I wonder sometimes, if I could just stay sleeping long enough, if I might wake up seventeen again; that time might flow backwards, and I would wake up back in that old life, with my childhood dog still alive, and my parents in their forties. Me, a teenager in a corduroy jacket, who could subsist on sourdough bread and hot chocolate and no sleep, or sleep for twelve hours straight if I wanted. A creature of ocean and forests, warm dry hillsides and cold wind; those days of diamond clarity, out on the Northern California coast, those windy, rainy, January nights, and where they sometimes deposited us; the coffee shop in town where I’m pretty sure the Gipsy Kings had been playing on a loop for years.

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I picked these leaves up off the ground in the Luxembourg Gardens the other day, where the gardeners were trimming the potted oleanders. I took them back to my apartment and set them on the wooden table next to a shiny brown chestnut and some pieces of its broken shell.

In the dark of the early morning I have started to spill the plastic bag of oil paints out onto the kitchen counter where the light is strongest. I don’t mix them in advance anymore, but do so right there on the palette with a brush. I don’t need those big piles of color the way I once did. I don’t need everything planned out, just to look, and see— the blue, the yellow, the red within the non-color, the unnameable colors that make up all the colors around us, all the grays and muddied reds or greens, the blues that are not really blue but violet, brown, a slurry color that reads as blue, and then, when all put together, describe a green plum with violet wax bloom and a blush of apricot.

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Hello and welcome to the fifth edition of The Book Supplement. Thank you for being here.

When I first launched this column back in early March, I did so without first securing funding to pay contributors, and without even knowing where said funding would come from week to week—other than my own grocery bill! Two months and five editions later, I still do…

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On a summer Monday several years ago, I went out in the July heat and made my way across the northern edge of the Jardin Nelson Mandela, the smell of chlorine wafting up through grates from the underground swimming pool. In an old building on the rue Coquillière, I passed through two sets of ancient wooden doors and then descended an absurdly narrow spiral staircase down to a basement recording studio. I was there to give an interview about the late poet Mary Oliver, who was my college writing teacher, academic advisor, and dare I say it, mentor. Pushkin Industries, a podcast and audiobook company, was in the process of making a book-length audio documentary about her, which has since been finished and can be found here. They wanted to speak to people who were inspired by her, who had known her, and former students of hers like myself.

Before the interview, the producer had asked me to prepare “two or three poems” of Mary’s that were meaningful to me. I chose two: “Rage” and “Tecumseh.” I chose “Rage” because it isn’t a very well known poem, even though it comes right before the extremely famous “Wild Geese” in her 1986 collection Dream Work. (In case you don’t remember “Wild Geese,” it’s the one that begins: “You do not have to be good…”).

“Rage” is important because without it—without its terrible, brutal specificity— poems like “Wild Geese” are taken out of context. This is one of those little things about the world that infuriates me, that people are always misunderstanding Mary Oliver, are bad readers of her, in fact, but there’s little I can do about it. In any case, “Rage” is the scorched internal landscape on which the “sun and the clear pebbles of the rain” from “Wild Geese” are falling. The dark sky of “Rage” is what clears to become “clean and blue,” with wild geese flying across it, “announcing your place in the family of things.” The story of “Rage” is the story of what happened to the “soft animal of the body,” of her body, before it found a way to simply “love what it loves.”

Rage

by Mary Oliver

You are the dark song
of the morning;
serious and slow,
you shave, you dress,
you descend the stairs
in your public clothes
and drive away, you become
the wise and powerful one
who makes all the days
possible in the world.
But you were also the red song
in the night,
stumbling through the house
to the child’s bed,
to the damp rose of her body,
leaving your bitter taste.
And forever those nights snarl
the delicate machinery of the days.
When the child’s mother smiles
you see on her cheekbones
a truth you will never confess;
and you see how the child grows–
timidly, crouching in corners.
Sometimes in the wide night
you hear the most mournful cry,
a ravished and terrible moment.
In your dreams she’s a tree
that will never come to leaf–
in your dreams she’s a watch
you dropped on the dark stones
till no one could gather the fragments–
in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,
and dreams do not lie.

(from Dream Work)

I first read this poem when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. There was a lot of difficulty and darkness going on in my own life then. I didn’t relate to the specific narrative—that’s not what happened to me, other things did—but the poem’s images have stayed with me for decades. Those terrible things that snarl the delicate machinery of our days. That dream logic, of the watch dropped on the stones till no one could gather the fragments. I knew that it was a personal poem, hidden in the second and third person; that you, that she.

