Being reviewed:
Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly’s Truths from Jim Crow’s Lies
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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
Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing
Gene Hackman’s death, about which I had even more feelings than I’d anticipated, led me here: to this famous, unfussy yet elegant meditation on the art of editing and, more broadly, on the arts of discontinuity. Murch, now 81, might be the preeminent film editor of the last fifty years but he’s also a polymath, and he writes with the lightest of touches, effortlessly making comparisons to other artforms (“editing is a kind of dance—the finished film is a kind of crystallized dance”), cognitive science, apiform biology, and ASL. To get back to Hackman: At the book’s center is Murch’s account of how, working on 1974’s The Conversation (his first editing job, which happened to become a masterpiece), he had an epiphany on the nature not only of film editing but of human comprehension—one that came from watching dailies and noticing how, and when, Hackman would blink. Magical stuff.
Megan Cummins
Managing Editor
Kevin Wilson, Now Is Not the Time to Panic
In 2011, Kevin Wilson read at UC Davis as part of the visiting author series. I was a grad student, and I came prepared with a question. We all came prepared with a question because, we were told, the Q&A crickets at previous readings made us all look bad. This was no great burden—I’d loved Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. I was 23, though, shy and inarticulate, so when I blurted my question—something about how other art forms function in his books—I’m not sure it made sense. I didn’t hear much of his response because I’d gone from feeling nervous about asking a question to nervous about having asked a question.
I’ve read all of Kevin Wilson’s books since, so I was surprised to realize that I was a few years late to Now Is Not the Time to Panic. It’s the story of two teenagers, Frankie and Zeke, who one summer cause chaos in a small town (and beyond) with an anonymous public art project that transforms from curiosity to obsession to panic. People die. And twenty years later, a New Yorker writer calls up Frankie to say: I know it was you.
It’s certainly a compelling premise, but what made this book unputdownable for me was its sensitivity to the high and low frequencies of a time in life that for most people is one of emotional tumult. While it shoots the idea of getting carried away to outer space, Frankie and Zeke’s tender, hilarious, and complicated connection keeps us firmly on earth, in the realm of human mess. Read if you want to laugh a lot and cry a little.
Kevin Wilson signed my copy of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth at that 2011 reading. For Megan, he wrote, Who asked the nicest question and staved off the awkwardness.
John Plotz
B-Sides Series Editor
Anthony Veasna So, Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes
Don’t buy this book to mourn the death of a great writer at 27. Buy it to appreciate what he managed before the curtain. So’s alter-ego in Straight Thru Cambotown, the never-to-be-finished novel that forms the bulk of Songs on Endless Repeat, makes no secret of his impulse to flee decrepit Stockton, California.
Danny is writing a thesis “about the philosophical origins of comedy and its epistemological relation to trauma theory, how both reveal the fragmentary, broken nature of reality.” That rings true: This book’s best lines make you laugh and wince at the same time: “You guys are all so rich, Dad says … you’re barely Cambodian. You’re barely Cambodian-American!”
In reality, though, “Danny” is not so much going straight thru Cambotown as straight back to it. Back to where the local community college is nicknamed “UBT; University Behind Target” and it is a place where “translators were teachers, Hondas were Mustangs, all colleges outside the Central Valley were U C Berkeley.” Still, escape is tricky, when he and his cousins Vinny and Molly reunite for their aunt’s funeral, time kind of … … … stops.
You can glimpse what would have been a “disputed and dangerous inheritance” plot up ahead. But what remains of the novel actually culminates with the cousins sitting around after that aunt’s cremation, drinking a doubtful homemade stomach-ache remedy:
The fumes of the incense and the ashes of their Ming collected over them. The drink fizzed in their stomachs. They stalled for that crashing wave of numbness, half-expecting, despite those influences whirling above and around, for nothing to happen.
Clive James has a poem: “The book of my enemy has been remaindered”; its first line is “I am pleased.” I can see Danny laughing and stoned, forking out the lousy $8.99 this book cost me on remainder, and offering a trauma-as-comedy comparison to the Khmer genocide (Can’t a guy even make a killing from the Killing Fields … ?) Me, I am not at all pleased.
