In Which We Decide To Forgo The Trombone

And Then God Created the South

by ALEXIS OKEOWO

I’m far from an authentic Alabamian. I don’t have a Southern accent; I can’t make enormous meals of pulled pork and barbecue, nor deep-fry anything, nor brew ice tea; and I tend not to romanticize the Civil War, unlike some of my Confederate flag-bearing high school classmates. But I did spend all of my childhood and young adulthood in the Deep South, that weary strip of bright green grass, orange powdered back roads, and confused, segregated cities. It's a place that is difficult and generous and slow and rough but, still, it's mine.

I had always felt indifferent about Alabama, where my parents had met as international students, and where we had moved back as a family when I was eight, after stints in Texas and Tennessee. But it was a state – the beautiful weather, the friendly people – that felt mostly easy and comfortable. It wasn’t until I moved to the East Coast for college, confronted by friends from New England and California who were surprised the police hadn’t water hosed me in the streets and that I had been allowed to go to an integrated school, did I become defensive of the South. (A male alumnus once came up to talk to me at a bar, and, upon learning that I am from Alabama, asked me, “How are you not an idiot?”) And it wasn’t until my home region was attacked, often by idiots like the one just mentioned, did I begin to feel proud of its resilience. So when the television series version of the film Friday Night Lights first appeared five years ago, I was nervous.

The original movie had been an uncomfortable freak show with a heart of gold, every Southern stereotype heightened to the point of garishness. The town was hopelessly small; the adults charmingly single-minded; and the black players menacingly brutish or silent. What it did get right was its portrayal of the internal baggage nearly all of the players had, as they tried to be kids with the eyes of the town on them, watching, waiting, and forever expecting.

But on television, the scene was swiftly laid in a Texan village named Dillon that was not bleak or simple; it was just a little peculiar and obsessed with football. The kids went to small-time strip clubs (or danced at small-time strip clubs), drove around in pickup trucks, and drank beer and talked shit. And football games – football games were like prom each and every fall Friday night until the end of time. The girls always had their hair, makeup, and outfits together even if they were hanging in someone's trailer, so anxious was their desire to be noticed. I once agonized over what to wear to a gathering at the local Super Wal-Mart.

The episodes prompted flashbacks to my own delirious beginnings at an Alabama public high school. Boys who wore t-shirts emblazoned with Confederate flags and who were both polite and obnoxious; my brilliant friend who wanted to be a preacher and lived across from a barn where a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan met; and the sudden presence of fun and catty girl cliques that were racially divided but got along wonderfully. As I progressed through the first season, and then all of the rest, the characters began to feel human and relatable.

There is, and has always been, a difference between the way in which the Deep South is portrayed and the way in which it actually feels to live there. To breach this gap, television shows and films have often relied on the pastime of football as Universal Unifier; football as a path of salvation for the downtrodden of the Bible Belt. Friday Night Lights fell into this trap, too. Football does mean a lot of things for a lot of people – a way to be popular and get girls, a way to escape darker realities and channel your energy, a ticket out of town, a very good time – but salvation it’s not, even as we got swept up by our teams, taking pride in them as we built up and then cast away their adolescent heroes.

The show was melodramatic, but necessarily so. I constantly thought high school in Alabama was over the top. Navigating the girl clique terrain was difficult. I desperately needed girlfriends, to strut through the mall with and ward off the catcalls of boys and also to have my back in mini-gossip wars. My refusal not to wholeheartedly join the black or the white clique resulted in a whole lot of confusion for everyone involved.

Negotiating with conservative friends was difficult. After September 11th, a boy accused me of supporting terrorists when I questioned the logic of invading Afghanistan. Figuring out my social life was difficult. I traipsed through most of the South with my speech and debate team to compete in addictive tournaments, but I was doubtful that it was an activity that impressed my crush, a boy in the grade below mine. So I joined the cheer quad for the soccer team, on which he played. When I found out that he was sleeping with someone else, however, I returned back to extemporaneous speaking practices with a kind of relief.

Figuring out hillbillies was difficult. One afternoon I stopped at a gas station near my house to fill up my dad’s minivan and walked in front of two white men sitting in a pickup truck, cigarettes dangling from their mouths and straw hats planted on their heads. They stopped talking and watched me with huge grins, mockingly, until I went inside the shop; the tension was made heavier by my sense that they had called out a name I hadn't heard. And balancing on the racial line was difficult. When I belonged to a Girl Scout troop, I shared baths and sleeping bags with my white friends, much to the disappointment of our troop leader, who kept trying to pair me off with the other black girl in the group.

Despite having figured out a lot about the region, when some people learn that I am Southern, they ask me to prove it. If I have drunk enough or am in a good enough mood, I’ll oblige and speak in a convincing slow drawl or say “y’all,” and I’ll end up feeling like the embodiment of the television show Treme – sounding alright, but not really feeling right. And superficiality is sometimes fine! It can be fun to embellish a place if you know what you’re talking about. I’ve now realized that Treme doesn’t.