I feel a lot of frustration when people in the literary world, who don’t really seem to know anything about Mary, don’t know about “Rage” or where it came from, talk about her like she’s just some kind of Goop-ified Instagram poet. It’s as if even ostensibly well-educated people forget that Pulizer-prize winning poets have published books, and that those books are available, and that you can read them, and might wish to do so before commenting publicly. I always assume that these people who don’t understand Mary, who say insulting things about her, only know her poems because they heard someone read excerpts of them out loud at the end of a yoga class.

This was especially difficult just after she died. Several people have written more or less the same essay, again and again over the years, the thesis of which is “I thought Mary Oliver poetry must be stupid, because lots of people liked it, but then it turned out I was wrong.” Everyone craves authenticity, and yet when someone is as nakedly earnest as Mary was, a certain kind of person can find that hard to deal with. Mary was private. Very private. And on the blank outer wall of that privacy, lazy images were projected. In a world of oversharing and the attention economy, a desire for privacy is suspect. But her desire for privacy came from some historically significant places. The benevolent grandmother of their condescending fantasies had nothing to do with the real woman I had known and loved, this weathered, chain-smoking lesbian who counted among her closest friends the filmmaker John Waters.

I was surprised by how many personal questions I was asked during the course of the interview by Pushkin. Who was I when I arrived in Mary’s classes at the age of eighteen? How did I relate to the physical landscape where I grew up? What did I think of the resonance between the darkness in Mary’s childhood and the one in my own? I had just spent a month caring for my beloved, ill father, and was not in the best or most optimistic frame of mind. Perhaps I should have refused the interview, but I wanted people to know more about Mary’s depths, and feared that a project like this might overlook them.

The second poem I had prepared, “Tecumseh,” is from the 1983 collection American Primitive.

Tecumseh

by Mary Oliver

I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there’s a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that’s
forgetting what we should never forget.
Tecumseh lived here.
The wounds of the past
are ignored, but hang on
like the litter that snags on the yellow branches
newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.

Where are the Shawnee now?
Do you know? Or would you have to write
to Washington, and even then
whatever they said,
would you believe them? Sometimes

I would like to paint my body red and go out into
the glittering snow
to die.

His name meant Shooting Star.
From Mad River country north to the border
he gathered the tribes
and armed them one more time. He vowed
to keep Ohio and it took him
over twenty years to fail.

After the bloody and final fighting at Thames
it was over, except
his body could not be found.
It was never found
and you can do whatever you want with that, say

his people came in the black leaves of the night,
and hauled him to a secret grave, or that
he turned into a little boy again, and leaped
into a birch canoe and went
rowing home again down the rivers. Anyway,
this much I’m sure of: if we ever meet him, we’ll know it,
he will still be
so angry.

The whole interview ended up feeling quite emotional for me. We talked a lot about time and death. I hadn’t really thought beforehand about the fact that I had chosen two dark poems, and both of them with a kind of violence at the center. They had just seemed important to me, if one wanted to understand Mary’s core themes.

“Tecumseh” was an important poem to me in high school, long before it became fashionable for white people to announce on which stolen tribal lands they were about to enjoy a Thanksgiving dinner. Even today, whenever I read it aloud to someone, I will sometimes feel tears well up. It’s that set up: he vowed to keep Ohio and it took him over twenty years to fail.

I ended up reading a third poem as well, which I hadn’t prepared, called “The Kookaburas,” from her 1992 collection New and Selected Poems. I hadn’t even remembered much about it except that there were kookaburras in it, and that it had given me this unsettled, unnamable feeling, which had stayed with me through the decades, and which came up in the interview.

The Kookaburras

by Mary Oliver

In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to stride out of a cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, pressed against the edge of their cage,
asked me to open the door.
Years later I remember how I didn’t do it,
how instead I walked away.
They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.
They didn’t want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly
home to their river.
By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.
As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.
Nothing else has changed either.
Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.
The sun shines on the latch of their cage.
I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.

We talked about regret, about how the things we regret the most, the things that haunt us, are the things we’ve done or failed to do out of our own weakness. Absorbed in our own dramas, avoiding our own fears, we can barely stand to look at the evil we do through inattention; the ways in which we become the worst versions of ourselves.

