First, it’s a pretty accurate description of eccentricity, especially of eccentrics in our own family. It often happens in the elderly, veterans, or the dying, that mortality gives people the impetus — the courage really — to aspire to more uninhibited versions of themselves. As odd as these people may become, it almost seems like a right that they’ve earned through the accumulation of so many painful experiences.

Secondly, the book is an attempt to reconstruct a man in full. Using memory, stories, conjecture, documents, and fiction, the narrator tries to cobble together a person. You can say all the obvious things about the impossibility of ever really knowing someone — of our futile attempts at real intimacy — but you come away from this book not with a depressing sense of failure, but with awe that we even have a desire to try. […]

Beyond this, there are different initiation protocols, if you want to call them that, that Reno experiences throughout the book. There is her immersion in the New York art world, her discomfort in the Valera’s villa at Lake Como, her easy though ambiguous acceptance into a radical political group in Rome. Did you look at this as a way to weave in a bildungsroman aspect to a book that gains so much of its strength from building out these different environments? Or was this more a way to tease out the broader theme of how art, economics, and politics were inescapable forces in shaping all the characters in the book, despite their efforts to deny this?

Well, gosh, thank you for so thoughtfully stating all this. Both. Every scene in the book is meant to, I mean should, both deepen the characters featured in it, and put pressure on the subjects, themes, and various kinds of meaning that come up in the writing. The last part of your question is a nice argument that one could make for the book or what I’m getting at, but when I am writing, I’m not going for effects. I mean, wait. I am going for effects, actually. But not arguments. Although books make excellent occasions for arguments — such as that characters are shaped by the forces of history and of culture. But those occasions come after, with the book as an instantiation of the argument.

What I mean to say is that I am writing for pleasure, and in hopes of trying to activate in the writing many different aspects of who I am and what I believe, and that any biases I have about how character comes into being, in life as much as in art, burble up unconsciously rather than polemically. […]

In regards to the short story as an art object, how do you feel about stories existing in virtue of linguistic or semiotic brilliance instead of having a direction?

I’m always good with linguistic brilliance. [Laughs.] I love that no matter what. I love stories and I love the way an arc of a story will work on you, but there’s something about language that to me is so special, and I feel like it goes right past all my logical brain workings. It feels like a drug. It’s a little shot of something and it jostles everything around, and I love that. I love Ben Marcus, I love Lydia Davis—give me those writers and I’m happy.

Do you think you had any illusions from childhood about pregnancy and birth that made it into the collection?

Who could not? It’s such a strange situation, the idea that two people take their clothes off and mash around for a while and later a completely new life comes to be. That’s always seemed completely amazing to me. […]

Richard Dawkins wakes some time before dawn. He doesn’t blink or yawn or stretch — his eyes clang open with all the force and suddenness of a steel door. He stares at his ceiling, blue and brown swirling in his irises like cars and livestock in the centre of a tornado. Richard Dawkins’ head is fizzing with mad thoughts. He chatters under his breath as he strides out of bed and down the stairs of his Oxford home. His wife gives a small grunt and goes back to sleep. Outside a shimmering band of turquoise near the horizon brings a soft sparkle to the beads of dew hanging from trees in early bud; the heavy clouds in the distance look peach-pink and insubstantial; so do the old pale brick houses that line his street. The birds are singing in riotous chorus. “Accept my genetic information, females of my species!” they sing. “Observe my superior fitness for survival, as evidenced by the strength and clarity of my voice! Oh, and, by the way, as a bird I have no concept of God or metaphysics, but I do believe in strict gender roles and the principles of Aufklärung!” Richard Dawkins sets off into the world.

As he shambles down his street a few small birds burst from a shrub, scattering at his approach. The famous scientist suddenly breaks from his mutterings and watches them carefully. “Horses!” he says, finally. “Flying horses. Nonsense. Balderdash. Not now. Not yet. One day. Tiny flying horses, tiny flying horses, millions of tiny flying horses. One day. One day.” Later, an upended bin gives the bestselling biologist some cause for reflection. Foxes have tipped it over, sprawling its contents over the pavement. “Hitler’s brain!” Dawkins exclaims. “Save Hitler’s brain, study Hitler’s brain, gain Hitler knowledge. Hitler science. Science Hitler. Hitler Hitler.” Soon he is heading down from his wealthy suburb into the medieval heart of Oxford, towards the University, seat of learning and discovery for over nine hundred years.

A few vans making early-morning deliveries trundle past him. He smiles and waves. “You want to see some films of a lady giving birth?” he shouts happily. “Fantastic stuff. Two million years old. Baby porn, baby.” By the time he’s on Market Street the sky has lightened and there are already a few pedestrians on the road — postgrad students with their morning coffees, undergraduates still stumbling home from the previous night. Some stare as he passes; some turn their backs. Suddenly, Richard Dawkins stops dead. He raises an accusatory finger at a horrific building standing in front of him. His face is twisted in fury. It’s not a church, though — it’s a charity shop. “WHERE DO AMPUTEES BUY THEIR SHOES?” the internationally renown secularist bellows, spitting and grimacing, tears rolling down his face. “DO AMPUTEES THROW AWAY ONE SHOE?”

