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At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month.
Nicholas Dames
Editor in Chief
Cesare Pavese, The Leucothea Dialogues, translated from the Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor
Much like Ovid’s Heroides, this remarkable 1947 book is a set of 27 short reimaginings of classical myths—but stranger, more elliptical, and because they present themselves as the retrospective musings of mythic figures in conversation with each other, a bit in love with death, as if these conversations happen in a void where the inevitability of fate is held in abeyance just long enough to think freely about what happened and why it had to happen that way. Death is woven into the book’s history: it was the book Pavese placed on the nightstand in the Turin hotel room where he took his life in 1950, his suicide note written on its flyleaf. Yet it’s also an exercise in freedom: mythic characters talking back to the fates they’ve been allotted. Achilles and Patroclus remember their childhoods together, the night before Patroclus’s death; Orpheus comes to realize that he wasn’t seeking Eurydice in Hades, but himself (“a person looks for nothing else”); Calypso, who calls herself “almost nothing,” and Odysseus argue about the nature of time; Dionysus and Demeter find themselves yearning for the world of human-made narrative from which they’re excluded. Tiresias, as if thinking to himself, says to Oedipus: “I feel like I live outside of time and have always been alive, and I no longer believe in days.” The mythic figures get to have the last say about their stories, even in their bewilderment about them. Pavese’s book was not much of a success at the time, and remains inscrutable, but this translation gives an Anglophone audience the book’s elusive beauty and even its terror—there are very few things like it. And for all its classical armature, it is very much a postwar book about catastrophes just barely outlived. The final conversation, between two unnamed voices discussing the afterlives of the gods, gives us what might be the book’s motto, or its epitaph: “It’s not easy to live as if what happened in the past was true.”
Benjamin R. Cohen
Public Thinker Series Editor
James McWilliams, The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
I knew nearly nothing about the life of Frank Stanford before this new, barnstorming, capacious biography. I knew only the smallest amount about his poetry. I’d heard he died young of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Maybe I saw that on the cover of a tattered paperback in a used bookstore long ago. I’ve come across some of his poems over the years, usually small snippets, mercurial ones that struck me as snapshots of a thought. McWilliams’s biography is comprehensive, helping me now understand Stanford as a full person. The bio begins at the end, when Stanford died in 1978 at age 29. It then goes back to hard Arkansas beginnings—he was “broken from day one,” McWilliams writes—and winds up back past his death. McWilliams is a Stanford fan but paints the full picture of a man who was, to put it lightly, flawed, complicated, and difficult. It seems all reviewers are calling it full-throated. They’re right. It is a significant achievement.
Megan Cummins
Managing Editor
Patrick Ryan, Buckeye
I’d been craving a big long novel I could sink my teeth into, maybe one with a dose of rollicking Americana and a scoop of heartache, all tied together by the intertwined strings of two connected families. (Or, you know, something like that.) I imagined luxuriating in such a book for half the month. Patrick Ryan’s brand-new Buckeye was all that and more—a 500-page drama whose main action spans much of the 20th-century—but, unfortunately for me, I sped through it in a matter of days. Though I mourned having to put the book down at its end, its characters have stayed with me ever since. The novel, in a way, finds a structure in the wars passed from one generation to the next, our never-ending cycle of bloodshed, from the First and Second World Wars to Korea and Vietnam, but at the heart of the book are two American families: Becky and Cal Jenkins; Margaret and Felix Salt; and their children, Skip and Tom, respectively (or is it?). Their mistakes, tragedies, and daily joys felt like mine, too, and their home of Bonhomie, Ohio, my own.
John Plotz
B-Sides Series Editor
Helen Garner, The Season: A Fan’s Story
I never thought I’d pick up a book about Australian Rules Football. Never search out “spectacular marks” on YouTube; and certainly never read an epigraph from Camille Paglia (“I exalt the pagan personae of athlete and warrior…whose ethic is candor, discipline, vigilance and valor”) without a single snort. Helen Garner, though—novelist, journalist, diarist—has always been able to forestall my skepticism and reverse my vantage.
Ever since her heart-stopping early novels, Monkey Grip (1977) and The Children’s Bach (1984), Garner has held the stifling coils of everyday life up for cold-eyed examination—yet without losing track of how invested all of us are in trying to live such an ordinary life on its own terms. Garner’s feminism (“All my life I’ve fought men, lived under their regimes, been limited and frustrated by their power”) is oblique and tricky. Never more so than now.
The Season comes across initially as a doting fan’s notes: an octogenarian grandmother spends some months keeping an eye on the best part of her teenage grandson’s sporting life. Even when anatomizing attempted escapes from a stifling patriarchy, she has always studied the way those codes get internalized—how they make unformed youth into men or into women. Watching her grandson’s ARF team, “I now began to learn about boys and men from a fresh angle, to see their delicacy, their fragility, what they’re obliged to do to themselves in order to live in this world, the codes of behaviour they’ve had to develop in order to discipline and sublimate their drive to violence.” Always a new approach with Garner, never a dull moment.
Bécquer Seguín
Literature in Translation Section Editor
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
In an attempt to seek writerly inspiration, I’ve recently turned to reading essay collections. I don’t know why, exactly. Perhaps it’s because my attention span, like most everyone else’s, is going downhill like a runaway shopping cart. Or perhaps it’s because essays are the only form of writing that I feel justified in picking up and putting down at my own whim, or my kids’. (I have two.) Reasons aside, my desk has become home to a growing stack of them, which includes Andrea Long Chu’s Authority and Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment, among other recent standouts. But the one that sits atop the pile is Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small, a collection of eleven essays and an introduction oriented around the thought that egalitarianism, while an eminently worthwhile political philosophy, is a misguided way to approach art and culture. Rothfeld, the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post, is a mercilessly precise prose stylist. Her metaphors are crisp, her detached tone often damning. Nothing is ever squeezed into a Becca Rothfeld sentence: each word, rather, is carefully chosen, cleanly arranged, and deliberately placed, as though in an elaborate nativity scene, or a model train display. But the most impressive thing about her writing is that it never ceases to brim with ideas. In this, her academic training as a philosopher peaks through. In the best possible way. 
