The Antidote, by Karen Russell: Sparkling with Life and Originality

Karen Russell's new novel The Antidote is absolutely freaking brilliant. It's a novel about injustice, which though set in the 1930s Dust Bowl, sparkles with life and originality. Truly, only Karen Russell could've written this novel. 

But let me back up a second: I set sail on this novel with some trepidation. Honestly, when this novel came out, it wasn't one I was seriously considering reading. And despite the many glowing reviews, despite other writer posting quotes from the novel online and breathlessly explaining that this book was blowing their minds, and despite the fact that I've loved Karen Russell's short stories, I still wasn't sure if a 400-plus-page novel about a small town in Oklahoma in the 1930s was a wise reading choice. (Also...Swamplandia! -- Russell's first novel -- was reading agony for me.) 

I present all this simply as a peek inside the mind of a sometimes very indecisive, risk-averse reader. 😅 But...it was a risk that paid off immensely. 

The eponymous Antidote in this novel is a character -- her real name is Antonina Rossi, but she also refers to herself as The Prairie Witch. She's what's known in the world of this novel as a Vault -- she takes "deposits" of people's memories, and stores them until they're ready to withdraw them. This helps people sleep at night, basically. But the problem is that during a huge dust storm at the beginning of the novel, somehow The Antidote's vault has been cleaned out. She doesn't know why, and she doesn't know how to get the deposited memories back. This is a big problem, to say the least. 

Why this is a big problem for The Prairie Witch is the meat of this story, which is also about a farmer named Harp Oletsky whose crops are the only ones in the area growing (why!?), and Harp's niece Dell who loves to play basketball ... oh, and a possibly sentient scarecrow. There's a shady and corrupt sheriff (who might remind you a bit of a corrupt contemporary leader for whom justice is a punchline), a possible serial killer, and a Black photographer from Washington, D.C. who finds herself all mixed up in the small-town doings. 

Russell alternates between the points of view of these characters, seamlessly intertwining (hugely important) backstory with present plot, into a story that examines injustice related to Native American land, police authority and overreach, racism, immigrant treatment, and so much more. My go-to line about historical fiction: The best historical fiction echoes clearly in today's world, and this novel certainly does that. 

I've been thinking about this novel for more than a month now, thinking about what to write about it. It won't leave me, and I'm still not sure I'm thinking coherently about it, except for this: I'm pretty sure this is my favorite novel of the year so far. Possibly a new classic. Watch for this on the end-of-year awards lists for sure. If, like me, you have been on the fence, I wholeheartedly implore you to give it a shot. 

Shelf Lives, Vol 3: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

In the spring of 2012, as a fledgling books website called Book Riot was just getting its legs, one of its leaders, Rebecca Joines Schinsky, began evangelizing for a yet-to-be-published thriller titled Gone Girl by a little-known writer named Gillian Flynn. Rebecca repeatedly professed to the Book Riot team and anyone who would listen on Twitter that Gone Girl was destined for greatness.

Was she right, or WAS SHE RIGHT?! Gone Girl published on June 5, 2012, and absolutely exploded. Rebecca is VERY RARELY wrong. 

But here's another strand of this story: Book Expo America, the book industry's (now defunct) annual gathering, was held in New York City June 5-7 that year, and I got to go. It was the first time many of the Book Riot contributors got to meet in person. I remember walking into Javits that first time with my press pass for Book Riot, looking around, and thinking, man, this is the life for me. Surround by writers and books. Talking with book people. This. Is. IT!

But so, Gone Girl was the absolute belle of that ball -- both at the BEA conference generally, and for all the Book Riot contributors specifically. The buzz was palpable. Everyone was talking about it. 

As soon as I got home from that trip, I bought and read Gone Girl my first free moments. (Here's my full review, and here's one quote from that piece if you don't care to read the whole thing: "When I finished this book it felt like my brain had curled up in a ball, mewling, like a kicked puppy.") 

That's my original hardcover copy I'm holding in the photo above. It IS a first edition. Anyone know if that's worth anything? 😅

For the rest of the summer, I couldn't shut up about Gone Girl either. No need explaining here how successful that book went on to be, or how it launched its own cottage industry of copy cat book titles and thrillers with alternating perspectives of unreliable narrators.

