In Which He Could Visit Her And Did Not Need To Write

ted berrigan by alex katz

Ted and Sandy

by DAMIAN WEBER

Ted Berrigan met Sandy Alper and seven days later they were married. She wrestled him to the ground, sat on his lap, and asked him to marry her. He agreed. She dropped out of college and boarded a bus with him to Houston, where she pawned her watch to pay for the marriage license. She said she dropped out of college because she could tell, in an instant, that “living with Ted would be far more educational than staying in school."

Sandy writes in the introduction,

I lugged a big suitcase out of the dorm, announcing that I was taking some props to the drama department, and we got a bus to Houston. We could stay with Ted’s friend there, Marge Kepler. In Houston we had a blood test and I pawned my watch to pay for the marriage license. We bought Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind as a wedding gift to ourselves. That afternoon we made love (I for the first time), in Marge’s bed. It turned out that she had been his lover in Tulsa. Later the three of us had to sleep together because there was only one bed in the house.

The letters between Ted Berrigan and Sandy Alper were published for the first time in Dear Sandy, Hello. In it Sandy explains that she was young (19) but she knew what she was doing. Once married, they visited her parents in Miami, who searched Ted's things and found letters from Ron Padgett about the drug scene on the Columbia campus. The next day the police arrived to take Sandy to Jackson Memorial Hospital mental ward.

Ted writes,

Sandy, get out of that place. If it takes a month, a year, years, get out of there. Lie, steal, cheat, do anything, but get out and come to me. I will be trying every way I know how to get you free. But they have us where they want, they think. I am sure they are going to have this marriage annulled. They are going to find you “disturbed,” and have the marriage set aside. Well, we don’t need to care about that. Our marriage can’t be set aside, no matter what legal authorities say. What is important is that we be together again. We can’t fight them their way. What we have to do is do anything they say, resisting only when we feel we have to. Don’t sign anything. We’ll do what they say, but when their backs are turned, we’ll be gone.

Come here any way you know how. If you think I can help by coming there, tell me, and I’ll hitchhike there tomorrow. Once we are together, we’ll vanish from their sight until such time as they recognize our love, our marriage, our dignity as human beings. Honey, don’t ever let them make you think you are sick, or disturbed, or anything of the kind. We are all sick, and disturbed, but if you ever believed anything I said, believe me when I say that you are the best, the healthiest, the most good of all of us.

She writes,

I found something about love life in The Brothers K. I am going to show it to the next doctor. Maybe he will see that I am not going to destroy myself and you aren’t. I seem to be struggling for both of us instead of just me. You will be part of my whole self forever.

I think I would like to read more Ibsen.

I talked to the Negro maid today. She is a great lady. She ran away with her first husband at the age of twelve and was married to him for twenty-seven years. He then died. She is good. She thinks the whole business is silly. I wish you could meet her. I wish you could be here. These people need much hope. You show people that sometimes dreams do come true if the dreamer works hard and believes. If he has faith and courage.

She writes,

They are putting the annulment papers in tomorrow. I asked them if they would harm you if you came down, and my father said he might even try to kill you if he saw you or lock you up. The doctor has recommended treatment with an analyst or psychiatrist and I would live at home. They  have accused you of much. Mainly of being schizophrenic and not realizing it or trying to do anything about it. Also you are a moocher and live off of others; Anne, Pat, Margie, your mother. They have evidence, letters etc. and what they have said about you. They also said you were not given your master’s degree, not even awarded it, but your letter of non-acceptance was a front and so many more things.

I wish you would write a letter telling me about all the truth about you. No matter how bad you may think it may be. Ted, even though I believe in you and your love for me, they have created doubts. I am not even sure I will believe either of you.

I do believe your love and many of the things you have said to me because I have seen myself the truth in life and the communication we have had is real.

march 1962

Ted responds,

My darling Sandy, I don’t know where to begin this letter. Are we losing? Are they coming between us? Honey, I love you so very very much. I want to answer all your questions very carefully. I want to tell you everything, give you everything you ever want to ask of me.

But forgive me, I must talk a little first.

Sandy, they’re beating us. They’re getting us down. All this about the annulment, and the detective reports, is something we knew from the first. I told you that this is exactly what they would do. Their plan is to separate us, to annul the marriage, and to use your sympathies and your natural feelings for your parents to drive doubts between us like a wedge until finally we are apart for good.