Like a lot of people, I awaited the premiere of Treme with eager anticipation. After capturing a side of Baltimore so elegantly, I assumed that writer David Simon would be able to portray a stage of New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina that was honest and compelling. The ingredients were all there: musicians with addiction and love problems, families with loved ones missing after the storm, and normal people trying to adjust to a drastically altered city. I was even fine with the fact that the show was starting off slow – so, so slow – but there is a difference between a slowly developing storyline, which should be employed carefully, and style filling in for an actual plot.

New Orleans’ musical tradition is soulful and complex, and its relationship to the city's triumphs and heartbreak deserves exploration. The extent to which the series exploits that tradition without further analysis, through extended scenes of live music or musicians talking about some gig or the other, is disappointing. For most of the first season, I wondered if I had somehow not known that there was a parade or festival for every week of the year in Louisiana. I would have urged my parents to take my brothers and I on more family trips there. All of the flash rubs irritatingly against the substance.

Instead of the way in which the characters of Friday Night Lights felt familiar yet unpredictable, these ones just seem boring. John Goodman’s protagonist from the first season is a man furious and hurt by the government’s neglect of New Orleans during and after Katrina, but the roots of his rage are undefined, and we’re left with a conspiracy theorist who puts up kooky videos on the Internet. An astoundingly annoying musician, played by Steve Zahn, is self-righteous and pretentious, supposedly a native who wants to take his city back, but all of his preaching about an authentic and mythical New Orleans rings trite.

Wendell Pierce from The Wire as a womanizing, hard-partying trombone player is delightful, but the only reason I stuck through the first season and part of the second was Khandi Alexander, who acted the hell out of a woman who was trying to find her brother, an inmate who disappeared in the storm. It’s as if the show’s creators don’t want to show the ordinary nuances of a place that isn’t so different from the rest of the country because they fear that they will lose the interest of an audience that wants to see gumbo and jazz on the screen all the time. Southerners joke among ourselves that the South may as well as be another country sometimes, but you don’t need a passport to go to Louisiana yet.

The South will continue to move at its own pace, and it’s really not that much worse than the race and class tensions present in the North. That sounds like a cop out, I know. I have a friend from high school who now lives in Boston and who became angry a few years ago when I told her that I hadn’t voted in Alabama’s local elections or in its national primaries. I didn’t understand her anger, at first. I haven’t lived in Alabama full-time since I left for college. Then I realized her frustration at the puzzle of a closed off and conservative state managing to produce open and smart people, who mostly either left it or didn’t do anything to try to change it from within. I realized that even if we renounce that godforsaken place, it’s still ours.

Alexis Okeowo is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. You can find an archive of her writing at The New Yorker here. You can find her website here. She twitters here.

"Miles to Go" - Alison Krauss & Union Station (mp3)

"Sinking Stone" - Alison Krauss & Union Station (mp3)

"My Opening Farewell" - Alison Krauss & Union Station (mp3)

In Which We Attempt Our Return To America

The Strangeness of Coming Back

by ALEXIS OKEOWO

To anyone who has lived abroad for a long time, "repatriate" is a misleading word. It’s similar enough to "expatriate" that it almost seems friendly or, at the very least, benign, like a mole that’s been on your neck for as long as you can remember. As expats, in whichever foreign country we are living, we play a game with each other. In order to figure out how serious a person is about committing to living abroad, we ask them two questions, "So how long have you been here?" and "How much longer are you here for?" If the answer to the first question is not long, the answer to the second better be much longer. If not, we dismiss you as a backpacker, an aimless traveler who has no interest in really learning about or contributing to this country we’ve now started to call home.

But the truth is that most of us will leave our adopted homes at some point. It may take a few years, or a few decades, but that word, “repatriate,” will squirm its way into your consciousness and refuse to leave until you finally pass through America's overbearingly bright customs terminals. Even then, it lurks at the corner of your mind, reminding you how easy it is supposed to be to come back home, as you find out how it is not easy at all.

A trick to permanently leaving a foreign country where you’ve lived for at least two years is to pretend that you’re really only stepping out for a run to the corner store and will be back in a flash. When you see friends at bars and parties in your last few weeks and they express sadness over your departure, tell them, "Oh, it’s just for a little while, I’ll be back in a few months!" This statement, which both you and your friends know is a lie, nevertheless eases a little the pain of leaving, soothes for a few minutes the betrayal of moving back to the States. When you go to your regular hairdresser, greet your neighbors in the hall, and walk up to your favorite street vendors, cheerfully tell them you’ll be going "home" for a while, but that you’ll see them later on in the year. Do they need anything from America? The problem with this trick is that you start believing the lie, this illusion you’ve created of global jet setting and minimal responsibilities. You have fooled yourself into thinking that nothing, even your impending return, is permanent, until it is.

This trick, though most helpful for people who have lived for several years abroad, is also useful for perpetual wanderers, who spend short spurts of time in various lands until they also finally tether themselves down. College students spending their junior semester abroad should be fine.

