In March of last year, English-language readers were finally presented with Satantango, the first novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the writer Susan Sontag once called “the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse.” The novel, considered a masterpiece in the author’s native country since its original publication in 1985, adds to his work now available in English, revealing in the process one of the most singular oeuvres in contemporary literature. And, though the time between translations of Krasznahorkai’s novels appears to be shortening (New Directions will publish his Seiobo next spring), readers suffering withdrawal from his bleak, absurdist universe have much to explore. Below is a short, non-exhaustive list of writers, all Mittel-European, who share affinities with Krasznahorkai.
 

The Castle, Franz Kafka
Looming behind Krasznahorkai is the hulking edifice of Kafka’s Castle, a novel perhaps all the more imposing because of its incompleteness. Krasznahorkai shares with Kafka a sense of metaphysical darkness and confusion coupled with a suitably dark sense of humor, rendering a world in which context is at best guesswork. Unanchored, Krasznahorkai’s characters drift through a gloomy landscape that mirrors their own uncertain morality, unable, as Kafka so relentlessly exposed, to make informed decisions—and, as we’ve come to expect, doomed to be punished for what they do not know.

The Adventures of Sindbad, Gyula Krudy
Kafka isn’t the only of Krasznahorkai’s forerunners to have his name turned into an adjective. According to translator George Szirtes, “Krudyesque” is a term that in Hungarian extends beyond a merely literary descriptor to encompass “experience comprised of the nostalgic, the fantastic and the ironic.” Krudy’s Sindbad Stories—collected as The Adventures of Sindbad (NYRB)—take place in a world that will strike readers of Krasznahorkai as familiar, if less unrelentingly bleak. These tales of amorous conquests unfurl mistily, though they ring with an achingly melancholic erotic tension. Modernist, prefiguring “magical realism,” and amoral: the stories are not cautionary in any sense, despite the constant refrain that desire causes nothing but trouble—and leads to a landscape strewn with suicides.(Zoltan Huszarik adapted Krudy’s stories in his 1971 film Szindbad.)

Kornel Esti, Deszo Kosztolanyi
Perhaps one need look no further than Krasznahorkai’s (typically lengthy) praise on the jacket of Kornel Esti to understand the importance of this novel not only to Krasznahorkai, but generations of Hungarian writers:

If anyone truly wanted to write the history of the Hungarian people, the author would certainly take the Dantean first sentence of Kosztolanyi’s Kornel Esti as the work’s epigraph: in a word, the most wondrous first sentence ever written in the Hungarian language.

Kornel Esti is the shadow self we all dream we have, a figure who arises at that moment when we first become aware that making one decision excludes all others. He’s the one who thereafter says ‘yes’ when we say ‘no,’ who lights fires and causes trouble. While the writer—Kosztolanyi and his stand-in narrator—sits at home, Esti is out gathering experiences in a world in which the following logic applies: “If a girl jumps into a well, she loves somebody” (in Bernard Adams’ translation). Like Sindbad before him and like Krasznahorkai’s characters after, Esti is a ravenous scamp, always moving and scheming, even if he has no particular destination or goal in mind.

Gargoyles/Three Novellas Thomas Bernhard
George Szirtes famously characterized Krasznahorkai’s prose as a “slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.” This often earns him comparisons to Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, the vitriolic Austrian. Beckett’s influence on modern literature is obvious; Bernhard’s less so. And while at the sentence level the comparison between Krasznahorkai and Bernhard is slightly superficial, the two writers do share similar, almost gnostic worldviews.

One gets the impression from reading Bernhard that middle Europe (i.e., the whole world) is full of raving lunatics doing their best to refrain from contact with the idiocy of other people. What in the U.S. we refer to quaintly or claustrophobically, depending on our temperament, as “small town life” is in Bernhard—and Krasznahorkai—a cesspit of malice, intrigue, and decay. His landscapes, like nearly all of those mentioned so far, are strewn with suicides. His narrators are hyper-aware of their own incipient madness and the fine line wavering between sanity and insanity. Despite (or possibly because of) this, Bernhard’s angst-ridden fiction is unsettlingly funny: laughter echoing out of the abyss. This, in the end, might be the best way to characterize Krasznahorkai’s work as well.

E.M. Cioran
The only non-novelist included in the list is the Romanian ex-patriot E.M. Cioran, whose aphorisms are collected in volumes with titles such as On the Heights of Despair, All Gall is Divided, The Trouble with Being Born, and A Short History of Decay. Cioran’s pithiness may stand in contrast to Krasznahorkai’s abhorrence of the full-stop, but the two men share a sensibility and sensitivity that transcends its articulation. A sampling of Cioran’s aphorisms (in Richard Howard’s translations) should suffice to prove the point:

“Man secretes disaster.”

“The proof that man loathes man? Enough to be in a crowd, in order to feel that you side with all the dead planets.”

“He who has not suffered is not a being: at most, a creature.”

“If death were not a kind of solution, the living would certainly have found some means of avoiding it.”

Tranquility, Attila Bartis
Attila Bartis is a contemporary of Krasznahorkai. His novel Tranquility, published in Hungary in 2001 and in an English translation by Imre Goldstein in 2009 (which won the first Best Translated Book Award), has been called “one of the bleakest books ever,” an assessment that holds even if the novel is compared to the Krasznahorkai’s fiction. Bartis’ novel is an unforgettable portrayal of madness, incest, violence, and that species of hatred that boils over in the cauldron of an Oedipal relationship. It convincingly depicts a world in which “pleasure [is] but ennobled pain,” a scathing allegorical representation of an era scarred by disastrous, inhumane politics. Of the books on this list, it stands the closest to the psychological depths plumbed by Krasznahorkai.