In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator. The interviewer asked me how I try to be, instead, “a god of flowers.” I struggled with that. In the poem, Mary herself said that even she was not yet a god of even the palest flowers. I didn’t know how to answer, because I don’t know that I did try to do such a thing—attempt to be a god, and a god of flowers at that. The interviewer—whose voice has been completely removed from the audiobook’s final draft, I never spoke to the official narrator, Sophia Bush—kept wanting me to speak in the first person, to say what I myself do. But it didn’t feel natural. I’m not sure that I do see things like that, or that I had meant to apply my ideas about Mary’s poems to my own personal experience. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure that a “god of flowers” is something that anyone can strive to become, or that one exists, “just waiting” in the heart of everyone. It’s possible that I didn’t really understand the question.

At the end of the interview, which I wasn’t paid for, I emerged back into the sunny, bright, chlorine-smelling world, feeling as if I had time-traveled. I could get nothing done for the rest of the day. The interview felt like it went well, or I hoped that it did. When I finally heard the finished product, my own segment made me flinch. It was strange to discover the specific way in which our wide-ranging, two-hour conversation had been whittled down into a few specific minutes. I regretted my modesty. When they asked me for a bio, I told them to just say I was a writer, before later discovering that every other author they interviewed had asked them to plug their books by name. I thought it made me come across as unprofessional, but oh well. More and more I find myself valuing my privacy, and am hesitant to break the seal.

A version of this essay was originally published in 2022.

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For a while now, probably since the heightened isolation of the Covid lockdowns, I have been having fantasies about a raucous Parisian brasserie filled with artists and writers. They—or should I say, we—could meet there, say, every Thursday night. I might turn to a fellow writer and say, hey, have you read the latest essay by ———? And then we could talk about it. Maybe I liked it, maybe they didn’t. Maybe the writer of the essay themselves would walk in, and then we could all discuss it together—agreeing, disagreeing, agreeing to disagree, and all of it relatively amiable.

A brasserie of artists—it sounds like a collective noun, like a murder of crows or a book club of aunts. I think that artists and writers need a place to discuss things and sometimes to disagree, and that place probably isn’t social media. So far, in the fifteen years or so that these virtual spaces have existed and been dominant, social media has had a way of turning any disagreement into something hostile. But disagreement, whether through a difference of taste, or a misunderstanding that could be righted, a point of view that can be changed, is an extremely important part of intellectual life.

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Hello and welcome to the fourth issue of The Book Supplement.

If you appreciate this coverage and want to see more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Every little bit helps to keep this going.

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In this issue:

A ROOM IN BOMBAY, by Manil Suri

A SPLINTERING, by Dur e Aziz Amna

THE EVOLUTION OF FIRE: Essays on Crisis and Becoming, by Angela Pelster

ATTENTION: Writing on Life, Art, and the World, by Anne Enright

All titles can be found here.

A ROOM IN BOMBAY: A Memoir, by Manil Suri

W. W. Norton & Co.; 304 pages; $29.99 US Hardback

“One can never come back home, but one can also never truly get away,” novelist Manil Suri writes in his evocative new memoir. His parents are bound to the titular room in a Bombay apartment by real-estate pressure and the fallacy of sunk costs. Suri’s father, a Bollywood music director, and his mother, once a secretary to Indira Gandhi, share this single room with their son from the day he is born until he leaves to attend graduate school in the United States. Although his mother’s family lived in a stately mansion in Rawalpindi prior to Partition, by the time Suri is born, they are “teetering on the line between middle class and poor.”

In a dynamic that will be familiar to fans of Suri’s award-winning debut novel, The Death of Vishnu, the Hindu Suris battle constantly for bathroom and kitchen privileges with their Muslim landlords, the Jaffers, as well as with the other tenants. Still, Suri has pleasant memories too, like the trance-like Sufi Qawwali music sessions held in the main room of the apartment, and playing with the Jaffers’ son during the Hindu festival of Holi, when the two boys would gleefully splatter each other with colored powder.

In Suri’s fiction, he deploys an omniscient narrative voice with finesse; here our narrator cannot presume to know the minds of others, and must maintain a respectful distance. Conflicting points of view must be jettisoned, but Suri writes with the same confidence that characterizes his novels. What results is a book largely about the relationship between parent and child, and the lifelong pull of one’s childhood home, as well as its limitations.

Early sections of the book function as a coming-of-age story set in the tumult of urban, twentieth-century India. Pivotally, Suri comes to understand that being gay is part of his core identity. Thanks to the early reassurances (however mistaken) of his Freud-reading mother that it was just a passing phase, he avoids the “taint of abnormality” that might otherwise have hung over him. Thus Freud manages to “perform therapy from beyond the grave,” Suri writes. Later chapters see Suri as a grown man and expat, torn between faraway parents and his new life abroad. Despite living comfortably in America as a mathematics professor, and eventually as a celebrated novelist, he is called back again and again to that room in Bombay, to care for his parents as they age.