I beg you, I beg you again, don’t defend me. Not to them, not to doctors, not to other patients, not even to yourself. Remember how it was when we were together, remember how I look and seem to you. Remember the love we have for each other. Have faith in your judgment, your feelings, yourself, in me. If you try to argue with their ideas about me, their supposed “facts,”  you cannot win. Their logic is superior to yours, and mine, their age and experience and their determination are something you cannot cope with by fighting them according to their rules. They know how to handle you. In only five weeks they have gotten you to write a line to me which reads “I am not sure I will believe either of you,” meaning them or me. What will they accomplish in another five weeks? or ten? or fifty?

Honey, I haven’t heard one word from your parents. I have received no legal notice from anyone. What right do they have to decide whether it is all right for you and me to be married? We must not allow them to even question us except as equals. We cannot act like all they want is what is best for you, when they have locked you up. It seems that all they want is what they say is best for you.

Sandy, don’t forget that Sunday night in Miami. Don’t forget your mother asking if you wanted to use her leather coat in New York, your mother and father handing you over to strangers. Don’t forget.”

Ted goes on to admit every weird or incriminating thing he ever did. He was completely honest, and that section of Dear Sandy, Hello reads like an autobiography. She believed him, she believed in him again.

There was a boy in the ward with Sandy who was disparaging of Ted, and whom she grew to dislike. He was also a writer, but didn’t like beatniks, and became convinced Ted was one.

I just met the new male patient. He is a writer from New York by the name of Barry Weiss. He doesn’t know you or Joe. He lived on 11th street. He doesn’t like poetry much and is very wary of your type, he says. He is cynical. He loves Henry Miller and says he can only read 25 or fewer pages at a time and then he must stop. He has sad eyes. Things writers can only write in aloneness and desolation.

On a different day she writes,

Barry talked to me a little, he thinks perhaps you are just an ordinary beatnik. He doesn’t know you. I wish you could give him a good working over. Send me Tropic of Cancer if you can. Barry did give me some candy and apricots so I can’t hate him. He has a few good qualities. He doesn’t think I have the stuff it takes.

And finally, “Barry is rotten as ever. He may leave. I hope so.” We can only speculate he was a know-it-all who knew nothing, and that Sandy didn’t like pretentious no-fun sourpusses.

They were both reading Henry Miller. She noted, “I just finished reading Tropic of Cancer, Barry loaned it to me. I did underestimate it. But still don’t think it is the greatest book. Some parts I liked a lot. I will read them again. He does have great vitality and life. It makes me want to be out even more.”

He writes, “I’m not really incoherent. I’m in a kind of trance from reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn. It is so great I have to stop every few pages and wonder." After speaking of killing birds to eat (a fantasy) he writes:

If I killed a little bird and roasted it over the fire and ate it, it was not because I was hungry but because I wanted to know about Timbuktu or Tierra del Fuego. I had to stand in the vacant lot and eat dead birds in order to create a desire for that bright land which later I would inhabit alone and people with nostalgia. I expected ultimate things of this place, but I was deplorably deceived. I went as far as one could go in a state of complete deadness, and then by a law, which must be the law of creation, I suppose, I suddenly flared up and began to live inexhaustibly, like a star whose light is unquenchable.

Sandy, my beautiful, innocent wife, Miller has just said simply much of what I have been struggling to tell you. If I eat dead birds in vacant lots, it is not because I am hungry, but because I need to discover Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire, the fiery earth. I people my poems with nostalgia. They are in part my bright land. And through the past few months, and most of all through my loving you, through marrying my soul, my self to yours as was preordained, I have now flared up like a burning rose, like a dove, and begun to live inexhaustibly, like a star whose light is unquenchable, good to eat a thousand years.

On a different day Ted writes,

I finished Henry Miller’s book called Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch today, and it really was a good book. Miller continually fills me with the joy of life. Right now I am living like the fox lives. All my senses have become sharper, and I smell, see, taste, and hear much more acutely than before. Food tastes marvelous, because we eat little. The weather is simply exciting all the time. We walk up and down all the streets. And all the time I think of you. I want so much to touch you, to lie with my eyes closed and feel you watching me. I do love you so.

Sandy writes,

I am entranced by Miller. Entranced and re-injected with faith. He is great. Your letter was sad because I want so much for you to be writing but I can’t do much now. I certainly don’t want you to be locked up or anything. It doesn’t torture me too much that you are out and free...

I have started reading Big Sur. It is great. I do have faith and courage. We too someday will be able to live our life. This book so far isn’t as wild that’s why it’s easier for me to take. Anyway he was a lot older. Life gets quieter after 50 or 60 I guess.

