Who's Reading What: Issue 106
Want to know what The New Quarterly editors, contributors, and volunteers are currently reading? Find out here!
Compiled and edited by Julianna Varga
Stephanie Bolster Author of "Two Poems" (Issue 106: Poetry)
On my bedside table at the moment are Robert Hass' Time and Materials: Poems 1997 - 2005 (because no living writer moves and inspires me more reliably), Gwendolyn MacEwen's The T.E. Lawrence Poems (because a book-annotation project initiated by Tim Bowling prompted me to revisit these still-startling poems), Michael Redhill's novel Consolation (because I wish I'd written Martin Sloane and because I share Redhill's fascination with photography and with architectural archaeology), and several works of non-fiction, including Don Coles' A Dropped Glove on Regent Street (a marvellous stylist and insightful writer in any genre), Celeste Olalquiaga's The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience (one of my greatest regrets is that my lifetime has not coincided with the Crystal Palace) and--as a partial explanation for why there are so many half-begun books lying around my house, Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood, edited by Shannon Cowan, Fiona Tinwei Lam, and Cathy Stonehouse.
Donald Mcgrath Author of "Russian Nights" (Issue 106: Fiction & Drama)
I'm reading Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama, a big beautiful tome about how nature and humans intersect. Lovely plates, too.
Mark Abley Author of "Poppy Men" (Issue 106: Poetry)
I'm reading Tom Lowenstein's amazing book Ancient Land: Sacred Whale (1993). It's a study of the rituals that formed and informed the traditional Inuit hunt for bowheads off the western coast of Alaska. Like Robert Bringhurst's wonderful recreations of Haida stories, the book is at once an elegy and a challenge.
S.E. Venart Author of "Conversation between the poem and me" (Issue 106: Poetry)
I am reading Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, for the third time. His narrative is full of surprises that double back on themselves and his descriptions of the inner lives of his characters are wrenchingly good. I am in awe of novelists. Especially as I switch gears from poetry to fiction, returning to my own first novel manuscript this summer. And there are other big changes to my writing life: what will writing be like with a one-year-old toddler, I wonder?
Saleema Nawaz Author of "Bloodlines" (Issue 106: Fiction & Drama)
I just finished reading The Gathering by Anne Enright. I enjoyed it--it's a sharp, glittering kind of book. Next up is The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon.
Maxianne Berger Author of "Luminous Defeat: A Cento" (Issue 106: Poetry)
I'm reading Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka translated by Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden (Boston: Cheng & Tsui Company, 2006). The book was awarded Columbia University's 2007 Donald Keene Translation Award for Japanese Literature. I am currently writing a profile of Kozue Uzawa for La revue du tanka francophone.
Regan Taylor Author of "Parc des Hommes-Forts" (Issue 106: Poetry)
I'm reading Any Human Heart by William Boyd, which is wonderful, witty, and warm. I feel silly not having picked it up sooner. I'm also reading A Fine Ending, Louis Rastelli's semi-autobiographical novel about Plateau hipsters in late 1990s Montreal. It describes a specific place and time I had glimpses of but was too young to participate in; it makes me wish I had been born ten years earlier. Both books make me wonder how it is possible to feel nostalgia for something I did not experience--a sign, I believe, of very fine writing.
Paul Berry Author of "One Sentence Stories" (Issue 106: Word & Image)
I can heartily recommend Tibor Fischer's Under the Frog, a recent selection in my book club that turned out to be quite the crowd-pleaser. It is the tale of a team of Hungarian basketball players in the early years of the Soviet occupation. Few writers are so adept at producing hearty laughter while still conveying just how grim and soul-crushing the regime really was.
Kim Jernigan Editor, The New Quarterly
I'm reading Harriet Doerr's Stones for Ibarra. This delicately beautiful novel was given to me by a friend in the States maybe two summers ago. I put off reading it the way you do when someone puts something precious in your hands and, because you value the friendship, you are afraid to look at it in case your appreciation is insufficient to the expectation. I needn’t have worried. The book, its author’s first, won the American Book Award in 1984. Doerr was then 74 years old. And so it is, in itself, an inspiration to anyone who feels life’s diminishment and still aspires to do some important work. It is also a book about life’s diminishment, the story of a couple--the husband just over forty, the wife just under--who leave all that is familiar to move to a remote village in Mexico where they plan to return to life a copper mine that belonged to the husband’s grandfather. They are a couple without faith in the ordinary sense, and their neighbours and employees, whose belief is a marriage of Catholicism and local folklore, regard them with curiosity and a mixture of bemused affection and contempt. We learn early on that the husband will die within six years from a disease of the blood, leukemia perhaps, and no faith, conventional or otherwise, will deter this seemingly fated outcome.
None of which gives you a sense of the book’s accomplishment. Its effect on the reader derives, I think, from the way it comes at its central story slant. Like the townspeople, we are never allowed much intimacy with the book’s central characters. The story moves around them, filling in the life of the town and its inhabitants. Even when the couple is at the story’s centre, we get little of their inner lives, the sustaining beliefs of the marriage. And yet, through some strange alchemy, we are powerfully moved. It is as though, by being placed at a remove and excluded from the story’s central drama, we are made to respect the couple’s own sense of privacy and restraint and to admire them for it. And then, by degrees, to make their hearts’ wind down our own.