Except for the last seven months, I have lived all of my adult, post-college life outside of the United States. For two years, I lived in Uganda, then another two in Mexico, with a hazy month-long interlude in Cuba. On holidays, I visited my Alabama hometown and New York, seeing family and friends, bringing exotic gifts, and repeating stories of adventures and disasters abroad. I thought New York was great, constant celebrations and good food and drink. Then I moved here. I feel that I should issue a disclaimer at this point to say that I have grown very fond of New York, but when I first came, I hated living in this city.

I didn't realize until I settled into my new room in Brooklyn that my friends who had moved back to America before me had not been completely honest about the strangeness of coming back. They told me about the initial shock, which I quickly experienced – the surprise at the rushed, orderly transportation system, the over-purified abundance of food and water, the relatively reserved people. They neglected to mention the lingering discomfort that would follow me as I went to work, did my grocery shopping, called my parents, met friends for dinner, went out on dates. I felt like a giant, hulking alien, one who didn’t belong in a sea of people who all seemed to know what the hell it was they were doing. (Get a monthly subway card, get into one of the hundred lines at Whole Foods, dinner tonight at Babbo then The Jane, OK?) The discomfort became physical, a tingling sensation of friction that rubbed against my skin. Not feeling at home in Havana was expected; in my own home country, it was unsettling.

The quiet was the most jarring. When I woke up, it was to the sound of my insistent iPhone alarm clock – not to people laughing, chatting, and selling things out of wagons and trucks in the street outside my window. When I stepped into the subway, except for a few crazy, welcomed instances, the lulling calm in the car was stifling. When I entered my office, the quiet receded to a hush. I relished when a beggar started yelling in a subway car, or hawkers tried to push Broadway tickets onto me in Times Square. Everywhere, it seemed, there were layers of silence upon silence upon silence. One fall afternoon, I got home, Skyped my best friend in southern California, and screamed.

So I refused to let go of my past lives. I carried in my wallet coins from the countries in which I had spent time, large, shiny Mexican pieces and small, grooved Ugandan and Kenyan shillings, knowing that I should purge my purse of them, but secretly enjoying the feeling of nostalgia when I accidentally pulled one out and gave it to a confused cashier. I hung out mainly with other ex-expats, hunting for authentic-tasting Mexican restaurants and reminiscing about trips we took together. I moved into a sublet in a building where most of the residents never spoke English and cooked rich, heavy meals, the smell creeping in under the door to my apartment. I looked up support group meetings for returned Peace Corps volunteers, supposedly for a story I wanted to write. I went out with very nice boys who looked at me blankly when I told them I was dying to move back to east Africa, and soon ended things with them. I was becoming that girl who had lived abroad for a long time and had come back the bad kind of eccentric, and I didn't mind.

The Washington Post recently ran a story about a group of American high school students who were forced to evacuate Egypt – their parents work for the State Department – and move to a Virginia suburb. The article says of the students:

Some of these students wear high school athletic uniforms with the word ‘Cairo’ emblazoned on their chests. Some refuse to change their watches from Egyptian time. They get news through friends' Facebook pages, where Egyptian classmates have posted photos from Tahrir Square and exultant messages in Arabic.

My friend Emily, who lived in Africa before moving back to New York, gleefully sent the article to me and said the kids reminded her of us. These kids also reminded me of other people I knew, people who both had and had not returned and their myriad idiosyncrasies.

I have a friend, a talented photographer, who spent her college years getting one grant after the other to travel across Mexico to do multiple photo projects. After she graduated a year and a half ago and moved home to Arizona, she felt listless and spent some more time in Mexico before signing on to a nine-month volunteer program in Sudan. When she returned home after that stint in Africa, she enlisted in the Peace Corps and now lives in rural Zambia. She says she just can’t settle in America. Another friend's dad has lived in Thailand for many years and will never return to California, my friend tells me, because he is "too dysfunctional to ever live here again." A good friend who moved to Philadelphia after years of traveling and studying in Asia and South America has had it bad, battling periods of depression as we both experienced our first American winter in a while.

There are businesses devoted to providing repatriation services, and they boast that they can help smooth the transition of any professional (with or sans family) from the exciting and unpredictable life he once had in a foreign country, to the more mundane existence that awaits him in his hometown. Learn how to make small talk about current events and gain friends for a modest fee. But the truth is that life abroad isn't really that exciting. It is thrilling and challenging, but no one uproots her life to go to a distant place so that she can be shocked and startled every day. She wants to carve out a life, meet people, find a nice apartment, pay her bills on time, maybe go to the beach a little more often.

I watched the movie The American several weeks ago, after abandoning it the first time I tried to watch it a few months prior. I thought the slow pace had turned me off the film, but on second viewing, I realized that it was because the title character was achingly familiar. George Clooney excels in his portrayal of a man who embodies the tragedy of never feeling – or being capable of feeling – at home. There has long been the trope of the stereotypical expat who lives abroad because he is running away from something. In reality, that figure is less common than you may think. In The American, the protagonist is an assassin, but he may as well have been one of the expatriate artists, teachers, journalists, aid workers, designers, or lawyers that I know. The random, fascinating people we met and places we explored, and the absurdity of always being the foreigners, made our lives wonderfully messy and worth the comfort we left behind. It's not that coming back is so awful; it's missing what we are abandoning.

