Judith Pascoe

Happy 100th birthday, Carolyn Heilbrun!

www.publicbooks.org/carolyn-heil...

I love a book that seems to focus on one highly particular thing but then unfolds unexpectedly. Samantha Harvey's The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping encompasses grief, Brexit, writing, and myriad other nocturnal obsessions.

In The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping, Samantha Harvey writes, “I am a bad sleeper, but nights of bad sleep are the good nights, because they involve sleep” (31).

The Shapeless Unease is about sleep deprivation, but also about larger things. “What is it we’re supposed to make of life?” Samantha Harvey asks. “What is it that keeps rising up in us even when we feel crushed?" (p. 172).

“Lately, whenever I read that someone in a novel is having trouble sleeping my heart lurches forward to unite with them, and then with their author, as if the ability to write the words guarantees a knowledge of the words written,” writes Samantha Harvey in The Shapeless Unease (p. 23).

You don’t have to be an insomniac to be fascinated by Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping, but it definitely enhances the reading experience.

"What happens when you move past fear? What happens when you break the invisible chain?" Lynell George writes, describing how Octavia Butler used science fiction to shred old notions and expired selves (p. 144).

In A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky, Lynell George writes, "Protecting your spark, your joy and desire, is itself a full-time endeavor. [Octavia Butler] knows that she may begin to question the buoyancy of her resolve. She tells herself in words and actions: you are your cheerleader."

Lynell George: “It was never lost on [O. Butler], not for one moment, who she might be, without the benefit of crossing through the doors of the library . . . where she was encouraged to linger, . . . where she didn’t have to worry if she had enough change in her pocket." A Handful of Earth, p. 113.

In A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky, Lynell George uses the Octavia E. Butler archive at the Huntington Library--which includes shopping lists, story drafts, dime-store notebooks, bus passes, and library call slips--to plumb the depths of Butler's self-bolstering creative process.

If your thoughts have turned to finding the perfect gift for an aspiring young writer (or an aspiring old one), I recommend Lynell George's A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, a beautiful curio cabinet of a book that reveals how Butler composed herself as a writer.

“[T]hrifty sheet printing manages risk: the almanacs selling steadily, the devotional tract perpetually reprinted, the blank form to keep one afloat, the fugitive ad of merciless gain,” writes Matt Brown in his cultural history of eighteenth-century British American print shops. #TheNovelandtheBlank

When Matt Brown reads the preface to Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling in British American reprints, he discerns a rich publication culture encompassing “scandalous history, the sermon market, literary medleys, . . . disbound sheets, title-page format, and the moody reader” (183). #TheNovelandtheBlank

In a fascinating chapter of The Novel and the Blank, Matthew P. Brown argues that jokebooks, a staple of the eighteenth-century book trades, “are a species of conduct literature, of self- and soul-fashioning, existing at one extreme along a continuum of character formation” (128).

Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Matthew P. Brown was able to explore sheet-based texts in the amazing holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia, and to tell a revelatory story about British American literary dynamics. #TheNovelandtheBlank

One of the nine things I admire about Matthew P. Brown’s The Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in Eighteenth-Century British America is how he makes printed ephemera—legal forms, manuals, advertisements, militia directions, almanacs, jestbooks—seem as interesting as novels.

Of The Season, Helen Garner writes: "Really I'm trying to write about footy and my grandson and me. About boys at dusk. A little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die."

I'm fascinated by how exactly Helen Garner in The Season, a book about her grandson's Australian footy team, manages to captivate a reader whose previous interest in football of any kind was limited to American college coach drama.

Midway through The Season, Helen Garner writes, "Am I wasting my time? . . . I'm losing my nerve. I also know that at about this stage of everything I've ever written or tried to write, I get scared. I know it's part of the deal, that I just have to slog on past it, but knowing this does not help."

In The Season, Helen Garner writes, "Blokes I know get excited when I tell them I'm trying to write about footy. You should do this! You should do that! . . . The only thing I can think of to say is, 'It'll be a nanna's book about footy.' Short silences fall."

I first read Helen Garner because a librarian put her novel The Spare Room in a display of short reads, and now I'll read anything she writes, including The Season, a book about Australian football, boyhood, parenthood, the pangs of aging, and the scary middle stage of book writing.

In a big book hiding in an elegant little book, Jacqueline Labbe convinces you that Austen and Smith are "a matched pair, complete, together, imperfect apart."

"[O]riginality and individual genius? The latter depends on a troping of a canon of Very Special Works and ignores the community-based practices of the period, its culture of clubs, coteries, salons, and partnerships," writes Jacqueline Labbe in Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith.

In Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith, Jacqueline Labbe writes: "Austen inserts a Smith into three of her novels in significant ways, thereby elevating a common surname that, on its own, functions merely as an ‘everywoman’ signature. One, or even two Smiths could be overlooked."

In Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith, Jacqueline Labbe says Austen finds in Smith “a companion, a pre-thinker, a co-interrogator of issues, themes, and ideas," which is a pretty great way of thinking about how a writer can befriend another writer even if they never meet.

Jacqueline M. Labbe calls Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith "a provocation and a thought experiment." She goes on to write of her inspiring book, "It creates a Smith/Austen bubble, mostly ignoring other life."

In Clam Down, Chen writes of writing about her father: "He overreacted to perceived slights because he read others in the most uncharitable light, but in her case, was he so wrong? . . . She was ashamed to think . . . she had even drawn a chart for herself of rising action and increasing stakes."

In Anelise Chen's Clam Down, "the clam struggled down the long campus steps. . . . [I]n a few minutes, she would have to go and perform in a so-called faculty reading, which had been planned weeks in advance. . . . [N]obody ever wanted to go to a reading, especially not now."

"She hadn't meant to become a bivalve mollusk, but it happened," Anelise Chen writes at the beginning of Clam Down: A Metaphorphosis.

Anelise Chen, in an author's note at the end of Clam Down, describes her "compulsion to mash up genres and styles" and her indebtedness to Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear and Sigrid Nunez's Mitz.