Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): I just finished Tin House Books’s own Me and Mr. Booker by Cory Taylor. I’m generally a slow reader, but I drunk this book down in one swift, gleeful gulp. The eponymous Mr. Booker, a dapper English film professor whose flirtatious coyness might actually be avoidance, had me thinking of the older man in An Education in the best possible way. But where that tale’s male lead is fundamentally a conman, Mr. Booker and his teenage mistress, Martha, are partners in crime, equally guilty of looking past the truth to keep a damned relationship afloat.

What drives the book forward, and what separates it from its teenage affair story competition, is Martha’s voice. She’s perceptive, candid, wry in a way only Australians can be, completely equipped to parry with Mr. Booker–and still just a kid. She and I both couldn’t turn away from what was happening, even when we both knew she was headed nowhere good.

Desiree Andrews (Assistant Editor, Tin House magazine): This isn’t a Friday Read—more of a lost and never found situation. When I was volunteering in Kolkata a few years ago, I ran across a copy of a book called The Affair.  The book was dingy, yellow and clearly very old but it looked like it had never been opened. As I read it, the binding glue disintegrated and pages feel out in chunks.

The book was about a scientist who had once taught at a prestigious British university but had left for the private sector. He is called back into the cloistered world of academia when an old colleague whom everyone hates (partly because of his terrible personality and partly because of his affiliations with the communist party) is accused of falsifying test results in an experiment. Although the narrator also hates the accused, he goes back to act as his attorney in a case that pits the academic old guard against the younger, more progressive professors.

All of the characters in this book are British men over 45. There’s no sex, no crime (other than the crime of scapegoating an apparent asshole) and the whole thing takes place on a dreary university campus circa 1970. There is no reason why I should like this book yet I’ve been explicably obsessed with it since I left India. I wrote the author’s name down in a journal that was lost in transit. Armed with only the loose description I’ve shared here, the Internet has been no help. I think it just goes to show we only want what we can’t have and I want to read The Affair this Friday.

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): I just picked up a second-hand copy of Marguerite Duras’ short novel Summer Rain and haven’t been able to put it down. Lyrical and intense, abstract in the best sense and with a peripatetic and at times surprising rhythm, it is the jagged and moving story of a large immigrant family living in the grey cement suburbs of Paris. With spare and crystalline writing, Duras brings forward and into focus the humanity of and intimacy within this rambling family of nine, while the bleakness of the city’s outskirts fades in the background. As Duras writes in Summer Rain, “Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.”

Meg Storey (Editor, Tin House Books): I am halfway through the craziest book I have ever loved. At AWP, I picked up an ARC of The Carp Castle, which Overlook Press is publishing this coming September. It is the only unpublished novel by MacDonald Harris (the pseudonym for Donald Heiney), who lived from 1921 to 1993 and was the author of sixteen novels. Set in post–World War I Europe (at least, so far), The Carp Castle opens with a metaphysician chasing his soon-to-be lover through a German forest, each of them flinging off clothes throughout the chase. At the moment their relationship is consummated, the sky darkens, not because of a storm cloud, but because of a zeppelin, which, it turns out, is the vessel that will take them, the mystic/cult leader Moira, whom they follow, and other equally nutty (at least, so far) characters to a place that Moira calls “Gianconda” and the cover copy calls “a better future.” Best of all, the zeppelin is named The League of Nations. Stay tuned . . .

Masie Cochran (Associate Editor, Tin House Books): I’m reading Airships by Barry Hannah. I read this collection in high school, again in college, and keep coming back to it every few years.  I love “Testimony of Pilot, “(take a second and read An Amazing Sentence Shape by Kate Brittain), “Green Gets It,” and “Our Second Home.” But this week, for whatever reason, I’ve read “Love too Long” twice. It’s angry and sloppy and wild and raw and so, so good. It’s about a lot of things, but mainly a man who loved a woman too much. “Maybe I need to go to church, I said to myself. I can’t stand this alone. I wished I was Jesus. Somebody who never drank or wanted nooky. Or knew Jane.”