Bécquer Seguín
Literature in Translation Section Editor
Maylis de Kerangal, Canoes, translated from the French by Jessica Moore
Following a bookstore event earlier this month, I walked up to a table to speak with the writer Maylis de Kerangal. I soon uttered the word “Alaska,” and her eyes immediately lit up. I was born and raised in Alaska and Kerangal, one of the most celebrated writers in France today, is continually fascinated by the place I once called home. She began talking to me about Harry Crews, an American novelist who, in 1974, was sent by Playboy to Valdez, Alaska, to cover the controversy over the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. She told me about how this was Crews’s first magazine assignment, and he took the opportunity to practice his own version of Gonzo journalism. From there, we moved to André Breton, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and other surrealists, who, during their exile in the United States in the 1940s and ’50s, became fascinated by Yu’pik iconography and history. De Kerangal is neither a Gonzo journalist nor a surrealist. But her fascination with Alaska is earnestly oblique, probing the idea of an often-mythologized place from a peculiar angle. In her Prix Médicis-winning novel, Birth of a Bridge, Alaska plays a central role in the backstory of one of the characters. In her most recent book of short stories, Canoes, the 49th state doesn’t appear explicitly. Rather, it haunts the collection’s metaphorical title as well as de Kerangal’s insatiable inquiry into the role of place in North America.
Gustavus Stadler
Music Section Editor
Sheila Curran Bernard, Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly’s Truths from Jim Crow’s Lies
After folklorist John Lomax “discovered” Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly, a name he apparently came to dislike) while visiting Angola prison in Louisiana, he and his son, Alan, crafted an often outright fictionalized story of the musician’s difficult past as a southern Black man in the post-Reconstruction, early Jim Crow era. All subsequent accounts of Ledbetter’s life have relied heavily on Lomax’s materials, including an oft-cited transcript of an oral autobiography that Sheila Curran Bernard shows never existed. Bernard delivers revelation after revelation obscured by the Lomax accounts. But most importantly, Bernard’s pointed biography proceeds from her belief that “by casting one man as the violent center of the narrative, they erased the context of racial terror that marked the economic and political dominance of white southerners in the decades following the Civil War.” Bernard’s book attempts to restore this context well into the early 20th century–and succeeds. Covering the period from Ledbetter’s birth to his eventual split from John Lomax in 1940, Bring Judgment Day is also very much a book of our own time, its analysis informed by the work of Black-centered historians, critical race theory, abolitionism, and Black Lives Matter.
Abigail Struhl
Public Streets Series Editor
Leigh Bardugo, The Familiar
Although perhaps nothing could be more fantastical than the news right now, I picked up the fantasy novel The Familiar looking for escape. Leigh Bardugo is renowned for her YA fiction and for Ninth House, a paranormal romance set at Yale. In The Familiar, she goes back to 16th-century Spain to tell the story of Luzia Cotado, a scullion whose magical powers bring her to the attention of scheming aristocrats vying for the favor of the king. Despite improbable feats of magic, the history feels all too real: war, colonialism, the Inquisition. Luzia is a conversa, a Sephardic Jew forced to hide her heritage to avoid persecution. Yet her heritage is her power: Her spells are proverbs in Ladino, “Spanish reshaped with the hammer of exile.” The Familiar exposes the injustice of oppressing immigrants and policing dissonant speech. At least, in this story, the good guys win.
Mary Zaborskis
Quizzical & Shoptalk Series Editor
Sara Sligar, Vantage Point
Sara Sligar’s Vantage Point is perfectly set in a moment where we are seeing the expanding possibilities, presence, and powers of AI tools—as well as what happens when these tools’ hyperrealistic capabilities are leveraged for nefarious purposes. Clara and Teddy are siblings navigating adulthood under the shadow of the Wieland curse—members of their old-money family have been key players in American mythology, seeing incredible successes and horrific tragedies (we get glimpses of some of the more bizarre myths, which are delightfully interwoven throughout the text). When compromising videos of Clara are released, relationships are put to the test, the curse’s powers are questioned, and the lines between real and fake become increasingly blurred, in technology and beyond. If you are already anxious about AI’s takeover, this might not help you sleep at night, but the thrill of this novel is worth it! 