But, eventually, you recognize, as I did, your tendency to idealize your life in one place and not appreciate the wonders of your life in this place. The itchy feeling of friction wears off, replaced by a familiar restlessness. I reunited with the friends who I had deeply missed when I lived far away, allowed myself to make connections with new people, and remembered why I thought New York was such a striking city. I was grateful for the luxuries of blending into a crowd again and feeling like I had membership in my country of residence. You do adapt, mainly because you know that you will end up going back into the unknown one day. You now despise that damn word "repatriate."

Alexis Okeowo is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She twitters here, and you can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels. Photographs by the author.

"Exodus" - Daara J (mp3)

"Karibu Ya Bintou" - Baloji (mp3)

"Partir de Cero" - Anita Tijoux (mp3)

In Which Here Are Novels Finer Than Any Imagined

Our Novels, Ourselves

Almost everything is a matter of taste, even criminal acts. Taste rules dreams, sexual profligacy and buying power. Haven't you seen High Fidelity? Novels are the ultimate arbiter of taste, for there is truly nothing that they cannot contain under the right circumstances. Tomorrow we issue our 100 Greatest Novels list, where we will examine those novels which most fully represent the feeling of life. As preparation, we asked a few young writers and artists to list their favorite novels. This is the last in a three part series.

Part One (Tess Lynch, Karina Wolf, Elizabeth Gumport, Sarah LaBrie, Isaac Scarborough, Daniel D'Addario, Elisabeth Donnelly, Lydia Brotherton, Brian DeLeeuw)

Part Two (Alice Gregory, Jason Zuzga, Andrew Zornoza, Morgan Clendaniel, Jane Hu, Ben Yaster, Barbara Galletly, Elena Schilder, Almie Rose)

Alexis Okeowo

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

This book is technically a children’s novel, but I usually believe that children’s books are the most appealing and universal. It’s a story about time travel – one of my all-time favorite subjects! – and finding your moral strength and trusting your abilities. What struck me about A Wrinkle in Time, even as a kid reading it for the first time in my backyard in Alabama, was how intelligent and layered the writing and plot were, and how enthralling this galaxy was that L'Engle created. I couldn’t stop dreaming about falling into her worlds.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie

This book was the only time I’ve read a novel that reminded me of my life experiences so much it was kind of excruciating at some points. The pain aside, Half of a Yellow Sun is the best example of grand, lyrical storytelling I've ever seen. The novel is set during the Nigerian civil war, and is a story both about struggling to live with compassion and dignity during chaos, and about a love affair that consumes a British journalist and two Nigerian sisters.

What is the What by Dave Eggers

I think I swooned at the first point in the novel when Eggers started writing from the perspective of the South Sudanese protagonist: the diction and the tone were perfect and reminiscent of the regal, funny Sudanese people I knew in Africa. The story about the Lost Boys (and girls) of Sudan is incredibly sad, yes, but the writing is so beautiful and the voice of Valentino Achak Deng so important, that I didn’t mind. What is the What ravaged my emotions, but in a good way.

Alexis Okeowo is a writer living in New York. She is an editorial assistant at The New Yorker. You can find her website here.

Benjamin Hale

These aren’t necessarily the books I would take with me if I were banished to a desert island; there’s no point, I know them too well.  These are three of the books that have most profoundly changed me, changed my understanding of literature, and changed the way I want to write.  

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

Kurt Cobain, with characteristic self-loathing, once described "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as “basically a Pixies rip-off.” If there’s a book to which I would happily acknowledge a personal debt with such groveling humility, it would be this one. My own novel is basically a rip-off of The Tin Drum. The Tin Drum is among the bravest books ever written.  

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow  

Henderson the Rain King is a better book, and I thought of listing it instead, but I chose Augie March because it was the first Bellow book I read, and the one I set out to study, in the way an apprentice chef might try to reverse-engineer a mystery sauce by taking sips and altering ingredients accordingly, trying to discover how the master made it. I lent my copy to a friend recently, who told me I’d apparently circled a certain paragraph and wrote in the margin, "LEARN HOW TO WRITE LIKE THIS." 

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes  

Arguably the first novel and, I would argue, the best.  To me, the Man of la Mancha represents the spirit of the novel: comedy in the front, tragedy in the back.  It is a story that begins, but never ends.

