Why They Can\u2019t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities<\/em><\/strong>, by John Warner (Johns Hopkins University Press). This one, by writer and long-time visiting professor John Warner, is much more than its subtitle suggests. Ostensibly about ridding educational corridors of the five-paragraph model, it is more fully a treatise on higher education in modern America. The book is laced with subtle humor and appreciably legible commentary. It is reasonable but not shy, aware of the market conditions that dominate higher education and averse to their influence. (If you want the most Warner line in the book: \u201cMy mother \u2026 has long wondered why I can\u2019t write the kind of book lots of people want to read. \u2026 I have wondered this myself, because I am a fan of money and the things one can buy with it.\u201d) Warner has a second new book too, The Writer\u2019s Practice<\/em> (2019), offering more practical direction. Why They Can\u2019t Write<\/em> is the base text that comes before it, ready for the hands of policy makers and practitioners alike.<\/p>\n The Place You\u2019re Supposed to Laugh<\/em><\/strong>, by Jenn Stroud Rossmann (7.13). This charming work of fiction offers a recent historical setting for a technology-adjacent scene in early 2000s Silicon Valley. Rossmann is not only the engineer who reads a novel in the series of that title at this website, but an engineer who also writes novels. Unlike the possible and hopefully outdated stereotype of engineers and scientists writing fiction, though\u2014so methodical, those arch paeans to rationalism\u2014Rossmann is a novelist<\/em> writing a novel. This one is witty, colorful, and compelling, drawing characters who evoke a setting grappling with the specter of a new digitally technological economy and culture; you know, the economy and culture that\u2019s unsettling higher education in Why They Can\u2019t Write<\/em>; the one we see building across centuries in These Truths<\/em>. That one.<\/p>\n Late in the Day<\/em><\/strong>, by Tessa Hadley (Harper). Like so many novels in the realist vein these days, this one\u2019s starting point is a spare symmetry: two couples, one death, the problem of the remainder; complementary types, parallel betrayals. (The elegant donn\u00e9e, or clean two-sentence pitch, is in fashion right now.) But within that scheme is a very middle-aged clutter, the mess of memories, possessions, resentments, fading achievements everyone carries around with them after a certain point. (It\u2019s a very tender novel toward objects\u2014a dead husband\u2019s slippers, old unused tampons, so many keys to so many locks. In its way, it\u2019s an inheritance novel.) All this can seem old-fashioned. But the novel has the virtue of knowing it. It\u2019s a story about the end of a way of life: not just one lived within the heterosexually prescribed, haute bohemian bourgeoisie, but the life saturated with protective irony.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The Collected Stories of Diane Williams<\/em><\/strong> (Soho). No other sentences this year, as sentences, put me under as much of a spell. Not that it was an easy one to be under, particularly here; at almost 800 pages\u2014and more than 300 stories!\u2014there are too many of them to take in for long stretches, and I needed to come up for air frequently, to put the book down and walk away from it to something reassuringly dull. These are micro-fictions almost entirely without that form\u2019s tendency toward showy cleverness, glimpses into kinds of peril, often sexual peril. As for the sentences, they seem to exist to demonstrate Chomsky\u2019s point that recursion is the fundamental property of syntax; clauses sidle, interrupt, hide in so many ways that I was tempted to generate a list, although such a thing would be interminable. Among other things, Williams is a master of the unruly em dash, and you begin to suspect its presence even when it\u2019s not there. All this can read like some American Delphic Oracle, cool and obscure, except that Williams is also, unexpectedly and sometimes grimly, funny.<\/p>\n Good Will Come from the Sea<\/em><\/strong>, by Christos Ikonomou, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich (Archipelago). If there is something like a literature of the EU, this will be, for the present at least, what it looks like. The setting is the EU\u2019s absolute margin, where it fades out into water and rock: an unnamed Aegean island, close to the celebrated tourist spots but not of them. The characters are internal migrants, Greeks leaving Athens after austerity has turned the city into a zombieland of capital flight, reversing the country\u2019s postwar demographic trends and unwinding history in the process, retreating from the city to \u201ca kingdom of caves\u201d; this is a fiction of reverse, in which modernity looks like a mythic punishment. Instead of new opportunity, these urbanized migrants find resistance, suspicion, profiteering cartels, globalization everywhere\u2014South African oranges and Dutch tomatoes moldering in crates while the local landscape dries out as if under some obscure, virtually supernatural interdiction. In four linked stories, we see these migrants face off against their local persecutors and lose, caught between dignity and survival. Everyone is becoming unhinged, reduced to a constant inner monologue that bounces between panic, grandiosity, and moments of insight: \u201cPlanning for the past, feeling nostalgic for the future. Today gets caught in a vise between tomorrow and yesterday, and it writhes and dies.