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): The Duc de Saint-Simon, godson of Louis XIV, diplomat, writer and nobleman, was at the thriving, conniving heart of kingly intrigue, lust, love, war and and all things conspiratorial going down at the most powerful, sumptuous court of Europe, the incomparable Château de Versailles. Unlike most of the courtiers, Saint-Simon was a reverent, honest man who wrote with candor and clarity about the everyday affairs of the court. Intimate observer par excellence, not many of the Sun King’s secrets went unnoticed by his godson and were recorded with careful detail in his Memoirs of Louis De Rouvroy Duc De Saint. Of Louis XIV and his high court, he writes, “Others were not allowed to dream as he had lived,” while on a different note regarding newfangled instruments known as cutlery, Saint-Simon observes, “Seeing him eat olives with a fork!” Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way: Remembrance of Things Past is said to have been inspired by Saint-Simon’s writings, possibly encapsulated in the Duc’s observation, “The shortness of each day was his only sorrow.” A book to be savored over macarons and tea cakes in late afternoon gardens.

Tony Perez (Editor, Tin House Books): This isn’t the first time that Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers has made an appearance on Friday Reads, based on what I’ve seen my colleagues carting around lately, I suspect it won’t be the last. What’s blown me away about the book is the way Kushner manages to maintain such momentum even while she’s moving around in time. The narrative is discursive and often anecdotal, but never loses its drive. Even while she’s flashing back and stepping aside, she’s always moving us forward (appropriate for a book that takes speed as one it’s primary subjects). I’ve got forty pages to go, and I fear withdrawals—thankfully I’ve got an ARC of Elliott Holt’s You Are One of Them to calm my shakes.

Nanci McCloskey (Director of Publicity and Rights, Tin House Books): I just read Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. I’ve read (and loved) Didion’s memoirs and essays, but I hadn’t read her novels. When I was browsing books in an LA bookstore, a perfect stranger said: You must read this. I just finished it, and I can’t stop talking about it. Sold. Play It As It Lays destroyed me (in the best way). It reminded me of reading Nathanael West for the first time. Didion works miracles in this book. The excruciatingly patient pacing. The elliptical storytelling. There’s nothing showy or pretentious; the book is profoundly moving.

Devon Walker-Domine (Open Bar Intern): Among my current reads is Adrian Oktenberg’s The Bosnia Elegies, a staggering work that, through the adept merging of journalistic and poetic styles, succeeds in conveying the vastness and complexity of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, both on a national and a personal level. The loss of a loved one, of a voice, of a personal history–these come together to form the collective loss of a moribund nation, and Oktenberg fearlessly and gracefully expresses this by imbedding in the very structure of her lines the patterning of loss and the visual representation of separations as they are coming into existence:

Nobody obeyed the command to kneel

some made a rush                        some stood stark and straight

a few fell at once        living and dead      lay mingled together

Here she lays the map of a fractured nation like a transparency over broken communities and the individuals composing those communities.  This kind of imagery essentially prohibits readers from maintaining an indifferent perspective, bringing them so close to the genocide that it can no longer remain a distant and vague outline of tragedy.

This is not a read for the faint of heart: its focus is set unwaveringly upon the fragile chain of instances composing human life, particularly as it exists against the backdrop of violent political upheaval. That said, if you can handle the unflinching gaze at humanity in conflict with itself, the reward is great. These are definitely some of the most stunning and intricately woven poems I have read in quite some time.

Lance Cleland (Murder Mystery Dinner Detective): An ordinary man who found himself embroiled in extraordinary circumstances. This is all I want said of my life. As such, I find myself constantly dipping back into the pool of spy novels I loved as a young reader. The first leisurely sunny day spent at the park will always find me with a paperback in hand, chasing German submarines, double-crossing the voluptuous, and trying like hell not to get my drink spiked in an underground Prague bar.