They exchanged ideas. They listed the books they were reading at the time, and what they thought. No slouch, Sandy was reading the best books, and open to suggestions from Ted, Joe Brainard, Dick Gallop, and Ron Padgett — a fine group of instructors.

He writes,

I have some new good books of poetry, and I’m reading a lot, not writing too much, except for the series I’m doing with Joe. I’ve read Go, a novel by Clellon Holmes about New York in the 50s, finished Henry Miller’s the Tropic of Capricorn, read a lot of poetry by a lot of people, and am now reading Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York, and the selected poems of Vladimir Mayakofsky, the young Russian poet. Dick has finished a book by William Styron called Lie Down in Darkness, and is reading Styron’s second novel, Set This House on Fire. Styron is a young Southern writer, and he is very very good. Both these books are as good novels as have been done in America since A Farewell to Arms.”

His letters read like his poems.

Joe is sitting over on his bed writing a postcard to you. My fingers are sore from pounding the typewriter. When I first get up my hands are not as loose as later in the day, and I miss the keys sometimes and bang up my fingers. We are making hot coffee now, and preparing to work on our collages some more. We’re still working on our religious one, although Joe has done two of his own, without writing, since I wrote yesterday. So, Dick and I are walking the streets, waiting for his check, and reading our books. I’m reading Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch by Henry Miller and Dick is reading The Tropic of Capricorn. I want to send this (my) book to you as soon as I finish.

She writes back,

I finished Daring Young Man. I am going to read some parts again. Oh! To be with you. Someday I would like to meet Saroyan. I will hope you will not be mad but I started Rebecca by Du Maurier. She reminds me of Conrad only not so intense. Her books so far is atmosphere. The second wife is painful in her ineptitude and shyness although I am sure she is a good soul. I want to finish it so that I can start Bread and Wine....

I read “Kaddish” and “Howl” and “Thank You” and “Fresh Air” and scattered other poems today. Nothing else. I have so much nervous energy. I don’t know what to do. Oh Ted just to walk the streets with you would be enough, to talk to you and hold your hand....

I read Lorca every day. He is good — sounds beautiful — very simple, lyric, and clear. Have been reading in the New Yorker about a beautiful grand modern cathedral. We must remember it in case we ever go to Europe.

He writes, “I’m reading Henry Miller (Tropic of Capricorn), poems by John Ashbery, Joe’s notebooks, and a novel by a writer named Clellon Holmes called Go. Dick is reading the newest book on the pre-Socratics, Tom is reading a book by Edward Dahlberg (who wrote the poem Dave said is very great, remember). Tom and I wrote a collaboration today called 'O’Hara’s Sources.' It’s a fourteen-line poem using ground rules.”

Ted was working on his translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat, which wasn’t a literal translation, but instead an homage. She mailed to him to say,

Read “The Drunken Boat” again and I like it of course I can’t be too critical of it as a free translation because I can’t read French. I’ll read it again tomorrow. I like the “Spooky Winds” especially where you put it. The last two stanzas seem much different than the other—tone I guess.

Later she says,

I read the revision of “The Drunken Boat.” I feel so good that you dedicated it to me. I wish you were here so you could explain the various changes. Some of them affect the flow and rhythm and style a lot. Later we can do it. Many of the good parts you left the same. I am going to read them a few more times.

And finally,

I went carefully over “The Drunken Boat” the final version is more idiomatic and modern and concise—less 19th-century I guess. We can talk about the fine details later. I think it’s good to know the reason for picking certain words over others in translation. Some sound better but there must be other reasons.

Ron Padgett insists that Berrigan’s The Sonnets were written by having Sandy pick her favorite lines, which he then arranged randomly based on their sound rather than their meaning. In his writing about his friend, Padgett explains that it was a long growing process for Ted to outgrow formalism and become loose. Ted says of The Sonnets, “Wrote by ear, and automatically. Very interesting results....All of this partly inspired by reading about DADA but mostly inspired by my activities along the same line for the past 10 months...working on collages with Joe."

"Ted," Padgett says, "with Sandy’s help, had set in motion the creative machine he had been assembling over the past two years, the machine that would enable him to create a 'big' work."

The letters span two months and end when Ted went down to Miami to rescue Sandy. She received permission from her doctor to go to the local library. It was her first time out of the hospital and she used it immediately to meet up with Ted. (Many of their letters back and forth contained secret plans for what to do if she escaped, but there was no mention of this attempt.) They hitched to Denver, then decided to head back to New York. They settld near Columbia University. She learned to shoplift and wrote a friend about it, who showed her mom, who showed Sandy’s mom. Her parents hired a private detective, again, to get dirt on Ted, and to find out where they were.

