Reading Charlotte Wood’s 2024 Booker Prize short-listed novel Stone Yard Devotional, I wondered whether most people haven’t, at least at one point in their lives, considered disappearing. For me, this desire began as early as in my teenage years, when I fantasized constantly about running away. Like the protagonist in the novel, it was less a running toward something, as much as it was a wish to not be embroiled in the demands of the world. That is to say, like the nameless woman in the novel, I was not running toward God, but rather fleeing from what a friend of mine calls “the vortex” of marriage, a mortgage, and raising kids in what sometimes feels like a relentless struggle lasting every last minute of our lives to become “a have,” instead of “a have not.” To make a difference. To matter.
But how to keep the demands of the world at bay—how to quiet the noise?
In all of English there are few words rich enough in their history and variety of use to warrant a dedicated dictionary that runs to hundreds of pages and multiple editions. That fuck is at the same time one of the most notorious, popular, and emotive words in the language makes it all the more fascinating—and deserving of the attention given to it in this volume.
Disgust and delight, it has been said, live in close proximity; in Eliza Clark’s debut collection, they share a home and a bed. These 11 stories revolve around food, sex, gender, power and the body; they veer from realism to sci-fi, fairytale, horror and post-apocalyptic dystopia. This is a book that seems crafted from the stuff of our deepest fears and our most illicit desires. You read on, by turns engrossed and grossed out, as though in the thrall of some demonic power.
Daughterhood’s particular contribution to this canon lies in its attempt to hold both sides at once: there is the daughter’s perspective, and there is the mother’s, and there is an imperfect zone somewhere in the middle, with room for both.
Peter Ames Carlin’s book isn’t just a cultural biography of the band going back to its formation in the-then sleepy college town of Athens, Georgia. It’s also a poetic meditation on what made so many of the band’s songs stand out, and continue to shine.