Benjamin Hale is a writer living in New York. He is the author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore.

cover by joshua k. marshallRobert Rutherford

Let me first assume a male audience. The books that you read in your angry youth tend to remain after the emotion they engender fades. Though the blueprint lightens, you realize the man you thought you'd become are also the men the authors wanted to be, but weren't. The three imaginary men I thought I'd become but lacked the conviction are:

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway wrote his first novel "not to be limited by the literary theories of others, but to write in his own way, and possibly, to fail." At least when he was young, he lived a life more full. It's easy to romanticize Ernest driving an ambulance in World War I and defining the lost generation in Paris, but it's easy because he actually did those things. No one should be allowed to write anything until they are seriously wounded in a war at least once. Hemingway shot himself in the head with a double barreled 12-gauge shotgun at his home in Ketchum, ID.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Fifty years before you were born, Miller put to words everything you have ever wanted to do in your life but you can't because you are too weak, afraid and lazy. He fucked his pen across Paris, and then raped New York in Tropic of Capricorn. Jack Kerouac was an aimless hobo in comparison. Miller died in the Pacific Palisades and his ashes were scattered off Big Sur.

The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson

A novel by an alcoholic before he became a drug addict is the best reason for sticking to alcohol. There's very little in this book of the Hunter caricature that came later, so it feels like a the work of a different author, the caterpillar before the cocoon. It's laconic instead of hyper and helps you realize that before he was a gonzo journalist he was just a kid who idolized Jack Kerouac. Thompson shot himself in the head with semi-automatic Smith & Wesson 645 at his home in Aspen, CO.

You wake up one day and you're happy, and you don't want to kill yourself. And that's depressing because it means you can't be a writer. To the men we became, and the authors who showed us how not to become them.

Robert Rutherford is a writer living in Los Angeles.

Kara VanderBijl

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

This book, which I believe I have read at the turn of each season since I first discovered it, inspires in me a strange mixture of nausea and awe. Flaubert's mastery of the French language remains the standard by which I measure my own understanding of it; his sad lady protagonist remains my greatest fear and a faultless mirror. Emma, c'est moi.

The Go-Between by L.P Hartley

One must disregard the fact that Hartley's opening line is now as over-quoted as a Frost poem in order to appreciate its truth. I treasure this story as a sort of secret garden, uncomfortably recalling the innocently ignorant period of my childhood. Plus, since this novel is ridiculously under-read, I have the pleasure of relating its poetry to anybody within earshot.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Eco wooed me by quoting Latin and refusing to translate it on virtually every page. In other words, this medieval murder mystery occupies the Read This And Understand Your Humanity shelf, a black hole of disproportionate presumption. A category of people, to which I belong, will read it and take pride in the fact that they grasp very little of the universe. It was not written for them.

Kara VanderBijl is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her website here.

Damian Weber

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

After reading too much, and writing three of your own unfinished novels, you can't read fiction anymore. Sure you can mine for ideas, but mainly your bullshit meter won't let you finish 20 pages. That's why we only read non-fiction now. Or Louise Erdrich. She never sets off my bullshit detector. On a different topic, we need to write more short stories.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

After you're done reading all the best literature in the world, you get over it, and move on to genre fiction. Especially if you want to write yourself, and you're sick of being limited by your own boring imagination. Did you know you were as imaginative as Dan Simmons? Did you know you could break free and write the craziest awesome shit?

Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

If all my favorite music lyrics could be assembled in a narrative of my life with the girl I like and our daughter, I would read it over and over like I do Trout Fishing In America.

Damian Weber is a writer and musician living in New York.

Jessica Ferri

The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

Do you hate everything but have a great sense of humor about it? Read Thomas Bernhard for all your obsessive, misanthropic, neurotic, suicide-inducing rants. Because really, when all you want to do is play piano but Glenn Gould studies at your music conservatory, what the fuck is the point of living except to complain about it?

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

Over a lunch of Frog Legs and an uneaten chicken sandwich, Franny realizes that she's surrounded by "section men," and needs to ceaselessly pray. Zooey, her actor brother, after a long marinade in the tub, calls her from the living room to tell her about Jesus and the Fat Lady. You will read this dialogue and you will laugh. This will be followed by a tightening in the chest.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre is the book in your middle school "media center," that calls to you with the intense-looking girl on its cover and the author's familiar sounding last name. You might want to make it a re-read past the age of nine, however, because Jane Eyre is one of the greatest novels ever written, and you'll need to have loved and lost and been "poor, obscure, plain and little," to fully understand how awesome it is for Jane to bust up out of a terrible situation in 1847 and go traipsing through the English rain, risking pneumonia and God knows what else to become the best narrator any reader could ask for.

Jessica Ferri is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find her website here.

Britt Julious

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

My body shakes thinking of the characters in The Secret History. I don't think I've despised characters so succinctly and passionately. The longer I think about the plot and the characters' decisions, the more incensed I become. But never have I had such immense, perhaps even overwhelming pleasure reading a book. Characters that challenge me this much only remind me why I love reading.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

The Dud Avocado is a whip-smart little gem of a book, one that I've read three times in the few months since I've finished it. Sally Jay is young and silly and tricky. I relate to her almost selfishly: I hate knowing that other people will read thus book and see themselves (flighty, sarcastic, anxious) reflected from line to line. I'd like to believe that Sally Jay and I are kindred spirits, and that everyone else is just pretending to know what it's like to be us.