Stephen Sparks is a buyer at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. He blogs at Invisible Stories and co-curates Writers No One Reads.

She’s joined a perfect moment of near-stillness in the otherwise barking-crazy 1980 film Carny, a nearly forgotten shocker starring limpid-eyed Robbie Robertson, nymphet Jodie Foster, and the not yet decimated Gary Busey as the Dunk Tank Clown, whose air horn monotone predates Billy Bob Thornton’s Karl by sixteen years.

In my memory the best scene in the movie is six-hundred-pound fat man George Emerson’s shower on the carnival’s muddy back lot in a rainstorm, his relief and pleasure pure heartbreak. It was photographer Diane Arbus who wrote in An Aperture Monograph that “freaks… are like a person in a fairy tail who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.”

I sometimes look for my own answer to that riddle, and the question itself, in books like the ones on this list. If you breeze through these pages, your soundtrack starts and ends with Tom Waits singing “Step Right Up,” from his 1976 album “Small Change.” As he’ll tell you, “it walks your dog, it doubles on sax.”

Freaks: Myths & Images of the Secret Self, by Leslie Fiedler.
Published in 1979, this cultural study of the concept of “freak” from ancient to modern times (or at least the seventies) is the bar against which any discussion of ‘otherness’ should be held.

Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, by Barbara Goldsmith
Migrates regularly, without table-rapping or séances, from my studio shelves to my desk. Victoria Woodhull, nominated as a Presidential Candidate in 1872, came to prominence in part through her past as a ‘magnetic healer,’ a proponent of free love, and what was at the time a freak-making trait – her belief in Women’s Rights. Goldsmith’s hefty 1998 marvel also brings us Woodhull’s sister, spiritualist Tennessee (Tennie) Claflin, and Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s fascination with the great beyond.

Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn
Absolutely no ‘freak show’ reference library is complete without Katherine Dunn’s 1989 novel, a contender for that year’s National Book Award. Dunn’s love letter of a book involves two carny parents and their brood of beloved children adapted for the stage through a do-it-yourself approach to genetic engineering. Arturo’s evil, Iphy and Elly are conjoined, Oly is small, and Fortunato sees all. There’s also a tale of a tail. Once you start, you won’t want to turn back.

Gospel Singer, by Harry Crews
The Gospel Singer points a crabbed finger toward what we know deep in our hearts – that the freak isn’t Foot and his twenty-seven inch foot, or Didymus, the singer’s manager-as-devil driving the careening limousine driven through the hardscrabble south, but the bartered soul of the Gospel Singer himself.

Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, by Gaby Wood
How realistic must an automaton be to make people think it’s alive? What if that automaton is a chess-master, or Thomas Edison’s first phonograph implanted in a mechanical woman? Shortlisted for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, this is an essential reminder of our obsessions with exploring what literally makes us tick.

Chang and Eng, by Darin Strauss
This elegant and unforgettable novel tells the story of the legendary twins conjoined by a band of flesh at their chest, born in poverty in what was then Siam, grown to be men in a circus act, and settled in North Carolina before the Civil War. Yes, they married, and the two fathered twenty-one children before dying in their dotage, always just a few inches apart.

Freaks, Geeks, and Strange Girls
The best ‘dark rides’ are the ones that start out the brightest. Open the pages of Freaks, Geeks, and Strange Girls and enter the Skittles-colored world of classic carnival banners, painted by masters like Johnny Meah. Collectors and experts on the culture and artwork in these banners pull back the curtain in thoughtful, informative accompanying essays.

An Aperture Monograph, by Diane Arbus
With its glossy white cover, An Aperture Monograph had a prominent place on our coffee table in my childhood home. The twin girls in dark frocks (were they conjoined? Why were their eyes so large and blank?) and the middle-aged nudists in their sunny, pleasant home terrified me the most. Shoes were their only clothing, and their flabby bodies hinted at my own doom.

Jessica Handler is the author of the memoir Invisible Sisters. Her work has appeared in More Magazine, Southern Arts Journal, Ars Medica, as well as Tin House. A teacher of creative writing, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Literary Genius & Buffet Peddler

Beware though, you must choose wisely. A close reading of The Things They Carried by the hoarder in your family could prove devastating. I know from personal experience the anguish that a wrongly prescribed fiction book can inflict upon a person- Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays contributed to my brief gambling addiction and affinity for all-you-can-eat buffets.

My advice- Stick with these contemporary classics. If they can’t cure what ails you, at least you’ll be well read.

If your child hears voices—
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

If your husband is second guessing his sexuality—
By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

Or if he’s simply having a mid-life crisis—
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver

If your brother is a sex addict—
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

If your cousin is into sexual experimentation and “trying new things”—
My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up by Stephen Elliott

Counselor to all Cousins

If your mother is depressed—
Something Is Out There by Richard Bausch

If your daughter talks back—
Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell

If your sister suffers from low self-esteem—
On Beauty by Zadie Smith

If your wife is disillusioned by marriage—
Why Did I Ever? by Mary Robison

If your son is acting out violently at school—
Everything Ravaged Everything Burned by Wells Tower

If your aunt might have an alcohol problem—
Lit by Mary Karr

If your friend hates his job—
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

If you’re dealing with a dysfunctional family—
The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

Amy Silverberg is a writer living in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a collection of short stories. Follow her on twitter here: @AmySilverberg.

The title character of my novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, is a young writer who converts to Catholicism. This may seem to some readers like an odd thing for a young writer to do. It certainly seems that way to the book’s narrator, Charlie, who knew and loved Sophie before her conversion. But throughout the modern era the literary convert to Catholicism has been a common enough figure to represent a recognizable type, and a substantial literature has built up around this type.

