BEACH READS FOR THE BRAINY

Celebrate Juneteenth

“Important reading for audiences of all levels to gain an understanding of past symbols of freedom and resistance and a way of looking forward.”

Library Journal, STARRED

Learn Why Women Are Waiting to Be Mothers

“Those who want to keep their biological motherhood options open may find hope and a sense of community in these pages.

Booklist

Meet the Men Who Fought the Mafia

“Moses provides the definitive account of a fascinating chapter... New York history nuts will be in heaven.”

Publisher’s Weekly

Reconsider American Religion

“Examine the rise of secularization in this edifying entry... both ambitious and rewarding.”

Publisher’s Weekly

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Dear Reader,

Kingdom of the damned. That’s what Romanian surrealist Max Blecher, in the title of his piece for this issue, called Berck. Berck is the French seaside sanatorium town where in the 1920s patients underwent treatments for spinal tuberculosis. While some were “encased in a cage of plaster,” the less lucky were left to wait out grim prognoses. Blecher knew this town and its treatments firsthand that’s how he understood the depths of despair it contained. Am I being too much of a pessimist when I say that the earth has started to feel like one big kingdom of the damned? A 3,900-mile-radius oblate spheroid rock covered in plastic and homicidal maniacs, barreling toward its own demise?

When the USSR dissolved, any utopian ideals had long ago been wrung out of the Soviet space program. But when the hammer-and-sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin on Christmas Day, 1991, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was still stationed on the Mir space station. He was left up there, orbiting, essentially forgotten for nearly a year, while tensions built toward the Chechen War and shock therapy raged below. Ground control went on strike. Krikalev eventually hitched a ride back down with some Germans, but while he was there, Mir had a single small window looking out on the endless expanse outside. “Every spare moment, we tried to look at the earth,” he said.

For this issue of LARB Quarterly, we tried to do exactly that to look not at the ways we are stuck or damned on this planet but to imagine being sealed outside of earth, dreaming of coming home. What earth would that be? Writers were free to take up the theme casually or catastrophically, studying the earth under their fingernails or the planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away. It’s Salma Shamel who gave the issue and its omnibus of takes a tagline: “There is nothing redemptive or emancipatory in suffering.” Laura Nelson’s history of Antelope Valley’s communist backto-the-landers teaches us the challenges of building heaven in hell while editor-in-chief Michelle Chihara’s survey of illicit global finance systems tallies the true costs of capital flowing freely, in the dark, behind walled-off fiefdoms. Through vibrant prose, poetry, and fiction, Earth renders life here as alien as it often is.

Yours, top: Nobuo Sekine

Phase — Mother Earth, 1968 earth, cement; cylinder: 220 x 270 (diameter) cm, hole: 220 x 270 (diameter) cm installation view, 1st Kobe Suma Rikyū Park Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, October 1 – November 10, 1968 photographer: Osamu Murai

© Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo bottom: Nobuo Sekine Phase of Nothingness — Cut Stone, 1970 stone, stainless steel, dimensions variable production shot, Genoa, 1970 photographer unknown © Nobuo Sekine Estate, Courtesy of the Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles / New York / Tokyo