Eric Ambler’s Journey Into Fear never crosses the border into literature in the way a good Greene or le Carré treatment can, but his novel is damn good fun nonetheless. An English civil servant on his way home from Istanbul gets roped into an international arms race. Escaping an attempt on his life, our ordinary hero finds himself isolated at sea with a multinational cast of secondary characters (a seductive nightclub dancer, her seedy, Marxist husband, a mysterious tobacco importer!), who may or may not be on board to kill him. Sprinkled in amidst all the thrills are some genuinely sharp critiques of the British Empire, as well as some humorous asides about female persuasions. But make no mistake, Ambler is here to take you from A to B in as entertaining a manner as possible.

Journey Into Fear is a classic set up, executed perfectly. I hope they say the same thing about me someday.

Michelle Wildgen (Executive Editor, Tin House Magazine): I’m reading Rosie Schaap’s Drinking with Men: A Memoir right now, a memoir about her love of bars, specifically the neighborhood joint where one stops by after work for a glass, maybe to check in with regulars, maybe just to have a drink. She grew up in these places, in a lot of ways, with her gateway to a shall we say “altered” community being her time as a teenage Deadhead. (Her account confirms much of what I assumed to be true during a brief Dead-curious period in my freshman year of college, symbolized by my sporting a rawhide ankle bracelet hung with bells. But that’s not important right now.) There’s something in the way Schaap approaches the subject of drinking that I find oddly bold. That seems counter-intuitive. Americans really like to drink, we know, and I live in Wisconsin, which has elevated it to a religion. Maybe it is just the fact that Schaap is happy to discuss drinking not as an epicurean pursuit, not so much about the libation itself, but the process, the ritual of consuming alcohol, the place and company of that imbibing. As much as many of us love a drink, I do think most of us tend to couch it in other terms, like gastronomy or sports or an addiction narrative. But sometimes, this book reminds you, it’s just a part of community life.

Holly Laycock (Publicity Intern, Tin House Books): I have spent the past two weeks consciously trying to pace my reading of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman to prolong its delicious strangeness. The surreal world O’Brien creates follows a nameless man who commits a murder for money, and then slips into a dreamlike existence where police barracks change shape, policemen turn sound into energy, and bicycles violate their riders, all to little fanfare. He is also accompanied by another character named Joe, who to the best of my interpretations is his soul, and who often provides some comic relief on this bizarre journey. To tell what kind of journey this is would spoil the outcome of the book, so I will simply say that you should read it when you’re really ready to hunker down. No text has gotten me so far outside of myself, and so far enmeshed in its wobbly parameters for quite some time, and I’m only sorry that it’s not longer.

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): Since finishing Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia a few weeks ago, I’ve had a hard time finding fiction to dig into; everything I’ve started has felt a little precious by comparison. (I cannot say loudly enough: you must read this book.) Instead, I’ve been getting my fix by weaving in and out of Always Apprentices, The Believer’s fantastic anthology of conversations between writers. The pairings for the conversations, and often the settings where they take place, are like something from a dream: Bret Easton Ellis and Don DeLillo catch up in a Louis XIII room in Paris! Wells Tower rides shotgun in Barry Hannah’s Jeep, and they skulk around together beneath the windows of Faulkner’s old house! What’s really moving here, though, is the way these writers talk about each other’s work and about the craft they both love. Even when the two are meeting for the first time, there’s intimacy in the way they speak that seems to come from a sense of being members of the same club.

And another set of conversations that have been inspiring me this month: the collaborative art being made over at Ten Paces and Draw. [http://www.tenpacesanddraw.com/] Ten Paces and Draw hosts “swaps” in which paired artists are given a weekly theme, make a sketch inspired by that theme–and then give that sketch to the other artist to use as the basis for a work. The results are stunning, and it’s fascinating to see how one artist decides to riff off the other’s concept. I particularly recommend the Forbidden Love, Arrested Development, and Detectives swaps.