Of course, the archetypal religious conversion in the Western tradition occurred in the open air, without a book in sight. Saul of Tarsus, one of the most energetic persecutors of the early Christians, set out for the synagogues of Damascus with the hope of rooting out heretical Jews who “belonged to the Way,” so that he could bring them back as prisoners to Jerusalem. As he neared the city, he saw a bright light flash from heaven and heard the words, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” The experience left Saul briefly blind, but after the scales fell from his eyes he became Paul the Apostle, the greatest proselytizer in the Church’s history.

Once he had converted, Paul’s primary mechanism for spreading the faith was literary—specifically, the letters to various far-flung communities of believers that remain among the central documents of Christianity. And we wouldn’t even know about the original “road to Damascus” moment had it not been preserved in another document of the early Church, the Acts of the Apostles. The process of conversion has been a common topic for literary treatment ever since. What follows are some literary depictions of conversion, some of which are mentioned explicitly in my novel, others not, but books that a “literary convert” such as Sophie would likely have read along the way.

Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

After St. Paul, Augustine may be the most significant convert in the Church’s history. In many ways his Confessions created a template that conversion narratives have been following ever since. It’s all there: a wild youth, a worried mother, years of intellectual and spiritual searching. Within the heart of the archetypal convert the desire for sensual pleasure is at war with the knowledge that such pleasure won’t finally satisfy, and this war was best summarized by Augustine’s famous prayer, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” When Augustine did finally give up the worldly life, it was through books: in a moment of particular torment he heard a child’s voice telling him, “Take up and read” (“Tolle, lege”) and he opened the Gospels. Finally, it’s what he did after he took up and read that makes him the exemplary literary convert: he wrote this book, the first autobiography in modern history.

John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Newman does not quite fit the pattern set out above. Far from being an unruly youth before his conversion, he was already a major religious figure, a leader of the Anglican Church’s Oxford Movement. But he turned to Rome when he found the Oxford Movements “third way” between Catholicism and Protestantism insupportable. In response to the outrage this decision caused among his circle, he wrote this narrative of his conversion, in which he explicitly placed himself in the tradition of Augustine. Reading certain word of Augustine, he wrote, “struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before ….. they were like the ‘Tolle, lege, — Tolle, lege,’ of the child, which converted St Augustine himself.”

Before Newman, there was a strong strain of anti-Catholicism in Anglo-American intellectual circles. Papism, with its unthinking loyalty to Rome, was something for swarthy Mediterraneans or — even worse — Irishmen. Newman’s book helped make Catholicism intellectually respectable in such circles, creating a context for a wave of 20th-century literary converts.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited may be the most famous product of that wave. In fact, it owes much of that fame to its movie and miniseries adaptations, and it’s far from Waugh’s best work. It lacks both the wicked sharpness of his early satires, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and A Handful of Dust, and the elaborate richness of his World War II trilogy, Sword of Honor, which I consider the best thing he wrote. But even lesser Waugh is great, and Brideshead is the novel of his most explicitly concerned with conversion.

Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair is the last and best of Greene’s explicitly Catholic novels, and it significantly influenced What Happened to Sophie Wilder. Greene specialized in writing about characters incompletely transformed by their conversion—often, like Greene himself, they convert initially out of love and only afterward take on the full implications of the decision. The result are characters whose natures are out of step with the demands of their beliefs, how are faced with a choice between doing the right thing and being happy. Ultimately, Greene advocates perhaps the greatest heresy of the therapeutic age: personal happiness is not the most important thing.

Muriel Spark, The Comforters

At the time of own conversion, Spark received support from both Waugh and Greene, but her writing itself is entirely original. As Waugh is known for Brideshead, she is known for the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which is likewise famous by way of its various adaptations. The Comforters was Spark’s first novel, and its protagonist is a novelist named Caroline Rose, a recent convert, who becomes conscious of herself as a character in a novel. This metafictional trick is old hat now, but it wasn’t when Spark wrote The Comforters. Spark points up the fictional elements of her books not to undermine the realist tradition in the way of the postmodernists, but to point out the parallels between the ordered world of a novel and the God-ordered world experience by the religious believer. Like Waugh, Spark also happens to be incredibly funny in an almost malicious way.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

As novelists, Waugh, Greene, and Spark could make use of their conversions while also treating the experience with a certain amount of detachment. As such, theirs aren’t really conversion narratives in the way of Augustine’s or Newman’s. The great modern example of the genre is Merton’s book. Born to bohemian parents in France, raised mostly by his grandparents in Queens, Merton left Cambridge after getting a local girl pregnant in his first year. He transferred to Columbia, where he spent most of time drinking in jazz clubs. After graduation, he was inched toward Catholicism by reading books—including Augustine’s Confessions. Merton’s memoir, which is often self-lacerating in the way of Augustine’s Confessions, recounts all of this from the vantage point of the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, which he entered at the age of 26, and where he would remain for the rest of his life. This is a rather different level of commitment than that shown by Waugh or Greene. A common theme of the Catholic novelist is the difficulty of reconciling faith with the demands of the modern world, but few go so far as to remove themselves from that world entirely. One question that animates my own novel is why a well-educated intellectual, busy leading a very modern life, might choose such a path. For this reason, Merton’s book is the one sets Sophie along the path to her conversion.

Christopher R. Beha is an associate editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of a memoir, The Whole Five Feet. He contributes frequently to the New York Times Book Review. What Happened to Sophie Wilder is his first novel.