Again, Sandy was committed to a mental hospital, this time Bellevue in Manhattan. None of the letters are from this period — maybe he could visit her, and didn’t need to write. There was a little poem he scribbled then: “I never thought . . . / that I’d come so much to Brooklyn / just to see lawyers and cops who don’t even carry / guns taking my wife away and bringing her back.” Then a judge freed her, and her parents gave up pursuit.

Damian Weber is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about the flies. You can find more of his writing here.

"See No Green" - Race Horses (mp3)

"My Year Abroad" - Race Horses (mp3)

with anne waldman 

In Which We Allow You To Have Your Privacy

The Flies

by DAMIAN WEBER

The first thing Suzanne asked when she came in was where they went and why she couldn’t go, but the girl wouldn’t tell.

“Nowhere.”

“Not nowhere,” Suzanne said, “you went somewhere.”

The girl didn’t say anything, she didn’t know what to say so she just went to her room.

“You have to tell us,” Linda said.

“I can’t,” the girl admitted, walking up the stairs.

“What can’t you tell us?” Suzanne shouted up the stairs.

After Suzanne went up the stairs and tried the door, she called down to Shirley that the door was locked. Shirley didn’t let the girls lock their rooms and when they did she always came up the stairs and told them to unlock it. But this night she let the girl have her privacy.

The girl knew she would eventually have to unlock the door for Linda, but went over to her fish instead. She picked up the little tin of fish-food and fed her goldfish, Blackbeard, who wasn’t in a fishbowl but instead in a big glass jar. Richard named him Blackbeard because he wasn’t gold at all, but black with yellow cheeks. He’s not taking Blackbeard, the girl thought, he can’t, he’s my fish.

“Let me in,” Linda whispered through the door. The girl went over to the door, unlocked it, then quickly went back to her fish and thought of different ways she could hide him. She could always put him under her bed or maybe even in the garage or even put him outside where he was born, where his mother was. Linda didn’t ask about the ride and the girl was free to wonder if she would also be leaving when dad left.

Were any of them going with him or was he leaving them all? What about Arla, would he take Arla?

Arla was a black lab, originally the property of a family named Foss who was trained as a seeing-eye-dog but failed. Arla couldn’t be trained; as Linda would say, “She has her own agenda.” Still Arla could be the mother of other seeing-eye-dog puppies who were taken from her and trained. Guiding Eyes for the Blind would keep her for a week before and a week after each litter but would pay all veterinarian bills even those not relating to the pregnancy.

The family had many names for the dog: Arla, Arla Doo, Arla Moo, Arla Girl, Arla Dog, Arla the Black, Black Dog, and Crazy Dog. When they called her she wagged her tail, when they fed her she wagged her tail, and when someone new came to the house and when someone old came. The poor dog was always being yelled at, she was always in the way or as Linda would say, “She’s always in your face.”

Arla was a ridiculous dog because she was afraid of the floor. There were gaps in the carpeting she refused to step on, bounding from one to the next, and only after she was finally safe would she sit back on her bottom. Also there were certain rooms she would not enter which usually contained her in the hallway upstairs. She wouldn’t go in the kitchen and eyed the wood floor with a look that said, “I couldn’t possibly ever dream of even thinking of going on that.” Linda would call but the dog wouldn’t come. “Arla Girl, you want to come in the kitchen? Come on Arla Dog.” It was the most ridiculous thing the girl had ever seen. The poor dog, the girl thought, if she knew how ridiculous she was she would laugh.

Maybe the house was too small for Shirley, Richard, Suzanne, Linda, Theresa, Cocoa, Peaches, Blackbeard, and a Labrador, not counting Tammy the ladybug, all the flies and all the ants. Plus there was Cuppy, but Cuppy died.

Shirley thought it wrong to not do whatever she could to relieve the suffering of all creatures, making the small house a zoo. When Richard complained she referred to Matthew.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

Cuppy, Linda’s cat, was black with a white face which Linda said made him look like he was wearing a tuxedo. The white patch on his face looked like a heart, at least it did to Linda, who always said it made him handsome even though the girl knew a cat couldn’t be handsome, only people, like her father. Linda was in first grade when he developed “this stomach thing.” The girl couldn’t remembered Cuppy because she was not yet two but later Linda would repeat the story even though she had already heard it.