Desiree Andrews (Assistant Editor, Tin House Magazine): My bother sent me a text the other day saying I had to watch The American Astronaut on Netflix.  He called the black and white space musical “messed up and awesome.” Of course I streamed it right away. I should start off by saying that this movie doesn’t seem to be meant for women. Being a woman, myself, I found this a little hard to get over. There are very few female characters. The ones that do exist are either only defined by their sexual appetites or are actual objects (a “Real Live Girl” grown from a box, who is also solely defined by her potential sexuality). The main female character is known as “the girl with the glass vagina.”  Maybe there’s a comment on gender politics that I’m missing but this film gave off a pretty “for boys only” vibe for my taste.

Putting the hyper masculinity aside, there are at least two scenes that make the whole movie worth watching. The first is a dance scene in a public men’s room where two men sing to torment the hero, trapped in a toilet stall.  The second: a stark image of a mad scientist walking among the bodies he’s just killed. The bodies have all turned to piles of ash. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realize that every scene has something pretty spectacular or utterly weird to offer. Although I’m not sure how this film hung together as a whole, it was definitely a better use of my time than watching all 26 episodes of The Killing.

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): Brilliant guitarist Django Reinhardt, whose first name literally means ”I awake” in Romani, grew up in the Romani camps near Paris in the 1920s and received his first banjo-guitar when he was twelve. Luckily for jazz lovers and music aficionados, Reinhardt was hooked. He explains, “Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision . . .” In the 1930s in Paris, he played regularly at le Hot Club de France with his Quintet that included fantastic violinist Stéphane Grappelli. They continuously enchanted audiences with tunes like their 1930s zippy version of “Tiger Rag” or their swingy 1937 “The Sheik of Araby.” Perfect music for sitting out on the porch or terrace with a little glass of cloudy Pernod or an iced lemonade.

Jakob Vala (Graphic Designer): I’ve been listening to Milk Music’s debut LP, Cruise Your Illusion, ever since my brother passed it to me last month. Our childhood friends Joe Rutter (drums) and his younger brother Alex Coxen (guitar and vocals) make up one half of the quartet. I’m clearly biased, but about halfway through the first song, I forget I’m listening to former Trick-or-Treating allies and enjoy the album for what it is—a skillfully crafted piece of rock.

Growing up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest does something to a musician; it breeds a sort of nostalgic punk aesthetic and lends a grimy lilt to the tightest of melodies. It encourages a mixing of genres. The members of Milk Music are scholars of music. They know their influences and they honor them with a sincere lack of irony. Drawing on its punk predecessors, the Olympia music scene (past and present), and of course, Neil Young, Cruise Your Illusion is a solid album that warrants multiple listens.

And here’s a link to their site: http://www.milkmusic.us

 

Michelle Wildgen (Executive Editor, Tin House Magazine): I have not been the most fascinating consumer of culture this month, but I can tell you this: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is so far so authoritative, unexpected, and compelling—my favorite in my early reading of it is a scene in which the narrator happens upon a couple in a bar and just stays with them throughout the evening as it expands and moves from one place and crew of people to another, and it captures so perfectly the way these nights can occur when you are at a certain age, a certain unfetteredness, naivete and openness, and maybe a certain sheer foolishness and bravery too.

I feel as if a lot of people were recently talking about the BBC series Call the Midwife, and I have not yet watched it but have been reading the book, choosing for some reason to do so when I cannot sleep in the middle of the night. Sometimes it soothes and sometimes it doesn’t, but what it demonstrates, again and again, is this unalloyed truth: inventing birth control is probably the single best thing the human race has ever done. When I read an account of these women in 1950s East End London held hostage to baby after baby and think of the Republicans trying to actually take it away, it makes me want to tear someone’s face off. See, now I won’t sleep tonight, either.