Emily Dickinson by Leland Myrick

For all its symbolism, that first line has a life of its own. At least it always has for me. It brings to mind late nights of history homework, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and the events of two wars in Iraq –wars that I and most of my friends experienced through our  televisions alongside Buffy the Vampire Slayer and America’s Next Top Model. The line presents a paradox: the safe distance of the historical record; and the only entry to an experience as mysterious and personal as dying.

When I studied English and American Literature in college, I found myself drawn to females writing about war. It’s not as celebrated, the home front, with its Victory Gardens and rationing, its domestic ennui and abstract terrors, but there were women whose words cut as close to the bone as any by Ernest Hemingway or Siegfried Sassoon. Emily Dickinson never drove an ambulance through occupied France, like Gertrude Stein, and she didn’t live through the London Blitz, like Elizabeth Bowen, but she gave me a language for talking about the female experience of war.

Culled from my bookshelf, here’s a short course in women and war. If you’re looking for battle scars, read between the lines.

“The Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen (From The Demon Lover and Other Stories)
Elizabeth Bowen actually wrote quite a bit about war. Last September is about the Irish war of independence. Heat of the Day is about espionage in London after the Blitz. But “The Demon Lover,” a story of just a few pages, packs the most emotional punch. One war comes back to haunt Mrs. Drover in the midst of another war. It’s a nightmare of war in spectator pumps.

“The Thing in the Forest” by A.S. Byatt (From Little Black Book of Stories)
I’ll admit to being a fan of A.S. Byatt, despite getting bored with some of her novels (who didn’t skip at least some of those poems in Possession?), and the reason is that she writes bracing short fiction.  This story, of two girls evacuated from London during WWII, is one of my favorites. Part fairy tale, part horror story, it perfectly depicts a child’s sense of morbid details and the accompanying moral anxieties.

The War: A Memoir by Marguerite Duras
The French Resistance is a favorite topic of mine, partly because so many women actively participated. Duras’s memoir vividly recalls her involvement with a resistance newspaper for the families of prisoners, the painful months she waited for her husband’s release from the Bergen-Belsen detainment camp, and his return, near death with typhus.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
Probably my favorite short novel ever. It concerns the 1918 flu epidemic more than WWI, but the heroine’s relationship with Adam, a soldier about to ship off, and her right-leaning coworkers at a newspaper, nudge it into the territory of writing from the home front. Porter’s way with delirium will stay with you.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Have there ever been two lines juxtaposed so alarmingly as these: “Every one has friends who were killed in the war. Every one gives up something when they marry.”  The worldly, the domestic: both fields of engagement. The tension of a whole novel in two lines!

The Seas by Samantha Hunt
In some ways, my novel, Glaciers, is a response to this ravishing book about a girl marooned on the home front, her dreary seaside town, and the haunted Desert Storm soldier for whom she pines. One of the most beautifully-understated, surprising, and imaginative novels of the last ten years.

Alexis M. Smith grew up in Soldotna, Alaska, and Seattle, Washington. She received an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. She has written for Tarpaulin Sky and powells.com. Her first novel, Glaciers, a Tin House Books New Voice, was published in January. She has a son and two cats, and they all live together in a little apartment in Portland, Oregon.

Oregon. There’s no place like it anywhere on earth. Its poets rise up straight from the black soil of rain forests, its rivers, its concrete and asphalt. They are building bridges. We are walking across to meet them.

Here are four of its essential poets.

Maxine Scates is the lyric daughter of Eugene. She writes in a small room in what used to be the basement of her house in the woods. After commuting for six years to teach at Reed College, she now teaches private poetry workshops in her living room. Her latest book, Undone , was recently published by New Issues and contains some of the loveliest and toughest poems about Oregon I have ever read. From “Choleric”

Meth labs dot the countryside,

our cottage industry, lives junked

like abandoned cars bleeding rust

in the fallow fields and blind

as he still is Teiresias sees

what can’t be seen, predicts

what we don’t want to know.

She also writes tenderly of the beauty of Oregon in “What Do We Know and When Do We Know It?”

…in these last shabby days of summer.

The days right before the mist

starts to rise in a fusion of twilight and evening

over the neighbor’s garden, when the hollow shafts

of sunflower stalks almost whistle, when we think

we can see the golden thread that will lead us

out of the labyrinth…

Carl Adamshick is another Portland poet who is bringing the good news to the City of Roses. An excerpt from Carl’s already short poem “Transportation” can be read on the local transit buses. Here it is in full:

I love the bus because it works on the Sabbath,

because you rent your seat like you rent your apartment,

because your neighbors are there listening to headphones

or staring into books. It can be a night of steady rain

and the lights inside can make it seem like a great hall

moving through the city. And if you’re sitting there

watching everyone living, a certainty comes to you

and you know God doesn’t ride, that God doesn’t enter.

Adamshick is one of the founding editors of the Portland-based Tavern Books  which makes fine press chapbooks and broadsides, and revives and reissues important volumes of poetry that have fallen by the wayside. Carl has lived and worked in Oregon most of his adult life. His first book, Curses and Wishes, won the Walt Whitman Award. He recently began teaching poetry at Vancouver School of the Arts.

Michael McGriff is the other co-founder of Tavern Books. Born and raised in Coos Bay, Oregon, the poems in his first book, Dismantling the Hills, depict the lives of rural Oregonians. Mike McGriff is the real deal. He writes with compassion and grace of the bonds between family, community and work in a landscape riven by big rivers and giant trees, where the economy has gone sideways. We enter the seaside lumberyards, sawmills and all night diners lit by the people who inhabit them, their hands and hearts scraped raw. This is the opening of his poem, “Entering the Kingdom”:

The summer’s gone, now

it’s the gray machines

of the rain. 5:30, November,

the sun breaks through

long enough to open something

along the ridge,

then darkness

and more rain.

