Books, essays, and poetry recommended by Dial contributors.

AUGUST 15, 2023

On September 23, the sun will once again shine directly over the Earth’s equator, marking the autumnal equinox and the official end of summer. Until then, there is plenty of time for reading: we asked Dial contributors to send in the works of journalism, literature, and poetry that have inspired them lately.

EVE FAIRBANKS

Eve wrote “The Dispossession of District Six” for our Reparation issue.

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I find consolation in history. Most things have happened before, and sometimes they were even worse. Sometimes, reading history lets me see across huge crevasses that have opened between the past and the present and to know better how we’ve changed—who we were, what we could be.

I’ve been reading Martin Sixsmith’s new history of the Cold War, The War of Nerves. It’s a psychological analysis of that great-power struggle. It has drawn back a curtain on the assumptions Americans still retain about what power looks like and the value of suspicion. It's not chronological, which is so intriguing; instead, it's organized according to different kinds of misunderstandings and cognitive phenomena. Unlike most Cold War histories, it doesn't assume what did happen had to happen. It's reminded me to keep sight, in my own writing, of what could have been and could be instead of just assuming everything is getting worse, inevitably. And it so deftly wields jaw-dropping gems, like that Harry Truman asked reporters to pray for him when he became president because, he said, he had absolutely no clue what to do. Imagine a president admitting that kind of thing now!

SOPHIE POOLE

Sophie wrote “Undoing the Alhambra Decree” for our Debt issue.

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I came across Péter Nádas’s 1986 novel A Book of Memories (translated by Ivan Sanders and Imre Goldstein) in an English-language bookstore and café in Budapest. On the cover, with nearly equal billing to the title was a Susan Sontag quote: “The greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century.” I purchased it along with a lemonade.

A Book of Memories is a large book that slips quickly, and at first, for me, confusingly, between three narrators. The first narrator is partly modeled on Nádas’s life growing up in Stalinist Hungary and then living in Berlin. The second narrator is a character invented by the first, and the third is an old friend of the first’s, who intervenes close to the novel’s end in the role of fact-checker. The book recounts Hungary’s recent history, including a particularly monumental scene where the first narrator is swept up in the Uprising of 1956. Nádas's descriptions are so intense that they occasionally read almost like horror, like when he writes of a kiss with his childhood friend Thea, or the strangeness of falling in love with a man in Germany and in German, his second language and country of exile.

SPENCER LEE LENFIELD

Spencer translated Shin Hae-uk’s poems from “Biologicity” in our Egg issue and “Debt” for our Debt issue.

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Out of all the writers that have stunned me over in the past year, I've been most surprised by the poetry of Ko Jung-hee (고정희), a central figure in the revolutionary upsurge of feminist poets that began in Korea around 1980. Ko wrote more than ten volumes of verse unlike any other Korean poetry I've ever read — thundering, epistolary, piercing. (I keep imagining her voice in English as a mix of W.H. Auden and Adrienne Rich.) Ko died far too young, in a hiking accident in 1991.

A Ko renaissance of sorts is picking up among scholars on both sides of the Pacific, including the wonderful critic Cho Yeonjung’s recent book Women’s Poetry 1980–90, which illuminates how Ko fought as intellectual and editor to advance feminism as a movement that independent of the labor politics of the left (then often dominated by men). Unfortunately, Ko hasn't been much translated into English (copyright seems to be an issue), and what little there is feels prosier than the magic of the original Korean.

BEN MAUK

Ben Mauk is an editor at The Dial.

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The subtitle of Elif Batuman's first book (“Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them”) would seem to make The Possessed, published in 2010, a project uniquely at odds with the present day’s moral currents. Across NATO member states, theaters are canceling Chekhov, orchestras are abandoning Mussorgsky, and Dostoevsky is disappearing from college syllabi. Yet not only is Batuman’s subtitle inaccurate—more than a third of the book follows Batuman’s efforts in post-Soviet Samarkand to learn the Uzbek language and understand its long-suffering and quite un-Russian literature—The Possessed is a manifesto of doubt when it comes to what makes a book Russian in the first place. Batuman’s literary travelogs take us from a Tolstoy conference to a reconstruction of Empress Anna’s palace of ice, but only to trouble our assumption that there is anything so pompous or vainglorious as a national literature at all, rather than a long series of unresolved arguments between writers, and between writers and readers, and between readers and translators, a long chain of spiritual filiation that knows no fealty to any country or to anything at all—except the pleasures, aesthetic and moral, of reading itself.

KRIS BARTKUS

Kris wrote “The Benthic Battlefield” for our Shipwrecks issue.