Recently, as I began thinking about these books on my shelf that have stood the test of time, I realized how crucial both Gone Girl, and Gone Girl Summer, have been in my life as a reader, writer, and general book nerd. That book and that summer were a turning point for me. Writing for Book Riot, and being surround constantly by book people, was what I knew I wanted to do. The worst advice someone ever gave me was don't do what you love professionally because it'll ruin it. That summer is when I realized how absolutely asinine that idea is. 

It took a minute, but now here I am: Working at StoryStudio Chicago, a nonprofit where I'm constantly surrounded by talented writers and amazing books; working as a bookseller at a local indie; and working as a daily editor at the Chicago Review of Books. Life is good, man. Always good to remind yourself of that when it's true. Thank you, Gone Girl Summer. 

Support Indie Presses That Lost NEA Funding: Open Letter Books Edition

Last week, The Chicago Review of Books published a tremendous tribute to indie publishers and literary journals who lost their National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funding. 

If you hadn't heard, a few weeks ago, the Trump Administration summarily canceled millions of dollars in funding to dozens of arts organizations -- money that had already been awarded, and that these organizations had counted on as part of their 2025 budgets. Why were these grants canceled? No good reason, really, and certainly not fiscal conservativeness -- the NEA's budget represents 0.003 percent of federal spending, basically a rounding error. More likely, the grants were canceled because fascists hate art. Art reminds them of how unimaginative and joyless their lives are.

Anyway, now, there are dozens of extremely worthy literary organizations doing amazing work that need our support. Americans for the Arts has a great page explaining what you can do to help.

But I wanted to highlight one of personal favorites indie publishers here: Open Letter Books. Open Letter Books is a nonprofit that publishes works in translation from writers from all the world. The organization actually recently sort of merged with Deep Vellum Books, though Open Letter continue to operate as its own entity. 

Deep Vellum is running a "replace our NEA grant" fundraiser and you can support them that way. Or, you can buy books! Need some recommendations? Here are six of my favorite Open Letter books!

6. Street of Thieves, by Mathias Énard -- This was the novel that kicked off my Open Letter love. I found this thanks to a bookseller shelftalker at an indie bookstore (57th Street Books) and I absolutely loved it. It's the coming-of-age story of a young Moroccan kid named Lakhdar, a lover of books, who, against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, begins to see the world as the oppressive place it is.

5. Zone, by Mathias Énard -- Full disclosure: I haven't read this yet, but it's the thrilling story -- told in one long sentence -- of a "spy" traveling by train from Milan to Rome and reflecting on his life.

4. American Fictionary, by Dubravka Ugresic -- Oh man I love this book from the fierce and funny Croatian writer Ugresic, god rest her soul. In these short essays "the comforting veil of Western consumerism is ripped apart as the mundane luxuries of the average citizen are contrasted with the life of a woman whose country is being destroyed." If you read and enjoyed Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, this is similar but much more biting.

3. Fox, by Dubravka Ugresic -- A episodic, dreamlike, possibly autobiographical meta-novel about a woman trying to escape her hometown. This book is filled with literary trivia, details about how stories become stories, and plenty of Ugresic's signature wit.

2. The Invented Part, by Rodrigo Fresán -- The first in a trilogy by Argentinian writer Fresán, this strange, post-modern, all-but-plotless novel consisting of a series of set pieces about the literary life, about inspiration for writers, about how readers understand fiction, and the Kinks, Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Wuthering Heights, and a lot more. 

1. Four by Four, by Sara Mesa -- From Spanish writer Mesa, this unsettling novel is a little like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, with a little The Secret History, and a sprinkle of the movie Get Out. There’s a sinister undercurrent of something nefarious happening, and everyone but the narrators seem to know what it is. 

Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon: To the World Wide Web...and Beyond!

My head hurts, and I'm tired. It's like I'm hungover. Pynchon-blitzed, as it were. Here's a thing I don't recommend: Reading 150 pages of Pynchon in one day. That's what I did yesterday, and I had the absolute strangest dreams last night, and as I write this the morning after finishing Thomas Pynchon's 2013 novel, Bleeding Edge, I'm not sure if I'm awake or still dreaming. 