“One day we looked at him and he was so thin. Dad didn’t know why, or how he became so sick, so quick. He was almost falling over, he couldn’t even lift his head to eat. Mom brought him to the vet but he said it was iffy. Then they just put him to sleep, I was at school, we were at school and came home and they killed him.”

Linda would always tell the girl she just wanted to hold him one more time. She didn’t even get to bury the body because the vet kept him. Cocoa, the oldest of the cats, was both deaf and blind and looked like he was always about to die but just wouldn’t. He had cataracts and had been losing his sight but was now completely blind. His eyes looked like marbles, cataracts covered both the iris and the pupil until his eyes were just balls of milk. The girl thought he looked like a sorcerer, a magic cat, but one that didn’t like her, a demon cat. He was Shirley’s since before the girl was born, and Suzanne was there when they picked him at the shelter. They went to look for a kitten but when they saw him they had to have him because as Suzanne said, “He picked us with his eyes.” The girl wasn’t sure what she meant but she believed it. It wasn’t difficult to convince Richard and Shirley to get him, he was a wonderful cat. Linda always said he was Richard’s cat, that dad was the one Cocoa really loved. He used to love Cuppy too, but Cuppy died. Now Richard was moving out and the cat wouldn’t have anyone.

Peaches was Richard’s mother’s cat and he certainly didn’t want another cat in the house but nobody else would take her. Shirley fed the cat when Nana went to St. Jerome’s but after they learned she probably wouldn’t ever leave again she brought the cat home. The family called the cat it even though they called the other cats respectively he or she. It was a miserable cat and hissed at anyone who came near and when the cat first came to the house Cocoa chased it from the kitchen to the bathroom and from the bathroom back to the kitchen. Peaches browned the wall trying to get away, creating the largest mess in Linda and the girl’s room but neither of them learned about it, they were at school.

Later when the girl was told about it, she could only imagine the cat running around her room, browning the walls while her mother figured out what to do. What could she have done? The girl thought there probably couldn’t have been much to do except shut the door.

The girl asked mom what could have happened to the cat to make her so unloving and so unloved. Linda said it wasn’t affectionate because Nana Manning wasn’t affectionate but Shirley disagreed, Nana Manning was too affectionate. That was the first time the girl learned her sister thought less of Nana Manning than she, later she would learn why. Maybe mom would make dad take the cat now that he was leaving.

Besides the dog, the two cats, and the goldfish, there were other pets in the house, like the ladybugs. The girl named one Tammy (she didn’t know why) and kept it all summer and into the winter and was still alive. She didn’t keep the bug in a jar however, she just let it fly around her room. There were many different ladybugs in her room but she was pretty sure she knew which one was Tammy especially since they were best friends and best friends could always find each other even if they were separated by three seas or a thousand years. She would come home from school and look all over for Tammy and then when she found her she would tell her how beautiful she was. Richard told her that ladybugs only lived two weeks but she said that wasn’t true because Tammy had been alive forever. Richard wouldn’t be able to take Tammy when he left, he wouldn’t be able to find her because they weren’t best friends.

Besides the ladybugs there were also the ants which came in the spring crawling out of the cupboards and out of the cabinets. They would even crawl in her cereal, until they put rubber bands around the bag. There wasn’t anything Richard could do, he sprayed once but it didn’t work. He didn’t use it again however because Shirley said she didn’t want him to spray poison in her kitchen.

They were fearless ants that weren’t satisfied to hide in cracks, they walked right out in the open, right up the kitchen window completely ignoring gravity, making the girl think they must be angels. The girl knew with the way dad tried to kill them he wouldn’t be bringing them with him when he left. Besides the ladybugs and the ants, there were also the flies which the girl thought were aw-ful. They stayed the longest, not leaving until after fall and when the girl asked her mother where they went for the winter Shirley told her in the garbage. After that the girl always looked in the garbage to see where they were hiding but could never find them. Richard could take the flies if he wanted. Richard, however, didn’t take Arla nor did he take Cocoa or Peaches or Suzanne or Linda or the girl or the ladybugs or the ants and the flies.

Suzanne announced dinner was ready by stomping down the hall and pounding on the door but the girl motioned to Linda not to answer. Coming down the stairs she saw dad already at the table and since Suzanne and Linda were still moving around she thought it a perfect time to ask.

“Are you taking Arla?”

Richard looked at her.

“Take Arla where?” Suzanne asked. “Where is Arla going?”

“Arla isn’t going anywhere, Arla’s staying here.”

“Who’s going somewhere?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Where you going?”

“Not far.”

“Where?”