Fluid and compelling, this heartfelt narrative—cleverly tied to the humble room at the center of his life, which takes on mythic proportions—is ultimately about the ways we fail the people we love, the imperfect narratives that real life has to offer, and how to reconcile with this reality. Suri pulls off a magic trick here: even though we know where this must all be going, we still can’t help turning the pages to see what happens next.

—Summer Brennan

Also by Manil Suri: The Big Bang of Numbers, The City of Devi, The Age of Shiva, and The Death of Vishnu.

A SPLINTERING, by Dur e Aziz Amna

Dzanc; ‎ 232 pages; $17.95 US Paperback

Tara, our narrator, starts with a confession: “I am what some call an unrelatable character, and I have done something unthinkable.” Her life is rife with problems: a devastatingly poor family in rural Pakistan, domineering male relatives, tumultuous national politics, and a simmering sense of rage. When her older brother declares her school to be a “den of whores” and forbids his sisters from going, Tara refuses to quit, sparking lifelong friction.

Despite her brother’s disapproval, Tara manages to get married and move to Islamabad, where her initial elation soon gives way to malaise. She still wants more, even though there is “no socially sanctioned way” to achieve it. When a chance opportunity shows how she might get rich, things change—radically. This turning point may be what makes her “unrelatable,” but it is also where the narrative picks up speed. Set against the backdrop of Benazir Bhutto’s 2007 assassination, the inevitable results of her actions follow like so many dominos falling, not so unthinkable after all.

In this well-written and fast-paced sophomore effort, we are carried along by Tara’s relentlessness much as the people of Pakistan are swept along and buffeted by political strife. When Benazir Bhutto is killed, Tara thinks it wasn’t hard “to erase a woman who had taken such risks,” and we wonder if Bhutto’s fate will be Tara’s own. As both national and family politics descend into chaos, Tara is confronted by the consequences of her choices.

The curse—and blessing—of female rage lies in its transformative power, which is not always controlled by the one who wields it. More family drama than political thriller, A Splintering nonetheless portrays a woman with unabashed ambition who decides to act on it, something which is, in fact, more often than not, a political act.

—Deborah L. Williams

Originally published by Duckworth in the UK; winner of the 2026 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award.

Also by Dur e Aziz Amna: American Fever.

THE EVOLUTION OF FIRE: Essays on Crisis and Becoming, by Angela Pelster

Milkweed Editions; 184 pages; $20.00 US Paperback

Angela Pelster opens her searing new collection with an epigraph from Bertolt Brecht: “To those who do not know the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.” But fear not—this is no preachy polemic. We begin in the rural Alberta of Pelster’s childhood, with its dual pitfalls of drugs and religion. Her family likes to break into houses under construction on Sundays, pretending they are going to live there. They attend a church that may or may not believe in evolution, but the world they inhabit has the same rules: adapt, or go extinct.

The core metaphor in these engaging, memoiristic essays is fire. Fodder for the pyre: a marriage, a religion, a family, the stories we tell and believe about ourselves and others. There is fire as trial and fire as disaster, fire as human nature and fire as the things we can’t control. The central essay deals with the end of a relationship, a creative awakening, and a literal house fire. We barely notice her sleight of hand when “I” becomes “she.”

“A body doesn’t make a conscious decision to evolve,” Pelster writes. “She knows. It’s the crisis the body finds itself in that forces the change.”

Pelster’s imagery is haunting: we see a home with everything in its place, everything quiet, sweet- pea seeds soaking on the counter in the moonlight—just before a spreading conflagration burns it all to the ground. Even the aquatic somehow invokes the metaphor of burning. Of froglets caught as tadpoles by the small hands of children, poured back into ponds once they are grown, Pelster writes: “They grabbed for one another as they fell, arms outstretched, like sisters in the dark, like fire reaches for fire, the warmth of another flame.”

What starts with the personal and immediate eventually tunnels down and out to address all of existence. There is a meditation on diaries and the political nature of archives, how they shape the story of the past not just by what is included, but by what someone has chosen to omit.

Certain later essays can feel caught up in the net of their own poetry, and might have benefited from further untangling; occasionally, flights of incantatory syntax might cause some readers to stumble. Even so, any hindrance is minimal. Pelster never strays too far from the personal and the specific, which is where her flickering prose shines brightest.

