seem dismal to compare an author to a brand. The writer—the literary purveyor, if you will—is indispensable, and each book they produce is a unique object. To group them together in a branded package like bottles on a drug store shelf can seem reductive, dystopian even, at its face. But this is essentially what publishers do when they commission several books by one author to be designed in a similar fashion. It’s a way for the publisher to associate a particular writer with a visual identity. And ultimately, despite any venal ambitions on behalf of publishers, the designs they require can be demanding and gratifying artistic projects for book designers.
In Paul Tran’s stunning debut poetry collection, the word “trauma” is never written. Instead, a violent encounter permeates the speaker’s environment, informing their descriptions of visual art, the natural world, and family history, specifically contextualized by the United States’ brutal intervention in Vietnam’s civil war. Survival in the face of bodily harm is everywhere. Here, Tran’s expansiveness is a major strength: the collection refuses to be a linear roadmap, providing the reader instead with a vast exploration of the aftermath of trauma.
To manage this telling, a cross-pollination of a parable, an allegory and a novel, Heti breaks God into a trinity. No, not that kind, though as a writer of the Jewish tradition, she invokes God as a creative, censorious and punishing He.
Nina Mingya Powles’s Small Bodies of Water, a memoir made up of interconnected essays, is one of those books I read ravenously, consuming the vast majority of it on a plane to Cyprus, tired, ears thick with altitude. I am glad I read it in this suspended state, between countries, held in the air. At first, this felt like an encumbrance on the experience. There are lots of places and things in Small Bodies of Water — a city in southern China called Guilin, a wild swimming spot called Slippery Stones in the Peak District, the mountain ranges of Kota Kinabalu, the poem-like texts of artist Talia Smith, pungent Rafflesia flowers — that I had the urge to Google. I wanted images and Wikipedia pages and definitions.
There wasn’t yet a sun.
The sky was still empty.