“88 North Spruce Street.”

“For what?”

“I’ll tell you later, after dinner.”

“For what?”

“Your mother and I,” Richard started, but stopped before he used the word divorce.

Suzanne knew what a divorce was, she didn’t need to be told.

The girl didn’t say anything. She saw that her sisters didn’t know what to say and waited for Suzanne to say something but Suzanne didn’t say anything. Then to break the silence or maybe just because she wanted to,

Linda stood up, pushed in her chair, left the table, went up the stairs, and to her room. The spell was broken.

“Dad,” Suzanne said, “you can’t move.” Richard didn’t say anything.

“Just stay here, you don’t have to go.”

“I’m sorry, I have to.”

“No you don’t.”

“Why?” she shouted, “why do you have to?”

“Because I have to.”

“Because why?”

“This is crap!” she swore.

The girl let out a little expiration of air at hearing her sister swear and was left sitting at the table alone with mom and dad when Sue stomped up the stairs, stomped down the hall overhead and into her room.

“Why don’t you go upstairs,” Shirley told her, “you’re all done.”

The girl pushed out her chair, stood up, pushed in her chair, went up the stairs, in her room, and locked the door.

A few minutes later Arla scratched at the door and she let her in, watching the magnificent dog cross the room and lie on the floor. The girl went over and sat down next to the dog. Arla was big and beautiful, it was something to pet such a magnificent dog and there was no way he was going to take her.

It was only seven and not yet time for bed. Usually around eight (or if she was lucky, a little later), Shirley would come up the stairs and tell the girl to brush her teeth. But tonight she thought mom probably wouldn’t come up.

Linda was on her bed and still hadn’t said anything but then finally did. “Is dad really leaving?” she asked. “I think so.”

“You know when?”

“No.”

“Is he taking Arla?”

“No,” the girl said, “he said so.”

“He can’t take Arla.”

“No.”

“What happened after I left?” Linda asked.

“She told dad not to go.”

“Who did, mom did?”

“Suzanne.”

“Then what?

“He said he had to.”

“Do you think he’s really going to?”

“He said.”

“He doesn’t have to.”

When Suzanne knocked on the door the girl didn’t object and Linda unlocked it. She had been crying. She came over and sat on the girl’s bed and then Linda came over and sat on the girl’s bed. The girl had the smallest bed in the house besides Arla and now all of her sisters were on it with her.

“You know when he’s leaving?” Suzanne asked the girl.

“No.”

“He can’t leave,” she said. “He doesn’t have to.”

“This is such crap!” Suzanne swore. The girl gasped.

“What did dad say to you?” Suzanne asked the girl bringing up the car ride again.

“I don’t say.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

“I don’t.”

“Terry, he’s leaving, it doesn’t even matter anymore.”

“I don’t.”

“You can tell us who lives on North Spruce though,” Linda said, “Right?”

“Miss Bernice.”

“Who’s Bernice?”

“Dad’s new wife.”

“Dad has a new wife?” Suzanne asked.

The girl nodded.

“What’s she like?” Linda asked.

“She’s nice.”

“Dad has a new wife?” Suzanne asked again, “You mean they’re married?”

The girl nodded.

“They can’t be married,” Suzanne said, “he can’t be married twice.”

“I met her.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re married.”

“She seems nice. She has witch shoes.”

“She has what?” Suzanne snapped.

“She seems nice.”

“I can’t believe this!” Suzanne said standing up, “This is all such crap!”

The girl gasped again, she always gasped when someone swore.

Suzanne stomped out of the room and slammed the door then stomped down the hallway and slammed her door.

“She has witch shoes?” Linda asked.

“They’re pointed,” the girl said, “like a witch.”

“Does she look like a witch?”

“No, she’s nice.”

“He’s going to live by the school?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does mom know?”

“She was there.”

“She was where?” Linda asked. “She came with you?”

“At dinner.”

“But, does she know about Miss Bernice?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I guess she does, right, she has to?”

The girl nodded.

“She has to,” Linda said getting up, straightening the covers on the little bed and putting the pillow back.

“Okay, go to bed, goodnight.”

Like the girl thought, Shirley didn’t come up the stairs and tell her to brush her teeth and neither did Richard which Linda said was even more than rude.

Damian Weber is a writer living in Brooklyn. The Flies is an excerpt from a longer work.

"No One Ever Sleeps" - The Walkmen (mp3)

"Line by Line" - The Walkmen (mp3)

The new album from The Walkmen is entitled Heaven and will be released on May 29th.

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)