ANN BLAIR
DWAYNE BETTS
TAYARI JONES
CHIMAMANDA ADICHIE
DAVID BEZMOZGIS
a novel that should be performed rather than read. THE WAVES, BY VIRGINIA WOOLF. Who doesn’t love Woolf? I love the intertwined consciousnesses in this book and the disembodied nature of her narrative voices. REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS CATTLE KILLING, BY JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN. Can you adore a book for one exquisite idea? Wideman does a masterly and, at times, infuriating job of creating distinct voices, blending those voices into each other, and all the while teasing out a really good story. But the thing that stays with me is the admonition “Do not fall asleep in your enemy’s dream.” This book has been with me for more than a decade. BEFORE YOU SUFFOCATE YOUR OWN FOOL SELF, BY DANIELLE EVANS. It’s dope. One of those books that stop you cold because they capture you with story and teach you something about your own life. In this case, these short stories take me back to my childhood. “Virgins” is heartbreaking and truly cold as ice in a way that makes you rethink so much of what it means to be a young man.
NANCY F. COTT
DAVID BEZMOZGIS I have long admired the Russian writer SERGEI DOVLATOV, who emigrated from Leningrad to the United States in the late 1970s and died prematurely in 1990. He was a satirist of both Soviet and émigré life and, to my mind, the funniest writer on these subjects. For a period in the 1980s, his stories appeared in the New Yorker—a very rare, if not singular, accomplishment for a man who wrote exclusively in Russian. After his death, his books went out of print and he fell into obscurity. When I was introduced to his work, about 10 years ago, it was because a friend sent me an old copy of a book called OURS. I fell in love with it and then sought out other Dovlatov titles from used-book stores. Fortunately, this past year, two Dovlatov titles, THE ZONE and THE SUITCASE, were reissued by Counterpoint Press. Dovlatov wrote always about a character based closely on himself. In The Zone, he details his experiences as a guard in the Soviet prison system, and in The Suitcase, he tells the
story of his emigration from Russia through objects he discovers in an old suitcase. The books are an excellent introduction to Dovlatov’s work and possess his signature blend of the comic, the absurd, and the humane. CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE THE DARK CHILD, BY CAMARA LAYE. A beautifully written, moving, and absorbing autobiographical novel about a young man coming of age under French colonialism in Guinea.
NANCY F. COTT THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR, BY ALLEGRA GOODMAN ’89, RI ’07. This is a book to savor. Inspired in part by the Schlesinger Library’s culinary riches, Goodman’s novel is peopled with memorable characters whose paths in digital technology and in rare books intertwine in unexpected ways. pNancy F. Cott is the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Summer 2012 r a d c l i f f e m a g azine
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