—Summer Brennan

Also by Angela Pelster: Limber and The Curious Adventures of India Sophia.

ATTENTION: Writing on Life, Art, and the World, by Anne Enright

W. W. Norton & Co.; 288 pages; $29.99 US Hardcover

In Anne Enright’s searching new collection of essays about reading and writing, she takes on the world of literature, with women and the injustices they are subjected to her persistent theme. Adapted from various talks and articles, with introductions by the author for context, Enright jousts with Joyce and provides a survey of women writers from Toni Morrison to Edna O’Brien, all served with her signature humor and wit: “Maeve Brennan didn’t have to be a woman for her work to be forgotten, though it surely helped.”

Readers do not have to be familiar with the authors Enright writes about in order to enjoy her essays, although they might be left with the urge to run out and read them. She grapples with the tragedy of Ireland’s Mother and Baby homes, and the ambiguities of the MeToo movement—where was the line between predators and run-of-the-mill philanderers and scoundrels, and who was to decide? Many of the essays are funny—“Indeed, a long marriage is, in itself, a lot like Beckett”—while several hint at a contemporary crisis of sexuality, but as practice, not identity. Here, as elsewhere, Enright’s sense of humor is a delight: “I don’t know if tomorrow sex will be good again, but I do know that yesterday it was fantastic.”

The book is a persuasive argument for reading, and for paying attention when you do: “Fiction is, or should be, ‘transporting’: this immersive state is not something you can enter and exit every two minutes to check dog videos and the progress of the war in Ukraine.” Thought-provoking and gloriously intelligent, Attention is that rare literary work that is equally erudite and fluent. Though its pleasures are more straightforward, readers who manage to follow Enright’s prescription might have an experience similar to hers on first reading Joyce. “For me, at fourteen, it was like mainlining language, getting high on words, just the pleasure of them, their intricacies and density.”

—Summer Brennan

Originally published by Jonathan Cape in the UK in 2025 .

Also by Anne Enright: The Portable Virgin, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, Making Babies, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, The Gathering, Taking Pictures, Yesterday’s Weather, The Forgotten Waltz, The Green Road, Actress, and The Wren, the Wren.

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Editor: Summer Brennan

Copy Editor: Howard Mittelmark

Guest reviewer: , author of The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction, has written for The New York Times, The Rumpus, Brevity, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.

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When I was in college, I studied playwriting with a memorable instructor, the novelist, playwright, and commercial Maine fisherman Gladden Schrock. Gladden was something of a character, a kind of mythical figure on campus. He doled out cryptic, twinkly wisdom while exuding an extremely masculine, weathered vibe. His classes were fun, and he peppered his critiques of our work with Gladden-specific phrases, the most famous of which was probably the concept of “the eight-foot bear.”

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I am a writer, but once upon a time I was also an artist. I studied painting as an undergraduate, and maintained some form of modest studio practice until I was in my early thirties. Sometimes all that meant was that a corner of my bedroom or apartment was devoted to canvases and glass palettes, their edges blunted by masking tape. Newspapers or drop cloths were spread across the floor. For a long time there was always a pair of jeans ruined by slashes of gesso and careless daubs of color, the places where I wiped my palette knife, hanging on a hook. There was the mineral smell of pigments, cobalts and cadmiums, and the lintseeds and turpentines I used to thin them, an eau de studio which clung to my winter coats.

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I must confess that I am a creature of habit. I like exploring, but I thrive on routine. Like Gustave Flaubert, I ascribe to the idea of being “regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”1 To this end, I like taking the same walk every day.

Of course, whether in a city or the country, even the same walk isn’t always the same. Every day, things change. The weather, the people, the plants, the animals. There are always surprises.

As I settle back into Parisian life, or rather, as I try to—so far I’m not having much luck—I’m trying to reconnect with my habits. When my life is functioning well, I usually try to go for a walk every day for my physical and mental health. Most days, without thinking, I take some variation of the same one-hour loop.

In a recent post, I believe I mentioned that I live in the Marais near Les Halles. There are many wonderful culinary shops in the neighborhood, and sometimes I go inside one of them to look. Someday I’d like to find out what kind of desserts I can make with yuzu, violet, or poppy flavoring. I wonder, does the poppy taste like poppy seeds? Or like the flower? I wouldn’t mind trying to make a madeleine the size of a child’s head (mould pictured above), perhaps for a Proust-themed dinner party. Maybe one flavored with jasmine or rose?