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One day, I will find words to explain why I love Bruno Schulz’s too-brief collected works. His stories combine torpor with a sense of imminence that never arrives; his characters and scenes don’t develop so much as ripen, distending with the nectar of his prose, until they burst and start to rot. When I crack open his books, no matter the time of day, I feel immediately on the precipice of complete exhaustion. I don't know if I'm even really reading, or simply lying next to his paragraphs, listening to them breathing on a drowsy summer night. Someone recently asked me whether it was possible to become a Naïve Reader again. The only practical route that came to mind was to read nothing but Schulz, over and over. The innocence, I feel sure, would return.

In contrast, Aleksandra Lun’s The Palimpsests is one of the funniest books I’ve read in recent memory: a wimpy Polish literary failure is sentenced to psychiatric treatment in Belgium for his desire to write books in a language not his own. There are great set scenes of the narrator being pelted with literary prizes and stuffed into the trunk of a Ford Focus by the Antarctic Writers' Union for not knowing his place. It’s a story that pokes at the touchy nationalism hiding behind the unified front of so-called international literature. But what I liked most about it was how it explored a very particular literary insecurity: the fear that one is destined to be trapped in the madhouse of writing, but insufficiently crazy to get the attention of the doctors.

LUCÍA CHOLAKIAN HERRERA

Lucía wrote “How to Overturn an Abortion Ban” for our Egg issue.

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I’ve been covering Argentina as a correspondent for foreign outlets for a while now, but this election year has found me standing at the cliff of a large, infinite hole of cynicism. Sometimes, it’s hard to deal with politics, so for the past few months, in order to escape, I’ve been reading non-fiction about the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in my country, including Conocer a Perón, about how one of Argentina's most important and controversial presidents, Juan Domingo Perón, organized his comeback to Argentina after his exile in Spain and De Peron a Videla, a narrative guide to the events leading up to the dictatorship of General Jorge Rafael Videla, which marked Argentina’s cruelest years.

I’m mixing these historical reads with biographies of two 2023 presidential hopefuls: Ricardo Ragendorfer’s biography of right-wing candidate Patricia Bullrich, an exquisite profile that sometimes reads like magical realism (Bullrich started her political career as a member of a leftist guerrilla group), and Diego Genoud’s book on Sergio Massa, which depicts how the establishment’s favorite candidate started building power from his teenage years. I’m also halfway through Graciela Mochkofsky’s book Timerman, the biography of Jacobo Timerman, one of the founders of contemporary journalism in Argentina.

CAITLIN CHANDLER

Caitlin wrote “Skeletons from Kilimanjaro” for our Reparation issue.

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This summer I’m exploring experimental nonfiction that diverges from the factual reality that defines my journalistic work, as well as reading experimental literature that plays with language, voice, and form. In June I finished Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark’s lyrical collection of essays that use fairy tales to interrogate our strange present. I had to force myself to slow down and not binge read, I didn’t want it to end.

Then I read Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand the World, which excavates and re-imagines the lives of prominent scientists and mathematicians in the 20th century and the discoveries that made or unmade them. I’m still chewing over one of his essays, “The Heart of It,” which follows Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki’s rise to fame and subsequent retreat into meditation and mysticism. I wonder what it was he took to the grave. I’m also now dipping in and out of two books of luminous poetry: The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser and Survival Is a Style by Christian Wiman. I brought these books back to Berlin from the mountains of Virginia, and when I opened Survival Is a Style just now to write this, two dead fire ants fell out.

JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS

Jessi wrote “Party at Das Literaturhaus” for our Energy issue.

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At the risk of taking the idea of the “beach read” too literally, recently I’ve been reading about oceans. It started with Max Frisch’s Homo Faber, which features a long stretch on a ship, a summer on the Aegean Sea, and a delusional engineer who is unable to accept the statistical anomalies that lead him there. Then I reread Kafka’s transatlantic Amerika, Anna Seghers’s Transit, and some of Moby Dick.

Were you aware that Bering Island, where the Danish explorer Vitus Bering’s washed-up crew spent the harsh winter of 1741, was once populated by a large, gentle creature known as the sea cow? I was not. According to Callum Roberts’s The Unnatural History of the Sea, the sea cow (distinct from the manatee) was a “gastric epiphany” to the stranded sailors, who brought the culinary recommendation to mainland Russia; by 1768, the species was extinct.