His journey is almost complete. As the sun, burning with nuclear fusion’s blasphemous glory, begins to float above the crenelated urban horizon, Richard Dawkins is climbing Magdalen Tower. Finally he is at the summit, surrounded by its magnificent Gothic spires. As dawn becomes day, Richard Dawkins looks out at a gloriously mechanistic universe, and begins to laugh. “There is no God!” he shouts. “There is no God! There is no God!” As he does so, his testicles sway freely in the breeze, swinging slowly, with all the dignified solemnity of old church bells. […]

Peering into the prose“documents” that account for history from a safe distance, Carson suggests, we risk falling into the active, generative abyss, a volcanic past that promises to flow into the present and freeze itself over our shapes: Here we are where Herakles eats MREs.  Our mythic heroes suffer from PTSD. We’re about to be covered up with ash, even though no one smokes anymore. […]

The story’s structure, mirroring the novel’s title, presents two narratives leaning toward each other with an inevitable intersection. The chapters alternate between the orphanhood of young Shannon and the moments in her mother’s life leading up to Shannon’s birth and abandonment. That Shannon will meet her mother again is inevitable, since both stories are narrated in her voice, but the less assured reconciliation of her desire for stability gives Celona’s story a perpetual, if tempered, tension, and a sense of many possibilities branching out.

Because, like a Victorian romance, the story’s conclusion is at least somewhat secure, Y succeeds on the observations and descriptions of the protagonist — a curly-headed blond with one blind eye — as she comes up against both the social and physical boundaries of her island home. Shannon’s precocious omniscience keeps her at a defensive distance from the disruptive characters she meets on her wanderings, including her somewhat abusive foster father of earlier days. And, possibly because she sees herself (as do others) as one of these outcasts, her emotional reactions to both affirming and dangerous circumstances can be disturbingly sparse, an attitude which strangely never gets reconciled. […]

The Spartakiad, a mass gymnastics display in Communist Czechoslovakia

The art of drinking, and drinking in public, is all about codes — knowing your environment and knowing the art of conversation. If liquor loosens tongues, it also drags you out of the corner and into the culture of the bar itself. This is all beautifully captured in Rosie Schaap’s witty, compassionate memoir, Drinking with Men (Riverhead, $26.95), a meditation on learning how to drink well, wisely, and with eyes wide open. If you’re seeking a story of drinking gone wrong, you’re better off with Augusten Burroughs’ Dry or Mary Karr’s Lit, but if you want an elegy to good bars and a stiff drink, Schaap has you covered.

She writes about grown-up drinking, and each drinking story she shares marks a significant shift or conflict in her life. As a teenager, she’d dress like a Gypsy and offer tarot card readings on the Metro-North New Haven line for free beers; as an adult uncovering her latent spirituality, she’d find refuge in bars between stints as a volunteer chaplain at the foot of ground zero; as a married woman, it took a special bar in Montreal to feel her relationship coming apart. To be a bar regular, she says, is all about “adapting—and about enjoying people’s company not only on one’s own terms, but on others.” We go to bars to find ourselves in other people’s habits, and in finding other people, find ourselves. Three martinis or more, you’ll always find yourself under the sway of your host, and that’s the best part of bar culture. […]

“I can neither deny nor avoid an attempt at reading Francesca’s style of backward-looking romance (and perhaps embedded within all romantic sensations are all manner of creepy, creeping nostalgias) — nor can I see this romance as anything but an absolute affirmation both of the force of depicting soul-states in space, and as an absolute indictment of the blindness and deadening effects of a world that failed to see as richly as Francesca Woodman herself could. Not even to imagine — simply to see, to perceive within the present, within the real, much more than what was merely present. What she often photographs seems to be the phenomenon of time itself — not so much a moment as a moment’s very intensity. And yet her pictures are documentary, insofar as they depict, with great intensity and charm, what it feels like (for a girl I guess, but not necessarily only); what longing feels like, what play feels like, not so much what it looks like to be alive, but what it feels like. 

Francesca Woodman seems to have been fated — to have been tasked by fate — to carry some of the formal and political investigations of her time back both to the origins of photography itself, and to more ancient — and of course transpersonal, and politically problematic — aspects of divine femininity that, however common and dismissible they might still seem, especially under certain light, have always haunted human image-making. In AGMA’s volume of letters and ephemera, we discover that she was a spirited and affectionate correspondent, filling her letters with florid descriptions — florid like her first name — of rather simple daily affairs like eating and drinking, which suggest the more masculine aspect of her patronymic. A process of enchanting — and also of haunting — mundane affairs and relatable soul-states is likewise always at work in her images. Ghostly bodies merge with the decaying walls that enclose them, a blurred girl ducks translucently behind an old mantelpiece; peeling wallpaper becomes material for a sepulchral fan-dance that manages both a gothic satire of burlesque and a witty intersection of youth and age, of the animate with the inanimate — or to put it more bluntly, sex and death.”

[Read More at LARB]