Pynchon is a madman. A comic genius. A brilliant writer. Maybe a kook? (Did you ever hear the conspiracy theory that the notoriously elusive Pynchon is actually the Unabomber?)

Look, when you pick up a Pynchon novel, you have to expect to be by turns amazed, frustrated, immensely entertained, bored, confused, tickled, and awed. Thankfully, most of these are the reasons why I read, and that's why I picked up this book. 

Why now? Because Pynchon is publishing a new novel (and almost certainly his last) this fall titled Shadow Ticket, and I wanted to remind myself what he's like (and also maybe I'm just a little bit of a reading masochist). This is my third time reading Pynchon. I still have Gravity's Rainbow PTSD, but I absolutely loved Inherent Vice.

Bleeding Edge is definitely more Inherent Vice than Gravity's Rainbow. It's a zany caper about New York City in 2001, before during and after the tech boom and bust in Silicon Alley, and before, during, and after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Pynchon seems to think these two are connected, though not in a conspiracy theory way, more in a thematic way -- that they both were the end of an age of innocence and excess (innocently excessive? excessively innocent?), and that they both resulted in fundamental changes to this American life. 

The story is actually about Maxine Tarnow, a fraud investigator, who is tipped off to some shady dealings by a start-up called hashslingrz and its tech bro CEO Gabriel Ice. Then a guy who was skimming money from hashslingrz's skimmed money winds up dead, and Maxine now has not just a fraud investigation but a murder mystery on her hands. Then Maxine gets a mysterious video of some guys on the roof of a NYC building practicing with a Stinger missile launcher. Then 9/11 happens. How the hell are all these things connected?

Or maybe they're not. Maybe everything is totally random. Who knows? At least there's some good Pynchon Puns.

Lemme give you an example. Maxine's son Ziggy is watching a movie when she comes back to the apartment one evening. It's the (fictional) 1990 film Scooby Goes Latin!, in which the Scooby-Doo gang travels to Columbia to bust a dirty DEA agent mixed up in a drug cartel. "And I would've got away with it, too," he complains, "if it hadn't been for these Medellin kids." God dammit, that's funny. 

Is the madcap plot and these puns and clever-alities (a Pynchon-esque non-word?) enough to keep you turning pages? Just barely, I think. Yes, I'm glad I read this but knowing what I know now having finished it, I'm not sure I'd read it again. This book is like tasting a whiskey you're not sure you like, but keep drinking anyway. 

"How Can I Be Brave?": An Interview with Samira Ahmed of Authors Against Book Bans

I have an interview piece up today on the Chicago Review of Books and I humbly implore you to read it; not because I did anything spectacular, but rather because my interview subject -- Samira Ahmed, a Chicago author and one of the national leaders of the group Authors Against Book Bans -- is an absolute force of nature. 

I've been writing about books on the internet for 17 years, and I've interviewed dozens of authors in that time, and I can tell you Samira is one of my all-time favorite interviews. 

The piece is part of Chicago Review of Books' Reading Your Resistance series, and in the interview, Samira talks about a topic near and dear to all of our hearts: Fighting back against book bans. 

Samira is as passionate as she is inspiring. I literally got choked up during one point in the interview, as Samira talked about how the current administration is emboldening book banners. Try this quote on for size: 

"Authoritarians hate art and they hate books for a few reasons. For one, art shines a light on truth. Books shine a light on truth. And when you ban books, when you censor books, when you control what information people are allowed to have, you can create an ignorant populace. Books and art allow us to be fully realized. Authoritarians want to oppress us. They want us to feel downtrodden. But art gives us hope."

Another highlight is Samira's anecdote about one of her own books being "soft banned" in a rural red state school district because "there are no Muslims or Indians here." She said her first thought was "You have books with dragons in your library, but there’s no dragons at your school either." But the truly inspiring part of this story is the teacher who wanted her students to read Samira's book asked Samira, "How can I be brave?" Samira talks about how that question has stuck with her. 

Let's all be brave. Let's fight back! Read the full interview here.