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes' writing is lush. Its lushness makes me wince, for I can only dream to write as uniquely and profoundly as she did. There are certain passages I've underlined and like to revisit from time to time. My masochistic nature breaks free; reading her work is torture for the young writer who only wishes to capture a portion of that indescribable quality each page possesses.

Britt Julious is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her website here and her twitter here.

Letizia Rossi

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes you just want to get the fuck out of New York. Get away from the bullshit, the social climbers, the sycophants and just head back to your home town. You're tired of getting wasted, open bars, not even knowing whose party it is; the antics of bankers, bohemians, socialites; conversations about ‘content’, banal proclamations, networking, feigning interest, working hard to get ahead. These assholes are all just spending their Daddy's money anyhow. I mean does anyone even really love anyone or is it just what they represent?

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry
 by Leanne Shapton 

My ex-boyfriend had the best stuff, amazing stuff, the stuff of dreams: LPs, 70s era McIntosh receivers, silk velvet chaise lounge, arts and crafts desks, criterion dvds, vintage file cabinets, Godard posters, fiestaware, le crueset, butter bell, sheets that – somehow tastefully – match the towels, William Eggleston books, walnut bookshelves filled with every book you’ve meant to read (arranged by color), a ship in a bottle, vintage Fernet Branca ad /(souvenir from trip to Buenos Aires). Does anyone really love anyone or is it just what they represent?

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend

Accept no imitators! This is the genre-defining self-deprecating epistolary diary novel. (Not mad at you Bridget Jones and Nick Twisp.)  SPOILER ALERT: "Love is the only thing that keeps me sane..."

Letizia Rossi is a writer living in Williamsburg. You can find her website here.

Will Hubbard

Justine by Lawrence Durrell

I am drawn to books that present an unthinkable world. A world that it would be impossible for me to inhabit because of my limitations. A world in which my head would explode. Such is the mercy of a great novel – that it only partially explodes our heads, privately and pleasurably. The Alexandria of Justine is a place where the colors of the sky and water are not colors you've ever seen before. And the politics of the place – both municipal and sexual – are impossible to understand and thus easy to enjoy. Every character constitutes a nation unto him or herself – there are cryptic alliances and yes, a great deal of sex, but eventually everyone stands (or dies) alone. Nobody prevails. Alexandria prevails. Durrell felt that he needed to write three sequels to explain away all the misery and intrigue of Justine – I would have preferred that he didn't. In fact, I've never read Justine all the way through – and still, somehow, it's my favorite book. Explain that.

The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller

Everything I said above, subtracting the abundance of sex and adding long, rich passages about the qualities of the light at various Greek archaeological sites. I know that strictly speaking this is not a novel, but when a human being has the experiences Henry Miller did and can process them with the grace that he does in this book – there's nothing to really delineate it from fiction. If a novel is a long story that didn't happen, then Colossus for all intents and purposes is a novel – it simply could not have happened. Again, our limitations. The most sensitive of us is far too dull.

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley

The narrator of this novel loves football, specifically Hall-of-Fame Giants running back Frank Gifford. It's an easy enough world for some of us to imagine – long Sundays in dark, cool, damp places checking alternately the score on the television and the amount of beer in our glass. But sport only frames Exley's story of human weariness and wariness which, again, gives me supreme pleasure because I cannot imagine surviving the mental circumstances of its narrator. That the protagonist shares his name with the author we forgive because the book draws heavily – some say absolutely – from the real Frederick Exley's life, which at times was more horrific than anything in his 'fictional memoir.' Punctuated liberally by the arrival of white-clad men from mental institutions, A Fan's Notes manages a steady undercurrent of hope; I doubt its author ever could.

Will Hubbard is a writer living in Williamsburg. His first book of poetry, Cursivism, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in April.

Durga Chew-Bose

Adolphe by Benjamin Constant

“Nearly always, as to live at peace with ourselves, we disguise our own impotence and weakness as calculation and policy; it is our way of placating that half of our being which is in a sense a spectator of the other.” Forgoing traditional imagery, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe is furnished instead with emotions, “sleepless nights,” and mood. Sober stuff, yes, but a fortune of maxims, I promise! Rumored to be based on Constant’s liaison with Madame de Staël, the plot is classic: a doleful and somewhat reclusive young man, seduces a Count’s lover. Their affections grow alongside the young man’s doubts and eventually, desire’s cruel law of diminishing returns overcomes. While short — less than a hundred and fifty pages — I suspect Adolphe has become my skeleton key; that which can unlock, or at the very least let breathe (read: indulge in!) some of my most pressing reservations. For anyone who is preoccupied with feelings, especially love, this novel is a trove of its articulations, both physical and mental. 

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras’s The Lover is best read over the course of one day. It possesses you. And like on especially hot summer afternoons where the sun's heat appears to be coming from inside you, Duras’s prose spawn that similarly sublime and somewhat punch drunk sensation from having sat outside for too long. My copy of it is worn, underlined, scribbled on, and yet, it still smells new. I refer to it not only for the story of the unnamed pubescent protagonist and her lover, but for the descriptions of women, like Hélène Lagonelle, who are "lit up and illuminated," (unlike the men who are "miserly and internalized.") That addled mix of envy and adulation—of knowing the nude shape of your friend’s body even when she is clothed, the convex, the concave, of using words like 'roundness,' 'splendor,' and 'illusionary' and then following them with words like, 'never last,' and 'kill her' — confirm the novel’s overture, a sentence that I copied over and over in my notebook what feels like years ago, unaware of its enduring potency: “Sometimes I realize that if writing isn't, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it's nothing." 