A woman sits in the middle

of her living room

surrounded by stockpots

filling with the ceiling’s

brown rainwater and chunks

of plaster. Her eyes

are the milk of blue granite,

and blind as a salamander’s.

Earlier, a man came with a lawyer

who came with a letter

from the city, a letter

condemning her 3½ acres

for the new pipeline.

She believes in many things.

That cayenne should be sprinkled

along the thresholds,

salt along the windowsills.

That the pulse should be taken

each night before entering

the kingdom of sleep….

He recently brought attention to the northwest when Tomas Transtromer won the Nobel Prize in Poetry. How? Mike recently translated Transtromer’s The Sorrow Gondola. Tavern Books has published four beautiful broadsides of his poems.

And what short list would be complete without Tin House’s own Matthew Dickman? Dickman has become one of the essential poets of Oregon. It’s easy to see why; his exuberance is unmatched. To read a Matthew Dickman poem is to be transported, swiftly, into the swirling galactic realms of the human soul. Hart Crane immortalized the Brooklyn Bridge, Whitman’s tomb looms over Camden, and you can’t say Amherst without seeing Emily Dickinson walking through the gardens in her white dress, and now Dickman has taken Portland into the heart of his poems where it opens like a dusty rose. From “Lents District”:

Dear Lents,

Dear 82nd avenue, dear 92nd and Foster,

I am your strange son,

you saved me when I needed saving

and I remember your arms wrapped around

my bassinet like patrol cars wrapped around

the school yard

the night Jason went crazy—

waving his father’s gun above his head,

bathed in red and blue flashing lights,

all American, broken in half and beautiful.

Happy 2012! Start the year out right. Go forth, and buy a book of poems.

Dorianne Laux’s most recent collections are The Book of Men and Facts about the Moon, and she has co-authored a handbook on writing, The Poet’s Companion, all from W.W. Norton. Laux teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.

Once writers become synonymous with the places they live, this identity has tenacity in the popular imagination. It becomes a part of a ‘brand.’ In this way, numerous Nigerian novelists have for years been overshadowed by Chinua Achebe, Czech writers by Milan Kundera, and — arguably — Japanese writers by Haruki Murakami. (Every argument has its exceptions, obviously — and they do spring to mind immediately: Ben Okri, Bohumil Hrabal, Kazuo Ishiguro.)

But who is Naguib Mahfouz, the novelist? Not many of his works are broadly known in America.  The Cairo Trilogy gets all the attention — but it’s resoundingly not his best work. Mahfouz has a number of much better books. Here’s a thumbnail list of my six favorite:

The Thief and the Dogs (1961) Perhaps the most ambitious of all of Mahfouz’s novels, The Thief and the Dogs is written in a stream-of-consciousness style — a style that has a certain, unusual wildness on the sentence level. The Thief and the Dogs tells the story of Said Mahran, a criminal who is released from jail several years after Nasser’s 1952 Revolution. He finds a changed society. All of his underworld friends have become important figures in government and commerce — and he is beset both by the failings of the revolution — and his own personal failings. A dark tragedy about the ways the individual can fail in society — and about personal weakness — both of which are significant themes for Mahfouz.

Autumn Quail (1962) More explicitly political than The Thief and the Dogs, this novel addresses the problems of government corruption — and the way it can destroy lives, on a personal level. After Nasser takes control, the bureaucracy is changed out, at least in part to purge any remaining loyalty to the king. One of the purged — and imprisoned — bureaucrats is Isa al-Dabbagh, whose loss of job and status (and love) will lead to his dissolution and alcoholism. The novel opens on Black Saturday — the 26 of January, 1952 — when fire ravaged Cairo and widespread looting and rioting rocked the capital. The tone is apocalyptic. Mahfouz grips you from the first sentences, painting a portrait of an individual — and a nation — in crisis.

Cairo Modern (1945) This is my favorite of Mahfouz’s novels. Perhaps this is because it’s set in Cairo at the time that my own father lived there — spending his adolescence on its chaotic, cosmopolitan streets in the 1930s. This is a book about the intersection of poverty and love, as a struggling student agrees to marry the mistress of a corrupt government official. The story is a romantic melodrama, at heart, but it’s also a vivid depiction of a vanished time.

Echoes of an Autobiography (1994) Written nearly half-a-century after Cairo Modern, this book will frustrate you if you’re searching for an autobiography of Mahfouz. Mahfouz is too complicated a writer for that; he offers, instead, fragments that add up to a cloud of meaning, the echoes of a person. Some sections are as short as one line. This book also ties Mahfouz, at least in my mind, to the South American magical realists — particularly Eduardo Galeano and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, both of whom are rarely mentioned in discussions of the Egyptian writer’s work.

Midaq Alley (1947) An ensemble drama — there is no other way to describe Midaq Alley. Here, Mahfouz takes a single street, and investigates all of its denizens. It’s a precursor to The Cairo Trilogy, and it condenses many of the themes that he will extend in that trio of novels. If you enjoy dramas with large numbers of characters — but not necessarily 1000 overwhelming pages of minutiae — then this is the place to begin a consideration of Mahfouz’s work.

Miramar (1967) Achingly beautiful — that’s the only description for Miramar. One of the few Mahfouz novels that leaves Cairo, Miramar is set instead in Alexandria, in a small, seaside pension named — you guessed it — Miramar. Written at the height of Mahfouz’s power as a novelist, it has some muscular, confident prose, and a tangle of complex relationships based around the intrigue of love. A stunning and powerful novel.