I also read the Berlin-based writer Rebecca Rukeyser’s steamy Alaskan bildungsroman, The Seaplane on Final Approach (2022), after it was recommended by the American novelist Nell Zink. And as a true summer read, I finished, in a single sitting, Zink’s latest novel Avalon (2022), which turns out to be a pelagic tease. Despite the title (a reference to the mythical British isle that appears in the King Arthur tale), it isn’t really about ocean passages at all, but the misogynistic myths that underpin fascism. This may not sound like beach reading, but it’s as hilarious and entertaining a novel as we’ve learned to expect from Zink, and can be enjoyed in the sun and primarily for these qualities. If or when you do want to locate the novel’s darker themes, however, wait till the weather turns, and reality sets in, and reread it alongside Klaus Theweleit’s influential 1987 treatise Male Fantasies.

KAYA GENÇ

Kaya wrote “Erdoğan’s Great Replacement Theory” for our Egg issue.

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I’m reading The End, the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical series My Struggle. To witness the first volumes of My Struggle getting published in The End is a joy and reminded me of Don Quixote, that most modern and old-fashioned of novels. At the end of Don Quixote the reader is chagrined to part with the knight errant, having observed his adventures in granular detail, and sees his reaction to the publication of Don Quixote’s first volume. I don’t want to part with Karl Ove either. I loved reading about Knausgaard’s struggle to remove boundaries between the writer’s life and fiction. He succeeds: he has found a way to alchemize his life into text.

Accompanying this 1,160 page tome on my trips to the beach is Catherine Belton’s feat of investigative journalism, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West. The dramatis personae of Russian plutocrats here is long yet informative. One learns much about the resilience of the KGB — the struggle of Soviet statesmen with money and power against losing their authority. Belton’s book is patient, unforgiving, and readable. I wish someone wrote a similarly thorough book on the dealings of Turkey’s autocratic government.

KC CHENG

KC contributed the photo essay “On the Shores of Lake Turkana” to our Rivers issue.

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Land of Big Numbers: A collection of short stories about technology, which takes place in mainland China and among the Chinese diaspora. Some of the stories may seem more realistic than others — in one, a young woman working at a floral shop steals a pen out of jealousy and curiosity about another woman's husband; in another, a town becomes addicted to a strange fruit that enables outbreaks of unchecked emotions. The collection spans different stages of life, from the young to old, all in unspecified periods of a modern China — those who feel left behind by new advancements, and those completely swept up in them.

The Nine Lives of Pakistan: The New York Times bureau chief Declan Walsh, currently based, like me, in Nairobi, writes about his years spent living and working in Pakistan. The book is written with a deep knowledge of the nation's internal strife, long-running conflicts with neighboring countries, and the very origins of its borders — a direct vestige of British colonialism.

ANDREA LINGENFELTER

Andrea translated Yang Win’s poems from “A Summer’s Day in the Company of Ghosts” for our Energy issue.

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I brought a couple bags of novels to sell to a local bookstore recently, and while they went through my books, I perused the small poetry section. I picked up a copy of “Your Blue and the Quiet Lament,” poems by Lubna Safi. The title and the cover drew me in. I opened the book to a random page, which is what I usually do when I pick up a new collection of poetry and am deciding whether or not I want to read it in its entirety. I came upon these lines:

This early, the vapor dances
like a dervish over the tea cup.

Sugar crystallizes
disobeying the water,

deep and deepening still.
A thought to stir it, to start

the rush, the ripple.
My finger beside the spoon…

The image of sugar captured my attention. I loved seeing it resist dissolving in a cup of tea. Anyone who could create this image was someone I wanted to read. I haven't been disappointed, although I've just begun reading the book. Safi's imagery is precise and startling, and she grapples with themes of grief, political violence, and art.

KENNETH R. ROSEN

Kenneth wrote “The Vanishing Breadbasket” for our Rivers issue.

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When I read, I handle a book as I would a puzzle. I read the author's note, thumb through the index, start the first chapter then revert to the acknowledgements, trying to assess what lies inside. The blurbs of praise receive my greatest attention. Equal parts vexing and nauseating, they invariably shower praise that shines no real light on the book itself.

When I first picked up John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War: A New History I couldn't believe that a dense history could be "exhilarating" (Evening Standard) and "force 9 on the Richter Scale" (Spectator). I was skeptical. And rightfully so. It is of a different kind of excitement, the kind you get from a professor who is jazzed about the subject matter and who wants, genuinely, to share it with others. Gaddis, the United States’s foremost Cold War expert, takes readers from the last days of Nazi Germany to the rise and eventual collapse of the Soviet experiment. With what some are calling the "New Cold War" approaching, looking backward helps clarify where we're going. Exhilarating it was not; illuminating and revelatory, palatable and timely? Definitely.

SIMEN SÆTRE

Simen wrote “Sins of the Salmon King” for our Rivers issue.

