Friday I submitted the revised manuscript of Trauma Plot: A Life1 to my saint of an editor, the brilliant Zach Philips. For three weeks I reworked the entire manuscript, top to end, word for fucking word, and managed, somehow, not only to finish, but also to shave things down from 101k words to a cool 87k. My wrists ache, my fingernails look like shit, and my mind is goo, but after ten long years, I’ve finally completed substantive writing on the project, and can recalibrate my self and my mind toward new things.
The other day K asked if I thought I’d “go all postpartum” now, but in truth, letting go of Trauma Plot mostly feels like relief. There’s plenty to be done, yes: copy edits, design decisions, audio recording, legal review, etc, but separating from the story emotionally is a blossoming, not a closure. I’m excited! I worked hard and I’m incredibly proud! It’s summer and I’m alive and I have other books sprouting in me that want to find a little light!
First thing, though, is giving myself the gift of being easy, breezy, and beautiful for a few weeks. I’m excited, yes, to get back to Proust pronto and I have two big freelance essays in the works for later in the summer, but I’ve been utterly underwater for the last nine months and plan to lay in the sun a bunch, see a lot of movies, and play the new Final Fantasy remake. Plus I’m dying to read a dozen books from my pile that have nothing at all to do with trauma, the newsletter, or any other other mode of writing-labor.
I’d like, though, to mention some recently-published books I’ve loved and share a stack of fall 2024 titles I’m excited for. (I should say I’m stealing this format from the wonderful Maris Kreizman, whose reboot of “The Maris Review” on Substack has been such a joy.)
Constance Debre, Playboy
Playboy is the first in a trilogy of autofictional novels concerning a French public defender who leaves her husband, career, and bourgeois life to fuck women and write. (Love Me Tender, the second in the sequence—though the first translated—was a 2023 favorite.) Where LMT is tense and shocking—animated by the narrator’s experience with a vicious and explicitly homophobic custody battle—Playboy is gasping and sexy, propelled by a wonderfully shameless erotic curiosity, “that fucking sweet taste [of cunt …] made for a face to go down on.” I’m not a spare stylist but love reading those who are—Debre’s sentences are ruthless, rapid, unadorned. Something of Ernaux’s “flat writing” lives in Debre too. Really enjoyed Christine Smallwood’s review of both of the first two in the trilogy for Bookforum. Can’t wait for Nom.
Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other
I love everything Dorothy Project puts out, and Dutton’s last novel, Margaret the First, was a revelation to me, so I was well-primed for this, and read it twice in a week because once was just not enough. It’s quartered in the way you’d guess from the title, though there’s a prevailing dis-ease that reverberates throughout much of the book—an eerie membrane—as if we’re tiptoeing right up to the edge of the known world. “Dresses” was a particularly thrilling assemblage, and there’s nothing I like more than books that have no interest in category, that dance and twist between many different forms. Loved reading Albert Mobilio on PDAO in 4Columns. If you have the time this Friday, Kate Zambreno will be in conversation with Dutton in Brooklyn at Community Bookstore.
Ayşegül Savaş, The Wilderness
Including this, even though it’s not out until October, because I raced through it on a particularly circuitous train journey through the city last week, so it’s fresh on my mind. A meditation in forty vignettes, for the first forty days of a woman’s life after giving birth—“the wilderness” of new motherhood, that radical betweenness, and a period of great transformation. In Turkey, Savaş writes, these days are also deeply entrenched in the worlds of myths and spirits: it is a time of exorcism. I first encountered Savaş in her introduction to Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood, a fever dream of a novel and one of my other favorites published last year, so I was thrilled to see this coming soon in Transit’s Undelivered Lectures series. In tone if not particularity, this inspired the same feeling in me as Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors or Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead.
I reference Garth’s newsletter in half my own, so it’s probably no surprise his next novel is one of my most anticipated releases later in the year. Cleanness is such a favorite of mine—Small Rain, I’m sure, will be another. I loved Davis’ Aurelia, Aurelia, and am excited for this one—a novel of Marie Antoinette. Packert Burke’s debut concerns three women—two trans, one cis—and “the messy webs of queer friendship.” I’m not sure if excerpts are available online, but I think of her essay “Who’s Afraid of the Gender Apocalypse” often. Anything New Directions sends me is gold, but I’ve been slowly exploring Tawada’s work all year, and am really thrilled to read this one—the second in a projected trilogy about a dystopian. world in which Japan has vanished and Hiruko searches for anyone speaking her mother tongue. Also excited for Russian Gothic, the first of Skorabogatov’s novels to be translated into English—I love a slim volume!
Not pictured, but I recently read Lauren Elkin’s debut novel Scaffolding and Virginie Despentes’ newest, Dear Dickhead—both strange Parisian novels of the #MeToo era. I’d say more but in honesty I’d like to write about them, possibly together, so mum’s the word for now, but these should be at the top of all your lists.
In other news, I interviewed Victoria Chang about her latest collection, With My Back to the World. I also have brief ditty in Document Journal’s recent Barthes series, and a piece on Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Parade, in the summer Bookforum, which should be available soon.
À bientôt!
Hopefully I’ll have a cover and preorder link to share soon, but in the meantime, my strange little rape memoir *does* have a page on the PRH site.