Pauls Toutonghi’s second novel, Evel Knievel Days, will be published by Random House in Summer 2012. His first, Red Weather, was published in 2006. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Zoetrope: All-Story, One Story Magazine, The Boston Review, Glimmer Train, and numerous other periodicals. He teaches at Lewis and Clark College.

Sam was kind enough to provide us with his own list (check back later today for his killer Spotify playlist) of some of the more essential titles in Jazz history, all of which would look good under the tree or on your bookshelf.

I once sat down with the great saxophonist Lou Donaldson, now age eighty-five, and turned on my digital recorder. The first thing he said was, “You know, the real story of jazz has never been told.” I said, “I want to hear it, please tell me.” Then he said, “I’m saving it for my book.”

History is told from the point of view of what’s documented. In Jazz history, that means the recorded sound, and for good reason; the most influential and interesting musicians were, by and large, the ones that most often made it into the studios and clubs when the tapes were rolling. But, fifty years from now, how will people have deeper access to the wonderful phenomena of mid-century American jazz, something behind the scenes, something more human than the hardcore iconography that develops when history is based on pinnacle moments?

In working on The Jazz Loft Project for twelve years, here are a few works that I found instructive:

American Musicians II: Seventy-One Portraits in Jazz —Whitney Balliett
What unfolds in Balliett’s work, when read chronologically as the pieces were published in the New Yorker from the 1950s to the 1990s (one year in his 1970s prime he published in all but two or three of the magazine’s fifty issues), is a novelistic chronicle of not just jazz but New York City and America in general. Balliett wrote well about icons, but more than any other writer he covered less heralded figures, too – bass players, drummers, trombonists, tap dancers, and club owners. Also, no male writer that I know wrote more about female musicians. Adam Gopnik said in a memorial tribute to Balliett that he wrote sentences as well as anyone at the magazine. He also represented subjects in their own voices, using long quotations influenced by the work of Lillian Ross and Joseph Mitchell.

The Jazz Life —Nat Hentoff
A hole in Balliett’s work is that he didn’t cover drugs and racial issues. Here Hentoff tackles them head on. Like Balliett, Hentoff needs a new, exhaustive compendium of his jazz writing, from all sources – books, magazine articles, liner notes.  Such a chronicle would become one of the essential written documents of jazz history, along with Balliett’s work.

Four Jazz Lives-(previously published as Four Lives in the Bebop Business)—A.B. Spellman
This book contains long portraits of four African-American musicians – Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Jackie McLean, and Herbie Nichols – by an African-American writer. Spellman and his subjects don’t dwell on drugs and racism in jazz, but it comes up honestly and matter-of-factly, part of the grain. It’s a shame a forward thinking magazine like the New Yorker didn’t hire Spellman to write four of these portraits every year. The public record of jazz history would be stronger.

The Scene—Clarence Cooper
This novel is not about jazz; it’s about the drug underworld in a fictional city that is New York. The African-American Cooper renders with power the devastating topsy-turvy culture of the drug scene. You can imagine some of the junkies portrayed to be a jazz pianist like Sonny Clark or one of the other numerous musicians who spent time on the streets and back alleys trying to get their daily fix.

Notes and Tones—Arthur Taylor
This is an essential collection of interviews with dozens of African-American musicians by a noted African-American drummer Taylor. Again, this is one of the rare sources where you get frank and honest expressions of the role played by race in jazz.

Thinking in Jazz —Paul Berliner
Berliner is a first rate musicologist. He can explicate theories and cultural implications of music from various countries. What he does that makes this book one of the most important in all of jazz literature is he blends his high level academic analysis with interviews with musicians. He lets the musicians speak from experience. Then he mixes in his analysis. One element that comes through is the rigor necessary to create this music. It’s a deft and brilliant dance achieved by Berliner.

Side Man—Warren Leight.
This play won the Tony for Best Play in 1998. Leight’s father was a post-War itinerant trumpet player and this play depicts the dedication many of these non-stars had for their music, despite the often comic and haphazard nature of their lives.

Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band -by Lawrence Gushee
Gushee achieves the impossible; he documents the undocumentable, the legendary Creole Band, which existed from 1914 to 1918 and almost never played east of the Mississippi and was never recorded. By scouring virtually every newspaper published on vhe vaudeville circuit in America’s heartlands and West Coast during those years – sometimes finding one sentence notices on the Creole Band buried in the fine print – he tells a story almost impossible to tell.  Somewhere in the book he says that the prevailing image of him carried forth by his children was of him sitting in their basement at the microfilm and microfiche machines.

CODA
A jazz magazine published in Canada. This “magazine,” which began in 1958 as a glorified mimeographed and stapled newsletter, provides nuggets of access, in the form of descriptive reports, to many of the smaller jazz joints in New York and other cities, joints that weren’t covered in the bigger magazines.

Sam Stephenson is the author of The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965 (Knopf, 2009). He has written for the New York Times Book Review, Oxford American, A Public Space, and Smithsonian, among other publications, and is a regular contributor to the Paris Review Daily and the Morning News. Sam is currently writing a biography of W. Eugene Smith for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His essay on Sonny Clark can be found in the current issue of Tin House.

Whether we will admit to it or not, we’ve all done it. Standing there in the bookstore, shifting the weight back and forth on our tired feet, we’ve held a book in our hands and scrutinized the cover, deciding whether or not to spend our cash almost entirely on the image and design alone. I’ve done it more times than I care to admit, and although I have been burned on a few occasions, more often than not I am pleasantly surprised by what’s underneath that cover. Here, in what will have to pass for some kind of order, are ten covers that continue to excite my eye and inspire my mind.