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Sometimes books are a bridge that can cross the differences in language, class, and geography. At other times, books take you closer to yourself. Recently, I had such an experience – actually, it happened twice. The first: was when I read Bjørn Hatterud’s memoir Mjøsa rundt med mor (“Me, mum and Mjøsa”). The book is an original and funny travelog with a modest goal: Hatterud sets off to travel around Lake Mjøsa, the biggest lake in Norway, in a car with his mother. The journey isn’t that long, it only takes a few hours to complete the drive. One wouldn’t believe that this could work as a book. Yet it does, due to the author’s sharp observance of minuscule details (like the red and yellow butcher trucks that drove from farm to farm in the 1980s) and small villages (a milk churn stand, a shop, a former post office and a primary school threatened with closure, like his vanishing hometown Byflaten). The book won the critics awards for best Norwegian non-fiction book, but I am not aware of any plans for translation, so unfortunately it might stay a Norwegian secret.

I also read Matias Faldbakkens novel Vi er fem (“We are five”). The book won several literature prizes in Norway and was well-received in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. The book is about a family of four. When they lose their dog, the children start playing with a lump of clay, that surprisingly begins to live its own life. It escapes and spreads fear in the village (it actually lives by eating peoples hair). What makes his book such an original read (except from the crazy plot), is his precise sense of landscape, slang, and folklore in the rural inlands of Norway. The cornfields, the “gessæl” (a slacker on moped), the importance of “mekking” (repairing ones own vehicles). This all happens in a village east of Mjøsa, were Hatterud undertakes his journey. I happen to come from a nearby village, and Hatterud comes from another, and I gather that Faldbakken grew up in a third. It is many years since I moved to the city, but these books took me back to see, in a new way, the culture I grew up with (and too accept it, or almost be proud). Vi er fem is still not available for English-speakers, but Faldbakken’s 2017 book The Waiter (The Hills) is available in the meantime.

JESSICA SEQUEIRA

Jesisca translated “The Woman Behind Borges” for our Fiction issue and “Brazil After Bolsonaro” and “Cleaning Up the Insurrection” for our Reparation issue.

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This year, I read a lot about music, the most abstract and sensorial of arts. The way sounds are translated from mind and heart into composition fascinates me; something in the activity parallels the challenges and joys of literary translation, but operates in different languages, and bypasses words. This year, I returned to the complete works (Obra Reunida) of Stella Díaz Varín, a Chilean poet whose work I love, whose poems are openly musical in many ways, with a jazzy, percussive lyricism. At the heart of her work is the idea of a don previsible, a “foreseeable gift”, which I interpret to mean internal rhythm—not just of poetry, but of the rhythm one gives oneself in one's understanding of the world. The rhythms we create for ourselves shape how we understand the world, which is why those afternoons of solitude and reading are so necessary, those moments of inner peace studying the shapes of rivers and patterns of leaves, before entering the worlds of others. What one writes, composes or paints is not a record or mirror of reality, but part of its creation, and sounds form and determine perception. For Stella, the ability to create a rhythm for oneself is a “foreseeable” gift in the double sense, since the word “foreseeable” can mean anticipatory—one finds in the world what one first starts to build out of silence, in contemplation—and can also, in a more literal sense, mean something prior to what is seen. Here comes the synaesthesia of the poet, because it is not only the eye that perceives, that “arid pupil where / not a single birdsong gleams”. Voices and gestures are important too, since “the ear listens / and the eye and skin / have their secret voice / their tactile flare”. Both sensation and solitude are intimately connected to understanding in Stella's work.

MADELEINE SCHWARTZ

Madeleine wrote “Can Anyone Stop Paris From Drowning?” for our Rivers issue and is the Editor-in-Chief of The Dial.

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When reporting on my story for The Dial on the possible, probable flooding of the Seine, I was confronted with a familiar problem: bureaucracy. Contemporary politics are often run through a maze of acronyms and associations. This is especially true in Europe, where the administrative webs of nation-states are dwarfed by the complexity of the EU. For a journalist, this raises a tricky question: how can organizations so important be so boring to explain?

I've taken some interest in the novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint, a Belgian experimental writer whose recent novels often take place at the European Commission. Airless spaces are not new to Toussaint; his first novel takes place almost entirely in a bathroom. La Clê USB (the USB key) is instead a thriller about Eurocrats. He describes the closed rooms of Brussels, where everyone talks "strategy" and "future" in a "coded language impenetrable to laymen, which, like slang, has the function of shaping the group and reinforcing its cohesion." (The plot, which touches on blockchain and China, seems like its own sendup of that kind of conversation.) Could Toussaint’s book be a new opening for novels about lobbyists? I’ll be reading the sequel, Les Emotions, next.