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Yesterday on the rainy market street I bought a bouquet of lilacs wrapped in packing tape. The flower seller spoke neither French nor English. In a cardboard box at his feet he had the bouquets arranged with no water; daffodils in various hues, and the lilacs. They are the kind of lilacs one might steal from a public park or a roadside, which is surely where these came from.

Almost every day I see them, these young men, selling their stolen flowers. The bug-eaten petals that probably looked better under cover of darkness. Good or bad, I encourage this enterprise with my crumpled five euro notes.

I can see them there, in the spring night, the river of headlights and taillights flashing white and red over them as they gather the goods in the rain. This city and its suburbs coming into flower, awash in a language they don’t know.

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Hello and welcome to the third issue of The Book Supplement.

If you appreciate this coverage and want to see more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your subscriptions go directly to paying freelance critics. Even a few dollars a month will help keep this going.

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In this issue:

SALT LAKES: An Unnatural History, by Caroline Tracey

YESTERYEAR, by Caro Claire Burke

EL PASO: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, by Jazmine Ulloa

LIPSTICK, by Eileen G’Sell

All titles can be found here.

SALT LAKES: An Unnatural History, by Caroline Tracey

W.W. Norton & Company; 272 pages; $31.99 US Hardback

At first, I found the lakes of the American Southwest vaguely uncanny, ultra-blue and surrounded by stone, perfect mirrors of the surrounding mesas, the troubled New Mexico skies. They were nothing like the lakes I grew up with, the tea-colored, pine-scented waters of upstate New York and rural Massachusetts. I fell in love immediately with the quiet colors of the desert and the rich, warm scents of the high, arid forests, but the lakes took time to understand. They are so conspicuously altered by humanity; one couldn’t pretend at any romanticized relationship between human and landscape. Our handprints are everywhere, our signature of death writ so clearly on their dusty, shallow beds.

Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, by writer and geographer Caroline Tracey, presents an alternative way of reading these bodies of water, not as sites of defeat and self-flagellation, but places of resilience and hope. This engaging, genre-crossing book—it could be shelved under nature writing, travelogue, memoir, or history—is part of a growing movement that rails against our dominant understanding of nature. For too long, bodies of water (and plants and animals) have been defined by their use-value, their ability to “serve” human flourishing. We’ve used our scientific understanding to quantify their significance, rendering them as dull and flat as any economic actor. But Tracey joins authors like Andreas Weber, Robert MacFarlane, and Robin Wall Kimmerer in arguing that the natural world deserves more than that. Rivers can be alive, plants can be kin, and salt lakes can be queered.

Before Tracey can begin making her greater argument about queer ecology, she first must prove that salt lakes are worthy of all this attention. Over the course of a decade, she visits a number of these ecosystems, traveling from Utah to Kazakhstan to Mexico. “People often refer to salt lakes as ‘dead,’ inferring that they are absent of life. But the lakes overflow with life—just in specific, small forms,” she writes. Not only are they fascinating studies of life finding its improbable, briny way, they’re also jaw-droppingly lovely (at least to Tracey). This matters, too: “Our earthly future, I knew deeply and resolutely, depended on loving the lakes in all their mysterious, freakish, sacred beauty.” To embrace a place like California’s Salton Sea is challenging but vital. From these strange, disturbed places, we can learn to accept the damage we’ve done to the natural order of things and begin reparations.

Throughout the book, Tracey weaves in stories from her own love life, which are intended to help bolster the point that salt lakes fall under the purview of queer ecology. “As a perspective on landscapes, queer ecology is often used to denote places that are denigrated, unruly, and inhabited by unusual, improbable groupings of species,” she explains. Sometimes this works, like when she describes falling in love with her wife, set against the backdrop of Mexico City’s marshy Texcoco Lake. In other instances, as in her chapters spent with a former boyfriend, the results are less compelling. Overall, Salt Lakes is a strong debut and a valiant attempt to play with form. When her writing sings, as it does when she’s describing her rough-and-tumble encounters with ranching, it does so clearly, with voice and heart.

—Katy Kelleher

SALT LAKES is Caroline Tracey’s first book.

YESTERYEAR, by Caro Claire Burke

Knopf; 400 pages; $30.00 US Hardcover; $14.99 eBook

Natalie Heller Mills is an American mother of six who has built her social-media fame posting about her picture-perfect homesteading lifestyle on a 500-acre Idaho farm. What her millions of followers (whom she dubs “Angry Women”) don’t know, is that her life—complete with detached children and checked-out husband—is a carefully curated facade propped up by a host of off-camera assistants. But Natalie’s world is shattered when she inexplicably wakes up one morning on an early-nineteenth-century version of her farm, and must struggle to return to the present day.