Roadmarks—Roger Zelazny
I’m not sure who painted this one, although I suspect it was the recently deceased Darrell K. Sweet. I first saw this as a paperback that my father was reading, and it came into my life soon after my grandparents had taken me on a world-changing month-long drive from Ohio throughout the American West and home again. So much of this cover looked familiar to me, and yet here, delighting my seemingly bottomless childish appetite for wonder and fantasy was a dragon! That juxtaposition of the mundane and the mythological was enough for me and I still experience a thrill when seeing this.

Etidorhpa— John Uri Lloyd
In high school in the mid-1980s, I spent an inordinate amount of time at Elyria, Ohio’s Booksellers, a massive store that carried everything from greeting cards to pornographic videotapes to used books. Their science fiction and fantasy section was a special delight, often containing overlooked gems from the 60s and 70s that were being cast off by their owners in favor of more modern writing. I was always drawn to the covers that promised the most weirdness, so this “underground fantasy of nightmarish horror and devastating beauty” complete with someone who looked like Charles Darwin standing in the midst of a pastel mushroom forest with a faceless hermaphrodite was just what I needed. Perfectly, the story held up and this remains high on my list of favorite tales.

CREEPY MAGAZINE, Issue #28
Perhaps I am cheating a bit by including a comic magazine in this list, but to this day this cover images scares the daylights out of me. I remember seeing it first as a very young child and being smitten with absolute terror. Something about that hideous pink sky and the way that the skull-bat-thing seemed to completely surround the poor terrified soul on the ground. There was no way he was going to escape some awful fate! Sadly, I never did learn what “Only one thing left to do…” meant, nor did I ever find out if that man escaped. But even now, as a 42 year old man, this cover really freaks me out.

Motorman—David Ohle
This has since been reprinted with an equally intriguing but vastly different, and much more colorful, cover. I saw the reprint cover first, only recently discovered this original version which is much closer to the surreal, queasy and unsettling nature of the book. Motorman is the story of a man named Moldenke, on the run from someone named Bunce in a world filled with multiple moons, men with multiple sheep hearts beating (sometimes) in their chests, beings known as jellyheads, and so much more I think it’s time you tracked this down yourself. Throughout it all there is the sense of gentle but inescapable decay and a terrible sadness. All of which, somehow, this artist was able to capture in this perfect cover, from the drawing to the font.

At the Mountains of Madness —H.P. Lovecraft
Ian Miller is a British artist who has been creating fantastic imagery since the late 70s. He seemed to be all over the place then, even earning a few collections of his own from the long-defunct Dragon’s Dream imprint. His work has been a huge influence on my own, and I quite simply never tire of letting my eye wander through his lines, textures, and shapes. This Lovecraft cover seems to me a perfect summation of so much of what makes his art unmistakably brilliant. And Lovecraft is often good for a late-night scare, even if there are a few too many “things that should not be” in his tales.

The Inferno— Dante, translated by John Ciardi
Growing up, Hell was always disappointingly realistically depicted. In movies, in comics, in art, in videogames…it always looked just like what you’d expect. Flames. Cyclopean cities. Winged devils tormenting sinners. The works. I had to read this particular translation as an undergrad and was immediately struck by the shifting and vertiginous cover image. My eye couldn’t find anywhere to rest in the piece. It felt, somehow, slippery and in a treacherous way. Staring at this bizarre, almost sloppy, smeared and blurry painting made me feel dizzy, mildly queasy, and completely ill-at-ease. All perfect for what is, read correctly, a deeply unsettling journey through the afterlife.

MULTIFORCE— Mat Brinkman
I really don’t think there are any artists working today, in comics or anywhere else, as consistently challenging, original, or brilliant as Mat Brinkman. So I may be cheating a bit here again since Multiforce is really a giant (11” by 16”), stapled comic book collecting the eponymous story from the pages of Paper Rodeo but it’s one of the few works that seems to burrow deep inside the mind’s eye like a heat-seeking missile and then simply explode. It’s really that wonderful, and this cover image with that title (yes, that really says “Multiforce” down below) is the perfect invitation to a detonation.

A Voyage to Arcturus — David Lindsay
This is one of the three or four books to have had a deep and lasting impact on my own thinking, shaping who I am and who I hope to eventually be. Although slightly marred by an awkward framing story, this surreal story is actually a Gnostic fable exploring the nature of pain and the existence of a Creator. The cover is a brilliant painting by Bob Pepper and thankfully the novel meets every expectation the cover sets forth and then exceeds them.

Moby-Dick, Or, the Whale — Herman Melville
Walk into any bookstore anywhere and you will surely see multiple editions of this great novel, almost all of them with some historically accurate photograph or engraving or other image from the early days of the whaling industry. That’s all well and good, and there needs to be a place for that, but I grew tired of that kind of thing very quickly. This cover though truly spoke to me. As someone who has been obsessed with the novel for most of his life, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been forced to defend it to friends. Cries of “It’s old!” or “It’s boring!” or “It doesn’t make sense!” seem to hound me everywhere. To me this beautiful and brilliant cover, a painting by contemporary artist Claus Hoie titled “The Pursuit of the Great White Whale.” The apparent crudeness and simplicity of the piece is all an illusion and a close inspection reveals a vision and a sensitivity that is almost breathtaking. To me, this cover has always been reassuring proof that Moby-Dick remains vital, important, relevant and ultimately modern, even 160 years after its initial publication.