\u201d<\/p>\n The Tyranny of Metrics<\/em><\/strong>, by Jerry Z. Muller (Princeton University Press). The question of what does and doesn\u2019t count as \u201cknowledge\u201d is a hot potato in this dysfunctional political climate. Jerry Muller\u2019s important book deconstructs the tendency of organizations\u2014including universities\u2014to attribute unique authority to the numerical measurement of a certain set of achievements, outcomes, and practices. A pernicious result of the \u201ctyranny of metrics\u201d? The tail wags the dog: universities mold themselves to metrics instead of mission.<\/p>\n Citizens by Degree: Higher Education Policy and the Changing Gender Dynamics of American Citizenship<\/em><\/strong>, by Deondra Rose (Oxford University Press). Since the Second World War, women in the United States have made massive leaps in educational attainment, and the economic and political benefits that follow; since 1981, women have earned more college degrees than men. Rose offers a fascinating and entirely persuasive analysis of the function of US national higher education policy in redrawing the map of college access. Gender equity was an unintended consequence of policies that both redistributed and regulated access to educational resources.<\/p>\n Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom<\/em><\/strong>, by Joan Wallach Scott (Columbia University Press). The question of academic freedom lives right in the belly of faculty identity. In its ideal form, it represents the freedom of faculty to conduct research and teach in their areas of expertise, based on the assumption that the knowledge they produce contributes to a public good, and requires independence and professional self-regulation. Yet each component of that ideal is under assault right now\u2014including the meaning and function of universities themselves, the professional roles of their faculties, and the expectation that a civil society values knowledge as a public good. Scott provides a history of academic freedom in theory and in practice, and offers a bracing analysis on behalf of its strategic defense in an uncertain future.<\/p>\n How can I pick just three titles to celebrate from this past year\u2019s amazingly rich crop of children\u2019s books? May I instead imitate Lewis Carroll\u2019s Dodo, who exclaims that \u201cEverybody<\/em> has won, and all must have prizes\u201d?<\/p>\n If not, then here is slimmest list of picks I can provide. Picture books this year did a gorgeous job reminding us of all the brilliant women and people of color whose accomplishments too often get forgotten. Kwame Alexander and Kadir Nelson\u2019s powerful ode to The Undefeated<\/em><\/strong> (Versify, 2019)\u2014Black Americans who accomplished amazing things despite toxic social conditions\u2014is invigorating. But my personal favorites are two nonfiction titles that put singular creative women squarely in the spotlight: Anika Aldamuy Denise and Paola Escobar\u2019s Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura <\/em><\/strong>Belpr\u00e9<\/em><\/strong> (HarperCollins, 2019) and Mara Rockliff and Simona Ciraolo\u2019s Lights! Camera! Alice! The Thrilling True Adventures of the First Woman Filmmaker<\/em><\/strong> (Chronicle, 2018). Both of these books immerse readers into the particular cultural milieu that their subjects inhabited, using a mix of magically evocative language and illustrations that wittily deploy some of the same artistic techniques that these remarkable women helped to pioneer.<\/p>\n Rarely do I agree with the prize committee who hands out the Newbery Medal, but I was on board with their decision to honor Meg Medina\u2019s middle-grade novel Merci Su\u00e1rez Changes Gears<\/em><\/strong> (Candlewick, 2018), which paints a lively picture of how its 11-year-old Latina heroine navigates everyday life as a middle-schooler while also coping with a beloved relative\u2019s Alzheimer\u2019s diagnosis. More recently, I was blown away by Dactyl Hill Squad<\/em><\/strong> (Arthur A. Levine, 2018), the first installment of Daniel Jos\u00e9 Older\u2019s middle-grade fantasy series set in an alternate version of Civil War\u2013era New York. It stars a strong female heroine who grapples with historically accurate forms of prejudice while learning how to ride the dinosaurs that have somehow survived to roam the streets of Brooklyn.