The narrative alternates between this struggle and interludes in which she recalls her devout Christian upbringing; her full-ride education at Harvard; her lackluster marriage to a wealthy, right-wing politician’s son (a “fairy-tale fever dream of a man-child”); her risky investment in the farm; and the escalating measures she must take to uphold the image of a traditional family.

Caro Claire Burke packages her story like the glossy social-media posts of her indelible antihero, and the satire is clear: Natalie is a thinly veiled version of Instagram influencer Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm. Burke uses the page-turning trappings of a thriller to launch a blistering takedown of America’s current ideological climate, exploring political radicalization, religious psychosis, parasocial relationships, child exploitation, and the performance of womanhood.

Yesteryear’s reputation precedes it: Knopf won the manuscript in a fifteen-publisher bidding war, and Amazon MGM Studios secured the film rights. Anne Hathaway is set to produce and star. That’s plenty of pre-pub pressure for any author, let alone a first-timer, but however high the expectations, they are handily met by Burke’s propulsive, timely debut.

— Katie Calautti

YESTERYEAR is Caro Claire Burke’s first book.

EL PASO: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, by Jazmine Ulloa

Dutton; 352 pages; $30.00 US Hardcover

As New York Times journalist Jazmine Ulloa writes in her debut: “The inability of Americans to confront the uglier side of our history, to tell our story honestly—to remember the origins, both rich and violent, that made El Paso and thus our nation—appeared to me to be at the core of the cycle of violence, with blood spilled in defense of one of its deadliest myths: that such a pure white culture had ever existed on land so brown.”

Beginning with the 2019 mass murder of people presumed to be Mexican at a Walmart by a white nationalist in her hometown of El Paso in 2019, Ulloa explores twin themes of violence and the American dream. As we follow the lives of five families from the nineteenth century to the present, including individuals of Chinese and Guatemalan as well as Mexican descent, this work of literary nonfiction evokes the feel and pull of an epic, generation-spanning novel. Drawing on interviews, archives, academic scholarship, and other reporting, Ulloa constructs a narrative history of El Paso, the US-Mexico borderlands, and immigration that is both beautiful and heartbreaking.

After returning home to report on the 2019 Walmart massacre, Ulloa begins to suspect that the story of El Paso is central to the story of America itself. She becomes certain while covering the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as rioters carrying Confederate flags and Nazi insignia seize the building, and security guards sweep reporters (including Ulloa) and members of Congress away via underground passages. From a prologue that recounts the story of the child heroes of Chapultepec, martyred while defending Mexico City from the invading U.S. military in 1847, to the detention of immigrant children separated from their families in 2018, Ulloa invests her subjects with a sense of urgency and meaning.

In this newly revealed America that has long existed beside the old, she positions her hometown as a kind of modern-day Ellis Island. “El Paso is alive. It breathes and heaves with human life. Your poor and huddled masses. Your staunch conservatives. Your rebels and living saints. Your Border Patrol officers and paisanos. And you and me.” It is a point of entry with a difference, though. Here, as history shows, migrants are both drawn in and deported, destined to be “watched, bound, and shackled.” This is a story that transcends the US-Mexico border, with something fundamental to tell us about America itself.

El Paso is written for two audiences: Latinx communities like those found in El Paso, as well as readers in the broader America that has so often excluded them. This ambitious portrait of a nation, told through the assemblage and juxtaposition of diverse, individual lives, culminates in something truly impressive that is more than the sum of its parts.

— Michael L. Trujillo

EL PASO is Jazmine Ulloa’s first book.

LIPSTICK: An Object Lesson, by Eileen G’Sell

Bloomsbury Academic; 200 pages; $14.95 US Paperback; $13.45 eBook

Foundation conceals. Mascara enhances. But lipstick? Lipstick transforms.

That’s the premise of Eileen G’Sell’s brilliant ode to the most conspicuous of cosmetics, one of several recent volumes in Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series. Like the other books in this collection, Lipstick offers a radical perspective on something ordinary, or in this case, iconic. After all, has there ever been a more potent—or fraught—symbol of femininity than an (ironically phallic) tube of lipstick?

Sure, a painted mouth can make one more beautiful or alluring, but it also has the power to shock, repulse, challenge, titillate, disturb, and as G’Sell puts it, “knock gender norms off balance.” It may be “a small luxury,” she writes, “but its power of reinvention is positively epic.”