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I care deeply about this book because it pools together so many thoughts that for so long I assumed were separate. It reads like trinkets in constant orbit, like "that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion." It's also terribly funny, diagnostic, and warm; the finest combination! One of my favorite chapters, 'The Tail,' begins with this: "Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I celebrate the tail." I simply cannot get enough.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here.

Rachel Syme

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

I am not ashamed to say that I loved the film adaptation of The Hours — if only for that twitchy Philip Glass score and to see Meryl Streep wring her hands and cry on a kitchen floor covered in egg yolks (I prefer this flustered Streep to the daffy Nancy Meyers version who makes croissants stoned) — but I do understand the bit of damage that the film and the book that spawned it did to the venerable cultural status of Mrs. Dalloway. Not that the The Hours didn't do Woolf justice; it's just that one could get the impression that it's not entirely necessary to go back and read the source material. The essence is there in the film, it's infusing the whole thing. Which is all fine! But if you have a deeper interest in writing, or women, or parties, or human frailty, or moral quandaries, or in passions v. the banal scutwork of daily life, then I would prescribe the original to you like a tonic. Reading Clarissa's inner monologue, her incantations about all of the things she can never have, that life will never be for her; this is how I learned that writing born from empathy just feels different, and those that master it are sorcerers.

Anagrams by Lorrie Moore

A small but important truth to get out of the way first: As a novel, Anagrams is kind of a disaster. Other novels likely talked some shit about it in the hallways, wondering why it had to come to class so grubby and loose and patched together. The book is — if we want to get technical about it — closer to a novella that has been smashed together with a few short stories and sealed with word pectin. Each little fragment features characters with the same names (Gerard and Benna) and a few overlapping characteristics that carry over between story breaks, but the flow is not immediately scrutable or consistent; it lumps along. And I couldn't love it more. As is the case with most things that get slammed into lockers at first, Anagram is a slow burner, this late bloomer of a book that takes some time and investment to blossom on you. It is a White Swan willing to twirl overtime with an Odile inside. I get more out of re-reading this book than I do most any other, if only because I think it's the funniest and harshest and loneliest Moore has ever been on the page, and her talent for owning that particular literary trifecta is well-documented. In an interview with The Believer, Moore said that she wrote Anagrams "longhand on a typewriter, and it probably contained more crazy solitude than any other book I've written." And she's right! It's a crazy lonesome read. But also, there are these glittering moments of warmth that peek through, sharp enough to break the skin: Life is sad; here is someone.  

The Debut by Anita Brookner

"Books about books" is a genre that is usually best avoided (unless you find great pleasure in watching someone try to high-five himself), but Brookner's story about Ruth Weiss, a 40-year-old Balzac scholar who, in the first line, discovers that "her life had been ruined by literature" is rich and savory, and magically absent of cliche. The book moves ever so slowly, as Ruth reflects on lessons from her youth ("moral fortitude…was quite irrelevant in the conduct of one’s life: it was better, or in any event, easier, to be engaging. And attractive.”), on her selfish childhood and one terribly broken love affair, and on how she came to be an academic loner writing a neverending study of Women in Balzac's Novels. Ruth's story has an Olive Kittredge sheen to it, in that not much happens outside of a lonely woman's meanderings through her own life, and yet it has a British crackle to it, and a tender pacing that could only belong to a mature writer. Brookner published The Debut — her debut — when she was 53 years old, and you can immediately tell that the prose comes from the mind of someone who has done some living and losing and mellowing and accepting, and is on that phase of the roller coaster where your jaw is settling back in. I read this when I want to feel like I am consulting an swami of calm; oracular spectacular, a soothing voice that also tells you how to live.

Rachel Syme is the books editor of NPR.org. She tumbls here and twitters here.

Amanda McCleod

The Brothers Karamazov by Fydor Dostoyevsky

Poor Fydor! Poor Dmitri! Poor Ivan! Though their fates may have been brutal it is Alexey Karamazov I feel the sorriest for! Fated to be Dostoyevsky's great protagonist in a second novel which he failed to complete within his lifetime. Alexey Karamazov is my favorite character of all time, easily. He appears to be modeled after saints and folk heroes alike, and is possessed with a bottomless kindness that is shocking in contrast to his own father's maniacal meddling. What I would give for that second book to have been completed! I had the great pleasure of reading The Brothers Karamazov along with a few friends in recent years and together we fostered the notion that everyone is at heart one of the three brothers: The realist Ivan, the impassioned Dmitri, or the gentle Alyosha. We hope no one we encounter is a Smerdyakov or Fydor, and we've all met our fair share of Grushenkas. I've loved an Ivan and befriended many Dmitris, but I'll always be an Alyosha.

Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

Heinlein captivated the world so thoroughly with Michael Valentine-Smith, the man from Mars, and his concept of Grokking that "Grok" has been incorporated into the English language. From the novel itself: "Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed." Since first reading Stranger I've held this notion in the back of my mind whether encountering art or others. I can honestly say that I never expected I would encounter such a earnest concept in a work of science fiction, yet Heinlein achieves many such beautiful instances as this one continually throughout the novel. At times this read can be campy, but that really only adds to the pleasure of examining humanity through the eyes of a man reared in martian culture.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

For one thing I can't think of a week since I've read this book that the Eternal Return hasn't crossed my mind. It is a horrifying thought, that is unless you live with such conviction that you reach Amor Fati. If you were doomed to repeat all of your days eternally, could you stomach living them? This is the sort of thing I'd like to wake up and worry about every morning, though often I am most worried about where caffeine will come from and how soon it will come. Thus Spoke Zarathustra was extremely enjoyable for me to read, but this is surely because it mimics the New Testament in style. As a product of catholic school it was actually very comforting to be reintroduced to this sort of language when I first read this novel. This quickly became extremely amusing, as Nietzsche's eccentric Zarathustra verges on zealotism often and backhanded critiques against religion are delivered feverishly. If you haven't delved into Nietzsche before I'd say this is a fun place to start.

Amanda McCleod is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find her website here.

Yvonne Georgina Puig

All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers by Larry McMurtry 

Larry McMurtry is pretty much my hero. He's one of the most productive and least pretentious writers around. This is a beautiful, hilarious story written in clear, simple McMurtry style, and much of it is set in Houston, Texas, my hometown. Not many novels are set in Houston because generally speaking it's an uninspiring place. But this book, along with Terms of Endearment, make me nostalgic for oppressive humidity and flat urban sprawl and larger-than-life hairdos. I don't enjoy writing book reviews (unless I love the book I'm writing about), or analyzing books to pieces. I just enjoying reading, and then enjoy loving the books that I love, if that makes any sense. McMurtry is easy to love in this way because he tells such great tales. Three summers ago, I started it on a hot day in Austin, Texas, a few miles from where the book opens. 

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley 

I love books populated by characters from Sarah Palin's "real America." Their problems are less self-indulgent and more insidious. "Real" Americans, in my opinion, are much more interesting than people from, say, Santa Monica. A Thousand Acres, an incredibly poignant and masterful first-person re-imagining of King Lear, set on a farm in the Heartland, is really a story about a family confronting evil. Yet everywhere you turn someone is baking blueberry muffins, or fixing coffee for the pastor, or making a casserole for the church social. Smiley gives you a slow drip of Godly politesse, and then suddenly you're drowning in utter devastation. I think this is how darkness really functions. 

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence 

A friend who recently graduated from Columbia told me she took a class there on D.H. Lawrence which was full of Lawrence detractors, and apparently there's this whole faction of them out there in the world, who go around disputing Lawrence's reputation as one of the greats. Maybe this is a known thing, but not to me, and I'd like to tell those people to shove it. It's enough that Lawrence wasn't treated very kindly while he was alive. These haters would be lucky to describe a flower just once as beautifully as Lawrence described flowers all his life. We need more writers in love with flowers, who find faith in nature, and who remonstrate the vulgarities of the world. Thank goodness for Lawrence's sensitive, deep-seeing soul. I love all his books, but I think Chatterley is his strongest narrative, and a good place to start in reading his work.

Yvonne Georgina Puig is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her website here.

Our Novels, Ourselves

Part One (Tess Lynch, Karina Wolf, Elizabeth Gumport, Sarah LaBrie, Isaac Scarborough, Daniel D'Addario, Elisabeth Donnelly, Lydia Brotherton, Brian DeLeeuw)

Part Two (Alice Gregory, Jason Zuzga, Andrew Zornoza, Morgan Clendaniel, Jane Hu, Ben Yaster, Barbara Galletly, Elena Schilder, Almie Rose)

Part Three (Alexis Okeowo, Benjamin Hale, Robert Rutherford, Kara VanderBijl, Damian Weber, Jessica Ferri, Britt Julious, Letizia Rossi, Will Hubbard, Durga Chew-Bose, Rachel Syme, Amanda McCleod, Yvonne Georgina Puig)

The 100 Greatest Novels

If You're Not Reading You Should Be Writing And Vice Versa, Here Is How

Part One (Joyce Carol Oates, Gene Wolfe, Philip Levine, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, Don DeLillo, Anton Chekhov, Mavis Gallant, Stanley Elkin)

Part Two (James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov)

Part Three (W. Somerset Maugham, Langston Hughes, Marguerite Duras, George Orwell, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Creeley, John Steinbeck)

Part Four (Flannery O'Connor, Charles Baxter, Joan Didion, William Butler Yeats, Lyn Hejinian, Jean Cocteau, Francine du Plessix Gray, Roberto Bolano)