<\/p>\n My favorite young adult novels from this past year likewise feature a productively uneasy mix of realism and fantasy. Debut author Laura E. Weymouth\u2019s enchanting portal story, The Light between Worlds<\/strong><\/em> (HarperTeen, 2018), juxtaposes a Narnia-esque alternative world with post\u2013World War Two England and, in so doing, vividly evokes the pain of dislocation and depression. Similarly, national treasure A. S. King weaves a ghostly presence into her painfully realistic account of how rooted white supremacy and misogyny still are in a small Pennsylvania town: don\u2019t miss Dig<\/em><\/strong> (Dutton, 2019).<\/p>\n\n How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States<\/em><\/strong>, by Daniel Immerwahr (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In the 1890s, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced the definitive closing of the American frontier, putting an end to a cultural and geographic foundation of American society (Western expansion). Yet, five years after the Frontier Thesis was first articulated, the United States went to war with the ailing Spanish Empire, easily defeating it and picking up its colonies in the Caribbean and the Philippines. Immerwahr\u2019s engrossing history of America\u2019s \u201chidden\u201d empire will not be a clandestine surprise for those who have paid attention to expansionary impulses over the past century, but it is a beautifully detailed account of how it was achieved. How to Hide an Empire <\/em>is at its best when describing the way that soft power is deployed abroad through standards that American companies set and the dollarization of the world economy, making US influence in the world a feat of technocratic management with the implicit threat of military action.<\/p>\n Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution<\/em><\/strong>, by Priya Satia (Penguin Press). The irony of massive 18th-century fortunes amassed by British Quakers through the manufacture of firearms is the central theme of Satia\u2019s engrossing history. However, the case is not just treated as an interesting narrative tidbit to hang a global history on; rather, it directly informs the bold argument of the book: the success of the industrial revolution is intertwined with violence. Even when some critics recognized the Quakers\u2019 hypocrisy, it was too late; the latter argued that guns, and the killing that went with them, were an inescapable aspect of British society. Satia\u2019s examination of their refusal to make a moral choice about the manufacture of weapons provides a platform for discussing the wider acceptance of violence in society and the growing depersonalization of gun-based killing. This history could not have been written in a more pertinent moment for Americans to learn from.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation<\/em><\/strong>, by Imani Perry (Duke University Press). What is patriarchy? This question is at the heart of Vexy Thing<\/em>, but Perry does more than define patriarchy. She names it, identifies it, locates its global reach, examines its historical construction, and explores its present-day impact. Vexy Thing <\/em>does a lot and in a good way. It is a capacious work of black feminist theory that works through patriarchy\u2019s violence to imagine personhood, livability, and a more just world.<\/p>\n Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848\u20132016<\/em><\/strong>, edited by F\u00e9lix Germain and Silyane Larcher (University of Nebraska Press). This book\u2019s impressive timespan and extensive geography may, on the surface, be a function of the global reach of France\u2019s erstwhile empire. But in reality, it is a testament to the deep roots and transnational reach of black French women\u2019s activism. From South America to Europe and from Africa to the Antilles, this collection assembles a range of black French women\u2019s contributions to the global discourse on citizenship and belonging from the 19th century to our present moment.<\/p>\n Superstore<\/em><\/strong>, created by Justin Spitzer (NBC, 2015\u2013). Currently killing its fourth season (and recently renewed for a fifth), this consistently underrated single-camera sitcom, set in a fictional Walmart-esque hypermarket in St. Louis, offers a clearer vision of American corporate brutality than most anything else on TV. Cloud 9, whose name\u2019s irony is not lost on its jaded laborers, sells everything from diapers to guns. The corporation\u2019s employee health insurance packages have exorbitant deductibles and paid maternity leave is a pipe dream. Fronted by the acerbic Amy, played by real-life activist America Ferrera, the store\u2019s workers navigate tornadoes, puddles of vomit in aisle 14, affairs and infidelities, pregnancies, clogged toilets, suspicious moles, undocumented immigration statuses, the scourge of ableism, and more, all to the strains of the Muzak filtering down from the glare of the store\u2019s fluorescent track-lit ceiling. Unlike other major network sitcoms (ahem, Modern Family<\/em>), Superstore<\/em> eschews sentimentality. Perhaps the show\u2019s biting evocations of the capitalist sensorium awakened by Cloud 9\u2019s endless shelves of blinding commodities are too real for some viewers? Regardless, they\u2019re missing out, because this show is funny as hell.