Gormenghast— Mervyn Peake
Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy is perhaps the only work that can compete with Melville’s great novel for my undivided attention. It came to me as a teen and its narrative of a young boy stifled by ritual and nearly strangled by the expectations of adulthood deeply affected me. Most editions of the three novels in the trilogy, Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone include Peake’s own gorgeous, scratchy, densely detailed drawings and studies throughout the text and often on the cover. This illustration is by Peake and, without spoiling too much, is the perfect summation of the awful, terrifying and exhilarating finality of the climax of the second novel. It is so simple and still so deeply moving. It still moves me.

Matt Kish was born in 1969 and lives in the middle of Ohio. After stints as a cafeteria cook, a hospital registrar, a bookstore manager, and an English teacher, he ended up as a librarian. He draws as often as he can, often with whatever he can find. He has tried his hand at 35mm black-and-white photography (with real film and real chemicals), making comics and zines, a bit of collage, and lots of pen and ink.

In 2006, coming out of a nasty breakup, I discovered (much to my surprise) that I was taking unexpected delight in blood-soaked literature. I’d never exactly been squeamish, but I’d always closed my eyes when the horror-movie heroine opened the cellar door—not to mention when the axe cleaved bone, or the chainsaw ripped the still-beating heart from the gushing chest cavity.

But now, my petty tragedy—and it truly was a petty tragedy—prompted a certain ache in me. I wanted to feel closer to the human condition, to narratives of survival, in which I recognized a tenacity that I wanted for myself. These were stories told against the backdrop of something larger and more frightening. They were also bloody.

Here is the list of the five most unflinching books I read during that time, the books with writing so trustworthy that you can’t look away.

Cruddy–Lynda Barry
Since its publication in 2000, Lynda Barry’s illustrated novel has generated a cult following—with thousands of loyal fans signing up for her classes in creativity, finding voice, and storytelling. Cruddy takes a horrifically violent storyline and infuses it with all the pathos and familiarity of girlhood. Even though I’ve never owned a knife with a first name and a taste for blood, I felt like I was reading about the secret inner world of my childhood: the isolation, the invisibility, the vulnerability.

Barry wrote this novel with a paintbrush and a stack of parchment. It’s vivid, it’s tactile, and, yes, a little comic. Cruddy’s narrator, Roberta Rohbeson, says: “When the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?” But she also says: “A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.”

There is wisdom, here.

Man Is Wolf to Man–Janusz Bardach, with Kathleen Gleeson
Roughly forty million people died in Stalin’s Siberian work camps; Bardach was one of the few survivors—emigrating to the United States in 1972 to become the Chair of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in the University of Iowa’s Department of Otolaryngology.

Bardach credits his unlikely survival with his ability to perceive beauty in the world around him. Under unimaginable circumstances in the frozen wasteland of Khabarovsky Krai, he survives beatings, impossible work assignments and starvation rations. There is no logic to his world, no justice.

In a rehabilitation camp in Kolyma, suffering from scurvy, Bardach meets a camp cook who only has two fingers on his right hand. He’d bet them in a card game—and lost. “But I got away,” the cook says, gloating, “with my thumb and little finger.” In a hazardous world, he seems to indicate, what you keep is more important than what you lose.

Sharpe’s Tiger–Bernard Cornwell
“It was funny, Richard Sharpe thought, that there were no vultures in England. None that he had seen, anyway. Ugly things they were. Rats with wings.”

In 1799, the British army sent a division of redcoats to fight the Tipoo of Mysore in Tamil-speaking Southern India. Cornwell’s fictional novel—impeccably researched—is the story of one of those soldiers.

Richard Sharpe is cannon fodder, expected to die quickly with his regiment of conscripted, illiterate criminals. But despite his vindictive sergeant, Hawkswill, Sharpe manages to gain military promotion and fortune. The sewers of Mysore run red with blood; the Tipoo’s man-eating tigers develop a taste for England’s finest, milk-fattened youth.

Autobiography of a Face–Lucy Greeley
When Lucy is diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma at the age of nine, she has a third of her jaw removed. She spends the next decade braving successive operations and long hospital stays. She searches for understanding, for a reason why, for a redemptive ending to something that is ongoing and fluid. Beauty is the prize—and love the gift it can bestow.

Years after I first read this memoir, I am still haunted by the scene where a young Lucy and several other children sneak into the animal testing center in the basement of the hospital. They can’t wait to see the “petting zoo,” but what they instead find is a reflection of their own suffering—pigs and monkeys in small cages, cats with, “matchbox-size rectangles with electrical wires implanted  into their skulls. The skin on their shaved scalps was crusty and red where it joined the metal.”

Upon the children’s return to their ward—a nurse demands they account for their absence. They cannot.

“Sooner or later we all have to learn the words with which to name out own private losses,” Greeley writes, “but then we just stood there in front of the nurses desk, speechless.”

The Secret History–Donna Tartt
You shouldn’t kill your friends. Really. And you shouldn’t become enthralled with the charismatic and the morally ambiguous. But don’t worry. This book is safe to read. And it allows you to give in to those guilty pleasures.

I’m not spoiling the ending to say that there’s a murder. The murder is disclosed in the first pages and the entire body of the text (so to speak) is about understanding how and who and why. Donna Tartt captures the superficiality of young men and women, the way that any ideas—no matter how grand—can eventually feel small and superficial.

Ultimately, The Secret History is a book about the seduction of wealth and intelligence, about feeling like an outsider and finally being called to stand at the center with your peers—only to find that this has a price.

Peyton Marshall is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Maytag Fellowship and the Richard Yates Award for short fiction. Her story “Bunnymoon” was published in Best New American Voices 2004. Her work has appeared in such magazines as A Public Space, Etiqueta Negra, and FiveChapters.