G’Sell—a poet and critic who teaches creative writing at Washington University of St. Louis—discovered lipstick’s transformative power early in life. At eight years old, her first job involved delivering Avon catalogs to her neighbors’ doorsteps. Even better than the three to four dollars she earned per route were the free lipstick samples she received as part of her compensation. But lipstick didn’t turn G’Sell into a beauty. She was still bullied for her “hairy legs,” her “uneven bangs,” and her “off-brand denim,” but lipstick did obliterate her “meek façade.”

“I became transfixed at how I could transform myself with a careful swipe of a lipstick tube,” she writes.

Is lipstick inherently feminine? In much of the ancient world, a painted pout said more about your economic status than your gender. Second-wave feminists maligned lipstick as a tool of the patriarchy and a capitulation to the male gaze, yet G’Sell shows us how different individuals—male, female, nonbinary, cis, trans—have used lipstick to subvert or destabilize that gaze, from Madonna to Courtney Love, Janelle Monet to Chappell Roan (whose theatrical makeup owes a debt to drag).

Gen Z appreciates lipstick’s slippery quality. In the US, nearly 30 percent of them identify as “queer,” while 40 percent say they don’t see gender as binary. These young people buy more lipstick than any other demographic. To them, lipstick is not a requirement of femininity, something to conform to or rebel against—they feel free to use it as a tool of self-expression and reinvention.

G’Sell’s reflections on this controversial tool of artifice is not a definitive history, but rather a rousing manifesto. “Lipstick’s possibilities should be available to anyone curious,” she concludes. “May a femme-friendlier future welcome that pleasure.”

— Raquel Laneri

Other titles by Eileen G’Sell: Life After Rugby and Francofilaments.

Other recent Object Lessons books include: Microphone by Ralph Jones, Snack by Eurie Dahn, Stock Photo by Simona Supekar, and Ballot by Anjali Enjeti.

Masthead

Editor: Summer Brennan

Contributing Editor: Howard Mittelmark

Guest reviewers: is the author of The Ugly History of Beautiful Things; her nature writing has appeared in National Geographic, Nautilus Magazine, and The Paris Review. is a writer, bookseller, medium, and cemetery historian. Michael L. Trujillo, author of Land of Disenchantment, is the Associate Chair of Chicana/o Studies at the University of New Mexico. is a journalist and critic who writes the newsletter Wearable Art.

Correction: An earlier version of this article imprecisely stated that Lipstick was Eileen G’Sell’s first book. In fact it is her first book that is not a poetry collection.

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Once upon a time, I created this section of the newsletter after a nice weekend walk to the Luxembourg Gardens and back, but then never followed up with it. Now I am back home after several months away—stressful, hard, sad months—and seeing the city with fresher eyes once again. It’s nice to pay attention to one’s surroundings and to share the things one notices, especially when the world is in such a dark place. I used to share these things with my parents, whom I often called when I was out for walks, but now, having just lost them both, I can’t do that anymore. Maybe I can share these things with you all instead.

I had gotten into Paris in the late afternoon of the previous day, riding in from Orly in the back of a cab. I saw that the trees along the river were coming into leaf. The pink blossoms on the cherry trees were already starting. I appear to have missed the magnolias.

That evening, I managed to get some necessities from around my neighborhood in the Marais—pick up medications, pay my Internet bill—but the next day I decided to venture further afield to a pharmacy on the Left Bank that stocks some of the hair products I use. After several months in the States, I am fresh out of all my French things.

Starting out on my walk, I noticed the number of businesses in my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that have recently closed. The cobbler is slated to become an upscale eyeglasses store. The smaller of three pharmacies is now a fancy skincare boutique. The toy store and the bike shop have both closed as well. Thankfully, the fishmonger that had closed in the summer has since reopened as a new fishmonger’s, with the same people working there, including the same strappingly handsome older guy with a white ponytail and white beard who looks like the mascot of a fish stick company1.

I used to be friends with one of the local tailors, around the corner from the fishmonger’s. He was from Turkey, and not very old, maybe about fifty. He fixed the holes in my jeans, and one day he grabbed me as I was passing one of the café terraces and bought me a hot chocolate. After that we would greet each other warmly whenever we passed in the street. His name was Kemal. About a year or so ago I noticed that his shop was closed more and more often. Someone in the neighborhood told me that Kemal had stomach cancer. I would see him sitting on the local café terraces, alone. I would wave and say hello, ask how he was, but he always looked so sad. I don’t know if he went back to Turkey or if something worse has happened. I will ask around.

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