<\/p>\n Dirty John<\/em><\/strong>, created by Alexandra Cunningham (Bravo, 2018\u2013). In search of an antidote to the proliferation of true-crime shows that revel in recounting men\u2019s systematic destruction of women\u2019s lives with nary a mention of misogyny? Look no further than Alexandra Cunningham\u2019s Dirty John<\/em>, a new anthology series whose first season is based on the Los Angeles Times<\/em> podcast of the same name. Documented serial abuser John Meehan, skin-crawlingly portrayed by Eric Bana, worms his way into the affections of Debra Newell, a successful Orange County businesswoman who looks like she belongs on Real Housewives<\/em>, but really just wants someone to rub her feet at night and make her smoothies in the morning. Flawlessly acted by Connie Britton, Debra is seduced by John, who is too good to be true until he is too evil to be believed\u2014even by a desperate woman. The show chronicles nothing less than heteronormativity\u2019s violent embrace, a once-welcome hug from which it becomes near impossible for Debra to extricate herself. Luckily she has her two daughters to help her. These delightful young women may talk like they\u2019re from the Valley, but they fight like they\u2019re on The Walking Dead<\/em>. To find out how, you\u2019d better watch the show.<\/p>\n PEN15<\/em><\/strong>, created by Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle, and Sam Zvibleman (Hulu, 2019\u2013). Imagine the awkwardness of a show about middle school whose two oversexed protagonists are played by 30-something women. Then imagine that the rest of the kids on said show are actually portrayed by pubescent early teenagers. As you\u2019ve probably guessed, PEN15<\/em> is the show I have asked you to imagine. And it exists. And it is glorious. Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle costar as Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone, two besties surfing the vicissitudes of youth at the turn of the millennium. Together, they encounter masturbation, AOL Instant Messenger, thongs, and huffing. The results are both cringeworthy and hilarious. The duo also confront the casual sexism and racism of some of their fellow classmates, who are not too young to reproduce their parents\u2019 patriarchal white supremacy. In one memorable episode, several girls from school tell Maya that she can\u2019t act the part of Posh Spice in their Spice Girls\u2013themed group project, with the unsubtle implication being that she isn\u2019t white, so it wouldn\u2019t make sense. Erskine\u2019s adult revisitation of this scene performs trauma work through the medium of comedy\u2014which is what only the best comedy does.<\/p>\n Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl<\/em><\/strong>, by Andrea Lawlor (Vintage). People don\u2019t write enough about sex these days, IMHO. One of the many virtues of Lawlor\u2019s novel is its profusion of sex scenes: about one every 10 pages. (Take that, Henry Miller.) Another plus is their sheer variety, thanks to the book\u2019s premise: a shape-shifting protagonist who changes genders, looks, and roles as readily as the book\u2019s author moves between updated fairy tales and minutely observed realism.<\/p>\n Transcription<\/em><\/strong>, by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown). If you like your narrators the way I like my weather reports\u2014unreliable but gripping\u2014you will enjoy Atkinson\u2019s latest. Juliet Armstrong, who worked for MI5 during WWII, finds her past returning a decade later to dog her new life as a caustic BBC producer. The narrative deceives the reader as handily as its protagonist deceives those around her. One part Penelope Fitzgerald, one part John le Carr\u00e9, with a twist.<\/p>\n\n ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Lights-Camera-Alice-interior.jpg\")
Nicholas Dames<\/h4>\n
Literary Fiction<\/h5>\n
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Carolyn Dever<\/h4>\n
Higher Education<\/h4>\n
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Marah Gubar<\/h4>\n
Children\u2019s & Young Adult Literature<\/h5>\n
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<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n Public Picks 2018<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
Max Holleran<\/h4>\n
Urbanism<\/h5>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Planting-Stories-interior.jpg\")
Annette Joseph-Gabriel<\/h4>\n
Global Black History<\/h5>\n
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Sarah Kessler<\/h4>\n
TV<\/h5>\n
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Sharon Marcus<\/h4>\n
Editor in Chief<\/h5>\n
![\"Public](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/PICKSmay2017.001-e1495130471123-1000x600.jpg\")
<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Dirty-John-episode.jpg\")